By:  Carolyn Nye

Sending timely and relevant communications to your email file is a necessity in driving qualified traffic to your site. Simply increasing your traffic numbers may be the first step, but it won’t mean anything until those visitors convert into buyers. Below are four tips to optimize your email program to help increase its conversion rate.

1. Emphasize Landing Pages

Landing pages may be the most critical element in converting email traffic of any kind. Whether emailing prospects for an acquisition campaign, or emailing your best customers for product offers, the flow-through from the email to the landing page is critical. Enforce the marketing message and make visitors feel like they are in the right place after clicking through. The page should give subscribers all the information they need — while quickly directing the visitor to the checkout process with as few clicks as possible.

Two easy ways to tell if your landing pages are converting well from your email campaigns are:

• Bounce rates. Check the bounce rates of the landing page; higher than normal rates indicate a problem with the page.
• Monitor click-through and conversion rates. Compare the click-through rates to the conversion rates. If you experience a high click-through rate but a low conversion rate, chances are your customers are getting lost after clicking from an email.

2. Segment Your File

Understanding the characteristics that make up your email file will allow you to develop an appropriate segmentation strategy. Sending targeted communications that speak to that customer on a more personal basis will, in most instances, improve your conversion rates versus a simple blanket message to everyone.

3. Choose the Right Offer

Testing your offers can give helpful insights into what motivates your subscribers to purchase and what they value on your site. For some sites, a simple percentage or dollars off works best, while others may find a clearance or free gift to be more effective. For premium or luxury products, a discounted-price offer may actually backfire, as customers may construe it as cheapening the brand. Testing offers will quickly identify which are most effective and give you a better insight into what your subscribers will respond to.

4. View Email as a Long-term Relationship

Because email has a reputation for being effective with a good return on investment, many marketers become disappointed when they see the initial results of one email that don’t live up to expectations. Every site has a different sales cycle and simply looking at the immediate metrics of one campaign is not enough to establish the effectiveness. Sometimes it takes a few additional nudges or touch points to ultimately convert a customer. Sending a promotional email will drive traffic, but perhaps a triggered email follow-up to those who clicked through — and then abandoned the cart — or sending another type of triggered message will be the right combination to convert your visitor. Don’t be afraid to overwhelm a site visitor with more than one message. It may be that last message that works to convert the visitor.

Summary

Taking the time to ensure your email program is as efficient and effective as possible is the objective of many sites. All the work involved in crafting the email itself will be wasted if the email does not do its ultimate objective: Convert visitors into buyers.

From Article Base.com

According to research conducted by GP Bullhound, online lead generation is growing at a rate of 71% year-on-year. Moreover, in a survey conducted by the Future of Tech Marketing in 2010, nearly 66% of the participants said that sales lead generation is their first priority. The study also found that social media is emerging as the most popular channel for lead generation among technology marketers. Sales Lead Generation: How to Generate More Leads

Sales lead generation involves creating or generating the interest of a prospective consumer in the products or services of a business. The primary purpose of lead generation is to increase sales. Here are four popular techniques that can help you generate more leads:

* Complementary Partner Referrals – Joining forces with complementary partners can help you generate qualified B2B sales leads. Tying up with businesses that sell products or services that compliment your own offerings can help you multiply your sales lead generation. For instance, if you offer IT consulting services, you can tie up with companies that sell relevant software.

* Cold Calling – Cold calling is one of the most popular techniques for generating sales leads. If executed properly, cold calling can help you to generate a large number of leads. Moreover, cold calling is a more cost effective option than field selling. However, it is advisable to improve your phone selling skills before you start calling your prospects.

* Event Marketing – Event marketing is another effective tool used for sales lead generation. Hosting events, such as live seminars, teleseminars, webinars and workshops, and participating in trade shows can help you connect with your prospects and deliver your sales pitch. Talk to your prospects about their problems. Explain how your product or service can offer them a solution.

* Internet Marketing – Internet marketing is one of most effective and inexpensive techniques that can help you generate valuable leads. Using techniques, such as search engine optimization, keyword research, article submission, back link creation and pay per click advertising, can help you maximize your online visibility and draw large amounts of traffic to your website. This can result in increased lead generation.

Social media is another platform that can help you to generate qualified leads. Create accounts on popular social networking websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. Join online communities that are related to your products or services, identify your prospects and start interacting with them to generate leads.

Today’s B2B marketing success revolves around the new spirit of collaboration between marketing and sales, and nowhere is this more important than the point where the sales cycle begins – defining the perfect sales lead.

There are myriads of technology choices and philosophies on how to generate, nurture and manage leads. However, any or all of these might end up futile if marketing and sales don’t agree on what defines a qualified lead prior to investing in lead generation activities.

