Minds On

Your Website as a Funnel — Connecting with the Decision Makers

2011-01-17T10:46:00.000-05:00

In a previous post I talked about how your prospects have split personalities and your website needs to provide different content for different decision makers. Let’s talk about how to do just that.

You’ve got to create a funnel.

A funnel lets you start with addressing a wide audience and then presents branches that can speak directly to different subject matters. You start at a high level and then get increasingly specific by presenting exactly what each decision maker or interested party needs to decide in your favor, but what other decision makers might consider irrelevant or even boring. A website is uniquely suited to do just that-present a bit of information and let your readers decide if they want more. That means the CFO gets information about how your product might pay for itself and your technical staff gets specifications and the right level of detail to help them sign off, too.

This also means that your website and its content probably need to be bigger and deeper than they currently are. Your general or conventional marketing and sales strategy probably aren’t a single argument – your website, the text, and the way people navigate it have to reflect the complete depth of your sales process. If it doesn’t, then you will probably be disappointed in your site, too.

Let’s say you sell industrial sprockets. You’d start with the most general approach by letting the prospects see that they are in the right place and by presenting information about your company, your reputation, and how the industry praises you. You could then present them with options, which allow them to see how your pricing works, see the materials, and engineering behind your sprockets, or how easy your sprockets are to work with and install. Each story would provide increasing amounts of detail and calls to action, letting the prospects tell you when they want to know more. And, at every point, your navigation and layout should make it easy for them to shift gears (or sprockets), to switch from learning about bulk pricing to examining metallurgy and tensile strength. Of course, you will be looking at the web logs to see the paths your visitors follow and then continually adjust and strengthen them to make the paths they don’t follow more attractive. And, your CRM needs to be able to link every visitor from a single company together so your sales team can understand who is in on the decision to say, “Yes.”

Unless your product is very simple, perhaps a commodity, you need to offer your prospects and website visitors options, increasing amounts of information, and even more important, next steps at every point. These steps may include the option to contact you, to give you a bit more information about their company in order to receive white papers or useful tools, or to provide them with things that they can use to carry your sales argument further inside their organization. For example, have you ever considered offering your prospects PowerPoint slide sets that they can use to sell for you?

Yes, that means that your website has to be bigger and deeper than it is today. And it needs to keep growing and evolving. For example, do you have a blog like this? Do you encourage customers and prospects to sign up for a newsletter that contains useful information, not just sales pitches? How well does your site incorporate every interaction you have with a customer or prospect?

You probably know how to talk to each potential prospect, but might not know how to translate that into a website that sells. Give me a call or drop me a line. I’d be happy to show you how we’ve done just that for our customers and talk with you about how you can do the same thing to turn your site into an active part of your sales effort.

Improve Your List Performance through Social Scraping

2010-12-17T09:33:00.000-05:00

For most businesses, especially B2B organizations, your lists are one of your most valuable marketing tools. What you know about your customers and prospects affects your ability to sell to them. If you want to acquire new customers, you have to either purchase or build lists. Ask yourself this: Are my lists good enough to help me meet my sales goals over the next year?

One of the things that the recent economic swing has done is dramatically shake up businesses across the country. Layoffs and reorganizations are now the rule, not the exception. All of the personnel changes are making in-house and purchased lists far less accurate than they used to be. The names and phone numbers you have for the CIO, for example, or any other title of the companies you’re targeting, are probably long out-of-date.

The term for collecting data to form lists is “scraping.” It’s unpleasant sounding, but it’s been a productive way to build lists. However, the typical list doesn’t provide enough information anymore. It’s not enough to just have the clients’ title and phone number, and maybe their email. You need to know a lot more about them in order to attract their interest.

Everyone is so inundated with messages today that you have to become very targeted to get through and capture someone’s attention. Massive shotgun marketing campaigns just aren’t producing the returns that most companies need. What is working is more personalized approaches - campaigns that segment their messages based upon factors that aren’t included in most lists, including age, interests, purchasing habits, affiliations, and more. With this type of detailed information, you can craft messages that appeal to specialized segments of your audience while still promoting the same product or service, but with the language, messages, and visuals that specifically appeal to separate areas.

How are you going to collect this data? Social scraping is the answer.

Start with your own customers. You’ll need to expand your intelligence about them, adding fields to your CRM, if necessary. Then, you’ll need to connect with them through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. You’ll learn about them and, what’s more important, they’ll help you and show you how to shape your messages to attract them.

Use your existing prospect lists and start following more people on Twitter. You’re not following them to start selling to them but to start listening to them. Find out what their interests are beyond your product area. Begin adding to your lists. Observe who they follow and track their responses. Over time, you’ll collect valuable information that will keep your lists accurate and help you form campaigns that are better targeted and more effective.

Does that sound time consuming and difficult? It might be, but put a few interns on the job and task your marketing department with the job of expanding what you know about customers and prospects. Make it a part of each sales representative’s job. Look for ways to target your marketing at more than just one possible customer type. Start segmenting your message to attract the interests of a wide variety of prospects.

