This document provides tips and strategies for improving sales and marketing in today's economy. It discusses the importance of expanding relationships within organizations, creating urgency, and linking return on investment to emotional benefits. It also provides seven tips for improving cold calling, including sustaining calling efforts, making every call count, using call guides instead of scripts, respecting executive assistants, always being relevant and informed, gaining opt-ins, and following up. Finally, it discusses four levels of customer satisfaction and four strategies for cracking into corporate accounts, including using an objection elimination strategy, shouting out your value proposition clearly, leveraging triggering events, and employing a multi-touch campaign strategy.

1. Chamber Enhancement Group
&
Association Development Solutions
Presents
Sales Survival Tips for Today’s
Economy!
Enhancing your Staff & Profits for over 24 years!
January 2010
White Paper
By Randy E. King Pres/CEO
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2. 4 Diamond Must system!
Expand your relationships
If you've got a great relationship with one key person but don't
really know anyone else at the organization, fix it now
Create urgency
Build referral sources
Better Add Strategic Value to ROI
These days, you need to link that ROI to a compelling value. In other words,
it's not enough that your prospect will save $5 million a year. What can he do
with that $5 million that’s going to sway him emotionally to buy your
product?
Link that ROI to an emotional, business, or personal benefit, however, and
your chances of swaying a decision maker rise dramatically
Seven Tips for Improving
Cold Calling for Lead Generation
Studies by leading marketing research firms like MarketingSherpa
show that 92 percent of B2B buyers are open to cold calls if the sales person
is relevant.
The phone is the human touch of your lead nurturing program and thus every
opportunity including cold calling to a potential customer should be treated
with great respect. Each time you pick up the phone, whether it be the first
call or subsequent calls, it's important to create value by giving your
prospects useful information in digestible, bite-size chunks.
Step 1: Sustain the calling
Step 2: Make every call count
Step 3: Throw away the scripts: Telemarketers use scripts.
Teleprospectors use call guides. Scripts leave little room for conversation.
Call guides are strong outlines to perpetuate conversation with areas to be
discussed and questions to be asked. They must be built with flexibility and
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3. assume variable outcomes while still staying on message and promoting key
relevancies to the customer.
Step 4: Respect the Executive Assistants
Step 5: Always be relevant and informed
Step 6: Gain opt-in
Step 7: Always follow up –
Four Levels of Customer Satisfaction
⇒ Meet Customer Expectation
⇒ Exceed Customers Expectation
⇒ Delight Your Customers
⇒ Amaze Your Customers
Four Strategies for
Cracking Into Corporate Accounts
Before you pick up the phone to call that big prospect, close your eyes
and picture him at his desk. He's busy; his firm has downsized and he's now
doing the work of two people. He's got three unfinished reports in front of
him, a meeting with a very important – and very angry – customer in half an
hour, 78 unread emails in his in-box and a worrisome conference with his
son's teacher this afternoon It's no wonder he's about to tell you he's not
interested in your company's great product!
Sales professionals today are "dealing with people who have a lot to do
and who are under duress," warns Jill Konrath, founder and chief sales
officer of Selling to Big Companies. That's why the polite, gracious phone
messages of the past won't cut it today. They won't get you a call back and
they won't keep a busy decision maker on the phone for more than a few
seconds.
Scratch your old game plan for getting into corporate accounts and
instead try these four strategies, which Konrath discussed during a recent
Webinar, "Cracking Into Corporate Accounts."
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4. Objection Elimination Strategy.
Most sellers create their own obstacles by what they say on the phone
or in an email, says Konrath. They leave nice messages about how they'd
love to meet with a prospect, but the response is always, "We're not
interested" or, "There's no money in the budget" or, "We're happy with our
current provider." Those words are indicators that your message isn't
working and that you sound like another vendor calling in from the cold,
says Konrath. Remember that what you're selling is just a tool. Your
prospect isn't going to be interested in your software but he is going to be
interested in streamlining his supply chain or reducing his sales reps'
Administrative burden or reducing his transportation costs. So stop
talking about your products and services and what your company does
and focus on the prospect's business objectives and what they're trying to
achieve this year.
"Shout It Out!" Strategy.
People have very short attention spans and are overloaded with
information so you can't be subtle about what your product will do for a
prospect. You need to shout out your value proposition clearly, definitively,
and in multiple ways. What's a value proposition? It's the foundation of all
your work to get into big companies, says Konrath. It's about the business
results a prospect will get using your product or service.