Check out the following 4 tips for defining the perfect sales lead.

1.      Get sales and marketing on board at the start.

Trying to get two teams to agree on the definition of the perfect lead can be difficult, but is essential.

Whether you are well underway in lead generation efforts or just getting going, if you haven’t brought the teams together to discuss and define a sales lead, you should definitely set the foundation here. Once there is a working definition that both teams are comfortable with, the conversation can quickly change to ‘how do we get more, working together’ as opposed to ‘the leads we are getting aren’t qualified’.

Ensuring everyone has a hand in the definition makes everyone more accountable, both now and in the future. Be sure you meet regularly to clarify and fine-tune your lead definition as it may change over time due to, for example, economic and/or product line changes. And finally, don’t forget to put your lead definition in writing, and be sure that upper management is on board.

2.      Ask as many questions as possible.

Cover all your bases by considering the following:

• Which leads have converted quickly in the past?
• What do we know about previous leads that did not convert?
• What are the characteristics of current customers that we want more of, e.g. company size, location, industry?
• What kind of influence do particular leads have in the buying cycle (i.e. an end user, a buyer or influencer)?
• What is the current length of the buying cycle and how can we shorten it?

3.      Anticipate problems your audience is trying to solve.

You need to understand your leads’ unique set of challenges. Knowing these will enable you to intercept them as they research solutions to their challenges.

Prospects will generally fit into 3 buying stages:

New information seekers:  These make up the vast pool of anonymous individuals within your lead universe.  They’ve just begun the research process.
Continuing education:  These prospects have separated themselves from the pack by continuing their quest for further education on your industry or product.  Opportunity knocks:  These buyers are ready to pull the trigger and are looking for reassurance that they are making the right decision.

4.      Don’t stop testing.

Lead generation and lead qualification are dynamic processes. Even though you have a fixed, mutually-agreed-upon definition, be prepared revisit it at regular intervals. Industry changes affect your potential buyers.  If the economy is suffering, most likely your prospects’ buying power is too.

Stay current on the known leads in your database and watch how they perform.  New developments within companies that used to be your ideal leads may take them off the top of the list (i.e., department downsizing, internal budget cuts and management changes).

The B2B marketplace, with its many diverse niche verticals, rewards marketers that know how to target well. Finding the right channels and the right messaging is essential.

And having a viable lead definition makes sales more effective, strengthens marketing’s credibility, and ultimately generates revenue growth.

By:  Andrew Spoeth

Are you a better coach or manager?  As a sales manager you are directing, supervising, managing, delegating, appropriating and reporting.  While these are important tasks, they may not lead directly to sales.  In some of my previous articles we discussed how important it is to coach your salespeople and how little time and training you may actually have to do that.  This article will give you some tips on how you can build your coaching skills and spend more time coaching.  Let’s start by defining coach.

Defining Coach

“A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.”

Tom Landry

Coaching is an interactive process that helps individuals and organizations develop more rapidly and produce more satisfying results.

Professional coaches are trained to:

• Listen and observe
• Customize their approach to the individual’s needs
• Elicit solutions and strategies from the individual

As a result of coaching, salespeople:

• Set better goals
• Take more action
• Make better decisions
• More fully use their natural strengths

Coaches believe that the salesperson is naturally creative and resourceful and that the coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the salesperson already has.

While the coach provides feedback and an objective perspective, the salesperson is responsible for taking the steps to produce the results he or she desires. (Modified from the Official ICF-International Coaching Federation definition.)

Are you a better manager or a coach?

What types of activities are you engaged in daily?

Coaches:

• Help salespeople set goals and then make a plan to reach those goals.
• Ask salespeople to stretch more than they would have on their own and give them the encouragement to do so.
• Focus salespeople on productivity not activity so that they produce results more quickly.
• Provide salespeople with tools, support and structure to efficient and effective.

Many sales managers feel they only have time to tell their salespeople what they want them to do and what they expect.  Most sales managers need to have more time to show salespeople and plan with them.  This will change behaviors, which will increase results rapidly. Too many times managers assume that salespeople can get the expected results, but in reality they are not sure how.

Let’s say you tell your salespeople to increase their sales by 20%.  They all agree.  The next thing you know several of them have increased sales but the rest of them have not and in fact sales have decreased for some of them.  How can this be?

Most high performers respond to a challenge and have the natural ability to increase sales.  The majority of salespeople will try to increase sales but little of their activities will pay off because they are already doing the best they can.  The ones that have had a decrease in sales are probably already struggling and de-motivated by the expectation to increase sales when they can’t even keep their sales steady.