Social media is providing a gold mine of information for those who are willing to dig. I’d love to talk with you about how you can take advantage of social media and develop more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

What Carnival Cruise Lines Can Learn From NASA

2010-12-06T13:29:00.000-05:00

Just a couple of weeks ago US & World News prominently featured the story of the Carnival Cruise ship that had an engine room fire, lost power, and had to be towed back to port. The passengers went from enjoying luxury treatment to camping out and eating Spam. I thought that the company did a pretty good job of admitting fault and trying their best to take care of the passengers. They refunded their money and offered them a future cruise for free.

But within days of the story, I received an email from Airtran announcing a deal with Carnival Cruise Lines. The big headline: “Distressed Cabin Sale.”

From everything that I can tell, the email was unrelated to the news. I’m betting it was a partner ad that they’d had in the queue scheduled for release. Instead of enticing me with an attractive discount, their email only reminded me of their recent disaster, painting a rather negative image.

I’ve traveled on Carnival before and I’ve had nothing but the best experiences. So, this idea of a “distressed cabin” left me somewhat unsettled.

Now, I know how these things work. Companies plan their campaigns in advance and have them set to drop on pre-determined dates. However, you can’t just blindly pull the trigger on these things. Even if you are in love with your creative idea, and have spent a lot of time and money developing it, if the timing is wrong, it may backfire, costing you even more in brand image dollars.

A marketing campaign is like a space shuttle launch - Mission Control watches ALL of the factors, not just internally, but also the weather and the sky around them. They have to make sure that everything is clear before they launch, monitoring the conditions every step of the way.

Like NASA, you must plan and queue up work, but then pay attention to what’s going on in your space. Keep an eye on the news, your competitors, and your customers, or in this case, your partner’s company. Even the best message can fall apart if you get the timing wrong.

With a few extra minutes, Carnival’s Mission Control could have taken a second look at the flyer and come up with a better lead- in for their ad. For instance, “$159 Cabin Closeout Sale - How Quickly Can You Pack?” Not only does this create urgency, but it also highlights the phenomenal bargain without making you think you’re buying something damaged.

How well are you monitoring your marketing efforts? Do you have a “T minus 60 and holding” pause built into your campaigns?

Let us know. I’d love to talk with you about how we work with our customers to build campaigns and monitor their pre-launch conditions and post-launch results. I’d be happy to share my cruise tips with you, too.

Your Prospects Have Split Personalities – Your Website Should Too

2010-11-19T10:39:00.001-05:00

Minds On builds a lot of websites and I look at countless more every day. Far too many of them are exactly the same. They put their product right in your face and shout about how wonderful it is and why you need every single feature they provide. It’s jarring. I’ve also talked to a lot of business owners who are frustrated with how poorly their website is at creating new sales. They just can’t understand it. It’s an especially big problem for B2B sales. “Why isn’t my website bringing in new prospects while my competitors look like they’re raking them in?”

I can give you the secret: it’s because your prospect isn’t a single person. They don’t have the same interests and the same problems. Even inside a single company — which many think of as a single prospect — there are many different individuals who are part of the decision-making process, who have different perspectives and things that they care about. If you are putting a single message out for a single ideal buyer, you might be missing a connection with all the other decision-makers inside an organization.

Let’s say you have a software product to sell. You can talk about all of the great features and benefits it provides. That’s great; you’ve connected with the end user. But, are they the ones who make the buying decisions? What about the technical staff that has to install and maintain it AND integrate it with all of their other systems? What about the CFO and those people who are only interested in the costs and the ROI? And, what about the internal training and support staff? If you’re not talking to all of them, you could be missing out on that key individual who can decide to buy your product or decide to buy a solution from your competitor.

Virtually every product category or industry has an entire cast of characters who potentially want in on the decision. You’ve got to know how to talk with all of them. Does your website do that?

But, how do you talk to all of these individuals without making your site completely schizophrenic? You’ve got to create a funnel. I’ll talk more about that in detail in my next post.

Is your website creating new prospects and driving new sales? Does it speak to the complete range of personalities and individuals inside a single prospect organization? Give me a call or drop me a line. I’d be happy to show you how we’ve done just that for our customers and talk with you about how you can do the same thing and turn your site into an active part of your sales effort.

Tweet Your Job Postings and Get Better Results

2010-11-08T08:24:00.000-05:00

The last few weeks have been very busy here at Minds On. New business is flooding in and existing clients are busy, too. It’s all good news. But, that also means that I have to accelerate our hiring. I decided to try a little experiment this time and instead of posting job openings on an online site like Monster.com, I simply tweeted about them.

It worked great! It’s just another sign that new marketing approaches can bear fruit if used smartly.

Not only did I get a lot of responses, but I got those responses through people I know and trust, which puts the applicants further up my trust scale to start with. I also received rapid responses and ended up scheduling five interviews the same day that I had sent the tweet. Just one little 140-character message that I had sent, which my connected network passed on and their networks also echoed, and I’ve gotten a handful of very interesting possible new employees - all in one day. That’s amazing!

I also use LinkedIn to spread the word and I’m finding that it is a very interesting resource. Not only can I spread the word rapidly through my network, but I can also see who is interested and who has taken a look at my profile. That is VERY interesting because it’s not just job applicants; it’s other companies that are interested in what I’m up to and companies that are potential customers.

