Sales: A Delicate Balancing Act

Posted on November 10, 2016November 10, 2016 by Jonathan Herrick

As if running a small business wasn’t already a time-consuming task, you have yet another obstacle: You need sales. And you need them now. Maybe you’re just getting started. Maybe your company is in a slump. Either way, you have to keep cash flow pumping and find a way to sell more of your products. Now!

A lot of business owners and managers understand this and are solely focused on driving immediate sales. But in taking this approach, they often hurt their long-term results. By focusing so much on the here and now, they fail to take the crucial steps needed to build profitable, long-term customer relationships that will lead to those all-important repeat sales and solid lifetime customer value.

That’s why you need a healthy balance: You need to win sales now while building a sales success machine for the long term. Sounds easy, right? It requires a plan and a process. Here’s how to do it:

Know Thy Buyer

To build an effective short and long-term sales approach, it all starts with delivering the right message through the right medium to the right market.

Make sure the group you’re marketing and selling to actually wants and can afford what you offer. Similarly, when you’re communicating with them, don’t make it about you. Rather shift the focus to their needs and how you can help them solve their greatest problems. And make sure you are communicating to them through their preferred marketing channels. In other words, don’t try to market your arts and crafts through LinkedIn, and don’t market B2B industrial chemicals through Pinterest.

No matter how hard you work, you won’t have much success trying to sell your products or services to the wrong market with the wrong message. So what’s the most important part of this equation? Knowing the DNA of your radical buyer. If you are trying to sell to a group that has absolutely no interest in your product (how vegans think about steak, for example), it doesn’t matter how powerful your message is, or which medium you communicate through.

Stop the Chaos-Embrace Change

Short term sales chaos is often the result of a non-existent long term process.The fact is, you’re never too small to put a process in place. Yet, for small businesses, creating a sales and marketing process is one of the biggest hurdles faced. Change can be hard.

If anything related to process makes you uncomfortable, don’t panic. Take a deep breath and relax. You can do this. Here’s something to consider: You may actually have an advantage over your larger competitors – you can act a lot more quickly than they can to help you mature your sales process now. So act now.

A common balancing act in sales is the need to fill your pipeline with quality leads, all while trying to get sales opportunities to purchase. Trust me I have been there. It’s really tough to prospect and close at the same time-in the end there are just so many hours in the day.

And that’s where a well-defined sales process comes in. It enables you to drive a consistent stream of leads into your sales pipeline, increase lead response times, and to build a solid foundation to bring in new sales month after month after month.

A mature sales and marketing process gives you the ability to invest in areas such as inbound marketing (designed to bring hot sales opportunities right to your desk) and gives your business key insights. You’ll be able to determine what lead and customer channels are working the best and which ones aren’t, pointing you to the exact actions you need to take to grow sales today and in the future

So if you don’t have a repeatable and predictable sales process, get one. Oh, and don’t wait until it’s perfect (Hint: It never will be). It’s better to roll out a new process now and tweak it over time than to wait for the “perfect” plan six months from now.

Get The “Unfair Advantage”

If you are going to improve your sales process and work to bring in more sales via marketing channels such as website, PPC, and social, the right technology is crucial to your sales and marketing success, now and long-term. With limited resources your business needs a way to do more with less and grow sales for your business. The truth is that just because someone isn’t ready to buy today doesn’t mean they won’t down the road.

Sales and marketing automation tools can help you to capture new leads online (such as your website) and to nurture people until they are ready to buy. The key to a successful balance in your sales strategy is to stay in constant communication with your potential buyers and customers at each step of the sales process:

Marketing automation is an ideal tool for this type of selling. You can feed the information you have about your contact into the system, and it will determine how to best nurture them; sending them the right message at exactly the right time. As you slowly offer your expertise and helpful resources to prospects and customers, you will be building lasting relationships that will pay off with a major purchase in the end.

Time To Go Low-Tech?

Our modern, digital world gives you lots of advertising and marketing options. However when you need sales right away, maybe it’s time to consider a low-tech approach. If you’ve ever been to Manhattan and had lunch at a corner deli because someone on the street put a flyer in your hand, you can relate.

Perhaps you should consider offline tactics such as guerrilla marketing, direct mail or radio. These channels can be used to push out time-sensitive offers and often drum up new sales quickly.

But remember this:

Prospects have a tendency to put off a buying decision for whatever reason. To help drive sales now, you want to make it crystal clear to them how they stand to benefit from buying now, and what they’ll lose if they don’t.

Going low tech certainly has it’s advantages in the long run.

It’s critical to stay in touch with your customers consistently, not just after new sales. Every time they buy from you, send them a thank you note. Send them something personalized on their birthday or when they hit a milestone in their business. Promote new products and services you think they might want and need.

When you treat every customer like gold, they will be more inclined to spend more with your business today and in the long run. After all, it’s always easier to grow sales from existing customer relationships than to start cold with new ones.

