Making a business more stable

A small business that I know set up a new offer in my area about a year ago. From a standing start this offering has generated new revenues of about $400k in the last 12 months. That indicates that there is a genuine need for the service and the pricing must be relatively attractive, particularly since this growth has been achieved without anything other than poster advertising.

It wants to grow the revenues from this new offer further since its core business has been cyclical and the new service is significantly more predictable, limited by the capacity of its facilities and the availability of suitably qualified staff. The supply side is complex with both national and local suppliers, all competing for the same kinds of staff and not differing much in the pay and benefits on offer. It looks as though recruitment may well be the key process in helping the business to grow.

Here I am, where are you?

I got an email from someone the other day which said, more or less, "Here I am, where are you?", it then went on to describe some work that the writer wanted me to do.

The email was from the Managing Director of a high street brand that I had done some work for a couple of years ago. I had facilitated a 2 day workshop for a cross-functional management team and although I had excellent feedback from them, nothing seemed to happen as a result. I followed up several times over the next 3 months but it went very quiet.

The moral of the story has to be, don't bore people to death with follow-ups but have patience. If they really liked what you did then you won't be forgotten.

PPC or PPA?

Pay per click has been with us for a while and it has proved to be highly popular with web marketers. It offers immediacy, targeting and test data. What it hasn't done up to now is offer every advertiser low cost. Some advertisers find that Pay per click advertising is highly expensive since they find themselves paying for clicks which don't convert into sales or relationships which can be exploited subsequently.

Google is experimenting with Pay per action advertisements. During the experiment, these will be available only on Google's content network, but because they focus on advertiser-defined actions they may ultimately prove to be even more popular than Pay per click ads.

While the experiment is in beta, there are some additional limitations for advertisers wishing to take part:

• U.S advertisers only
• You must have conversion tracking (or be able to implement conversion tracking code) on your website

Advertisers will have to think through just what an action (a sign up for a newsletter, a sale of a book or another product, for example) might be worth to them and that will no doubt mean that bid prices for sales actions could rise sharply which will do Google's share price no harm at all.

I can't wait to see this experiment roll out beyond the content network and then into Europe. This looks as though it will be a very exciting innovation.

How important is the brand?

In Rain's 2007 report on lead generation, there was an interesting insight on the importance of brand in the sales process. Brand matters: 65% of well known companies report themselves as being good or excellent at lead generation while the comparative figure for less well known organisations was 44%. If you are well known, whatever lead generation tactics you employ are likely to work better.

So what does that mean? It could be that branded companies are overemphasising their abilities at lead generation, but that sounds unlikely. It could be that less well known organisations less gung-ho in their self evaluation but that sounds unlikely too.

The Executive Summary - 6 Lead Generation Insights - can be downloaded from Rain at no charge.

What makes a great eCommerce website?

Creating a successful eCommerce website requires the same kind of tried and tested approaches as those used in sales letters. So what are those techniques?

• develop a focused approach to a targeted audience (pre-writing preparation) - that focus will help you to develop the right kind of copy and it makes testing simpler because you know what type of audience to test it on
  

• grab their attention using a combination of powerful headlines and sub-headings which they can use to navigate their way through the site
  

• hold their interest by reminding them why they are on the site (to solve a problem) and give them teasers about the solution or product that you are offering
  

• develop trust - often the biggest hurdle for budding copywriters – building an interesting and emotionally-compelling story that can get through built-in lie detectors that readers have developed and make them trust you, as well as convince them that you have the right solution or product

• demonstrate your credibility using testimonials although if you are already high profile in your market, talking about your background by mentioning specific achievements (facts and figures) will work as well

• make your offer by setting out the pricing, the main product, the incentives and so on

• close the sale. The “Call To Action” must be absolutely clear – there's nothing worse than going through all the effort of writing a carefully constructed sales letter than to have your reader leave at the end because the close isn't doing its job
  

UBPs and ad copy

Remember Andy Bounds? He is very good at reminding us that everything we do as sales and marketers has to be tested in a world populated by buyers who look at the world differently from us. He believes that the copy has to meet the buyers' unique buying points (UBPs) rather than our selling points.

So where does the buyer want to see the price in an ad? Different ad producers tackle the problem in different ways, some people:

• put the price in the headline
• set out the price in the opening paragraph
• leave the price until the point they are asking for the sale
  

It's obviously important to get this right, so let's start to look at an ad from the Andy Bounds perspective. The price is not a benefit to a buyer so emphasing price in the headline could alienate some buyers before they find out how wonderful the product is. Of course, if the product is a staple where the price is well-known then a low price could make a compelling headline providing it detailed the saving rather than the price itself.