In the past, it’s taken weeks to get a list of qualified applicants. But I just did it in a few hours and without breaking a sweat. When I narrow the list down, I’m betting I’ll be able to check their references more completely by using LinkedIn and Facebook. I think this is a very promising approach. I’ll write more about it after I’ve finished this round of hiring.

It’s a good idea to let your network know when you are hiring. It shows the world you’re growing and it helps to bring you great talent that you might not have known about through the conventional approach. Give me a call or drop me a line and we can talk about how you can use the latest marketing venues to accelerate your marketing and sales efforts.

Deal with the Deluge and Don’t Lose Track of the Most Important Things

2010-10-29T10:21:00.001-04:00

I don’t know how well you handle the constant influx of information, but for me, it’s a challenge. It seems unrelenting at times: all of the email, phone calls and interruptions at the office and on top of that, trying to keep track of people on Facebook and Twitter. Most days I do pretty well, but every now and then I miss something important. The other day I went full Homer Simpson and forgot to pick up my son at school.

D’oh!

My wife and daughter were off on a school trip and Nate and I have been having a great time as bachelors. But the other day I got into what I thought was a groove and I was knocking down problems and churning through everything that came my way. I left the office in a great mood, drove right by his school, and went home. I felt terrific and was still getting things done, taking out the trash and talking with a friend, when the school secretary called to tell me that Nate was the only kid still at school. You know that sudden sinking feeling? Talk about getting slapped awake!

That was the problem — I had been sleepwalking. It’s far too easy to do, to get completely submerged in the data flow and to lose track of things that are really important. Nate was fine and I’m sure he’ll hold it over my head for years to come. But I was stunned that I’d forgotten about him. It was no way near a disaster, but it was a wakeup call.

And this happened when things were going well. Business is booming. We’re hiring as fast as we can and are adding new clients and new business left and right. And just that fast you can lose track of really important things, like picking up your kid from school.

I’m not going to suggest that you stop looking at Twitter and permanently delete your Facebook account, but if you’re like me, you’ve got to find ways to both stay connected and not become overwhelmed. There’s an amazing amount of power and benefit in the online and social media world, but it doesn’t do you any good if it blinds you to the important aspects of your business or your life.

What can you do to find balance? I’d suggest not trying to monitor all of the streams continuously. Set aside specific times of the day to check your email and other information streams. Do the “Dr Pepper” method: check in at 10, 2, and 4 (OK, you have to be a connoisseur of marketing to remember that, but it works). There are even free services, like NutShellMail, that can help you keep track of everything more easily, tracking tweets and Facebook updates in a specially formatted email message.

For me, I’m trying to stay awake and focus on what’s important. It’s managing the data flow, not drowning in it. And it’s something to work on every day.

What do you do to keep focused and not get lost in the deluge? Give me a call or drop me a line and we can talk about how you can do more with marketing and social media approaches without drowning in them.

Everything or Nothing – The Extremes of Social Media in Marketing

2010-10-22T14:04:00.000-04:00

I’m seeing a trend that makes me shake my head and wonder: Companies that are completely confused and terrified about social media and do nothing AND the opposite group that does exactly the opposite — dump all other marketing efforts and go 100% social.

Social media, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and location based services like Foursquare and Gowalla are very interesting and offer a lot of potential. Almost every business should be experimenting with all of them and looking to see what comes next. But, they certainly should not be abandoning the forms of marketing that have been working for years and continue to work. There seems to be an idea floating around that social media is free. Sure, it’s free, if you don’t count your staff’s time. And, if you don’t integrate it with a campaign that includes your website, imagery, and effective calls to action. Oh, and it’s also free from results if it’s not tied to a coordinated marketing effort.

Social media is a remarkable networking tool, but to make it pay it has to be tied to other marketing tools: websites, email, and yes, even print, like catalogs, direct mail, brochures, and product sheets. It’s one more tool that everyone needs to be trying out, adapting to, and finding out what works for his or her business. But certainly not to the exclusion of everything else right from day one.

It’s just as bad to batten down the hatches and try to ignore the whole thing. If you’re not on social media, that doesn’t mean that your customers and your competitors aren’t. And they’re definitely out there, talking about you and your products. If you’re not there to take part in the conversation, they’ll become frustrated and think that you don’t care. And, guess what? They’re right. If you don’t care about what your customers think, when they have problems, or when they want to sing your praises, then you’ll get to learn some very interesting social media lessons. Lessons about dealing with bad PR figuring out why customers are abandoning ship on you.

I understand that some businesses are very worried about opening up and letting their employees talk about their business. And yes, there are management and legal concerns to deal with. So deal with them. The opportunities for your business are too big to ignore. But those concerns can be addressed. There are workable methods to incorporate social media into your business and with your marketing.

I’d love to talk about what you’re planning for your marketing and how you’ll integrate social media in the coming year. Give me a call or drop me a line and I’ll share how we’re helping businesses make social media a fully integrated part of their daily marketing efforts.