If you want to grow tomorrow, you have to sell today. But it doesn’t need to be a frantic, last minute fire drill. By taking the time to understand your ideal customers, using the right technology, and putting the right sales and marketing process in place, your sales will flourish and your cash flow will take care of itself.

12 Blogs Your Marketing Agency Should Be Following

Posted on November 9, 2016December 15, 2022 by Katie Culp

Keeping abreast of what’s happening the marketing industry—especially digital and social media marketing—is important for any business. But if your business is marketing, it’s essential, and if your clients are small businesses, you need a constant stream of new ideas and inspiration. Because small businesses have limited time and often limited resources, you have to find ways to be creative, clever and innovative to improve their customer experience. With so much noise out there, that can seem like a tough mountain to scale.

Not to worry! You can find plenty of inspiration from others online (for free!). Reading blogs that talk about how other agencies, as well as big and small business, are innovating in the marketing space, as well as staying on top of recent surveys, analyses of new survey data, new industry trends and strategies, are important in order to keep your finger on the pulse of the rapidly evolving marketing industry. No matter how experienced you are, the only way to stay relevant is to read.

Here are 12 marketing blogs every agency—but especially those serving small businesses—should be following:

Adland (@adland)

This blog has been a staple of the advertising game for years. It’s an image-driven blog featuring all kinds of ground-breaking ads on a variety of media: television, social media, print and radio, and the stories behind them. Adland has an impressive library of ads from the past as well as what appears to be an archive of every Super Bowl commercial ever made. If you’re looking for inspiration or to see what other brands and agencies are doing, Adland is a solid place to start.

Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

Vaynerchuk is a digital marketing guru (as well as a venture and angel investor) who builds businesses. His blog holds his thoughts on everything: how to use Snapchat, strategies or selling real estate, popular new apps, the nuances of negotiating, the importance of logos, the value of emotional intelligence (and everything in between). It’s a mash up of his opinions on the news, technology, social media innovations, and the nuts and bolts of marketing and entrepreneurship. It’s a must-read if you’re looking for variety and years of experience.

Kissmetrics (@kissmetrics)

This blog covers the ins and outs of digital marketing campaigns, giving you smart information and an insanely thorough, wide-ranging downloadable catalog of infographics and guides. The blog covers all things measurable—and how that data is impacting various aspects of marketing—like customer loyalty programs, A/B testing, traffic and lead generation, omni-channel marketing…you get the idea. As loyal Kissmetrics users, we can’t recommend this one enough!

MarketingProfs (@MarketingProfs)

Reading MarketingProfs regularly is sure to make you feel like a marketing master. The blog educates readers about everything related to content and digital marketing, and offers real-world solutions to all kinds of marketing challenges. MarketingProfs also keeps readers abreast of emerging trends in the industry. Contributors are experts, screened for expertise in particular areas. There’s no shortage of free content on the site including marketing articles, email newsletters, discussion forums, sponsored seminars and virtual conferences. For $279 a year, you get access to a treasure trove of marketing information, including webcasts, special reports and interactive toolkits.

The Inspiration Room (@InspirationRoom)

This site is all about finding creative inspiration, specifically for advertising, design and film industries. It offers small write-ups of clever, advertising across all types of media. The site, which was established in 2006 by Stephen Molloy, is sleek and easy to navigate. Articles are based on submissions sent to the blog from agencies, production houses, photographers, sound and music companies and PR firms. In addition, the folks behind it do some original reporting on stories they deem worth promotion.

Search Engine Land (@sengineland)

Although it’s really more of an online publication than a blog, Search Engine Land provides detailed and useful information about the search marketing industry, and that’s so much more than just SEO. Recent stories/posts include coverage of Google at SMX East 2016, why call tracking helps improve paid-per-click campaigns and a guide to how Google handles duplicate content. If your agency helps small businesses maximize search traffic, Search Engine Land is a necessity for your reading list.

The Social Media Examiner (@SMExaminer)

The Examiner bills itself as the world’s largest social media marketing resources and its readers will find articles, expert interviews, reviews of the latest industry research, original news and more. Social Media Examiner even boasts it own podcasts covering everything social media related. The site attracts more than half a million email subscribers.

Dorie Clark (@dorieclark)

Clark is a marketing strategy consultant who has authored articles for sites such as Harvard Business Review, Time, Entrepreneur and the World Economic Forum blog. She has schooled a wide range of clients, including executives at Google, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley and others. Her blog is not only well-designed and interesting, it’s well written—it’s clear that Clark is an award-winning journalist. The blog offers interesting morsels of information and stories that aim to help readers build the kind of marketing voice that enables them to be seen as a thought leader in their industry, and if they do it right, beyond.