Putting the price in the headline makes a number of assumptions:

• the buyer is aware of the normal price for the product
• the buyer will find the discounted price attractive rather than suspicious
  

Using the UBP approach, it makes more sense to focus on the benefits that the buyer will enjoy from the purchase - what they are left with after the product or service is delivered.

If the benefits are really compelling then the price can be introduced after the buyer understands what the purchase will do for them. It's at that point that the buyer makes a decision based on their individual value proposition - are those benefits so attractive that they overcome the price that you have just disclosed? If they do, then there is a good chance that your buyer will close the sale.

You only have seconds to make a good impression

Today I got some junk mail. It was a reasonably well-constructed sales letter and it was well directed - I was certainly within its target group. It was let down by some very basic failures in the paper and the printing.

I know I'm obsessive about this stuff, but plenty of people notice if a letter is produced which:

• is printed on 80 grammes paper which looks as if it has been recycled from old cereal boxes
  
• is printed by a jet printer where the paper handling is so poor that the area of the letter with the contact address has bounced under the print head producing a quite unacceptable blurring of the print
• carries a print ghost higher on the paper, presumably produced by stacking the printed output while the ink was still wet
• has a very low quality logo in the top corner of the letter

It wouldn't matter if I thought the offer was good. Their lack of interest in these details means that they are people that I don't want to work with.

Make sure that you sell value, from the beginning

• We have the best product / service
  
• Our customer service team is the best
• Our pricing is the most competitive
• Our team is the most qualified
• We are number one in our market

Buyers hear this day after day and they simply stop believing it and start looking for more solid evidence. It's a common habit in sales to present these descriptions as fact when there is no opportunity for the Buyer to test whether the statements are true or not.

As a sales and marketing approach it isn't very effective and it doesn't distinguish the business from any other supplier - it's a 'me too' sales tactic. These approaches are often supported by marketing programs that use a relatively passive communication model which consists of "here it is, this is what we do". Why not try something a little different?

Is it possible for any of your prospects to experience your business value prior to the first meeting with your sales team? If they can, it can be a springboard to the process - it reduces the comparison with competitors, the sales cycle can be shortened and it will be easier to protect gross margins.

Your sales team can spend most its time personalising how they will help the prospect use your product or service as a business tool, instead of spending a disproportionate amount of time in the sales cycle cold calling, and educating prospects.

One way of letting prospects experience the value is give them free business content which encourages them to make a call for a salesperson to visit.

Marketing tools like webinars, teleseminars, newsletters and workshops can be the key to communicating your value first to generate qualified leads. These marketing devices allow your prospects to learn about your value through their own filtering and judgment process and if done correctly, they will call and say "I am interested".

A different eye

A designer has taken a look at one of our eCommerce sites and has shown us some ideas about how we might change its look and feel. We looked at them together yesterday and we all agreed that visually, he was right - his visual concept is significantly more sophisticated than the one we are using.

The trick is to combine some of those visual concepts with other things we already doing. In some ways we are very pleased with the site - it has great positioning for several good keywords and products already sell from the page - and although it is intended as a classic B2C site, it is developing a steady list of enquiries for larger volumes from businesses who are interested in buying the product.

I'm going to have a word with him today to see if I can get him to adapt his approach a little to see if how can we can get the best of both worlds. None of us claims to be strong in design - but we know what we like - and we get plenty of value in working with designers who approach our problems without our baggage about what the web page has to include.

How rude can you be to a prospect?

Sometimes, selling business services there is a reluctance to be too candid. You have probably trained yourself not to be rude to the client either about what they have done or what they propose to do. Like any rule, it can be broken - sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately.

At one time I was working with a number of prospects and one of them was moving particularly slowly. In fit of frustration, I told them candidly that what they had done was far from perfect and that they needed to sharpen themselves up. Amazingly they read what I had written and decided that it reflected a passion for their business and there is no doubt in my mind that it helped me to close business with them.

A few months later, a copywriting colleague was looking at the collateral put together by one of my prospects and was very scathing about the nature of the offer and how they were promoting their service. Instead of attempting to turn those comments into something more emollient, we took the decision to face the issue head-on. It's always a high risk strategy, and it isn't something that is appropriate for all situations. However, if you feel that the prospect needs to see how strongly you feel about their business and there is a real risk that your normal approach won't be successful then it may be worthwhile taking the risk.