Tom’s Mini Me – How Social Media is Taking Leading Role in Sales and Marketing

2010-10-08T14:23:00.003-04:00

I’ve said it before: Minds On gets new customers because I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We’re a small company with big ambitions and these social media tools help us make connections and win business that we might never have known about. And it does it by making our networks much more powerful.

If you’ve been to any sales training or marketing seminars in the past twenty years, you have heard about the value of networking. You know about joining associations and participating in local gatherings. You know how to approach people and you know how to deliver your “elevator pitch”, that short and enticing description of what you and your company does.

But you can’t do that 24 hours a day. You’d need a clone. Actually, you need an army of clones that could carry your message and exponentially expand the impact of your network.

I use my personal LinkedIn profile and Facebook page to talk about our business. As my network of friends and connections grows, people I don’t know find their way to us. It’s those connections that make that happen. It’s as if I had a mini-me, working twenty-four hours a day shaking hands, delivering my elevator pitch and getting introduced to new people: people who I ordinarily would never meet, people who my mom knows, who work with my cousins, or those old business colleagues they are connected with.

But it’s more than just connecting. You’ve got to let people know what you do and how passionate you are about it. And you have to show that you’re interested in what they’re passionate about as well. Your social media posts, the things you talk about on Facebook, and the things you tweet about, have to let people see your passion, your drive, and your interests.

How many times have you heard, “It’s not what you know, but who you know”? It’s always been true, from finding employment to selling a product or service. The best way to connect with someone you don’t know is through someone you do know. It’s about trust and credibility. Facebook and the other social media tools are making that possible in new and exciting ways.

Any sales situation is based upon a level of trust. If you’ve ever bought or sold something on eBay you know how scary it can be to try and make a transaction with an unknown stranger. So, when someone you do know and trust can say, “I know and trust this person. You can do business with them,” it allows you to relax and find out if there’s a fit between you and this person or business that is no longer a complete stranger.

And my Facebook, my mini-me, is making those connections.

Let me share something else I’ve learned: You can’t put all of your marketing eggs in one basket, even one social media basket. You’ve got to be constantly experimenting and measuring EVERYTHING. Each method, each marketing tool connects and reinforces the others. My Facebook page is fed by this blog, by what I tweet, and by other content on our website and our email newsletter. If you are doing direct mail, you want that to connect to everything else you do. It sounds complex, but it doesn’t have to be. You just need to let people connect with you the way they want to.

Drop me a line or give me a call. I can show you how we’re helping businesses, like Dominion Homes, integrate social media and Facebook into virtually everything that they do.

Mom is Facebook Stalking Me, but it’s Good for Business.

2010-10-01T10:14:00.004-04:00

I opened my personal Facebook account a few years ago when Facebook emerged from the “just for college student” phase. I wanted to see what it was all about and thought it would be fun to connect up with old friends and acquaintances. It should be no surprise to anyone paying attention to social media: Facebook has brought new business to Minds On. It brought more business than all of the other forms of social media combined — more that Twitter and more than this blog.

I look at Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as the other social media tools, as an extension of what I’m able to do personally to network, to connect with people, and to learn about what’s going on beyond my physical horizons. And it’s making unexpected people become great advocates and salespeople for Minds On. My mom is one of the best.

Yes, my mom is my biggest fan. She’s the first to praise any accomplishment I post and she’s always there to spread the word. At first I was a little embarrassed, feeling like an eight- year-old playing soccer with his mom cheering on from the sidelines. But guess what? Mom is a people person and that’s what social media is all about. Not only is Mom singing my praises to my friends, but to her friends, too. And her friends all have friends. The effect of Mom “Liking” or replying to my posts magnifies the effect of everything I do. And because of that, I can connect with people I don’t know — people I might never have known without her cheerleading.

Because of my mom, there are dozens of others like her who follow my posts. Every so often, one of them will find themselves talking with one of their acquaintances and hear that a company needs help with their marketing. Another connection is made. They know about Minds On not because I’ve done business with them, but because they know someone that knows my mom. You might be suspicious about some of the hype you hear about social media, but I can give you direct instances of where it works for us and brings us new business.

Passion is contagious. I’m passionate about what we do, and because of that, so is my mom. And you never know when someone, a stranger to you, but not a stranger to someone in your network, might need help with something you do well. They just need a way to find out about you.

I have made those connections. And Minds On is working with new customers because of it.

The power of social media is the power of the network. You may have heard of Metcalfe’s Law. It says that the value of a network is dramatically increased as its number of connections grows. If you have five friends you can make ten connections, but with twelve friends you can make sixty-six connections. As your numbers of connections grow, both the direct ones and those of your friends, you suddenly have a massive and valuable network.

Some people and business are reluctant to dive into social media and Facebook, but they’re missing out on a huge opportunity. When you have the opportunity to grow your network of customers and fans, you should take advantage of it. You never know when one of your customers, friends, and yes, even your mom, may know your next big customer.

And here’s the Minds On page: http://www.facebook.com/MindsOn
And me on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tomaugustine

What have you learned about social media marketing for your business? Have you found something that works? Are you still struggling and confused, trying to make it work? Give me a call or drop me a line. I’d love to hear about what you’ve tried and I’d be happy to share what’s working for us and for our customers.