Story Needle (@StoryNeedle)

One of the most progressive content marketing blogs out there, Story Needle has gained popularity simply for its emphasis on that old stand-by: good storytelling. Because what is content, after all, if not telling a story? Story Needle is written by Michael Andrews, a content strategist and former manager of content strategy at Sapient. His blog parses content strategy in ways that make sense, discussing relevance, personalization, adaptive content, design, user experience and more.

Unbounce (@unbounce)

Unbounce is all about optimizing website landing pages so that they collect and convert leads and increase conversions. The posts are chock full of data and very actionable advice. For instance, recent posts included information about Google Map’s promoted pins, and 36 landing page design examples and critiques of them and a 50-point checklist for your landing page.

Quicksprout (@NeilPatel)

This is author Neil Patel’s blog. He is also the cofounder of Crazy Egg and Hello Bar and helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GP and Viacom grow their revenue. The Wall Street Journal has dubbed him a “top web influencer” and Forbes tagged him as one of the top online marketers. His posts are about all aspects of branding, small business marketing and digital marketing generally. Those posts often contain links to research (that shore up his points), and discuss a wide variety of marketing news and topics, like this recent post, “How to Pimp Out Your Facebook Ads for Maximum Conversions.”

Inside AdWords (@adwords)

Sure, maybe this seems obvious but sometimes we don’t see the what’s right in front of us. No doubt you and your clients are using Google AdWords, so keeping up with their latest news, user tips and general information on better ways to make use the tool is important. Each blog post is a like a mini-tutorial on different aspects of Adwords, like remarketing lists for search ads or their Customer Match feature.

Finding a Sales Process That Works For Your Team (And Your Customers)

Posted on November 7, 2016October 28, 2022 by Jonathan Herrick

Every small business owner knows the key to predictable revenue and growth is a strong sales process. And just as important as having a solid process, is making sure it fits the team. Especially for a small business, where the sales team may wear other hats (or be two people), the process needs to mesh with their particular needs. The truth is, there’s really no one “right” sales process anyway. It’s based instead on your market (perhaps even your niche within the market), the internal dynamics of your company and culture, and the needs of your salespeople and customers.

Building the process doesn’t have to feel like rocket science. At its core it’s just a fairly easy-to-follow progression of steps that allows your reps to control the sales conversation with potential buyers. Creating that process requires an understanding of both your sales people and your customers.

Start with the customers you have.

Ultimately the sales process is about your customer, so you need to know their challenges, objections sales people might face, and what a positive sales call looks like. You also want some direct feedback from customers about your product or service (which may also need tweaking). Making these preliminary calls is essential market research, allowing you to better understand your customers’ needs, so you can determine the best way to approach and sell to them moving forward.

Establish criteria for qualifying leads.

Clearly, you need “Someone” to sell you products and services to-But that doesn’t mean everyone. It’s not a great use of your team’s time to chase unqualified sales leads that were never really potential customers. Determine what your customers have in common and create baseline criteria for your team to use in figuring out whom to target. That criteria for qualifying leads might answer questions like:

What solutions are your prospects currently using?
Why are they looking for a new solution?
Does your product or service solve a problem or alleviate a pain point?
Does it save them money? Time?
Can your ideal buyer afford it?
How long does it typically take your buyer to make a purchasing decision?

Using four or five questions to determine which leads are the most likely to convert to customers is especially important for a small sales team who will feel stretched thin if they are chasing down a lot of dead end leads. Also, work with your marketing team (which might also double as your sales team) on ways for them to generate leads in the most time-efficient manner. That might mean online ads, email lists and newsletters, social media, trade shows, community events and word-of-mouth referrals. All of these can be efficient lead generators and more effective than cold calls.

Create a script.

Call it what you will—script, elevator pitch—it’s both the way you show a customer the value of what you’re selling and how the sales process works. Develop that script and keep refining it until it’s a concise story. One that introduces your product or service, presents its features and benefits, explains your pricing, and that asks those qualifying questions you’ve established. Make sure that in addition to drawing attention to the benefits of what you’re selling you also mention the common pain points. This is another way of qualifying the lead—if any of the common pain points are a deal breaker for a potential client, better to learn that sooner than later.

Put in a place a step-by-step plan for following-through.

Many salespeople think once a person has made the decision to purchase, their job is mostly done. But research shows 80 percent of sales need on average five follow-ups to close the deal. That’s why follow-up is a critical—and often the longest–part of a sales process. The follow-through plan should include things like checking in to uncover any last minute objections, sharing case studies and ROI calculators to reiterate your value, and even sending a personal note thanking them for their time.

Once your customer purchases from you ensure they understand how to use the product or service, pointing them to online tutorials and videos and sending educational materials they might need. And finally, check in down the road—making sure you have met or exceeded their expectations from the sales process.

Determine the level of digital support that’s needed.

Your sales team will need some level of digital support as they pitch and sell to potential customers, depending on what it is they are selling. That starts with your website or a landing page that speaks directly to customers coming to you online through referrals, partners, blog posts, advertisements or a Google search. Make it easy for visitors to navigate your site on a mobile device or the desktop, and to find detailed product or service descriptions.

