Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Architectural Firm - Part Four

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To wrap up this series on Lead generation and lead nurturing, we’ll explore the ideal prospect, how to actually construct a lead nurturing system, and more.

This is the final installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read in initial installment by clicking here.

How Do You Envision the Ideal Prospect?

Whether a firm knows it or not, they have some sort of prospect nurturing system.  It is my opinion that if they cannot describe it in details, they don’t know enough to ever have a great closing rate.  Just about every prospect nurturing process commences with a deep familiarity with your prospect’s likes and dislikes; their “persona.” The demographic (who they are – social strata, economic level, low, middle or otherwise) and psychographic (how they shop, what do they buy, at what quality level). 

Here are a handful of crucial queries to enable you to manage this step in the objective:

• What number of consumers are involved with the procedure of shopping for your business' products and/or services? Exactly where are they in the pecking order?
• Are they the key decision maker for this type of purchase?
• Precisely what business or personal needs motivate their choices? What questions do they routinely have?
• What questions are they really going to raise before a purchasing decision is reached?
• What does your current buyer’s process resemble? How much time does the entire process typically take?
• How are consumers affected by your current marketing and advertising campaigns?
• Will their web-based habits (amount of time on your website, which pages, how long, how often do they return) indicate specific clues to how they consume your marketing subject matter (eBooks vs, blog articles, video or webinars, etc.)?

Once you assemble the data to resolve most of these concerns, you will be able to identify a group of suitable buyer user profiles that permits you to concentrate and target for your lead nurturing activities.

Forming the Lead Nurturing Process

Now that you have formed a group of prospective consumer user profiles, you should enjoin them to a particular lead nurturing concept.

This process looks something like the following:

• Selecting a variety of touch points for the nurturing process: How frequently do    you reach out to the potential client?
• Decide on your content offer strategy: You might want to begin with a simple blog, written multiple times a week.  You might write a specific white paper or special report on a product or service criteria. After that you might advance to a variety of previous customer case studies, and then invite the candidate to a webinar. The strategy is yours, but the information you have formulated should tip you off as to what scheme you should employ.
• Decide on your cadence, that is, when do you make contact with a potential client; weekly, bi-weekly, every other day? 
• Decide on your communication strategy. Is electronic mail the centerpiece of your          communications strategy? Do you make contact using telemarketing, direct mail,   trade shows or any other methods?

Easy to use lead nurturing processes may possibly include a selection of four to five electronic mail communications dispatched over duration of time. Does your process include different impressions (touch points), promotions, contacts, conversation channels on a regular schedule of frequency? Only you can determine what works and what does not.  You alone must capture the data necessary to formulate a ranking or rating system to know exactly where your lead sits in the funnel; what type of nurturing is appropriate at that particular time and touch point.

It’s recommended that you begin with an uncomplicated work-flow process or system, and subsequently permit your strategies to grow or alter as time passes.

Designate Accountabilities and Follow Up

Lead nurturing is often the marketing and advertising team’s duty, and it’s a rather straightforward case to delegate a group of staff members to take care of your company’s continuous nurturing activities. However, the technique of creating a lead nurturing program is a cross-organizational job and should call for marketing; you’ll need the appropriate individuals to research, quantify, accumulate information, develop consumer data, cultivate nurturing promotion strategies, and look for as well as produce engaging, informative content material that tells a story, and makes people’s lives better.

The two main other reasons to construct a “lead nurturing staff” that also includes staff of both marketing and advertising are:

1. Handling the plan should be to transition potential customers through the sales process, converting them from suspects into opportunities, and then hand him or her on to sales. Precisely what key elements specify a strong “opportunity?” When will the sales staff assume the responsibility and make contact with the prospect?
2. Develop an evaluation course of action so as to adjust the nurturing process for that particular type of buyer persona. Is the nurturing procedure providing effective outcomes?

When qualified prospects don’t convert, that is, there is a stop in the flow through the sales funnel, are sales representatives taught to send them back through the nurturing system, or will they merely jettison all of them?  Keep in mind, you are going to need a clear and concise, delineated communications system involving marketing, advertising and sales, or not having the signals clear could turn expectations to disappointments.

Lead Nurturing and Ongoing Adjustments

By characterization, lead nurturing includes potential clients that are presently in your marketing and advertising data bank. The lead funnel indicates your process is to provide the potential client with engaging content that actually improves your relationship with said prospect. How much is enough? How much is too much?  Imagine if the material you actually gathered has inconsistencies, or you chose to discover more about a potential customer to enable you to supply customized written content, only to find out you turned off the lead.

What then?

The point is that you will need to be on a constant learning voyage with each lead as they traverse the lead funnel, making adjustments along the way.  That way, you will grow in experience, and develop more closely appointed strategies for each rating or rank of lead.

Progressive user profiling resolves this difficulty, even while permitting you to accumulate more details about a potential customer gradually. An eBook, white paper or a webinar could possibly cause a lead to ask for one or two fresh bits of engaging company information.  If your system is automated, you will be surprised how much intelligence data you can collect to assist you in refining your lead nurturing and user profile construction.

