Small Business Marketing Sucks

Is quoting a ballpark price always a losing proposition? In this article, I talk about how to turn a potential losing situation into a win.

It has all the markings of a lose-lose situation. Quote too high a price and you probably won’t ever hear back from him. But if you under-estimate the cost, you’ll look shady if you actually bid for the job and your proposal comes in higher. So what’s a poor web designer to do? Bite the bullet and throw out a number? Or tell him you can’t quote a price without knowing exactly what he needs? Here are a couple of approaches you can try...

Read the full story at SitePoint.

In my latest SitePoint blog post, I finally reveal what stapling bacon to your face has to do with cold-calling and I explain how to overcome the single biggest obstacle you’ll face when it comes to actually doing it.

Several years ago, the company I worked for held its international sales meeting, and reps from all over the globe came to our corporate headquarters in Los Angeles. I was asked to stand up in front of the group and make a presentation. Two of the reps from Australia approached afterwards to tell me they thought I’d done a good job. One of them expressed his fear of public speaking with this statement...

Read the full story at SitePoint.

In my last SitePoint article, I promised to show you if and how cold-calling can generate new clients. In this article, I’ll tell you why it works so well and reveal a deep, dark secret behind it (hint: it stinks).

In my last post, I promised to show you if and how cold-calling can generate new clients. As I mentioned in that post, the company I work for uses cold-calling and cold-canvassing as its primary means of getting business. That doesn’t mean we ignore other marketing methods. It’s just that we don’t just sit around waiting for people to respond to our mailers. We have a sales force on the street and a telemarketing team on the phones actively looking for new business.

Get the full story on SitePoint.

After publishing an article on their website, the folks at SitePoint have asked me to be one of their business core bloggers. I’ll be publishing about 6 blog posts a month. Here’s the first:

In 2008, Eyes on Sales featured an article entitled, “Why Decision Makers Hate Cold-Calls.” If you want to be convinced that cold-calling doesn’t work, that it’s a colossal waste of time, and that it’s the most “ineffective and costly” way to find prospects, then go ahead and skip what I’m about to say and go directly to that article. (Just be sure to read the numerous comments from people who vehemently disagree with the author.)

On the other hand, if you’d like to explore how cold-calling can be a great way to find new clients, then stick around, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Full story on SitePoint.

I’d like to think I’m a good boss, but I’m certain that at least a few of the people working for me hate me this week.

That’s because I’ve been subjecting them to some extensive training on setting sales appointments. The first step was to develop an effective script. Everyone worked hard coming up with a good one, and today we completed our final drafts. I gave everyone until Monday to make any last-minute tweaks and to practice, practice, practice before launch day.

But a few of the more rebellious ones decided to start using the new script right away. In the first hour after today’s meeting, 3 people set appointments with their new script; and one person used a portion of his to overcome an objection and book an appointment. Way to go, team!

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing some of our techniques and strategies, successes and failures. Regardless of how you’re marketing, I think you’ll read something to help in your endeavors.

An article of mine has been published on SitePoint.com.

SitePoint is an online media company and information provider targeting the Web professional market, specifically web developers and designers. Its website contains a vast variety of tutorials and articles coupled with a vibrant and well-informed community of over 400,000 members. It was named the third most popular eBusiness website and is currently the 749th most visited web site in the world.

The article is titled, So What Exactly is “Value” and How Do I Use It to Sell? It can be found here.

Sales and marketing gurus are always talking about value — that in order to have a successful product or service, we must “create value” for the customer. But what exactly does that mean?

While the theory is absolutely correct, the concept of value is subjective and nebulous. What is valuable to one person may be completely irrelevant to another.

And to complicate things even more, we tend to be myopic about what we think is valuable about our product or service. It’s like trying to read the label from inside the bottle... what we think is valuable and ought to cause consumers to buy is often not the case. So it would seem that determining what’s valuable to your customer is not as easy as it sounds.

Here’s a simple definition:

If you are increasing or decreasing something that your customer wants increased or decreased, then you are creating value.

So... what value are you creating today?

Any good salesperson worth his salt knows that no one buys anything on the basis of a product’s features, that to communicate value you must translate the feature into a benefit.

“Features versus benefits” is Marketing 101. Yet, even if you master the basic skill of effectively translating features into benefits, you’ll may still fail in the final and most crucial step of the buying process – triggering the need or desire that causes your prospect to act.

You see, it’s not the benefit per se that motivates a person to buy. It’s power-packed words describing those benefits that trigger the emotions which motivate us to spend our money, time or energy. In other words, people buy because of the emotions associated with the benefits, not the benefits themselves.

Let me give you an actual example. Recently, my oldest son’s Boy Scout troop did its annual popcorn sales fundraiser. We set up (with permission) in front of a local gas station/mini-mart and arranged two-hour shifts of two scouts each. When our turn came, I instructed the boys on some basic etiquette (“Stand up straight,” “Allow people to enter the mini-mart; don’t block their path,” “Speak firmly but politely,” etc.)