Ask your team what kinds of information the website needs to support their sales efforts and help customers make a decision (or use the product or service) and build that in. It’s usually best to focus on the problems solved by what your company sells, rather than an overly technical description of its bells and whistles. If you sell small speakers, for example, tout the space they save and the amazing sound quality more than the polypropylene woofer and air motion transformer tweeter. Include tutorials and product demonstrations that show customers, clearly and simply, how your product or service works.

Make sure your salespeople are consistently using the process you’ve carefully mapped out.

After all this work, it’s important that your team is actually using the system that’s been created to help them. Research from IDC shows about 40 percent of sales reps don’t actively use the sales process or methodology on a regular basis. Include your sales team’s feedback as you design each step of the process and they will be more likely to buy into it, like it, and use it. An easy way to alleviate much of the time-intensive labor of follow-up is through marketing automation. Setting up simple campaigns through your marketing automation and CRM software can save hours of time and missed opportunities in the long run.

By molding the sales process around your ideal customer and the unique needs of your sales team, your small business will be in better position to convert more leads into happy, lifelong customers.

The Dos and Don’ts of Effective Business Networking

Posted on November 4, 2016November 4, 2016 by Jonathan Herrick

Gatherings like industry association meetings, conferences, trade shows and networking events may feel like an awful lot of work when you’re already running a business. And some events may end up being a waste of your time, but face-to-face networking is a necessity if you want to grow.

In fact, small business is all about networking – building relationships and, in turn, building opportunities. Those opportunities aren’t just referrals to new customers or recommendations for new business, either. Networking also gives you opportunities to better your business by sharing ideas and experiences with fellow business owners. That said, networking is an art, not a science, and there is an etiquette to it, one that is implicit and needs to be observed if you are to be successful.

Here are five do’s and five don’ts to keep in mind when you’re networking at any sort of event.

Do:

Smile and introduce yourself.

It sounds obvious, but there are many people that stand around—or worse, sit around–waiting for someone to approach them at networking events. Initiate conversations rather than waiting for someone else to start one. The goal is to meet as many people as you can, and to make those meetings memorable, by having a conversation with someone about their business, the industry, even their kids, long before asking for their business card. Remember that the whole goal of networking is to make a personal connection.

Prepare conversation starters.

Being prepared to socialize will make you less anxious and help you come across more confident (and more charismatic). Don’t dive directly into questions about your business—or someone else’s. Instead, ask what someone thought of the presentation just given (or the panel discussion, reading, etc.). People generally like being asked their opinion, and will usually feel very easy about sharing. When you share your opinion, keep it positive or at least neutral—steer clear of being overly negative, because you don’t know how this person is or isn’t connected to the speaker. If you’re at a luncheon or dinner, you can ask about the food (for example: “Excuse me, do you know if the coffee is decaf?”). You can also ask a question, such as “Is that the iPhone 7? How do you like it?”

Prepare conversation closers.

A good way to wind down a personal conversation is to steer toward business. Questions such as “What attracted you to this industry?” “How many locations do you have?” or “I like your logo design, where did you get the idea for it?” When you feel it’s time to move on, make sure to close out the conversation properly, don’t just leave. Exchange business cards or Linkedin profiles and say something like “Great meeting you. You’ve got an interesting business, maybe I’ll see you next month.”

Maintain the 80/20 Rule.

When you’re engaged in networking conversations you never want to dominate. The tried-and-true rule is to listen 80 percent of the time, ask questions 10 percent and share your own opinion 10 percent. People are often most interested in hearing what they have to say and once they get a chance to do that, are more likely to focus and really hear what you have to say.

Be authentic.

It’s best to speak honestly and truthfully about your work, your aspirations, what you want from your current job and the profession generally. Before you come to an event make sure that information about you online and across social media is up-to-date and accurate, including photos. Part of being authentic is making sure public information about you is current and in-sync, and that includes your photos, resume and recommendations.

Don’t:

Stand around looking at your phone.

Keep your phone in your pocket. Just because a side conversation started or someone with whom you were speaking has been interrupted doesn’t mean it’s time for you to start checking your email or your Instagram feed. First, it’s unprofessional and second, it shows disinterest and a lack of maturity. Instead, do the hard work of networking –walk over to another group or person, take a peek at their nametag, introduce yourself and ask a question (See the 80/20 rule.)

Start a conversation with your business card.

Although you should come to business functions and networking events with high-quality, well-designed business cards (yes, those still matter), there is a time and place for the card exchange. Invest some time, first, in actually making a connection. After all, networking is about much more than expanding your business card collection.

