Another Sign That You Still Need Some Conventional Marketing

Over the past few months in this blog we've talked about all of the things we do here at Minds On. To say we're a marketing company sounds vague in today's terms of specialization, but it's true. We are audience driven. That means we look at who our client companies are trying to reach and build the tools that can both get to them and carry the messages they want to deliver in the most effective way. Sometimes that means traditional marketing, like brochures and trade show booths. Sometimes it means online, interactive, and social media, or sometimes it's both. But the key is to find a way get to through to that target audience.

We just went through an election primary and a lot of candidates were pushing the envelope on social media. There are some advisors who insist that they spend all of their money on social media. But every night on my drive home from the office, I saw what must have been over a hundred yard signs for a local candidate; someone I’d never heard of before.  If I hadn’t seen those signs, ALL of those signs, I wouldn’t have known about that person. It was very effective.

After a few weeks of seeing that candidate’s name hundreds of times, I checked out his website. It was very well-designed, and he was promoting his Facebook and Twitter feeds. It was a well-rounded approach.

And that’s the point. It was well-rounded. It must have been very inexpensive to print and distribute those signs. And it was those signs that got me to his website. For little effort, a campaign can have a printer print dozens of plastic signs and have volunteers distribute them. The signs serve two purposes: one is to highlight the candidate’s name; the other is subtler: you see a sign in a yard and you know that every person with a sign supports that candidate. The more signs, the more support.

If this candidate had gone strictly online, I would have never heard of him. And I’m betting that most of the people who had his signs in their yard wouldn’t have either. It was a combination of conventional marketing and the personal touch of a volunteer showing up at your door and asking you to display a sign that made the difference.

This is something that a lot of people miss: social media is a PERSONAL media. You need an introduction. You take an active role and decide if you’re going to engage or not. And all of the things that help you engage are keys to a successful marketing effort.  In this case it was a yard sign… a LOT of yard signs. But for your business, it might be a tradeshow booth, a data sheet, a mailed postcard, or it might be an online video and an e-mail campaign. What matters is that your campaign finds its way to where your customers and prospects live.

OK, so you might not be running for office, but you’ve got a product or service to sell. Are you spending everything online? How are people going to learn about you in the first place? Are you missing out on the simple and effective conventional marketing benefits that a few brochures, an effective business card design, or a well-executed trade show display can bring you?

You should definitely be exploring online marketing and social media, but on occasion, look up from your computer screen and find out where your customers and prospects live and where they move about in the world. It might not hurt to plant a few signs in their yards.

I’d love to talk with you about your marketing, both online and conventional. Are you getting the most impact from what you’re doing? And would you like to explore combining social, interactive, and conventional marketing? Give me a call or drop me a line.

Empower Your Sales Team: Encourage Them to Use Your CRM

I hear people complain far too often, “I can’t get our sales team to use our CRM. They might enter basic contact info, but that’s about it. It’s useless.”

It’s a shame. A good Customer Relationship Management system can significantly improve your sales processes and give you critical information about your future sales and current prospects. Great data collection will tell you where to place your attention and how to spend your marketing dollars to receive the biggest payoff. I’ve seen organizations that fully embrace these systems discover things about their customers that they never suspected until they collected the data and took a hard look at it. I’ve seen them discover huge sales opportunities and eliminate bottlenecks in their sales cycles that cut out days, weeks, and even months. And I’ve seen it show exactly who on the sales team is doing the work that will keep them successful. Imagine what your sales would look like if you could see exactly what your most successful sales people are doing and then shape everyone else to be exactly like them. That’s what a great CRM can do for you.

It’s clear why sales people resist it. They want to be doing the work of sales, making calls, taking meetings and making the final deal. But the true predictor of future sales isn’t past sales - it’s current activity. That’s what a good CRM will tell you. You can see which members of your sales team are doing the work today that will make them successful next quarter.

But some CRMs are clumsy and difficult to use. Your CRM choice should make it completely natural for your sales team members to capture what they’re doing at every moment including who they’re calling or meeting with, what future activities are planned or promised, and collect increasingly detailed information about the prospects they’re working with. If your sales team is collecting lots of data, but waiting until the end of the day or the week to put it into a system, it will never get done and you won’t get what you need from your system.

There are some terrific options available today. Solutions like Salesforce.com are affordable and very powerful. But some organizations need very specific processes and data collected and don’t find most packaged solutions to be a good fit. We’ve worked with a number of customers like this and built them custom solutions that are designed to be a natural part of their sales workflow.

For example, here’s what our customer, Matt Berry, has to say about the CRM tools we designed and built for Healthlinx:

“The tools that Minds On created for us have absolutely revolutionized how we do business,” says HealthLinx COO Matt Berry. “We’ve seen a huge spike in productivity, a substantial decrease in sales rep training time, and an overall increase in awareness of our sales process. This last piece, the Scorecard, is astonishing. It will transform our business. Each rep knows exactly that their numbers are and we know, too. Everyone is tracking the same thing. And we can get to the root of what makes a sales rep successful.”

You can’t cajole, punish or even torture your sales team into using a CRM, but you can make it a natural part of the sales process. If you do, you’ll take greater control of your business. I’d love to talk to you about how you can do this for your business or how to make your existing CRM a more natural part of your sales process. Give me a call (740.548.1645) or send me an email.

