How Your Customer Can Be Your VP of Sales
Here’s food for thought. Ever think that your best sales people and your customers have a great deal in common? Here at Zephyr Strategy, we have uncovered the value of this commonality and how to use it to your advantage.
Your customers know the truth about your company. They know how well you sell yourselves, provide services and follow up. They know if they are being served by your A-team or not. Your customers see how your company responds when mistakes are made. They know who your competition is and how they market themselves. And, your customers are aware of other sales opportunities for your company.
Some of your best sales people already have this knowledge. Both your best sales people and your customers know the true value of the services and products your company provides. However, only your customers know where they feel there might be room for improvement. Customers are the mirror every company needs to see its true reflection.
Ho Hum Women’s Initiatives
A well-respected, senior-level businessman recently asked me, “What’s a women’s initiative?” That is a good and honest question! Women’s initiatives have been initiating for decades now, so I’m surprised he had to ask; however, this businessman truly didn’t know. This lack of understanding is only one of the obstacles companies face when starting an initiative for their women.
Women’s initiatives continue to crop up in corporations, professional services firms, non-profit agencies and communities. The intentions are certainly admirable, yet most women’s initiatives have the same Ho-Hum quality.
Here’s what I’ve observed about why these initiatives are often Ho-Hum: Read more
Data is King
I recently received several direct mail pieces. It reminded me of how important it is to make sure your direct mail list is scrubbed and up to date. With so many resources today for updated contact information, it is a
lazy practice to simply buy new lists that are potentially outdated. It is also expensive. These folks sent three sets of the same mailing piece to my company. It was sent to the attention of an old employee (she left 3 years ago), and she was my admin assistant — I have no idea why she was on this list. The postage for each envelope was $1. The cost to print these brochures was probably about $1.25. So $6.75 was wasted on printing and postage alone!
One of the most important assets at any company is the inhouse contact list. If you’re like most companies, that data is spread out everywhere. Your financial system has contacts, but only the accounts payable clerks. Your help desk has contacts in their system, but only the end users, not the decision makers. Your marketing department has contacts, but half are from raw inquiries and tradeshow lists, none of which were ever qualified and are now all dated. Your contracts department has contacts, but that list is probably comprised of attorneys and contracting officers. The most important lists - the actual names of your prospects and clients (i.e., the BUYER), reside on the laptops of your salespeople. And these are the people who seldom backup their data and are more protective of those lists that a mother lion is about her cubs. Read more
Top Ten Tips For Having A Successful Trade Show
As the events manager for Zephyr Strategy, I get the opportunity to work with numerous clients on everything from webinars to trade shows. For one client alone, we support approximately 50 trade shows yearly. Over time, I’ve had a chance to learn from my mistakes as well as others. I have developed a list of tips for our clients and I’ve shared them below. One of the biggest pieces of advice I can give anyone considering a trade show is to have a complete plan, starting with considering the right shows for your industry and focusing more on driving attendance to your booth and following up on those great leads.
Here’s my list:
1. Choose the right shows.
This is the first major decision to be made. Your target audience must attend or you will not get the desired results. So do your research, and find out which shows your current clients attend (often your competitors’ websites will mention which shows they are participating in).
2. Set your trade show budget.
Trade shows can be very expensive, and there can be many hidden costs. Your company must decide how much money it is willing to spend. Prepare a budget, delegate the money appropriately, and keep a running record for review after the show closes.
A few cost saving tips:
• Never make a budget cut that an attendee will notice. Remember that image is everything! An out–of-date exhibit will give a poor impression to a potential new client.
• Be aware of Show Service discounts. Show services, such as electrical or water hook-ups, offer some large discounts (sometimes up to 50%) if you order early, usually more than 30 days before the actual show.
• Determine how much space you actually need. Did you rent a 30’x30’ booth, but with better space planning realize you could have used a 20’x20’? The savings here could be substantial!