Have a meaningful conversation with the other person, asking questions about their interests, business and life outside of work (if that feels appropriate). Debra Fine, the author of “The Fine Art of Small Talk” suggests listening closely to what’s being said in order to pull out bits of information that will help you ask questions and keep the conversation going. Once you’ve built a rapport, ask for the other person’s business card and offer yours.

Be too casual with language.

The business world has become more casual about language, but you should not use language that’s unprofessional or contains expletives. Four-letter words should be reserved for conversations with those you know well (or know well enough to know they won’t be offended). Always err on the side of propriety.

Sit when being introduced.

Always stand when introduced, look the person in the eye and shake their hand. Sitting down shows a lack of respect for the other person and makes it seem as if you’re holding court, rather than networking like everyone else.

Be a passive listener.

A passive listener listens but isn’t reacting to what’s being said, is often distracted and fidgety, and doesn’t even looking at the speaker. When you are an active listener, however, you are giving the speaker your full attention by making eye contact, leaning toward them, saying yes or “mmm hmmm” to show understanding and empathy and encourage them to continue.

Networking doesn’t mean shoving your product or value proposition down a bystander’s throat. The goal is to make personal connections to benefit yourself and fellow business owners so make sure you’re playing by the rules at your next networking event.

How to Use WordPress as a Landing Page Builder

Posted on November 3, 2016November 3, 2016 by Jeanna Barrett

If you’re using WordPress to build and manage your small business website, you’ve made a fantastic decision. WordPress is used by 60 percent of all websites running on a content management system (CMS), making it the most popular CMS platform out there. It’s popularity is in part because it is easy to use and free — the best of both worlds. In addition, as a WordPress user you have access to a library of more than 45,000 free (or inexpensive) plugins that can optimize your website design and content, and integrate with many other popular marketing tools.

WordPress can also be used to create landing pages for your website without wasting time and money by asking your technology department or website designer (if you’re lucky enough to have a team that big) to create landing pages. The landing pages you create in WordPress can then be used in conjunction with your marketing automation efforts to host content and promotions, and collect leads to grow your business.

It’s best practice to use a specific landing page for every advertising and marketing campaign, so you can track your efforts. For example, you should use a separate landing page for different AdWords campaigns and for every content download you create. On top of that, you can use landing pages to drive customers from an email campaign to your website for additional information. The uses of landing pages are endless and a big part of a smart growth strategy for any size business.

Here are some beginner options on leveraging WordPress as your landing page builder.

Method #1: Setup Your Landing Page in WordPress from Scratch Using Your Theme

Most WordPress themes will include a design for a single, full-width page. If you’re just getting started with WordPress and researching a design to use for your website, make sure a full-width page design is part of the theme you choose. We included a list of some recommended themes that include landing page designs below.

If you’ve set up WordPress correctly, when you create a new Page in WordPress, this will create the page in a subfolder of your website. For instance, if you create a Contact page in WordPress, the URL should be yourwebsite.com/contact. You can create pages that appear in your website navigation, or are hidden from your navigation. If you’re using landing pages for promotions and advertising, it’s best you don’t include them in your navigation.

When designing the page, you use the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, just like if you’re writing and designing a blog post. You can embed images and embed forms from the marketing automation tool you’re using, such as Hatchbuck. Just create your forms in your marketing automation tool and choose the “embed form” option to drop the code into WordPress, so the form and leads you capture are integrated with your marketing automation platform.

If you want to set up a completely separate landing page theme from your website theme, you can use WordPress Multisite, which allows you to set up as many subfolders or subdomains from one WordPress installation and each site can have it’s own theme, plugins and settings. For example, you could create a subdomain called content.yourwebsite.com with a new WordPress installation and separate theme. Then you can custom create that specific theme to have landing pages that are simple and don’t include your site’s entire header and footer.

Some of the best themes that include landing page designs are:

Method #2: Using WordPress Landing Page Builder Plugins

Nowadays, there are a multitude of plugins created to solve the landing page design problem for business owners using WordPress. By installing one (or more!) of these plugins, WordPress will function like many of the popular landing page builders such as Leadpages or Unbounce. These plugins will install landing page builder features within your WordPress dashboard so it’s easy to choose a template; drag and drop landing page widgets; set up a confirmation and thank you page; and integrate your forms and leads with your marketing automation platform.

If you’re not happy with the landing page template that your theme came with, or would prefer the ease of a drag-and-drop editor, this is probably the best option for you. Here are some of the best WordPress landing page plugins that we’ve seen:

OptimizePress: OptimizePress allows you to create sales and marketing landing pages in addition to other features such as building a membership-only WordPress portal or site. They have 30 templates that are mobile responsive and allow you to quickly add features to your landing pages such as order boxes, testimonial blocks, progress bars, countdown timers, and video and audio players.