Re-Addressing Fall-Out

Earlier in this article we discussed tanking another crack at failed opportunities.  Leads fall out of the process for any number of reasons, and it is best to dissect the entire process to see if there is a recurring problem in your nurturing campaign systems.

Some people become disillusioned with the process, become annoyed for a myriad of reasons, others simply change their mind.  Still others get a better offer from a competitor, or said competition got over on the prospect through some unforeseen reason.  Regardless of the fall-out, it is not a prudent move to analyze the failure, and adjust accordingly.

Secondly, and just as important, your team should attempt to re-position the prospect into the lead funnel for another attempt at closing the sale.

This has been a worthwhile trip through the lead generation and lead nurturing process, and hopefully it helped clear up some misconceptions and perhaps offered an insight into what you can do to make your marketing dollars produce a more fruitful return on investment.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Architectural Firm - Part Three

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Part three of four

This is the third installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read the initial installment which can be found here.

Here are a few areas to discover critical functionality indicators inside a lead nurturing marketing campaign:

• Engagement: Identify the email open and click-through rates. This data is a great starting point for your tracking efforts.
• Lead acceleration: Are leads moving according to expectation through the lead funnel?
• How does the time it takes to convert from lead to converting to a sell-ready state? Are leads attentive to your firm’s content strategy? Between nurturing campaign stages, how long does it take to move nurtured prospects into the sales cycle?
• Outcome metrics: What are the conversion rates? From initial contact (suspect) to lead, from lead to sales opportunity? How many leads begin the process? How many of them convert successfully through the entire process (closing rate)? What is your company average transaction amount (sales revenue average)? What is the entire length of the sales cycle in terms of time?

Once you establish a baseline with these and other key indicators, you can look for trouble
spots in your nurturing campaign, experiment with solutions and consider your next steps.

Going Forward From the Beginning

A fundamental lead nurturing strategy, utilizing a small amount of potential buyer user profiles, a restricted procedure flow, and some performance metrics, is an excellent place to begin. Like prospect scoring, on the other hand, direct nurturing is actually a stratagem that’s by no means concluded; there’s always room to fine-tune, improve and
expand your efforts.

In addition to incorporating improved and updated user profiles, fresh touch - points, content variety and communication avenues with your established activities, there are other tips on how to take advantage of lead nurturing, including:

• Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention: Utilize valid and current lead nurturing practices to produce more intense interactions with your current leads AND clients - including cross-sell and up sell possibilities influenced by engaging content.
• Relationship Building: Implement lead nurturing process to allow clients to get to know your firm better, provides you an opportunity to strengthen the relationship, and develop a bond so that you firm is “Top-Of-Mind,” and that your competitors become a distant memory. Assist and follow up with your customers concerning their newly purchased goods and services; supply them with help-desk support options, suggestions, provide consumer online groups for community information and facts, and various solutions.
• Remarketing: Re-evaluate each failed conversion to develop “come-back” strategies to take another pass for possible conversion. Sometimes, simple annoyances caused the prospect to fall out of the lead funnel.

This image displays another look at the sales funnel, and the lead nurturing process. The middle of the funnel is a critical area on which to focus, but as noted previously, doesn’t try to force your lead to a buying decision. There should be well focused energy in providing all of the information to a particular lead in this position, so that the buying decision formulates with you and the relationship you are building with them.

Lead Rating - How Lead Rating and Prospect Nurturing Interact

I would like you to understand the way in which prospect rating can help to increase your current marketing and sales campaigns. An essential prospect ranking principle - the warm lead - is additionally essential for any lead nurturing strategy.

“Warm qualified” prospects demonstrate an obvious affinity for your product or service and solutions, however, they typically do not score as significant as would the oh-so evident “sales-ready purchaser.” Identifying a warm lead using your own rating method is normally a question of time and experience. The efficacy of your system will be determined by various psychographic and demographic ranking considerations of your “ideal” prospect, coupled with your firm's practical experience going through a number of prospective buyers. Once you discover what your business’ lead scoring ceiling (the culmination of the factors compared to your ideal consumer), it’s not as difficult to be able to systemize the entire process of navigation directly to the sales staff. These folks, who are on the direct firing line of dealing with the prospective customer, must fully understand what makes the ideal time to work with the prospect. By the use of metrics (the rating system) and the prospect, they should know what stage of the buying process in which they find them. If sales intervenes too soon, there is a degree of probability that the prospect may back away, become frustrated, or seek further study with your competitors.

Timing is everything.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Accounting Firm - Part Two

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This is the second installment in a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No accounting firm can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle. You can read the initial installment by clicking here.

Obviously, trade shows are not the only venue for Accountants to generate suspects. Anyone that visits your website, or picks up one of your flyers, or holds a spot in your mailing list database is merely a suspect. A person walking in the door makes them a suspect. It is the conversion of those suspects to prospects, or leads, that are crucial to the sales process.

