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Not Enough Fresh Sales Leads? Marketing is the New Sales
Your sales are down and leads are rare. The phone's not ringing. Let's blame marketing! If you join this band wagon to rationalize your poor sales results, you need to step up and take responsibility for your own fate. It's amazing how often sales teams play the victim here. They blame the marketing department, team or an individual, for their lack of sales. Don't get me wrong, I'm on your side. Often, in a typical, let's say "traditional" organization, there is disconnection between marketing and the sales organization. There is a lack of communication, team work and common goals. Sad but true. Often, the larger the company, the less marketing serves the individual sales professional. In corporations, it seems the norm for marketing is to concentrate on selling "the brand" and not products and services. Corporate marketing sells 'the logo' to trigger trust and positive emotions when people see it. Not all, but most, traditional marketing leans on advertising which fails to work directly for you in attracting new prospects and leads. In small to medium-sized companies, there is usually a very small marketing team or a single very, over-worked marketeer. Worst, as a business owner or independent professional, you don't have a budget and you do everything! Again, marketing is absent or not good enough to generate enough new opportunities. The most important and singular point I'm making is that you must recognize and deal with "what is," to improve your situation. Recently, I turned 40 years old. A friend said to me, "Don't worry, 40 is the new 30." If you want to improve sales and your commission, guess what? "Marketing is the new Sales!" Understand YOU are your own marketing department. Accept it and take action. Just like the decline (if not extinction) of personal assistants, sales administrative assistants and secretaries to support sales teams or individuals, there is less marketing support too. You type your own sales letters and other correspondence and keep your own schedule. Today, you need to work on your own public awareness, lead generation and sales support materials and communications. With tighter budgets, less staff and more responsibility, it's up to you. Any way you look at it, as a sales professional you must take charge. Sales superstars and expert managers know this. They devise a strategy and implement their own marketing systems, in addition to the brand-like corporate, marketing efforts. Marketing is continual communication to influence someone to take an action. Marketing departments do it through various means and on a mass scale, via print and media advertising and public relations. Single, sales people can market effectively through personal contact and working in the field. You can source new deals and increase lead generation within your existing sales process without as much pain or work as you think. If you don't accept that you have to take action yourself and keep looking outside for leads and prospects, you are going to continue to fail to reach your sales objectives. The good news is that the technology and tools available today are powerful, affordable and effective for solving this challenge. Keep an eye out for future Customer Catcher? articles, where I'll give you strategies, tips and tricks for creating a profitable, Personal Marketing program to drive your sales skyward. You'll get the sales you want and become your own marketing machine with bigger, better and more immediate results. Until then, think about evolving into your latest role because? "Marketing is the new Sales." Get free help and advice at www.CustomerCatcherTips.com. . Martin Wales helps you increase your sales and profits with simple, proven tools and systems that get immediate results. If you want more customers, contact him at that get immediate results. If you want more customers, contact him at Martin@CustomerCatcher.com. In-Depth Business Management... Click-Here
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Careers and Employment Raise Your Fees Overnight! Do you want to make more money? 6 Steps to Avoid Losing Summer Sales It's a fact - the online world dies down in the summer time. Kids are out of school, families are on vacation, there's fairs to attend to, and many are just spending too much time outside to be online. For those that market mostly online, the summer months could be eating your profit. The good news is, it's easy to take your product to where your market is - offline. How to Sharpen Your Sales Message with Do-it-Yourself Focus Groups - Small Business Power Tools You've probably heard of focus groups. It's a tool that the big guys use to quickly test a new product or service or to get fast feedback from potential customers. Focus groups do not provide real, actionable information but are great for what I call "clue hunting." For example, I once sat through a series of focus groups on a new camera-related product. After three focus groups, we were able to pretty well conclude there wouldn't be much of a market for this particular product, and the idea was dropped. The three focus groups probably cost this advertiser around $5000 vs. the hundreds of thousands of dollars that would have been wasted had they put the product into manufacturing. Increasing Sales by Using Coupons - Will it Help Your Business? Increasing Sales by using Coupons. Will it help your business? Well, the Promotional Marketing Association's (PMA) "Coupon Council" shows that 3.8 Billion coupons were redeemed in 2003. Consumers saved over 3 billion dollars. 