Thrive Landing Pages: This landing page builder for WordPress has more than 150 landing page templates available, and they also design landing pages, thank you pages and confirmation pages in sets so that they all have a consistent look and feel for your customers. They also do a great job offering themed sets such as an entire set for webinars, podcasts or online courses. Thrive Landing Pages also pays close attention to load time and speed tests so that your landing pages load quickly, which is a major contribution to Google’s organic search algorithm and website scoring.

Beaver Builder: This plugin is well-suited for WordPress users who have a bit of know-how when it comes to landing page design. Beaver Builder allows you to build any type of page, and is powerful enough to create great looking landing pages. With flexible drag and drop tools, and pre-made templates, you can whip of a high-converting landing page. It’s highly flexible if you have a vision in mind for your landing page and don’t necessarily need an out-of-the-box template.

Landing pages are an incredibly valuable part of your website when executed efficiently, and WordPress is a great option for this execution with minimal effort.

4 Keys to Expanding Your Company Overseas

Posted on November 2, 2016October 31, 2016 by Guest Author

If you want to find great success as a business owner, you’re eventually going to need to expand. While there are plenty of places to expand to in the United States, some of the emerging markets in places like Asia present golden opportunities for businesses to make millions.

However, exporting your business idea overseas isn’t as simple as expanding to the next city over from your hometown. Here are a few things you need to understand in order to expand your company overseas.

1. Understand International Politics

If you want to expand your business into a foreign nation, it’s not going to be as simple as signing a few forms and calling your bank to obtain a business loan. Instead, you are going to need to do some politicking to work within the foreign system that exists in another nation. Learning about your target country’s business laws and developing diplomacy skills will allow you to build the relationships needed with to make that possible.

2. Understand Other Cultures

At the core of succeeding in business overseas is understanding the culture of another nation. This includes understanding the language, the daily lives of average citizens, how their government operates, their religious beliefs and values, and much more. A master’s degree in diplomacy can help you immensely if you want to learn how to deal with nations in general, but it’s advised that you extensively research and visit the specific country you’re aiming to expand to. You should also be familiar with their market and how your industry will fit into it.

3. Network

Good teamwork is required for the success of a company whether large or small. However, if you don’t have the connections to make things happen, you won’t be able to build the team you need. Connect with anyone who can help you network with important leaders, foreign workers, and local suppliers in your target country. Knowing the right people will give your overseas branch a head start so that you won’t have to build it from the ground up.

4. Keep Learning Business Skills

Beyond the cultural and legal differences from country to country, there isn’t that much different between maintaining diplomatic relations between countries and maintaining good business relations between a parent company and its foreign branches. They both require the same kind of skill set. Keep your business skills sharp and professional. Besides the skills needed to expand overseas, you will gain skills in resolving conflicts, tact, and assertiveness that will benefit you as a business owner in general.

Overall, there is a lot that has to go into a foreign expansion. However, with the knowledge and skills discussed above, the entire process should be much smoother. You will be much closer to making an international name for your company.

About the Author

Dixie Somers is a freelance writer and blogger for business, home, and family niches. Dixie lives in Phoenix, Arizona, and is the proud mother of three beautiful girls and wife to a wonderful husband.

5 Tips to Prevent Conversion Funnel Hocus Pocus

Posted on October 31, 2016October 19, 2016 by Jonathan Herrick

Unfortunately for your sales process, more than 95% of people aren’t ready to buy anything the first time they visit your site. Even if you’re lucky to convert website visitors into sales leads, less than 50% are qualified or ready to make a purchase.

The truth is different customers will travel on different buying journeys. Some may be just looking while some are ready to buy. Your goal as a marketer is to engage with people early in their buying process and convert as many visitors into paying customers.

And luck has nothing to do with it. It’s all about having a solid process and strategy in place.

Think of all that hard work you’re putting into growing traffic. No matter how you attract your visitors, the reality is that you’re going to lose most of them before they enter your sales funnel–Poof, they’re gone.

Your goal is to guide as many visitors as possible through the marketing funnel and to minimize that leakage. So before you get bogged down with a bunch of conversion hocus pocus, follow these five stages to build a high-converting funnel and grow the pool of your new leads for your business.

Conversion Funnel: What is it?

The basic idea of a conversion funnel is that first you attract traffic, then some of that traffic becomes interested in what you have to offer, and from that point you have their attention and your goal is to convert as many visitors into customers as possible.

The efficiency of your funnel determines the return on your marketing dollars and also the cost to acquire a new customer. That’s because getting traffic costs money and if you convert enough of that traffic that you paid for, you’ll make an impressive ROI.

The structure of your funnel will depend on many factors including your sales process and lead nurturing strategy. Dave McClure, CEO of 500startups and former head of marketing at PayPal, put together a very solid, unique conversion funnel.

The idea of it is that each stage of the funnel (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) is the metric you should be tracking. Obviously, the idea is to optimize each stage of your funnel.

Unlike traditional funnels, McClure’s includes the element of referral, which means using already converted visitors to feed more leads into your funnel. That’s free advertising. Let’s break it down by comparing your conversion funnel and marketing goals to the goals of the Sanderson sisters in Hocus Pocus.