Suspects don’t turn into prospects until some form of communication occurs with a suspect and a member of your company. This sharing of information will let both parties mutually determine if there is genuine interest in your particular services, and that there is credibility in your promise to deliver it. Only then will they graduate to the position of lead. They are now at the top end of the sales funnel (see Figure 1, below).

Understanding the Lead Nurturing Concept

Lead nurturing is the approach marketers use to develop and “care for” individual relationships with these immature prospects – even while they’re not yet ready to purchase - in order to earn their particular business should they eventually ready themselves to purchase.

I’m sure you will notice that the sales funnel in figure 1 is specifically illustrated for inbound marketing, but the concept holds true for all approaches involving relationship or content marketing. The top of the funnel is where the suspects first convert into leads, and these leads make their way toward the sales end through lead nurturing. The process is the same regardless of what type of marketing you perform.

You begin finding suspects to turn into leads, to convert to customers. The further down the funnel improves their “qualification” rating, or rank if you will. This is where you provide the level of nurturing they require, by returning for additional information. They may either contact you or you may contact them. The choices are numerous, and they are yours to make. What is certain today is that today’s customer or decision maker, be it business to business or business to consumer, is performing a lot of online search prior to making a buying decision.

Your responsibility as a business professional is to provide individual leads an easy path to the information they require to reach a purchasing decision, to keep your brand name top of mind during this time, and to be there when they are eventually in a position to make a commitment.

Within this article, I will attempt to explain the fundamental actions your business should take to establish an efficient and effective lead nurturing system.

For instance, these aspects are important to the overall success of your lead nurturing system:

1. Knowing and understanding the fundamental principles associated with prospect nurturing
2. Creating an uncomplicated prospect nurturing process
3. Understanding how to perfect and broaden your current process
4. Evaluate the success of your company lead nurturing program
5. Understanding how to employ prospect nurturing to produce a greater, more productive connection involving the marketing and advertising and sales teams

 Suspects & Prospects

Figure 1.

People, especially those looking to select the right accountant, often produce an extended buying cycle; they may take weeks or even months (up to eighteen months for one of our clients) to make major purchasing decisions. While this may not be true for all individuals, most people will still take their time on any major selection decision (and selecting someone to oversee their financials usually falls into this thinking), unless of course, the issue is one of an emergency nature. When the clothes washer goes out, they may not perform all the research they would have like to because the pile of clothes keeps rapidly growing. But selecting a firm for a long term relationship, and supporting their vision for their business, always requires a lot of research and evaluation.

Remember, lead nurturing is a lot like creating a pathway for prospective buyers, specifically where your company marketing and advertising group serves as the ever-attentive instructor.

You can learn more about what buyers are researching or looking to purchase, which is determined by their particular actions and patterns. If the prospect has visited (revisited?) your website; your analytics will tell you how much time they spent on a particular page, or what information they downloaded. If you use more traditional marketing strategies, by keeping a record of their inquiries, communications and/or visits, you can nurture them accordingly. In either process, you can produce engaging, well-timed information and facts, in relation to those needs and wants. It may be an eBook, white paper, brochure, flyer or product cut sheet.

Today’s accounting prospects also spend far more time performing online and offline research - a situation that often brings the prospective buyer to the attention of a firm's  sales and marketing teams, long before they are prepared to make a buying decision. A particular concern, naturally, is the ability to isolate these “warm” potential customers - the ones that aren’t prepared to purchase at this time - from your “hot” sales opportunities, which characterize instant sales and profits possibilities. This is precisely why prospect rating resources tend to be ever more popular these days.

Another challenge is knowing the way to interact with individuals that display a “maybe now-maybe later” attitude. Potential customers gradually make their way down the sales funnel, and you nurture them by providing with the information they require without disturbing or perhaps offending them. Performing a rush to judgment by pushing the lead toward a sale is not a good idea, despite the sales person’s need to make their quota. We will cover conversion chaos in another segment of the article.

Lead nurturing might be overwhelming, and it can become a complicated challenge. Getting started with lead nurturing, on the other hand, could be a straightforward process, provided an efficient strategy is developed, together with clearly defined objectives.

Quantify and qualify leads and lead data, merged with a marketing automation solution.

Automation presents your company with the opportunity to monitor and evaluate the process efficacy of your marketing endeavors.

NEXT - Part Three of this four part article will cover dissecting a lead nurturing program, and how it works.  See you next time.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Architectural Firm

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This is the initial portion of a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle.

Regardless of the methodology of lead generation you employ, in all probability your architectural firm will spend considerable time, energy and financial resources on lead generation. Some firms utilize direct mail, telemarketing, referral or customer-based marketing, trade shows, networking and a host of other strategies to generate leads and revenues. Others use their own particular formula for marketing and advertising. Lead generation and lead nurturing are top-of-the-funnel aspects of marketing and sales in every business; yours is no different.