Is Your B2B Sales and Marketing More Than a Great Dog and Pony Show?

2010-09-17T08:49:00.000-04:00

Marketing is a very tricky business. I’ve spent my entire career and adult life working in marketing and I’m still learning. One of the things I’ve seen is marketing from some companies doing TOO good of a job of showing you how great life will be with their product or service, only to discover that their marketing is completely divorced from the reality of their business.

I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences. Take for example, working with a home remodeler. Sure, it’s an old joke, like from the movie The Money Pit about how a contractor always tells you one completion date and it’s always long after that. But, I’m talking about more than just being overly optimistic about dates. I’m talking about setting up expectations and making promises and then promptly breaking every one of them.

Promises about quality. Promises about how the job will proceed and how clean they’ll keep your house. Specific promises about what will be done no later than the end of the week.

All of the broken promises leave us gun shy and scarred. And, we kick ourselves from being taken in by the great presentation that we initially saw.

With that in mind, are your sales and marketing more than a great presentation? It better be. In today’s market, and with the lightning speed of social media, if you’re not following up on your promises, the whole world is going to be reading about it on Twitter and talking about it on Facebook.

When we talk about integrating marketing in a B2B sales program, we’re not just talking about making it a part of every step of the sales process. We’re talking about making sure it represents the reality of how you do business. The worst possible mistake you can make is to over promise or misrepresent your product or service. If you promise that your product can be installed in three easy steps, there better be just three steps and they better be easy. If you say it will take six week for you to complete the job, you better be done in six weeks or less.

It’s always tempting to paint a rosy picture about all of the sweetness and light that your product or service will bring to a customer, but what your prospects and customer really want is the truth. That’s especially clear in business-to-business sales. Consumers don’t typically have their own marketing departments, but most businesses do. When you’re selling to them, they understand how marketing works because they’re marketing to someone else. Most have a healthily cynicism about marketing, so your marketing better not oversell and over promise.

The best possible way for that to be done is to tell stories about your customers. Tell real stories about real customers, and when possible, let the customers speak for themselves about what you did for them.

Then go beyond… over deliver. Surprise your customers by doing more than you promised. Then do one more thing: Make it easy for them to spread the word about you. Make is simple for them to send Tweets praising you. Make it easy for them to Like you on Facebook and become a fan. Invite them to write a letter for you to post on your blog. That’s real integration. That’s the type of B2B marketing that works today.

Are you keeping the promises that your marketing makes? Are you integrating the latest tools into your sales and marketing efforts? Give me a call or drop me a line. I’d love to talk with you about some of the ways we’ve helped our customers do exactly this type of integration, and maybe you can recommend a reliable contractor while you’re at it.

Back to School and Your B2B Marketing Homework Assignment

2010-09-01T10:09:00.002-04:00

It’s that time of year again. My two kids are finally back in school. They had a great summer, including a beach vacation just ahead of the hurricanes, but now it’s time to hit the books again. As much as they liked the summer vacation, the excitement of starting a new school year is clear.

I remember what it was like, although when I think back to my childhood summers they seem to be more like reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show”, set in an endless, carefree Mayberry summer, running around on bikes and playing outside until the street lights came on. My kids seem to live high tech, fast paced lives, even during their vacations, but they do manage to relax and forget about their studies in their own ways.

But even now, grown up and gray hair showing, I think of this time of year and I’m back to school myself. Here we are in September with just four months left in the calendar year. That’s enough time for most businesses to still have a positive impact in their sales with some solid marketing work, and it’s not too early to start planning for the next year.

To do either of those things, you have to go back to school. The market today is changing too fast to simply roll out the same old efforts like you did the last few years. You’ve got to study what’s working, what’s not, and find new and effective ways to connect with your customer and prospects.

I can’t tell you what those are for your business right off the top of my head, but I can give you some homework to find out. It’s not a difficult assignment, and it might help you improve your marketing grades.

Today, this afternoon, make a few calls to your best customers. It’s always a good idea to thank them for being your customer, but today, you’ll ask them what they’re paying attention to. Talk with them. This isn’t a survey. Ask them how they’re dealing with email. Find out if they’re using Twitter and Facebook. Ask them which websites they read on a regular basis and if they still read any print magazines. Also, be sure to find out what has really captured their attention lately (other than the Old Spice Guy).

Now ask yourself these questions: Are there any common themes between what you do and your customers? Are you and your customers changing the way you respond to marketing?

And then ask the big question: What are you going to do differently?

Are you ready to go back to school? I’d be happy to help with your homework! Give me a call or drop me a line.

Driving on the Wrong Side of the Road and Gaining a Fresh Perspective

2010-08-23T14:25:00.000-04:00

We just got back from our summer family vacation, and it was terrific! This year we decided to spend some time, in the “off season,” in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Everything was nearly perfect, aside from airline delays and having them lose our luggage (It finally got to us, but in the Caribbean, who cares?). The beaches were beautiful, the water amazing – the perfect relaxing time with the family.