Forgetting who I was for a time and what I do for a living (hey, it was the weekend), I didn’t pay much attention to the boys’ canned pitch (“would you like to buy some Boy Scout popcorn?”) to which most people politely replied, “no thanks,” or sometimes even rudely ignored them.

It wasn’t until one customer asked, “What’s this for?” to which the boys replied, “It’s for the Boy Scouts!” that my sales-trainer radar finally engaged. After telling the woman that they were raising money for a trip to Gettysburg, I took the boys aside and presented a new approach. I instructed the boys to say the following:

“Would you like to buy some popcorn to help us earn money for a trip to Gettysburg?”

You see, their original pitch did not address prospective popcorn-buyers’ unasked question: “What’s in it for me?” The additional “help us earn money for a trip to Gettysburg” provided something beyond the (questionable) benefit of over-priced, average-tasting popcorn. It triggered a desire that caused people to act. In other words, it provided a buying motivation: a desire to help the Boy Scouts. Buying the popcorn satisfied that desire with the good feelings everyone got from helping a worthwhile cause.

The result? Over the next 45 minutes, until our shift was over, every single person that walked by either bought popcorn or gave a donation towards the trip. In the words of the boys after their first sale using the new approach: “It works!”

It’s important to know your product, as this video so amply demonstrates:

They say that, in sales, “facts tell, but stories sell.” In this classic scene from the movie Tommy Boy, Chris Farley does a great job telling a story to demonstrate the superiority of his company’s brake pads. Unfortunately, he takes it just a little too far...

In my last post, I took issue with a particular sales consultant on what I considered to be blanket statements he made regarding the so-called ineffectiveness of cold calling.

In all fairness to his expertise, the author did outline an effective alternative to cold calling:

Once I’ve identified a company to approach about any of my services, I do my homework. I call three or four of the company’s salespeople. My hope is to speak to a salesperson that has been with the company for only a short time, to another who is an old hand with the company, and one who is a top producer.

When I speak to these individuals, I am upfront with the purpose of my call. I let them know who I am, why I’m calling them, what my intentions are regarding calling the company about my services, and request their permission to ask them some questions about the company and their experience with the company.

After asking a series of questions, he gains permission to mention their name. Typically, he says, the individuals not only give permission but will encourage him to call, turning it from a cold call to a warm call to a referral. He goes on to say:

When I do call the company, I use the introductions provided by the salespeople to break the ice and gain credibility. Those introductions turn the call into a conversation about their needs and observations rather than a sales pitch.

This approach works well for him because he is selling a relatively high-dollar service (sales training) to large companies. But what if you are selling a lower-cost item to smaller companies that don’t even have a single sales person, much less three or four, to contact? What works for the author cannot be applied across-the-board to every industry. Having only a hammer doesn’t automatically make every problem a nail.

To illustrate, the company I work for is a small, independent Yellow Page publisher. Our average sale is less than $1,200 and our typical customer is a mom-and-pop shop. Besides selling new business, our sales reps are expected to call on several hundred existing customers to renew their advertising. Our sales cycle is short (about a week-and-a-half from appointment to signed contract). It would be too time-consuming and not cost-effective enough to spend time researching every potential company that we call on. Incorporating the author’s method into our sales process would be sales suicide.

For companies such as ours (and maybe yours), cold-calling and cold-canvassing are the only available options our reps have for prospecting new business. Our short sales cycle doesn’t afford time for networking and relationship building. Even for businesses that can afford to try other methods, cold calling is still an effective tool to include in your marketing arsenal.

In case you didn’t get the memo, it appears that cold calling is offically “dead” – at least according to one expert. In an article entitled No, You Don’t Have to Cold Call – Ever, sales consultant Paul McCord had this to say about cold calling:

In my opinion, there is hardly a more worthless use of time and energy than cold calling.

Cold calling is time consuming for the salesperson and it immediately signifies to the recipient of the call that the person making the call isn’t an expert in their field because most prospects assume that true experts aren’t sitting at a desk pounding the phone.

Really, Paul?

He goes on to suggest that, while cold calling may generate some business, it's not the most effective way to find prospects.

There’s just one problem with his statement: My department generated nearly half-million dollars in revenue last year... strictly by cold calling.

In one particularly good (pre-recession) month, here’s how 3 appointment setters did:

• Decision-makers spoken to: 230
• Appointments set: 86
• Appointments sold: 27, resulting in $43,000 in revenue

That means we set 1 appointment for every 2.7 decision-makers we spoke with, and our sales team closed 31% of those appointments.

Admittedly, that was an above-average month. But on average, my best telemarketer sets 1 appointment for every 33 dials, and he sets over 60 appointments a month. Pretty good results from something that’s such a “worthless use of time and energy,” wouldn’t you say?