Wasting Leads – Making Your Sales and Marketing Work for Your Competitors

You want to talk about pet peeves? One of the biggest things that bothers me when I look at an organization’s marketing and sales efforts is seeing it creating and wasting leads. It is all too common, and it’s why many people think that marketing is a waste of money. Frankly, many organizations are wasting their money.

Let’s say you go to a big trade show and set up a goal to create two hundred leads. That’s terrific. And it’s not that hard to do if you have a really big crowd. You set up an attractive booth, you plan an interesting event by giving away items and perhaps one big, cool thing (iPads will be the hot giveaway this year).  No problem. You’ve got two hundred new leads

But what are you going to do with those leads?

My bet: nothing. You’ll hand them off to sales; they’ll call on a few and find out that most of them aren’t leads at all. They’re just names. They have no interest in your product or service. They just wanted the squishy ball you gave away, to give to their kids. So sales will turn their attention to other things and let those leads sit.

Even if you have some well-qualified leads, if you generate too many of them, sales can’t effectively follow-up. And if you have leads that really are interested and you don’t follow up with them, they’ll go looking for other solutions. You’ve just created a lead for your competitors.

For you to understand how to focus your marketing, you need to completely understand your sales process and measure EVERYTHING. You need metrics on how each lead moves through your system and what causes it to progress from mildly interested to a full sale. And you’ll need to know the precise characteristics that are required to make someone a lead, not just a name.

Here are the rough categories I use to define leads:

1. Name – open a phone book and randomly put your finger down. That’s a name. Completely useless. That business card you collected for a chance to win an iPad is also a name. That list you bought is probably just names (or will be until you do something with it).
2. Suspect – someone that has given you the basic information that matches your ideal customer profile. This could also be someone you have discovered by research. They have the potential to become a lead, but the probability is low.  They’re in the right industry; they’re the right size, and they are facing the problems that you solve. 
3. Lead – this is someone that has voluntarily given you detailed information and indicated that he/she is in the market for what you sell. This is usually the category that the previous two are grouped into. For most sales organizations, a lead is still too far down the pipeline to be worth spending  time on.
4. Prospects – these are people you have detailed information on, including the confirmation that they have the budget to make the purchase. You’ll also need to understand who makes the buying decisions (could be multiple points) and how they decide. 

If you can make these definitions part of your marketing and sales process AND create a model of what a prospect looks like in detail, you can design a marketing and sales approach that works. If you simply collect names, you’ll be spinning your wheels and any interest that you do generate will more likely than not, end up benefiting your competitors, not you.

It’s better to have ten highly qualified leads to give your sales team than a thousand names. Ten leads they can turn into five prospects. A thousand names they might turn into one — and that will take a huge amount of effort.

And, through all of this, the goal should be to do less, spend less, and get better results. It’s possible, but not if you’re just using your marketing to collect names.

I’d love to talk with you about how to reshape your marketing to create highly qualified leads and prospects, and measure the effectiveness of your sales and marketing. I can show you the types of programs we’ve developed for our customers to do just that and how you can make your marketing work for you, not your competitors.

Empower Your Sales Team – Quarterly Sales and Marketing Conferences

That old question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” is almost completely meaningless in business today. Things are moving just too fast. Frankly, planning for more than a year is also getting to be too far ahead to predict. To really keep your sales team fully empowered, you have to narrow that window of marketing development and planning, and increase your communications between the sales and marketing teams.

Back many years ago when I worked in a big technology company, we used to hold quarterly sales and marketing meetings where we’d fly in our sale reps from all over North American and hold a multi-day conference. We’d introduce the latest tools, get their feedback on what we were working on next, and listen to what they were seeing and hearing out in the field, and find out what was working and what wasn’t. It was very useful, but also very expensive and time consuming.

If I were doing the same thing today, I’d set it up as a video conference and take up no more than a few hours, maybe over a few lunch hours. There would be no disruption to sales efforts and the cost would be next to nothing.

If you can arrange to get your sales and marketing teams together for these quarterly meetings, here are my suggestions:

1. Unveil new programs. These programs should be the result of your previous meeting in the last quarter. Frankly, they shouldn’t be a surprise.
2. Recognize great teamwork. Make a point of recognizing the sales and marketing staff who worked on each new project. Make a point of highlighting great contributions from sales reps and connecting it to the end results. You want sales reps to make time to work on your marketing projects and they will if they see the payoff (and you don’t take up too much of their time).
3. Reward top sales performance, but don’t just focus on closed deals. Also, recognize the most calls, the most qualified leads moved forward in your sales process, and other milestones that you track. Furthermore, make a point of recognizing their analysis of lost sales and opportunities. This is critical information in shaping your future efforts.
4. Let them talk about the current market conditions. Find out what they think they need for the next quarter.
5. Announce your current quarter projects and teams – and note where you might be changing them from by what you’ve learned in this meeting.

In addition to this type of meeting, I highly recommend developing some type of internal online system that can let your sales and marketing team communicative and share information in a much more real-time way. It’s very simple to set up an internal bulletin board, Wiki, or blog.

How are you communicating with your sales team, keeping them fully enabled to meet the challenges they meet in the field? How are you learning about the tools they need to win sales? I’d be happy to talk with you about what we’re doing for other customers and the types of things we see working to make sales more effective. Give me a call or send me an e-mail. And you don’t have to wait until next quarter!