The only thing odd about the whole thing is that the people drive on the wrong side of the road. OK, maybe it’s not wrong, but it’s completely the opposite of how we drive in North America. It takes a little getting use to driving on the left, but it’s not too bad, except with turning right, or left, or dealing with the roudabouts.

It forces you to pay very close attention to what you’re doing. Normally driving is something that we can practically do in our sleep, and by the traffic here in Central Ohio, many of the drivers are definitely dozing. However, making a change to driving on the left meant that not only did I have to pay attention, but everyone in the vehicle was also paying close attention to making sure I didn’t screw up and get us all killed in paradise.

Now that I’m back, I think I’m a better driver. I’m less on autopilot, and I’m more conscientious of the act of driving. I don’t know how long this awareness will last, but it’s a good thing.

See where I’m going (this is a marketing blog, after all)? Is your marketing on autopilot? When was the last time you stepped away from your desk and looked at everything from a fresh perspective? Can you see how your marketing works from your customers’ and prospects’ perspectives?

That’s tough to do, especially when you’re in the trenches, trying to make your business run efficiently. But, it’s critical that you do it every now and then. The more you can change your perspective and give your marketing a hard look, the more likely you’ll be to find successful approaches.

One of the best ways to gain this perspective is to take an occasional marketing holiday. Get away from the office, step outside your comfort zone, and look at what’s happening with a completely different market. Don’t look at your things or your competitors. Spend some time looking at what a completely different industry is doing. If you can, find a guide that can help you find the really interesting and effective material. Find out how it works, and why.

Then, go back and look at your marketing with fresh eyes. You’ll be more aware and more thoughtful about what you’ve been doing, and you will be prepared to make the necessary changes.

If you need a guide, I’d be happy to take you on a marketing vacation. Let’s drive on the other side of the road together and see some really interesting, exciting, and effective marketing. Then, take a look at what you’ve been doing with fresh eyes. Give me a call or drop me a line.

Tom Goes on a Diet and Thinks about Marketing

2010-08-11T10:40:00.000-04:00

I’ve been working out for almost a year now. Like a lot of you, I’ve made various attempts to get in or stay in shape over the years and I’ve had trouble sticking to it. But this time, I’m really enjoying it. Maybe it’s turning 40, or maturing in more ways than just the graying hair. Whatever the cause, this time working out is fun and I’m planning on making it a lifelong activity.

I’m feeling great and recently decided to improve my diet, too. I’m a guy, so I don’t like to say, “I’m on a diet,” but technically, what we eat and how we eat is our diet and that’s what I’ve changed. And, as you might suspect, if you know me or have been reading this blog, it’s occurred to me that these changes are a great metaphor for achieving marketing success.

Here are the four steps you need follow to succeed with personal fitness:

You have to commit to change and decide on a goal.
You need to create a plan.
You need a routine, but that routine must change over time so you don’t plateau.
You need to eat the right things and eat them more often.

For marketing, it’s exactly the same approach, but instead of “eat” in Step #4, change that to “Market” or “Promote”.

For some, these steps might appear out of order, but let me tell you why it’s important to do it this way. You have to make the commitment up front, not after deciding on a plan or budget. Those are tactical decisions. Before you start on marketing for your company, you have to decide what you want, not how you’re going to get it. Pick something like, “I want to grow my sales by 5% in the next 12 months.” Commit to that and the choices you make about what to do will support that goal. You can change any individual exercise or program as long as you keep your goal firmly in mind and fully committed.

Next, you’ll need your plan. If you’re like me and didn’t have a clue about how to work out the right way, you’ll need help. You probably won’t achieve your goals if you don’t have a plan that will do the right things at the right time. There are so many things you can do when you go to the gym, so many choices. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s intimidating. You’ll probably just end up on the treadmill, putting on the miles but getting nowhere. With a plan, you can see real progress.

The other part of working out and marketing is changing things up. If you do the same workout over and over, you’ll see results rather quickly, and then you’ll suddenly stop changing. That’s called a “plateau.” A small change in your workout will bring new results. The same things will happen with your marketing. You might have a great campaign, but it won’t keep attracting attention forever. You have to be prepared before you start, and know when to change things up and how to keep the results coming. That means measuring, analyzing, and being prepared in advance to know what to change and when, based upon your measurements and results.

Diet is that final piece. What I’ve learned recently, and it’s not obvious, is that I’m not eating often enough. I’m now eating seven meals a day (including snacks). I’ve made the choice to eat good quality foods, get rid of the junk, and not to concentrate everything into one or two big meals a day (and getting hungry in-between). Good marketing follows the same pattern. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen companies blow their entire marketing budget on one or two big pushes or events, and then starve for the rest of the year. Effective marketing means consistency, repetition, and ALWAYS having something going on. I’m dropping the pounds and getting leaner. Is your feast or famine marketing generating leads?

And the most important thing for me in making fitness and diet work is that I found a friend who knows what to do, has been there before, and pushes me to keep at it. The real difference that is helping me succeed now, where I’ve failed before with diet and working out, is having someone to work out with and keep me motivated — a coach, a trainer. You’ll need that same thing to be successful with your marketing.