For instance, one Web marketing firm says they "help clients improve their
online user's Web experience, which typically results in a 40 to 150 percent
improvement in key operating metrics. In just the first three months of
working with us, a recent client increased sales conversion by 57 percent and
increased average order size by 25 percent." This is a great value proposition,
says Konrath. It tells what they do and ties it specifically to how they help
their clients. Before your next sales call, create your own value proposition,
summarizing how you'll improve the prospect's business, tying your product
to the critical business issues and using exact numbers, if you can. Value
propositions will be individual and company specific so you should always be
fine-tuning them.
Triggering Events Strategy.
Triggering events are those occurrences that create opportunities for
your product or service. For instance, you might read in the news that a
company's sales are down – that's a triggering event for an organization
that helps clients boost sales. Other triggering events include new
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5. strategic initiatives, government legislation, and management
changes. "If you can align your value proposition to a triggering event,
now you're talking about something relevant and something urgent," says
Konrath. Scour the news, the Internet, press releases, and other sources
to find the events that should cue you to pick up the phone.
Campaign Strategy.
Once you've got a triggering event, you're going to start calling a
prospect and 95 percent of the time you'll get voice mail. Don't give up
after you've left three to five messages, as most people do, says Konrath.
In today's market, it can easily take eight to 12 attempts to reach out to
someone before you connect with them. Plan to touch the person you're
targeting in multiple ways, with new information each time. Use the
phone, email, white papers, articles, case studies, and more to
demonstrate your expertise and credibility. Don't rely solely on voice mail.
"Dialing for dollars is dead," concludes Konrath. If you're calling and
leaving "that nice voice mail message," your chances of connecting with
the decision maker are nil.
Social Media & Marketing, Social Selling!
Facts and stats you should know!
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6. Forrester Research; 2.2 billion today on line users……
2013 – 3.2 billion
Face book 350 million
Between 2006 and 2007, online donations grew by 26% but between 2007
and 2008 online donations only grew by 14%.
As showcased in the diagram, the four steps are:
1] Listen
2] Interact: Join the conversation
3] React: Adjust your product or service based on [2]
4] Sell
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7. The key word here is stronger. Social media tools, like LinkedIn, can
only strengthen these relationships and complement — not replace — the
necessary face-to-face, interpersonal communication.
B2C companies can have purely digital relationships with their customers
and often have to as a result of the pure volume of customers. However, what
social media has allowed for B2C companies (closer engagements and real-
time digital conversations with customers) can also be leveraged in the B2B
world. While B2C companies can, and for practical purposes often must, have
purely digital interaction with customers, it’s still important for B2B
companies to use social media tools as a complement and not a replacement
for face-to-face interactions.
After studying over 50 international nonprofit organization's email
lists and response rates, the 2009 eCampaigning Review
Study revealed that 60% of nonprofits present a compelling argument
for supporters to take action, yet close to 70% of the organizations did
not send a follow up email within one month. 37% of nonprofits did not
even bother to send a thank you email.
Other interesting findings include:
• Email lists are continuing to grow, though the rate of growth was 17%
in 2008. This is down from 19% in 2007 and 21% in 2006.
• The average subscriber on each email list received about 3.5 messages
per month. However, since many organizations are segmenting their
• lists and targeting messages, some people may be receiving 10 emails
monthly from an organization while others may only receive two or
three.
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8. • Emails sent to activists who had recently taken action on a given issue
received 3x the response rate of regular full-list actions.
• The annual churn rate, or the rate at which an email list “goes bad” in
a year, held steady at 19% between 2007 and 2008.
Social Media and Diminishing returns?
As the money moves up, who is viewing the social message? Does the
decider follow the content at all levels of the social engagement? At
what point does disengagement take place?
Decision Maker
Money
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10. 25-34 has grown by 60% from 11.2 million users to 18.1 million users
35-54 has grown by 190.2% from 6.9 million to 20.2 million users
55+ has grown over 500% from 954,000 to 5.8 million users
While the 18-24 year-olds still have a solid presence on Facebook at 18
million users, they have only grown by 4.8%, which indicates a much slower
growth rate as compared to older demographics.
In addition, the number of people who identify themselves as high school and
college students has declined by -16.5% and -21.7%.
According to a recent social media study conducted by NTEN, Common
Knowledge and ThePort, nearly three-quarters of 980 nonprofit professionals
surveyed are finally integrating some social networking into their online
marketing and communications.
74% have a presence on Facebook with an average community size of 5391
members. Four-fifths of survey respondents said that their nonprofit has at
least one-quarter of a full-time staff person spearheading their online social
networking. Over 50% say that they intend to increase social network
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11. staffing over the next 12 months. Social networking is generating very little
revenue. On Facebook, almost 40% of respondents raised money via
fundraising, but 29% have raised $500 or less over the past 12 months.