Like the sisters, your business goal is to pull in as many leads (or in their case, children) as possible. In order to do this, each stage of your funnel (or their child seeking strategy) should have a purpose and your target customer should be clearly defined.

conversion funnel — *Replace “children” with “leads,” and you’ve got yourself a place to start.*

Stage One: Acquisition

The first step is getting traffic. There are various ways to get traffic; such as advertising, content marketing, PR, business development, partnerships, search marketing, SEO, and so on.

The volume you get doesn’t mean much. It feels good to get a lot of traffic; but unless you’re in the publishing business, it’s just a vanity metric.

The focus at this stage is to measure which channels deliver targeted visitors and the best ROI. Some channels deliver a high volume of low quality leads; others are the other way around. You’ll have to try out various channels to start sniffing out the best lead source for your specific business.

Stage Two: Activation

Once you’re driving traffic you need to activate or engage your visitors. Your goal is to make sure they have a great first visit. This means, if you acquired traffic to your blog, it must provide value to the audience.

There are two ways to engage your site visitors. The first way is by enticing them with some sort of resource. You either get them to sign up for a trial and use your product, or sign up for a blog newsletter, download an eBook, sign up for a Webinar, or provide their details with permission to be contacted in some other way. If the resource you provide is valuable and a solution to their particular needs, you’ll get them hooked.

The second way is retargeting. Using tools like Adroll, Retargeter or Perfect Audience you can pixel your prospects and target them with relevant ads outside of your website.

Stage Three: Retention

Retention is where you get your prospects back. This is achieved through lead nurturing and engaging your leads through email marketing and providing them with more content that they value.

If you’re a software company and you got your leads to sign-up and use your product once, you want them to come back and use it again to become engaged users. You need to make sure your particular product meets their needs for the optimal customer experience and to make sure you keep them coming back time and again.

Stage Four: Referral

Here’s where things get interesting. Successful companies are the ones that have the most efficient marketing. Some of the fastest growing companies have spent very little on marketing because of simply nailing the referral portion of the funnel.

For example, Uber has captured most of its users through word of mouth marketing. Alternately, LinkedIn makes its users upload their entire email contact list and send out invites as part of the signup process. Dropbox built their massive customer base through referrals-giving customers additional storage for referring friends and family.

Whether you’re a small business, a retail store or a software company, referral is an incredibly important stage of your funnel. That’s because customer acquisition today is very expensive.

If you can get each customer to refer another customer, your business becomes self-sustainable. Even if your referral rate is something like 0.4%, it will boost your ROI dramatically.

What you want to do is find a way in which to either incentivize word of mouth or somehow make using your product part of customer acquisition (e.g. “Sent from my iPhone” signature). Other methods include creating viral campaigns or sweepstakes to which your customers can invite friends and colleagues.

It’s important to note here that referral isn’t necessarily a “stage four” in the funnel. It can come at any stage. The only thing that matters is that you pay attention to and actively work to boost your referral rates.

Stage Five: Revenue

Here’s where you monetize your leads. Either they sign up for the paid version of your product or make a purchase. When your leads are ready to buy, you present them with an offer.

Oh, and don’t forget about your paying customers.

The key metric here is the Customer Lifetime Value. You want make sure each customer generates revenue higher than it cost to acquire them, either through repeat purchases, up-selling, or simply retaining them long enough. That’s how you generate ROI.

Building a high converting funnel takes more than a little magic and hocus pocus. It’s about putting a consistent sales and marketing process in place to draw in more leads (Aka cast spells on more children) and to boost conversions at each stage of the funnel.

The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Email Marketing Success: Part 5

Posted on October 28, 2016June 20, 2018 by Jessica Lunk

The Win-Back Email

Welcome to the final installment of our email marketing series. In part 5, we’re going to help you overcome the inevitable: lost customers.

Despite all of your hard work, persuasive and engaging email marketing messages, and superb customer service, some of your once enthusiastic customers have “slipped through the cracks.” You won them over. They joined your email list. They went from being enthusiastic leads to happy, loyal customers who bought from you again and again. But now, nothing. They seem to have disappeared on you.

Their disappearing act could occur for a number of reasons. They could have been won over by your competitor. Or maybe they had an unpleasant experience with your company’s product or staff.

Don’t beat yourself up over it. It happens. And it will happen again. But there is something you can do about it. Hint: It involves email marketing. These former customers may not be buying from you at the moment. But they are still on your email list. Use this to your advantage.

Here are some steps you can take as you work to win them back.

First, use your email marketing software to create a segmented list of subscribers who are also previous buyers but haven’t bought in a while. Then send an email with the goal of getting their attention and getting back on their radar.