That’s the role that Minds On takes for our clients. I’d love to talk with you about getting your marketing efforts in shape. There’s plenty of time left in this calendar year to make things happen and it’s never to early to plan on what comes next. Let me know what you’re doing to get fit or tone up your marketing! Give me a call or drop me a line.

Where Does Social Media Fit in B2B Marketing?

2010-08-04T14:29:00.003-04:00

I recently did a series on Empowering Your Sales Team. I’d like to turn my attention to another topic for a few posts: B2B Marketing. But before all of you B2C folk click away, I think you’ll find that some of the same lessons apply to you.

Business-to-Business marketing is often thought of as less sexy and interesting than consumer marketing. That may be true for some companies, but certainly not all. But there are a lot of very innovative B2B companies out there that understand this one fundamental principal: businesses buy like consumers today and consumers are all over social media.

Social media is the term we apply to a collection of Internet tools that include blogging and tools like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Foursquare. At first glance, they all appear to be exactly what they claim: social, trivial, and fun. B2B shouldn’t be fun, should it?

But there’s a lot going on here that makes perfect sense for B2B marketing. Social media is all about spreading the word about things individuals like and dislike. In social media, things can happen quickly. Good news grows real roots and bad news moves at the speed of light.

Social media is actually the perfect set of tools for the B2B marketer. It’s a way to grow and share content about your business, your market, and your customers. It’s a way to establish credibility, and it’s a set of tools to let you address PR disasters in minutes.

The core of any good B2B social media approach is content...lots of content. That’s where your blog comes into play. Nothing increases Search Engine Optimization (SEO) like great content that's frequently published. And if you’re publishing things that are interesting and valuable to your customers and prospects, you’ll quickly find it is one of the most cost- effective ways to spread the word about your products and services.

Chris Brogan, author of Trust Agents, says, “Content is my best B2B social media lesson. I’ve seen many companies learn that providing interesting content (like video testimonials or how-to information) is a great way to encourage prospects, warm up leads, and convert to sales opportunities.”

Once you’ve got your blog in place, you can start using Twitter to spread the word. You should also consider getting your customer service team up on Twitter ASAP. Having your team watch Twitter for your company name and keywords on Twitter are great ways to spot a problem. Responding to it and fixing it immediately can win you big praise.

Then you can move on to Facebook Fan pages and other social media tools. It’s worth nothing that Facebook has over 500 million users. How many of your customers are also Facebook users? There are endless things you can do. It’s helpful to have a strategy and make social media part of your overall marketing plan. Your social media strategy and plans don’t have to be difficult and you don’t have to employ a team of teenagers to make it work. It’s just another way, perhaps a better way, to communicate directly with your customers and prospects.

I’d love to hear what you think about social media and how you’re using it in your business and as part of your overall marketing plan. Give me a call or drop me a line.

Building the Ideal B2B Website

2010-07-28T10:16:00.000-04:00

When we started Minds On nearly ten years ago we still had to convince some people that their businesses needed websites. Almost everyone has caught on by now and we have to do less evangelism about websites and ecommerce (although the preaching has now shifted to Social Media).

But just having a website and an online store isn’t enough to make your business successful. I find that when I sit down to talk with business owners or marketing managers, they’re uncertain about what to do with their websites and don’t have a clear picture about what will work for them.

Here are six things areas that you should think about for your B2B website (most B2C would benefit from this approach as well:

Professional Appearance - As the face of your company, the way that your website looks at first glance is extremely important. Think about it this way: If you have a customer visit you at your office, what impressions do you want them to take away from seeing your facility? Your website should do the same thing. It’s probably time to take a hard look at your site design and compare it to your top competitors. If your design is more than three years old, it’s probably looking dated and ready for a fresh approach.
Customer-Centric Content – You need a reason for customers and prospects to spend time on your site. And you need a reason for them to come back. Building a content strategy with a strong brand voice and communicating with them in ways that they understand is essential. Make sure your product or service categories are relevant to your audience; limit acronyms and use visuals, images, video and other content types to engage and inform your audience. And provide lots of clues and indicators that you frequently update your content. How often? Every day is ideal, but multiple times a week will probably provide a minimal effective return rate.
User Experience – How easy is it to find your way around your website? Most websites find that nearly three quarters of visitors view only your home page and then leave immediately. Does your site and home page help people quickly and easily see that you have what they need? Does it show lots of recently updated information? Is there a easy way for customers and prospects to self-identify and follow a path for information targeted just for them? And do you have a strong search feature so anyone can find anything instantly?
Showcasing Analyst Relations and Customer Testimonials – For B2B sales this is very important. You need to show that you are a credible product or service provider, not by claiming so yourself, but by pointing to known authorities and customer testimonials. Highlighting good reviews and detailing how experts feel about your company is very effective, especially to a first-time customer.
Product/Service Information – For many businesses, this is the entire site. Some call this “brochureware” sites, and this type of site is frequently regarded as uninteresting and of limited usefulness. Since the point of your web presence is to increase sales and awareness, having your product/service information available online is a valuable asset to your company. You should have detailed information here, including white papers and materials that help position your product or solution in the industry and directly address the problems that your customers are facing. But don’t limit yourself to text. This is a place to showcase your product or service by having video demos, white papers, research, presentations or free trial offers.
Interaction with Customers – Do you have a way for people to easily interact with you? Can they easily spread the word about you? Links to your social media accounts, blog, RSS feed, or subscription to a newsletter is a great way for previous and potential customers to stay in touch and gain more information about your company.