Why have they got clay feet?

The latest sales person or sales manager is recruited with the best of intentions, but after 6 months or so it is clear that they haven't turned performance around - they are OK, but they simply aren't setting the world alight.

There could be plenty of reasons for this, and it needn't be because the latest recruit doesn't have the skills that they mentioned on their CV.

Sales is a team game. For the salesperson to be really successful, there are plenty of activities behind them which need to be working well, too. Paying upper quartile salaries to people with good CVs isn't enough. Managers of the business need to make sure that the organisation has positioned itself to help its salespeople be successful.

A little preparation might be a good idea

If you are pitching to a big company and you think that you have just one shot then you are probably doomed to fail.

In big companies, people rarely (if ever) decide to change how they're doing things in just one meeting. They need to:

• involve others in the decision process. Getting management & staff buy-in is often essential for the success of any new initiatives or products
• compare your potential ROI figures with their own internal analysis
  
• make sure it's worth their while. Bringing in new vendors, service providers or consultants is a lot of work and frequently disruptive to their existing schedules

As a seller, you need to realize this from the beginning. It's going to take multiple calls, multiple meetings, multiple contact points. It can go more quickly, but you have to prepare for the long haul. You can't disclose too much at the initial meeting. You have to think about how to spread out what you want to say over time so as to advance the sales process.

Key questions to ask yourself as you get ready for that first meeting are:

• what is the logical next step? Once you know this, you can evaluate all your other ideas in terms of how they contribute to that outcome
  
• what do I need to share with this decision maker to entice him/her to learn more? Which stories and examples will have the strongest resonance with this buyer?
• what do I need to learn about them to ensure my offering can make a valuable contribution? Selling consultatively means that you need to think through the questions you want to ask before you go on that meeting. Your ability to engage the people that you meet in an intelligent discussion of their business objectives, issues and needs will be crucial to your success

That's not selling, that's giving it away

This morning's post brought forth its usual mix of junk mail, most of which could have been classified as a series of 3 month trial offers.

The logic seems to be that once you, dear reader, have used the service for a period you will be so overwhelmed by the value you have been able to uncover that you will happily sign on for a full subscription. More likely, since you need to provide your bank details in order to qualify for the 3 month trial, you will be forgetful enough not to cancel the subscription before your bank pays the subscription on your behalf.

This looks like a very lazy sales technique. If the offer has real value then the 3 month trial shouldn't be necessary, the copy should make it crystal clear to the readers that this offer will satisfy real wants or cravings that they have. Do some research, establish what the value proposition is and develop some proper copy. Selling may not be easy, but giving the service away for 3 months is unimaginative. There wasn't a lot of similarity between the services being promoted in my junk mail pile except the offers that were being used to promote them.

Modifying sales activity

Phil and I sat down yesterday to review what we had been doing for one of our clients. How we had shared the activities; what had worked; what we might do differently. It also gave us a short term plan to share with our client.

It's important to have this kind of review meeting periodically. It gives you an opportunity to stand back from the day-to-day activity and take a more critical look to see whether your investment in individual activities is paying off. In sales it is important to focus on activities that take you forward in your pipeline. The moment that you undertake activity for activities' sake, you are probably wasting your time.

It was a useful session and both of us got a lot out of it. The frequency of account reviews depends to an extent on the nature of the account and the amount of effort that you are putting into it - the higher the investment - the more frequent the reviews. As a minimum, all live accounts should be reviewed once per year. A large account with many contact points might require a review every 6 weeks.

The email barriers are going up

I hate spammers. Not because I find it tedious to delete all the ads for penny shares or canadian pharmaceuticals. I hate them because they are having an impact on legitimate business.

Talking to someone the other day, he complained that 40% of the people that signed up for email updates to his blog weren't able to verify their subscriptions. I didn't believe him so he checked in real time - the actual figure was 37.5%. Now that probably doesn't mean that he has lost all those people as readers, simply that the basic process of sending an autoresponder confirmation email to an email address and getting a positive response has failed. Perhaps those autoresponder emails are getting caught up in company firewalls or maybe an overactive spam filter has pushed them into an email limbo.

We have the same problem with one of our contact lists - we use an email distribution service which generally works very well, but at one very large organisation, virtually none of the emails distributed by the service reach the inboxes of the people on the list - the exception seems to be a couple of their subsidiaries in Australia which don't seem to be protected quite as diligently as their operations elsewhere. That means that email requires work-arounds if you intend to use it as part of your contact strategy.