• Look out for rush charges! These can be everywhere if you do not watch deadlines with printing, shipping, giveaways, and show services. Create a timeline that can quickly and clearly show your upcoming deadlines.
• Review your invoices after the show. There could be simple mistakes — such as a charge for a second wastebasket that you didn’t order — or costly ones, such as your booth neighbor’s large service order being mistakenly charged to your booth number instead of his! Read more
Perception Is Reality
On Friday I attended a conference, “The Future of Software“, sponsored by Potomac Techwire and the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority. The participants in the first panel discussion (focused more on the future of software) were entrepreneurs and tech-types embroiled (one way or another) in the software industry. The second set of panelists (focused on investing in software companies) were comprised of representatives from various venture capital funds around the area. One of the most entertaining speakers was Andre Boisvert, who clearly isn’t afraid to say out loud the things that everyone is thinking. Read more
Your Customers Want These 4 Things
Sure, all your customers are different from each other. They have different strengths, weaknesses, cultures and goals but there are FOUR things they all want!
We have interviewed hundreds of customers from our client organizations in order to advise them on ways to improve customer loyalty. From all that research with all those different customers, there are four strong themes that always emerge to influence levels of customer satisfaction.
The difference between SEO & PPC
There seems to be a lot of confusion between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). Both of these activities fall under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). However, they are
very different activities and its the smart marketer that makes a point of learning the difference but embracing both. This is a Heat Map chart created by Google. A heat map is created by tracking where people actually LOOK on a website. This is done using some really cool technology that we’ll talk about on another post.
You use SEO best practices to make sure that your website appears in the “organic search” results of a Google page. That is the column on the left, and in this image, you can see how popular that column is to our search audience. This is the section that has the most credibility. Appearing on the first page, above the “fold” of a Google results page is the goal of all business marketers. However, the process of improving your organic rankings and moving up the food chain of Google (or Yahoo, or any search engine tool) is a laborious process. It takes a long-term commitment — it can sometimes take 6-8 months before you even start moving up the ranks. Read more
Cliff Notes® For Selling
Most of our technology clients are involved in complex sales across several vertical markets. The sales cycles are often quite long, and there is a learning curve that goes along with each sale. So by the time the deal closes, the Account Executive and the Sales Engineer have built a lot of knowledge about all the aspects of selling the solution. The TRICK is keeping that knowledge in-house, and making sure that if the sales person leaves, that knowledge doesn’t go walking out the door with him. Additionally, our clients want to duplicate the successful sale across other geographies or verticals. To help enable this, we developed a process for writing up sales guides. The goal of these guides is to share the best selling practices and help our clients duplicate these wins. When a new sales person gets hired, reading these guides can help shorten the learning curve - anything that gets a sales person selling faster is a good thing, right? Here is the outline we follow, (with modifications for each client’s unique requirements.)
Company Playbooks
How much money did you spend last year to make sure your sales and marketing teams could articulate the value proposition of your company? Now, how much did you spend making sure the rest of the company could do the same? If you’re like most organizations, with the exception of what might be in an employee manual or on a corporate brochure, the remaining employees, which quite often make up over 80% of the staff, have been ignored. And so what is the result?
If you go into most mid-sized businesses and ask anyone outside of marketing and sales what the company does, you will get a different response from each person. There is no cohesiveness or understanding across the organization. But these are the people who are interfacing with your current and future customers on a daily basis. Read more
Sales Comp - a Moving Target
Elements of BD
I often get asked if I know of any best practices on how to compensate sales and business development professionals. This topic has been a moving target since the first sale of anything ever happened! How do companies balance their need for more sales against the motivations and drivers of their sales and business development people in order to get what everyone wants?
You won’t get the silver bullet in this post, however, we’ve made observations worth sharing. Part of the problem is that the One-Size-Fits-All-Sales-People Compensation Program that companies adopt creates that moving target that makes you crazy. If the “one size fits all” doesn’t work, then a more flexible structure could be explored. Read more