When you set an expectation to increase sales, your salespeople will benefit from specific instructions on how to do so.  Part of this can be done in a sales meeting and the rest in one-on-one coaching.  For example, explain at the sales meeting where you expect the increase to come from.  It could be that the increase should come from a mix of new business and existing customers.  If that is the case explain that they should start with existing customers because the easiest business to get is more business with satisfied customers.

• Have each salesperson choose 10 customers with whom they feel they can increase business.
• Ask them to create a plan for increasing business with each customer.
• Discuss some of things that will need to be done, like checking on current satisfaction levels, asking questions to learn of needs, educating the customers on ways you can serve them and closing the deal.
• Then meet with them one-on-one to determine how they will execute their plan and how that will be measured.
• Check in with them weekly to see how their plans are working and give them coaching if they are stuck.

Once they feel they have exhausted getting more business from current customers help them make a plan to get new customers.  Since the easiest way to get new customers is through referrals, develop a referral process with them that they can all use. Put a timeline in place for implementing the referral process and coach them to stick to it by helping them prioritize their work.  Of course, there are many other ways to get new business and they should not be penalized for those, especially if they work, but do reward them when they implement the plan you have coached them on.

Closing is a crucial area where salespeople need coaching.  How many of your salespeople have deals that are stuck?  What type of coaching do you give them to help them move the sale forward?  Each week, provide time as a team or one-on-one to help salespeople close business.

Definitely spend time coaching your less productive salespeople but don’t let them consume you.  You will get the most results from coaching your productive salespeople because even the best salespeople get better with coaching

By:  Alice Heiman

By:  Larissa Ham

Scared of promoting yourself and your business? Don’t be.

There’s no point being coy if you want to run a successful small business, says sales guru Ciaran McGuigan.

“In my experience shy business owners have skinny kids,” jokes the owner of Strike Force Sales.

Marketing Angels founder Michelle Gamble agrees, saying owners need to be “fearless, focused, relentless and consistent”.

Be relentless, says Marketing Angels founder Michelle Gamble. Photo: Supplied

“If you’re in a small business and you want to grow the business you just can’t be shy,” she says. “You’ve got to get yourself out there.”

The sales and marketing experts were part of a panel at Kochie’s Business Builders Boot Camp in Sydney last Friday. Below we summarise some of their best tips.

Rob Hartnett, managing director, Selling Strategies International

“It never ceases to amaze me how many small businesses are happy to spend $45,000 on a company car to get their salespeople around, but won’t spend $4,500 on what they’re going to say when they get there,” says Hartnett.

He says your first sale should be to yourself. “You’ve got to believe in what you’re selling”.

If you don’t like the thought of hiring sales people, or can’t afford it, he suggests investing some money getting your own sales training so you can sell your product or service.

If you are in a position to hire your own sales guru, do some research before signing any contracts.

“Don’t hire the wrong people and then try and train them,” Hartnett says. “Benchmark what you want and then hire against that.”

Lauren Brown, founder and managing director, Pulse Marketing

SME owners should understand how their business plans and marketing plans work together, says Brown, and realise that marketing covers many things.

“Marketing just isn’t around traditional marketing. It’s anything that communicates with someone who might do business with you.”

Brown says business owners should enter awards as a way of proving their credentials. They should also make sure their marketing is relevant and getting through on the right channels – whether that be traditional media, websites or social media.

Targeting your audience multiple times is also the way to go.

“Don’t talk to 100 people once, talk to 10 people 10 times. Very rarely do you see something once and say ‘I’m going to go and buy that’,” she says.

Ciaran McGuigan, CEO, Strike Force Sales

McGuigan is a big advocate of calling 10 potential customers before 10am each day.

But if you’re not comfortable cold calling, he suggests placing the calls at a time when you know the recipient won’t be there. The chances of rejection fall, the challenge instead being to leave a message enticing enough for them to call back.

“It’s a different problem but it’s a better problem if you don’t like being rejected,” he says.

Another tip is to enter your competitors names into Google Alerts – “every single time they do anything on the internet anywhere in the world you’ll be told”.

Carl Bellamy, group sales manager – small business, Yahoo! Search Marketing

Not surprisingly, Bellamy advocates testing all the search marketing engines – not just Google – before investing all your marketing cash. You should also test your keywords to find out what works for you.

“You need to fish where people are biting. Think about how you search on the internet and your keywords,” he says.

Michelle Gamble, founder and chief angel, Marketing Angels

As part of Marketing Angels’ motto of being fearless and relentless, the business’ Facebook site offers a ‘marketing tip of the day,’ which has greatly increased the number of ‘likes’ on the social media site.

Gamble also recommends email marketing – mailchimp.com.au is one such site that can help you craft your own newsletters.

She also says small business should aim for media exposure.

“Don’t be frightened of chasing down media opportunities. The higher your brand awareness is the less it costs to get each new customer through the door.”