In some utopian future, spam won't exist and email will work perfectly, but don't hold your breath.

Where's a non-expert when you want one?

We know what we want to find - a group of non-experts in a particular subject. So how do you go about finding a non-expert? They realise that this topic is important to them but they don't think they have got it mastered - they need to know more. Where do they sit? What do they read? How do we recognise that they are non-experts? Are they capable of classifying themselves as non-experts?

Actually, thinking about it, targeting has to be based on self-assessment. It doesn't matter to us how expert these people are, it is the fact that they think that they are non-experts that makes them the right targets.

OK, now I've understood that, where are they?

Traffic mix

We have several eCommerce sites. As part of another exercise, I have been looking at traffic sources for each of these sites.

What is interesting is that the towels site - on almost every measure [page rank, inbound links and SEOmoz page strength] - would normally be regarded as a less successful site than the champagne site. The measure where towels outperforms champagne is in the volume of organic traffic ... and that, Ladies and Gentlemen is the only measure that really counts.

I haven't done a detailed analysis of the competitive sites, but if I did then I imagine I would understand better why the towels site is bringing such a high proportion of organic search visitors. Very often, it isn't necessary to build the perfect website to get organic traffic - just a little better than the competition.

Where is the business going to come from?

We obsess about our pipeline. Which companies are in it, what is the nature of the opportunity, do we have a solid chance of winning the work? These are all good questions.

It's important to use a variety of different channels for winning new business. I was at a meeting of SME consultancies a couple of weeks ago and one of the people there said that all his business had come from Networking. Networking is a powerful tool and I don't want to decry it, but it is important to have some more active channels which you can develop alongside it. The power of an effective sales and marketing process which includes a number of different channels is that you will inevitably increase your reach. The more people who know about you, the more business you will do - all other things being equal. The point about networking is that it is indirect and although you can do a number of things to make yourself more effective at networking, it is difficult to regard it as an active channel where activity links quickly and directly to outputs. By comparison, targeting particular types of businesses and talking to them is almost entirely active.

Having opportunities in the pipeline is not the same as guaranteeing that we will win the work. Sometimes the main competitor - the status quo - prevents the prospect from becoming a paying client. Things move through the pipeline at their own pace and we have to recognise that there is often a fine line between staying in touch and appearing overly eager. That said, one of our prospects has decided not to go ahead with one of their business ideas which we were very excited about. They had an enormous competitive advantage in a consumer product of growing importance. The idea was that they would start to sell direct from a website using a new brand name while continuing to support their existing B2B sales with their current brand name. The margins were potentially very attractive and we were looking forward to making the business perform spectacularly, but the status quo has reared its head and the prospect isn't going ahead.

We are looking for another opportunity which is just as exciting.

Green is the colour of growth

The headline makes sense only for those of you who use the Google Toolbar. Google's algorithms have determined that the page rank of the blog is now 4 rather than 3. For those of you without the toolbar I should explain that the page rank is shown as a small graphic with a green bar.

I'm a bit surprised. This is a blog which doesn't attempt to cover day to day news or fashionable topics, although I did get very interested in Linkie Winkie for a few weeks last summer. That means that I have a small niche, posting reasonably regularly on the business things that I see around me. What is good about the blog is that it has generated correspondence with a number of interesting people and allowed me to monitor and take part in some debates that I doubt I would have been aware of otherwise. It has also provided an excellent proving ground for ideas which I have then re-used in our newsletter and in several White Papers.

Organic champagne results

Another seven weeks on and here are the positions for the champagne site in Yahoo!, MSN and Google. We are still first page for the three search terms that I have been tracking since 13 October. Once again, thanks to Brad Callen on how to do it. Incidentally, just in case you want to check that I'm not making it up, you can access all the tracking posts very simply by searching for champagne from the blog search bar.

Here are today's results with the figures for 3 December in curly brackets, 25 November in round brackets, 13 October positions in square brackets:

3 word search term
Yahoo 1 {5} (4) [3]
MSN 2 {3} (3) [7]
Google 6 {4} (19) [not indexed in first 1000 sites]

2 word search term
Yahoo - 1 {5} (5) [7]
MSN - 8 {8} (7) [13]
Google - 9 {10} (311) [not indexed in first 1000 sites]

2 word search term
Yahoo - 1 {1} (1) [1]
MSN - 1 {1} (1) [1]
Google - 1 {1} (1) [1]

That's still pretty pleasing - still first page on all 3 terms and the upward movements outweigh the downward movements.