This article is not about the strategy, it is about the process. As an inbound marketing agency our company, Zen Marketing, is in the business of teaching businesses how to generate more leads from their websites using content, but this is not a sales pitch today. Forget inbound marketing for the time being; let’s focus on the best approach to nurture the leads that you have generated.

One of the oldest clichés in the business world is “sales is a numbers game”. The number of customer sales transactions is the direct result of the number of “touches” the suspect experiences to convert to a prospect, to a qualified lead, to a sale. A touch might be an ad in the newspaper, meeting at a trade show, phone call, direct mail piece, or article found on the website. Every business is different; every marketing campaign is different. The sales cycle is what it is for your business; you know best the period of which we are referring to.

Those attempting to generate qualified leads, or prospects, if you will, will quickly learn precisely how long and what number of those suspects and prospects result in completed transactions (aka closed sales). In measuring this, a hard truth is exposed: there is major difference concerning “qualified” as opposed to “ready to purchase.”

Here is another truth. There will always be a percentage of “qualified” leads in the lead nurturing process that simply fail to generate a sale, just as there are those that make it all the way through the sales funnel, having received all of the lead nurturing they could ever hope for, and yet fall completely out of the pool of “sales-ready” prospective purchasers.

Statistics reveal that any architectural firm can consider approximately eighty percent of qualified prospects will ultimately make a purchase; however, there is no guarantee the transaction will hit your revenue report.

Lead Generation

We won’t be spending a lot of time on lead generation, because there are so much varied approaches that there are hundreds of books on the subject available for download on Amazon. The trick is realizing the difference between a suspect from a prospect; between a “lead” and a “qualified lead.”

Successful business-to-business marketing tactics include a broad and diverse range of tactics. Some of the most widely utilized include:

• Relationship marketing
• Content or Inbound marketing
• Direct or outbound marketing
• Online marketing
• Events 
• Tradeshows
• Educational workshops

When it comes to lead generation each tactic yields some amount of leads; but at what cost? And how efficiently are the leads created? The graph below, courtesy of our partner Hubspot®, reflects the sliding scale of the costs per lead. I provide this for information only, and won’t be discussing the benefits of one over the other, as it is for your firm to decide what strategies will be effective.

That said, nearly every any business card collected at a trade show is nothing more than a link to a suspect. Chances are that the person providing the card had a fanciful notion to share it because he or she:

• Behaviorally averse to confrontation- it’s easier and safer for them to simply string you along
• Was too bashful to say that something about your product or service caught their eye and nothing more
• Something from their past was brought to mind as a result of seeing your booth
• They love collecting business cards (you wouldn’t believe the number of cards that are given out and then thrown away when the person gets home)
• They ask for more information, only to gather further information to compare with your competitors

IN OUR NEXT POST ..... we take a serious look at lead nurturing.

Lead Generation & Nurturing for Your Accounting Firm

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This is the initial portion of a four part series dedicated to lead generation and lead nurturing process. No business can be successful with new client development without a strong understanding of this phase in the sales cycle.

Regardless of the methodology of lead generation you employ, in all probability your accounting firm will spend considerable time, energy and financial resources on lead generation. Some firms utilize direct mail, telemarketing, referral or customer-based marketing, trade shows, networking and a host of other strategies to generate leads and revenues. Others use their own particular formula for marketing and advertising. Lead generation and lead nurturing are top-of-the-funnel aspects of marketing and sales in every business; yours is no different.

This article is not about the strategy, it is about the process. As an inbound marketing agency our company, Zen Marketing, is in the business of teaching businesses how to generate more leads from their websites using content, but this is not a sales pitch today. Forget inbound marketing for the time being; let’s focus on the best approach to nurture the leads that you have generated.

One of the oldest clichés in the business world is “sales is a numbers game”. The number of customer sales transactions is the direct result of the number of “touches” the suspect experiences to convert to a prospect, to a qualified lead, to a sale. A touch might be an ad in the newspaper, meeting at a trade show, phone call, direct mail piece, or article found on the website. Every business is different; every marketing campaign is different. The sales cycle is what it is for your business; you know best the period of which we are referring to.

Those attempting to generate qualified leads, or prospects, if you will, will quickly learn precisely how long and what number of those suspects and prospects result in completed transactions (aka closed sales). In measuring this a hard truth is exposed: there is major difference concerning “qualified” as opposed to “ready to purchase.”

Here is another truth. There will always be a percentage of “qualified” leads in the lead nurturing process that simply fail to generate a sale, just as there are those that make it all the way through the sales funnel, having received all of the lead nurturing they could ever hope for, and yet fall completely out of the pool of “sales-ready” prospective purchasers.

Statistics reveal that any accounting firm can consider approximately eighty percent of qualified prospects will ultimately make a purchase; however, there is no guarantee the transaction will hit your revenue report.

Lead Generation

We won’t be spending a lot of time on lead generation, because there are so much varied approaches that there are hundreds of books on the subject available for download on Amazon. The trick is realizing the difference between a suspect from a prospect; between a “lead” and a “qualified lead.”