79% of American's used coupons last year. There are many Coupon Franchises out there with quite a track record. Here are a few of them: Val-Pac; http://www.valpak.com/info/franchise/franchise_faqs_content.jsp. 4 Tips for the Summer Slowdown - How To Pick Up Sales You may have heard about the "summer slowdown". You may be experiencing it right now, or you may not be affected. Regardless it's important to pay attention, and do something this time of year. Outsourcing the Sales Function Small to medium companies that want to increase sales or profits and find it is possible to outsource sales should - do it! At this point most business owners and executives either become overwhelmed with doubt or fear. Are Your Sales Meetings Boring? Many sales meetings are boring and a waste of salespeople's time, say the majority of salespeople I interview. A review of what's going on in the market is good to know, but to be effective, sales meetings need to be a lot more than that venues for quick market updates. Management From Within Inspiration and Management from Within Part 2. Make Time, Not Excuses There are four primary activities that successful salespeople engage in on an ongoing basis. These are Prospecting (45% of time), Presenting (20%), Product Knowledge/Malleability (20%), and Professional and Personal Development (15%) Book of Lists Marketing for Pressure Washing Companies The American Business Journals produces a Book of Lists each year in their many markets, it is wise for pressure washing companies to use this book of lists to find new clientele. The book of lists, lists the top companies in size in all industry sectors. Since pressure washing companies clean almost anything, it behooves them to use the book to selectively target the top companies to do business with. 3 Ways to Increase Your Sales Last week I got a call from Jose, who was looking for help improving his ads. He'd been running the same ad in four local papers for two months and only gotten one response. He was understandably frustrated. With more than a dozen very satisfied clients, he knows that the residential property management services he and his brother provide should interest more people, but he wasn't having any success getting attention or generating leads. Are Your Business Proposals Losing You Sales? 10 Steps to Get the ?Yes? You Deserve Your ability to write an effective and persuasive business proposal directly relates to your level of success. Write a great proposal and you'll get the contract or make the sale. Write a ho-hum proposal and your prospect will go elsewhere. All Small Businesses Need to Gather Community Intel How well do you know your community? As business owners it is essential that we know our communities intimately. Have you ever made the effort to learn more about your town; Do you even know where to look. Lets discuss some ways to gather intel for your community based marketing efforts. Increasing Business Through Distributors You're a small company with a good product. You are confident that the product can sell, but you don't have the financial resources to hire a team of fifty salespeople to market and sell the product for you. You also don't have the staff resources to support those that purchase the product. How do you make your good idea and good product create success for you? Never Trust a Silent Customer Imagine you run a pizza parlour. You have all these neighbourhood families that pop in at least once a week for some pizza, garlic bread and Coke. On an average, one customer spends about $30 per week. But let's assume they spend just $20. Imagine you did something that bugged this customer, but he or she never told you about it. What would you stand to lose if they left? Set Yourself up for Trade Show Success Of the many mistakes small business owners make, a big one is participating in trade shows and business expos without a strategy for turning those marketing opportunities into sales. Here are five tips to get you started. Keeping Your Sales Team Motivated Sales managers frequently approach me for advice on how to keep salespeople motivated, especially when sales reps get into a rut - and seem to keep slipping deeper into it. Telling managers what not to do usually solves the problem. Most managers do things to de-motivate salespeople without even knowing it. 5 Secrets to Managing Your Sales Manager Productively Many people believe that the main reason for representatives leaving their organisation is that of money in that they leave for a bigger salary. In fact, the biggest reason why people leave organisations is that the role they are doing is no longer offering any challenge or excitement. The second reason is due to the behaviour and capability of the immediate line manager. More often than not, the two are strongly linked with the manager taking little interest in the representative's development and as such the representative feels under valued and bored due to the lack of attention and challenge. Want to Increase the Amount of Business that Your Firm is Getting? Business development is important for every business and refers to the action of bringing in customers or clients that are likely to make positive contributions to a company's bottom line. Business Development is all about establishing relevant and subsisting relationships in the market place. Do You Really Want Local County Contracts? If you really want to secure government contacts at the county level; there is a lot more than just getting on a list and bidding on a solicitation. Government even at the country level is a little corrupt and insider-ish. You can complain about the evils, backdoor deals and wasting of tax payers money or you can remember that the imperfect system is run by humans and what goes on in generally what should be expected. No difference than the shenanigans of the Catholic Priests.
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