Another 2008 market research study conducted by NPD Group showed
that 61 percent of Boomer Internet users had visited sites that offer
streaming or downloadable video (e.g., YouTube and TV networks), while 41
percent had visited social networks (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace The
study conducted by Advocacy Online, Duane Raymond of Fairsay and
consultant Jess Day also noted that 50% of organizations' online lists had
40% or more inactive supporters. Only 9% had a strategy for reactivating
dormant supporters. Yikes. What can we glean from this study? Nonprofits
need to:
1. Segment their lists more and write separate emails that resonate
with different levels and types of supporters.
In July, Frogloop posted an article on Five Symptoms that May Indicate that
your Nonprofit Is Suffering from List Decay and suggested nonprofit’s
consider asking themselves the following: How can members help the
nonprofit and advance the mission besides signing petitions or donating
money? Are their offline events they can sign up to attend? Can they
volunteer? Write a letter to the editor?
2. Survey their list at least once a year and ask supporters what
issues do they think the organization should take on?
The key is to make online members feel like their opinions count and that
your organization cares. Also ask members what motivates them to take
action and donate money.
3. Determine if these inactive members are bad email addresses.
Remove them from your list. Only 33% of organizations surveyed cleaned up
their lists.
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12. 4. After a few attempts of trying to re-engage inactive supporters,
consider removing them from your nonprofits list.
I know that this can be controversial for organizations that pride themselves
on list size, but there is no reason to keep people on your list who aren’t at
the very least opening up your email communications.
5. Grow Your Online Lists to Account for Churn Rates
Conduct paid recruitment campaigns -- including search engine keyword
advertising and online lead acquisition campaigns – such as Care2 offers -- to
build your lists quickly around newsworthy issues or microsite campaigns.
Other noteworthy stats from the
2009 eCampaigning Review Study are:
• 93% have a presence on a social network.
• 76% of the organizations surveyed ask their donors to take action
online.
• 69% ask their online members to make a donation.
• 92% collect email addresses from at least two sources, including:
events, website, and offline mailings.
• 51% of organizations have 10,000 members or less.
• 5% of supporters are active members (meaning they took one or more
actions in the period of the study between June and August 2009).
• 7% of respondents conduct split tests of email alerts.
• 4% of campaigners are supporters of more than one organization.
Nonprofits are making progress with their online communications, but need
to adapt some very basic best practices to move their members up the ladder
of activism.
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13. David Armano spoke at the Conversational Marketing Summit in NYC
This underscores a fundamental truth to social media that many
organizations underestimate--being social means having real live people
who actively participate in your initiatives. It's difficult to automate
and a challenge to scale, but it can also help move your business forward in
ways that produce leveraged outcomes such as new/better products or
services.
The economics of using social media in business require the participation of
people to fuel it. It is not simply enabled by technology that maintains itself.
One of the biggest lessons to be taken away from a social platform such as
Twitter is that the ecosystem it's a part of if, is itself built on people who keep
it humming along with not only content, but a seemingly endless stream of
third party applications. This phenomenon is not entirely new--it's been
referred to as end-user innovation (innovation by consumers and end users,
rather than suppliers).
There are a few considerations every organization needs to consider when
developing their blueprints for their own unique social media design. While
there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are few things you can plan for as
you review the many options before you.
Here are three to consider:
Seeding. As you plan your approach for designing your social system, take
into account that you'll have to invest to grow your effort into a
healthy ecosystem that can produce data, insights or even new ideas. People
will be required in order to do this.
Feeding. Whether it's a community, Wiki or internal collaboration solution
you've put in place, it will have to be fed with a steady stream of content.
Some of this can be automated and some of it can come from your
participants--but there has to be some editorial judgment made for every
piece of content and functionality. People are required for that.
Weeding. A productive social business design will require efforts to prune
and weed out material that can inhibit its growth (just like a
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14. garden). In some cases, automated moderation services can do this--but in
others people will be required to ensure that interactions are productive.
Weeding can also include creating a separate environment--for example,
Nokia's "blog hub" encourages employees to vent freely internally (using
anonymous aliases).You can bet that someone is looking at the data and
analyzing it. If not, they should be.
It's worth noting that seeding, feeding, and weeding all take place after any
social initiative has been launched. But not taking into account the
manpower that's involved in these as you develop your social business design
strategy can lead to a lack of adoption or participation--essential elements to
any social initiative. Ignoring these realities will continue to propagate the
myth that social media is fast, cheap and easy. As organizations look to grow
or scale their current initiatives, it's proving to be anything but.
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