Successful business-to-business marketing tactics include a broad and diverse range of tactics. Some of the most widely utilized include:

• Relationship marketing
• Content or Inbound marketing
• Direct or outbound marketing
• Online marketing
• Events 
• Tradeshows
• Educational workshops

When it comes to lead generation each tactic yields some amount of leads; but at what cost? And how efficiently are the leads created? The graph below, courtesy of our partner Hubspot®, reflects the sliding scale of the costs per lead. I provide this for information only, and won’t be discussing the benefits of one over the other, as it is for your firm to decide what strategies will be effective.

That said, nearly every any business card collected at a trade show is nothing more than a link to a suspect. Chances are that the person providing the card had a fanciful notion to share it because he or she:

• Behaviorally averse to confrontation- it’s easier and safer for them to simply string you along
• Was too bashful to say that something about your product or service caught their eye and nothing more
• Something from their past was brought to mind as a result of seeing your booth
• They love collecting business cards (you wouldn’t believe the number of cards that are given out and then thrown away when the person gets home)
• They ask for more information, only to gather further information to compare with your competitors

IN OUR NEXT POST ..... we take a serious look at lead nurturing.

The Evolution of Referral Marketing for NJ Attorneys and Architects

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Remember when commercials were only about products for sale on television? There were “new and improved” this and that, “try this new” whatever. That sort of thing constituted the bulk of television advertising.  Websites, content marketing, social media and blogging didn’t exist.  Marketing hadn’t changed in decades; Madison Avenue made certain of that.

There were ads for cars, trucks, cigarettes and booze, but never would one see a lawyer offering money for injuries, or for the hospitals that sent the ambulances for their potential clientele. 

Remember when television ads for medical centers, prescription medicines, personal hygiene and contraceptive products, bankruptcy filing, and personal injury lawyers hawking their services simply did not exist?  While we still see beer commercials, most alcohol and cigarette ads have disappeared from the television ad scene. The remainder has taken over mainstream television advertising, and portions of the late night commercial breaks.

Television Was Looked Down Upon in Professional Services

Television advertising was so crass and of low esteem. Community hospitals would never stoop to such a level, as doing so may damage their reputations. The American Bar Association forbid advertising of any kind but was especially fearful of television. Besides, most lawyers and other professionals seldom, if ever, considered themselves as marketers; they relied on reputation and referral.  Only in the 1990’s when the Bar Association relaxed the rules did the “bottom-feeders and ambulance chasers” begin to the small screen.

Back in those days, it was considered a prudent and proud business that relied on the most traditional business model; word-of-mouth and referral was how business was done. Homogenous industries such as lawyers and accountants, architectural firms, banking, doctors and hospital executives networked in their local associations and the annual or semi-annual industry conferences.  They relied heavily on their retainer clients to refer others.  If one professional did not handle the client’s needs, they were referred to a specialist with whom they had a working relationship.  A referral fee, however frowned upon, was and is the rule of the day even now in many industries.  Referral networks and the reliance of referrals made sense, because it was the accepted marketing formula.

Today it is quite a different story.  Professionals must consider themselves a business, not an island unto themselves.  All manner of professional firms utilize mass media as a means of getting the word out, but costs continue to rise.  With all the clutter of television ads, and consumers tuning them out (TiVo, the DVR,), the conversion rate is nearly impossible to accurately measure and overall effectiveness is often questioned.

Where Are Professional Services Going With Their Marketing Dollars?

Like newspaper advertising, television is a valid form of push marketing. It serves a purpose but today companies are seeing far better results increasing word-of-mouth via the many social media platforms that have become dominant.  The digital world provides solutions to expanding the overall marketing reach of professional services, and a great solution may be closer than you think.

At Zen Marketing, we provide workshops for companies that wish to enter the networking and word-of-mouth arena. These offer an affordable opportunity to apply social media strategies and tactics into a marketing formula and can involve many individuals within an organization. Social media is also a great entry into the use of inbound marketing, the most effective method of this digital age.

A study performed by Marketing Sherpa reflects a drastic shift in expenditures for all business (see Figure 1.)  Please note the “traditional marketing” strategies are at the bottom of the budget expenditure graph.

A good way to get one’s feet wet in the inbound marketing pool is to develop a social media strategy.  By scheduling one of our networking and social media workshops, you can begin to understand the value proposition it presents.

Contact us and begin to grow your business digitally.  Who knows, you might be able to save money and grow your business concurrently.

How Architects Can Create Sustainability in Business Development

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Your business development or sales organization has been very busy. Think about all that time spent drafting emails, responding to voice mails, writing proposals with little or no real relevance, pitching to non-decision makers and not holding prospects accountable to commitments… in actuality that is a lot of time NOT spent selling, it is time spent chasing!

What percentage of the overall time of your sales efforts are actually spent actually selling with new prospects? And how does your brand and/or credibility suffer from these typical but common sales activities?