Depending on your market and your brand voice, you may want to take an approach that playfully toys with their emotions. Think about how you could use an image like the sad-looking puppy below in your email along with the subject line, “Sarah, We Miss You. Please Come Back.”

“But Why Would I Want To Come Back?”

But remember they won’t come back just because you want them back. They are asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?” and if you don’t answer that, game over. So tell them what’s in it for them. Give them a powerful incentive, financial or otherwise.

Remind them of why they chose to do business with you in the first place. Talk about the benefits you can offer them. And, keeping in mind they may be skeptical, show them proof of what you say, especially social proof in the form of customer testimonials.

If they have left you because of a mistake you made, or because your product didn’t deliver as promised, you want to offer a sincere, heartfelt apology. If possible, use your message to try to start an email or chat dialog, or even persuade them to give you a phone call. Understand that an apology can go a long way, and might even help you win your customer back.

Using the same type of approach we just mentioned, your subject line might be something like, “Sarah, Are We In The Doghouse?”, combined with an irresistible picture like this one:

Because who can say no to those puppy dog eyes???

Here’s what a sample “We Want You Back” email might look like.

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Subject Line: Sarah, Where Have You Been? We Miss You!

Hi Sarah,

I hope you are doing well! I noticed you didn’t renew your SEO services contract with us this year. Perhaps we did not live up to your expectations, or maybe you’ve decided to go with a different vendor.

I’d love your feedback. Please contact me directly if there is anything I can do to help you address any concerns you may have. Your satisfaction is my number one priority.

We want you back. To show you we mean it, I’d like to offer you a 20% discount off of your next project with us.

We hope to hear from you soon!

Thanks!

Bob

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In your email, make it easy for your reader to do business with you again. Make sure you address any concerns and put forth a great offer to get the relationship back on the right track.

A smart, consistently-followed customer re-engagement strategy will win back many of your customers you thought you lost. When they get back on board, you will want to treat them like gold and nurture the relationship well (as you should with every customer relationship).

This rounds out our five-part email marketing success series, and while we’re sad it has to come to an end, we feel confident that you’re all email marketing experts at this point so send away! Come back soon for more tips on email marketing, marketing automation and CRM.

In the meantime, check out the rest of our series!

The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Email Marketing Success: Part 4

Posted on October 27, 2016June 20, 2018 by Jessica Lunk

The Referral Email

Yesterday we covered the easiest sale you’ll ever make. And while it doesn’t get much more simple than selling to current customers, today we’ll discuss what might be the second easiest sale to make: referrals.

“The single easiest way to double any business is for each customer to bring a customer.”

Bill Glazer

Think about it: People buy from those sellers they know, like and trust. Your customer who tells his friends about you knows, likes and trusts you. And because your customer has spoken highly of you to his friend, that friend is likely to feel favorably toward your brand. In his mind, you are not likely in the suspect category of “just another salesman.” You most likely already have a distinct advantage.

Are you beginning to see how this advantage can translate to more sales for you?

It can. And email marketing can help you. Today we’ll show you how.

But first…

Let’s talk about how email marketing will not help you get referrals. If you have not delivered as you promised, if you have not provided solid products and great customer service, sending an email to your customers asking for referrals will not help you — it may even harm the relationship even further. If a company you bought from did a poor job and left a bad taste in your mouth and then had the audacity to ask for more business, would you send your friends to it? Of course not. Your customers feel the same way.

Of course not. Your customers feel the same way.

So success at getting referrals starts way before the process of asking for referrals. You need to deliver a positive customer experience from the get-go. (Tracking your customer relationships in a CRM is a great way to select the right customers to send a referral email to.)

You need to earn the right to ask your customers for referrals.

Once you’ve earned that right, what might your referral-seeking email look like? Glad you asked!

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Subject Line: Get One Hundred Dollars on Us

Hi Scott,

Thanks again for trusting us with your web design project and your content marketing efforts – we’re so happy you’re part of the Rocket Marketing family.

If you are connected to anyone who might benefit from a website redesign or content marketing help, we’d love to offer them a free consultation – and would love to offer you some extra cash! We have a great referral program that pays $100 for every customer you refer.

It’s been so fun working with you and your team – please let us know if you have a colleague or connection we can assist!

Have a great day!

Bob

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Notice a couple of things about this email: First, the subject line. It is designed to make the reader curious, and it shows a very desirable benefit.

Even when you’re sending an email to a customer who knows and trusts you, you want your subject line to stand out.

In the body of the email, we are thanking Scott again for their business. You don’t ever want your customers to feel unappreciated. So thank them often for buying from you.

It’s been said that sales success is boosted by getting “Yes” answers to a series of questions. So make it easy for your customers to say yes by making sure they’ve had a great experience, enticing them with a great incentive, and making it simple for them to follow-through.

Again, effective referral gathering is a powerful marketing and sales strategy. And when you succeed at it, you are going to have a lot of new leads you need to nurture.

Now, check out more posts from our series: