Dallas Business and Marketing Blog

At one time I was a Regional V.P. of Sales for a large global corporation. I managed a team of more then 30 multi million dollar producers and if you had asked me who was in sales at that company I would have told you I, my counter parts and their teams.

At this company we had a “Global Sales Manager” (who I will not mention by name to protect the guilty), I was no fan of this individual, he rarely spoke to the team (which was a good thing) and when he did come to the field you never put him in front of your best clients or distributors because he had a knack for ruining relationships and messing up deals on the verge of closing.

One year the other VP’s and I went to corporate for a National Meeting and guess who decided to get up and speak to the entire company! I looked at my fellow Sales Managers and just thought, “oh boy here it comes”.

I was then hit with something I have many refer to as “a flash of brilliance amid a sea of idiocy”. This fellow asked a simple question…

“Will all the sales people please raise your hands”?

There was about 300 people gathered for a dinner that night and of them about 20 hands went up. The field sales people were not invited to go to HQ so we had the Regional VP’s and our inside sales team, executive managers and a few channel managers who worked in corporate.

It was then that I was blown away by his next statement! He said and I do quote,

“I should have every person in this room who does not have their hand in the air fired. Sales is everyone’s responsibility, each of you should be telling your neighbors, friends, family and anyone you talk to ever; where you work, who you are and what your company does. You don’t have to close deals, be slick or do the hard work that our actual sales team does every day but if you are not telling everyone you know about your company, you are not doing your jobs”.

This hit me! Not only was that right at the full company level, I also wondered how many of my exceptional sales people had friends, family or contacts that did not know what they did. I had a conversation with my team as soon as I got back to my region about this. I was clear that nothing is more irritating then a “pushy sales person” yet simply being in the habit of telling every person you met what you did, who you did it for and what type of people you worked with over the life of your career could easily add millions to your net worth.

Further my sales people we not my employees, they ran their own sales firms, my company employed these firms and as you might imagine these firms had people working in them, “not in sales”. I had the presidents of my rep firms then have this same talk with their people.

Did everyone do it? Of course not, yet those who did found it remarkably effective. So my advice to any company president, manager, director, entrepreneur pretty much anyone trying to build a company is make sure everyone working with you is at least a little bit, part of your sales team.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: sales, sales management, entrepreneur, business, business management, team building, marketing

Popularity: 16% [?]

Affiliate marketing has become one of the biggest industries in Internet marketing today. There are all types of affiliates from small work at home individuals to large corporations who leverage their resources to send surplus traffic to strategic partners websites. One of the biggest problems affiliate marketers face is building a database of leads and customers. Sure you can do e-newsletters, e-books, free reports and blog subscriptions but what about all the visitors that actually buy or start to buy something from you?

Do you realize that they are the most qualified leads you can have? Now some affiliate programs give you the customer data so you can do follow-up and add-on marketing, but many do not. Further many times your customers start to buy but fall out of the order process. Because you don’t have access to the affiliate sites server logs you never get that data. Those leads are golden! They are people that started to buy and changed their mind, that means…

A. They are buyers
B. They are qualified
C. They are still in the market

So how do you gain access to the names and emails of these people? Some affiliate marketing programs have api interfaces and other technologies that let you create your own order form and pass the data across to them. With this you can capture the data, but again this is only some programs and for a lot of small time affiliates or smaller companies they don’t have the resources to do this type of integration.

Well I am about to give you a very simple, low tech way to capture the names and emails of every visitor you send to an affiliate site and better yet it will also be a iron clad way to cloak your affiliate links so they never get hijacked or affect your Google quality score.

Step One - Make a copy of the affiliate page, almost an exact one. Put instructions on the sign up, something like “part one of two” this will tell your user that they are going to have to enter more information.

Step Two - Use your email marketing system (I recommend Aweber) to create a simple form that asks for name and email address.

Step Three - Set the thank you page (the page the user is sent to after filling out the form) to the sign up page on the affiliate site. This way your user enters name and email, clicks enter and goes into the real sign up process.

Now there are some things you need to be aware of. First is may tick off some of your users, odds are they will have to enter that same information again. Next you will need to include verbiage on that page that says they give you permission to email them, if you are smart you will also set this list up for double opt in (meaning they will get an email and click a link that says they are ok with you sending them information).

The beauty of this technique is that anyone can do it, you don’t need to be a programmer and your affiliate partner can’t do anything to get in the way of your information capture. Next many of your potential customers will never finish an order, with this step you will capture tons of leads to follow up with. Next the process if fully automated, once in your follow up system you can automate follow up messages, do broadcasts, etc.

Another side benefit is it will help you track down orders that you may not be getting paid on. I would love to tell you that all companies pay affiliates for every single order, yet orders fall through cracks and sometimes they are simply stolen. It might be nice to see how many people start to order from that affiliate program you never make any sales though.

This is not the perfect way to accomplish this task by any means, a pass through programmed form that will prevent your client from having to enter duplicate data is a lot better, however like I said this technique can be used with just about any program and utilized by any marketer with even very basic skills.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, email marketing, leads, list building, follow up marketing, internet marketing, lead capture, database development

Popularity: 17% [?]

The above formula is the crux of marketing and the central philosophy of what we do here at Franklin-Spirko. the first thing we do with a client is to establish the ‘message’ of the business and this is not as easy as it seems! Having done this, we ‘position’ the message by designing this as a value proposition for the target audience or marketplace and not for the business owners! this is the single most important aspect of creating a marketing plan that will turn into revenue. Here is a tip - when you do this, you must be able to explain your business to anyone, starting with your family! If Mom cannot understand what your business does, chances are your customers can’t.