Time is Your Most Valuable Asset

Consider the impact on your top line revenue if you were able to reduce the time either you or your sales people spend chasing procrastinators.

Consider the impact on your growth if you were able to double your actual time spent selling (most sales people are only in front of new prospects (outside the scope of your existing core client base).

Here is a hint: an improvement of 5%-20% of the time equates to 2-8 appointments/hours per week.

What would this translate into with regards to gross sales?

There is a marketing process that can shorten the sales cycle and dramatically improve conversion and close rates. When properly deployed it can eradicate all those annoying time wasters many sales people get stuck with while providing your brand or product with a significant boost in credibility. The common term is content marketing or inbound marketing. More about that in a minute…

How Is Time Utilized in the Sales Process?

Just think about the amount of time that gets invested into:

• prospecting and networking
• engaging
• presenting
• writing proposals

This is usually followed by the big chase with the “prospect”… and then you come to discover that your sales people were on a big fishing expedition!

Sooner or later every business owner will realize the importance of addressing this situation.

Quite often traditional sales people sit back after all of the hours of prospecting, pitching, presenting, proposal writing and chasing and go over in their own minds why the prospect, who seemed so interested yesterday did not buy today. There are shelves of books dealing with this problem in book stores. The reasons that sales people typically provide are at the very least predictable.

Do any of these replies sound familiar?

• Your price is too high!
• We need to “think it over”!
• We have decided to postpone this for now!
• We have decided to stay with our current provider!
• We chose another company!

If you had a stock portfolio that was under-performing the overall market would you keep dumping time and money into those stocks? I seriously doubt it. What you would do is you assess what you have that is working, and then determine what to keep and what to eliminate… you would cut your losses with regard to what is really an under-performing asset. Why would you approach your marketing tactics any differently?

Place Your Focus on the Plan

For our clients opportunity is not a viable strategy to business development. Our clients believe in the creation of plans, plans that are both realistic and achievable; plans that establish measurable goals and provide personal accountability. Our clients wake up every morning knowing what action items have to be accomplished, and understand how these activities align with their overall long term mission.

Can you honesty argue that your marketing and sales goals are clearly defined, understood throughout your company, and are being achieved? If not perhaps it’s time for you to seriously consider a change in your company’s approach to marketing. Beginning with the overall vision and leading through the goals, strategies, and action items necessary to achieve a result that you will be proud of. And getting off of the unsustainable cycle of cold calling, frustration, and remorse and shifting your marketing spend into a more sustainable process.

It Must Be Measurable

Adopting new marketing tactics are always met with excitement until the revenue line doesn’t grow or the results are fuzzy and non-measurable. That has often been the case with traditional marketing tactics like direct mail, newspaper advertising, and road signs. And while good marketers have adapted internet marketing best practices like dedicated landing pages and QR codes to help strengthen these traditional practices provide and provide some analysis they really cannot compare to the quality and volume of data that can be generated from an inbound marketing approach.

Again, using the stock portfolio analogy, how long would you continue with an investment advisor if all you routinely saw were the fees s/he was charging you and not the performance of the portfolio? That is very similar to what many businesses are doing- paying the fees to pump out ad’s without being able to assess the impact that ad is having on their revenue growth.

Change Your Approach to Marketing

With the proper application of a well defined plan along with a robust inbound marketing platform (we recommend Hubspot® and use it ourselves) you can consolidate almost all of your marketing endeavors into a single software-driven process. The advantages to this approach are:

• You will project your company’s value proposition
• Your target audience will understand your company culture
• The value your company brings to your clients will be broadly and repetitively understood
• You will be able to quantify which tactics are most successful and where to shift your investment of time and talent

Perhaps best of all you will share that across a blog and different social media applications automatically and seamlessly. You will now have the ability to:

• Create and/or enhance the awareness in your brand that rivals the best public relations tactics
• Repetitively establish your credibility
• Provide opportunities for interested parties to become qualified prospects
• Maintain a high level of engagement over time
• Understand where in the sales process your investment in training and continuing education needs to be applied

Get the Facts

We have a comprehensive e-book that illustrates the inbound marketing process in great detail, and would love to share it with you. To obtain your copy, with no strings attached and no sales person phone calls, just complete the short form, above, right.

And if you would like to schedule an initial assessment of your current website and see an inbound marketing quotient just drop us an email and request a complimentary consultation.

Hunterdon County Business Expo - How to Make the Most of Your Time

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Are you attending the upcoming Chamber of Commerce Expo and Restaurant Showcase on October 16? Would you like to insure you generate a return on your investment of time at this show, the only trade show of its kind in Hunterdon County?

You will get a more value if you have a game plan going in. Here are several tips for people who are planning to attend the Expo.

What Are Your Objectives?

Why attend the EXPO? Defining your objectives will help you prepare and you will find your time at the event more productive. Some of the things you might want to accomplish include:

• Looking for collaboration or partnership opportunities between your business and other companies
• Find a great service or product provider for your home or business
• Get some face time with local business people, important clients, prospective new clients, or even your neighbors
• Bringing back some best practices office so your execution at other similar events can improve

By setting objectives now, and developing a plan to accomplish them, you can not only streamline your approach accordingly but utilize your resources more efficiently.

Look at the EXPO Website Now

Every show publishes a list of exhibitors and the Chamber of Commerce has a great website for the EXPO. Just point your browser to www.hunterdonexpo.com and click on exhibitors. Take the time to identify the companies you know you want to meet (maybe a business partnership opportunity or a service you’d like to explore) or observe (maybe your competition is exhibiting there). Look for potential service providers that you want to speak with, perhaps even setting up an appointment with them in advance to get more of their time and attention.

Have a New Perspective on Your Business Cards

Have you ever considered bringing business cards with a different email address to a show? This works! There’s value in developing ongoing relationships with vendors and exhibitors relevant to your needs, but you also don’t want your primary email address flooded with spam or sales offers. If you complete the event registration and print a small supply of business cards with a different email address you’ll still get lots of great information but you can also redirect everything into a separate folder with Email Rules for reading later.

Jog the First Few Miles

I used to regularly attend three and four day trade shows. Las Vegas, Milan (Italy), Frankfurt (Germany) to name a few. I would always have a list of those booths or suppliers that I needed to meet with, but on the first day I would do a quick lap around the entire show–checking out booths, getting a sense for companies with something special  and taking notes of which booths I particularly wanted to come back to see. At any show, there will be vendors you didn’t know before, or established companies that do a particularly good job at educating and engaging their audience.

Don’t be Afraid to Say No… but Politely!

Exhibitors who really understand the sales process will train their booth staff to actively engage people in the aisle. If you’re interested by all means stop and have a conversation. But remember the importance of managing your time, and don’t be afraid to say “no thank you” and keep walking. Be polite and smile. The same goes for the uncomfortable situation where you suddenly realize the conversation has turned into an unwanted (or too early) sales pitch.

Think Again About all of the Giveaways

Do you really need it? It is probably not worth lugging around for the rest of the day.  If you are just going to throw it away later you’re just wasting someone’s money.

Visit Important Booths during the Lulls and You Will Get More Attention

Every show has an ebb and flow to it. Sometimes the activity level is fast and crowded, others, especially during meal times, seem quieter and slower. If your time on the show floor is mostly during the “busy” times booths will be chaotic and you may not get the time you need from the representatives. Instead, plan to come back when you can afford to miss something on the conference agenda (a talk, a celebrity appearance, or a workshop, for example). The booths will be far less busy, and reps will have more time to spend with you.

Look for the subject matter experts, and ask questions that will help you learn

Booths are usually staffed with sales reps, which can be a great source of information. A really good sales rep knows what is happening in their industry, and usually has a lot of great insider “gossip” about other companies. You can also seek out the real thought leaders and subject matter experts from each company. Do your homework in advance- find out who at each company is writing their blog posts, who is featured in their white papers, and who is quoted most often in their press releases. You might even check them out on their social media sites, and then ask for those people when you visit the booth.

All told, the time spent at the EXPO can be a fast and efficient way to build awareness of the many great local businesses, products, and services available to you.

Top 4 Reasons Services Business Fail

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In this fast-paced world of business, mostly professional service firms such as lawyers, architects, structural engineers and financial service providers, are hesitant to move toward social media as a means for growing business. If your intent is to stay the course with your current marketing and sales methodologies, you are probably also defining yourself through the use of these following top 4 reasons for failure. 

After all, none of these business sectors seem very alluring, fun or exciting. As valuable as these products and services may be, they aren’t top of mind services of which people are routinely in need.  Banks and other financial institutions may be, but most have shied away from the new marketing, and are constantly being absorbed, merged, bought and sold.  Their focus is elsewhere.

Besides, there are established means and marketing methods that are tried and true; at least that is the current thinking, like these top 4 statements, right?

1. If it (marketing) ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Why should we convert from traditional marketing when it has served us so well in the past.   Besides, social media just isn’t for us, right?  It is no matter than even though 87% of adults that use the internet that have an investment account use social media as well as use the internet to manage their accounts (Forrester Research). 

We use our website as nothing more than a digital brochure, even though it has been proven that a static website is like a billboard in the desert. Additionally, traditional advertising has worked well for us, so why rock the boat?  It really doesn’t matter that as the market ages, our customers of the future will be entirely immersed in the digital experience.

2. We believe in our existing customer base’s demographics and psychographics.  That will not change.

We, as a business, have relied on our customer’s loyalty for generations.  Surely that won’t change.  It doesn’t matter that even though the world has gone crazy over the internet and social media, we, as a traditional business have little need to change the way we do things. Our customers introduce their children to our firm, and their children will become our clients over time.

Ours is a business of referrals, and therefore there is no need to utilize marketing methods that are here today, gone tomorrow.  Social media is just a fad.  The stories about Social Media being the New Word of Mouth are fiction; not to be relied upon.