I should know this not because I’m involved with the Company, but I’ve been through the pain first hand! I can now sit back and count the wasted hours and not to mention the time with the design and marketing people that I incurred in my business career, simply because of my own insistence that, as a business owner, I was always right. I would personally agonize over designs, brochures and copy, just to put the ‘owners influence’ on it and to ensure that I was involved. I’m sure I paid several times over for the job to be done simply because I got in the way of the talented and creative people I had already paid to do the job in the first place!

Shortly, we will produce a video showing how we can look at a website and get a feel for the overall business - again, this may sound obvious, but when you watch the video, you will see how much detail we go into and how we can literally sense the personalities of the business without even knowing them! The video is not meant to be negative and naturally, we will not reveal the identity of the Company, rather we will provide direct, but constructive criticism, with a clear strategy on how to improve. The analysis will focus on both commercial and technical aspects.

Lastly, don’t spend your money on expensive advertising and marketing campaigns until you’ve nailed the above.

~ Neil Franklin

Technorati Tags: messaging, positioning, marketing, sales, business, leads, advertising

Popularity: 15% [?]

I spent the first part of my career as a sales person and it always amazed me how people outside of the sales industry would react when we discussed our careers. Many seemed to feel that sales was a difficult way to earn a living. People would explain to me how they knew there was a lot of money to be made by a good sales person but they just felt it was beyond their personal ability to sell effectively and live with a quota over their heads.

As for the quota, that does take getting used to for some people. The truth is every employee in every business has a “quota” of sorts. In other words if they don’t perform well enough they don’t keep their job. For the sales person this is much more personal though, you see the numbers every day, you monitor a sales funnel so you know what is or is not coming down the road and you also know that other people might loose their jobs if you fail in yours.

Sales people get a bad wrap at times for being “slick” or “aggressive” and even at times “cut throat”. A lot of people think of Uncle Mike the Insurance Agent or a slick used car salesmen when they hear the term sales and this is why I believe the fallacy exists that selling is difficult when the reality is that true selling is one of the most natural and easiest things you could ever do.

There are only really four things you need to be able to sell

1. You must know your product/service and believe fully in it

2. You must know your client and be willing to put their best interest before your own

3. You must be speaking to a client with the financial ability to make the purchase

4. You must then transfer your belief and knowledge to your client

When you follow that simple process selling isn’t even selling, it becomes nothing more then training your customer to do business with you. I have seen spectacular results from a new sales person, watched them close deal after deal and then something happens. A competitor takes away one account or they loose a deal on price or any one of a million bumps in the road.

The next thing you know they are under quota, unmotivated and sometimes looking for a new job. Now what changed? The customers are still the same, the product is still the same and the company is also still the same. The only thing that changed was the sales person’s belief system.

So that is why I say selling is nothing more then a transfer of belief. When you believe in your company and you honestly believe your client is better off doing business with you then with your competition you never really “sell” you just transfer that belief to them and they then logically choose to buy from you.

So if you or your sales team are ever struggling my advice to you is don’t do what everyone else does. Don’t blame the leads, the market or your pricing. Don’t work on “the fundamentals” of a presentation you can all probably do in your sleep. Just as an athlete works first on the core of their body regardless of their sport you need to work on the core of your sales ability.

Take a step back and remind yourself why you personally are bringing value to your your position, remind yourself why your company is the best in your industry. In short give yourself and your team a “belief booster shot” and you will see the difference in short order.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: sales, sales training, marketing, sales advice, sales techniques

Popularity: 14% [?]

Internet marketing has come a very long way over the more then a decade that I have been working in the field. During that time I have watched the industry mature and followed a lot of great web development companies as they have grown and matured. One thing I find very common even today from some very talented companies and people though is a giant hole in their web sites. What is this hole you ask, shocking as it may sound it is…

No Sales Process

Crazy? Yes but true none the less. I have looked at countless sites that are beautifully designed, well optimized and have exceptional traffic. Yet the site clearly does nothing to put the visitors into the “sales cycle”. There is either no call to action or you really and I mean really have to be a proactive visitor to find it.

There are several things you must ask yourself all the time about your website.

1. Do you know the primary and secondary goals of your site?

Shockingly many site owners don’t or they only have one defined goal vs. several. Such as your site goal may be simply to make a sale of a product or service but what is your secondary goal? Is it branding, lead collection or something else or all of these things. You must know those goals before you can be sure your site addressed them and you must track the results in order to improve the results.

2. Does your site “speak” to people who are at different points in their buying cycle?

Some people are in research mode (this is why you must generate leads), some are ready to buy, some need one question answered in order to buy. You must have resources for each type of visitor and said resources must be easy to find and navigate to.

3. How can you make visitors that will never ever buy from you valuable?

Look most websites will convert fraction of traffic to a lead or a sale so almost every site has what can only be considered surplus traffic. So how do you make that traffic profitable. Some examples are viral marketing or advertising revenue, both can help turn your extra traffic into something of value. You simply must be doing something with it if not you are wasting a valuable resource.

A great way to look at this is that when you create web pages you should try to line them up with sales and/or marketing positions of the off line world.

~ Some are like outside sales people. - Closing the deals.

~ Some are like inside sales people. - Answering stock pre-sales questions or just filling orders.

~ Some are like sales managers. - Linking the efforts of all the other sales people together.

~ Some are like marketing directors. Building lists of leads and pumping them into the sales cycle.

In short are you treating your sites and pages like a sales and marketing team and acting as their sales and marketing manager? If not, you may want to rethink a lot of your efforts. Then sooner you make the change the easier it will be,

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: sales, marketing, internet marketing, sales cycle, online sales, search engine optimization

Popularity: 12% [?]