3. Treat customer service and loyalty programs as expense departments.

The more we solicit customer opinions, the more it costs us to satisfy them.  Maintaining the status quo is cheaper than actively promoting loyalty and customer interaction.  Surveys performed by American Express clearly point out that customers that use social media are more demanding, will cancel a purchase of they have a bad social media experience.  The same survey also says they spend 21 percent more with companies that have a social media customer service program, and are more loyal; it can’t be true, can it?

4. Social media is a waste of time, money and effort.

Social media is confusing and the expense hasn’t proved itself yet.  Regardless of the report produced by Adobe’s Digital Index report, it says social media is still evolving.  Waiting until it is completely understood by the masses is a prudent decision, right?

It’s obvious that this article is meant to poke holes in the theory of the status quo when it comes to marketing in the digital age.  Frankly, we see too many small to medium sized services businesses that don’t execute the traditional model very well. If your business has suffered from any of these types of thinking, you may be in serious trouble... or denial.  Regardless of the industry you play in, there is well-identified value to be found in social media and inbound marketing.  The traditional model of lead generation is no longer working as it used to.  The inherent cost of traditional marketing is far more than inbound marketing, and digital marketing produces more loyalty and greater referral clients. 

Isn’t it time to take another look at inbound marketing?

Inbound Marketing and History Lessons Can Work Together

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A favorite saying in business is “those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it". In today’s economy, this lesson can often be disputed. It is easy for a business owner to develop a rear window perspective and allow their business development to be determined by tactics based in the past- it's human nature to want to stay within our comfort zones and rely on past successes because new or misunderstood opportunities are intimidating or represent risk. There is nowhere this behavior is more prevalent than in the adoption of technology. It is viewed as costly, difficult to master, ever changing, and often confusing while at the same time it is possibly advancing the business of our competition,

But even though technology is advancing at a faster rate than ever before, there are still many proven best practices and techniques everyone should be advantaging if they want to be successful. When applied through technology, the business owner can gain access to a greater number or prospective customers and create measurable reports of their business at a more efficient rate. Service professionals from architects to accountants have shown success when that taking advantage of these tactics, plus the many new marketing techniques, but not in a way that makes you lose the personal touch with the people who keep your business standing.

Making Marketing with Technology Personal

Most marketing tools today revolve around using technology to reach their customers. We are a technology-based marketing company and our people are always on the go- does this sound familiar? Our client companies are now using web pages, mobile media, and social networking to keep their message fresh and engaging in this fast-paced world. But these are just the tools that will help you reach more customers. In order to be successful, your company must combine this technology with quality marketing techniques along with good content creation. You want to reach more people, but only the kind of people that will be interested in your business, product, or service.

Making marketing (and especially advertising) feel personal is one of a series of immutable laws in marketing. You want your customers to feel like you know them and are listening to their needs, not sending them spam and constantly pitching them to make a purchase. Businesses can leverage message boards, online polls, and dozens of other technologically-based marketing techniques in tandem with direct mail to get firsthand information about what their customers are thinking. This allows for the design of effective promotions and adjustments to business offerings that maximize sales... and profits. With so much information available right at your fingertips, why should a business ever be out of touch with its users?

Improving Support for Small Businesses

People used to avoid small businesses because they felt they could get lower prices and comparable service at the large national chains. This is no longer the case. Online marketing tools do just as much to improve the sales of small businesses as they do the large corporations. Best of all, you do not have to be an expert on marketing or technology to succeed in the online world. There are companies (like Zen Marketing) that can set up a great marketing campaign for your company and provide the support necessary to keep your web pages running.

The best part about online marketing for the small or private business is that it is highly efficient. Instead of worrying about a middleman managing your affairs, marketing companies put you right in contact with your viewers and prospects. You can discover where they are coming from, what they are specifically looking at, and what parts of your web page are driving the sales process. This allows you to streamline all of your efforts in to one solid inbound marketing process that keeps customers coming back for more instead of wasting time and effort putting together campaigns that never get you anywhere.

Combining Quality Marketing with Technology

Technological advances do not change how you advertise, just where you advertise. If you want to create a quality inbound marketing process, you need to focus on creating quality information about your business, product or service. Create and share links to pages that tell people why your offering would benefit them. Fill your web pages with information on why your expertise and service is the best choice for them. The use of keywords in content is important to search engine optimization (SEO) but remember a lot of keywords without the proper context will impede your inbound marketing results- people will not want to stay on your page or follow through with your offer.

It is incredibly important to embrace new technology if you want to sustain the growth in your business, but you need to combine these tools with solid marketing techniques as well. In the past, the focus of an advertising campaign was to explain why your product or service was a good choice. This approach is still effective with internet marketing. You do not want to get so caught up in using the marketing techniques that you forget to embrace the basics of good marketing strategy. Use a marketing provider that will blend these two business practices, and you will find your company growing at an unprecedented rate.