There are lots of other things to focus on, including your ecommerce strategy (we’ll talk about that in a future post). But if you focus on these six items, I believe you’ll find that your strategy for your website can come together quickly and easily. I’d love to hear about your website plans. And I can talk to you about what I see successful businesses doing (many of them are our customers!). Give me a call or drop me a line.

Is Your Marketing Campaign Part of the Living Dead?

2010-07-21T09:59:00.000-04:00

There are zombies everywhere you look.

Seriously, if you take a look around you, you can find examples of things that are dead and should have been buried and forgotten long ago.

I’m not talking about your Uncle Stewie. I’m talking about marketing campaigns that companies are using that have long since stopped being useful and productive. When was the last time that those “caveman” commercials for Geico were actually funny? And what about company names based around the 800 number? These undead campaigns are actually hurting the companies they were designed to help.

You are probably plagued with zombies, too. Why is that?

I can give you a few reasons. Marketing is hard work. It’s difficult to come up with really productive methods to carry your message. And integrating a new marketing campaign across your entire company can be expensive. But perhaps the biggest reason is this: people are attached to campaigns that were once successful and point to that past success as the reason to keep pushing on – even when the campaign is no longer working.

Every marketing campaign has a lifecycle. And that means at some point you have to retire EVERY campaign.

And that means two things:

You need to be creating and testing new campaigns continuously.
You need to constantly test and measure the results of your current and active campaigns.

The best way to do this is to form a real partnership between sales and marketing and plan from the very beginning the lifecycle of a campaign, when it will be kicked off (born), and when it will be retired (die). Marketing can drive a campaign if it has continual and real-time feedback from sales. You’ll know what’s working and be able to do more of the same. And you’ll know what’s failing and be able to try something else.

One of the worst things that can happen is to have a successful campaign become very successful, and then set it on eternal autopilot. When you turn your back and stop measuring results, stop planning new replacement campaigns, you’re destined to failure.

Your marketing program should focus on creating new campaigns on a regular basis, continually measuring their effectiveness, and actively killing off those that are no longer producing at the level you need. You can’t get attached to anything, including your company name and logo. Take a look at the Apple logo and name across the years. They’ve had three logos and dropped “Computer” from their company name. They can be ruthless about their marketing, creating big campaigns, letting them run as long as they’re successful, and then replacing them with new ones as soon as the old ceases to be effective. Notice that the “I’m A Mac” commercials are gone? But look at all the iPad commercials.

When was the last time you took a hard look at all of your marketing? It can be scary, but it has to be done. Your marketing is too expensive and too critical to let it remain shuffling around, killing your potential in the market. I’d be happy to join you on the hunt. Drop me an e-mail or give me a call and I’ll show up with my shotgun (OK, no firearms. I’ll bring my iPad) and we can hunt down and kill your zombies and find new life for your marketing needs.

Blurring Lines – Social Media Refuses to Stay inside the Box

2010-07-12T08:49:00.000-04:00

Like a lot of people I know, I’ve tried to set up the way I use social media to both help me grow my personal and business network while trying to maintain some semblance of privacy.

I set things up this way:

Facebook for personal friends and family connections
LinkedIn for business contacts
Twitter for broadcasting information and gathering information
Blogging for expressing thoughts in depth

And I bet you’re thinking, “How’s that work’n out for you?”

Let me put it this way. It ain’t easy.

People I meet want to be friends on Facebook, even though our dealings are all business. Family members want to connect on LinkedIn, which is more than a little strange. And some really interesting conversations take place by exchanging tweets. I’ve also found that my most personal posts on this blog are the ones that get the most traffic.

I completely get it when someone replies to a friend request and says, “I reserve Facebook for friends and family, but I’d love to connect on LinkedIn.” But, on the other hand, I’ve connected and made more new customers through Facebook than any other form of social media. It’s that personal touch, that sense that I’m a real, authentic person and completely passionate about my business, as well as the community that people respond to. It lets even cynical business people move beyond the cold dollars and cents equations and decide if they’d like to do business with Minds On based upon someone that gets it, not just anyone that’s cheap.

So yes, more people know how I spent the weekend or where we went to dinner last night than I use to be comfortable with. I think I could get by with a little less of that, but I have to admit, it’s all just so darn useful.

So what about privacy? Here are a few tips:

Get to know, in depth, Facebook’s new privacy settings and use them. Restrict who every message and posts go to. Be selective.
Set up a Facebook page for your business – a fan page. Be sure to post and respond often to make it useful and interesting.
Be yourself. If you only use social media to release faceless PR and business bits, you’ll generate very little interest. But share a bit more of yourself and people will respond.

You don’t need to share everything. Learn what’s TMI (Too Much Information). Eventually you’ll find that balance, perhaps living a bit more in the open, but retaining enough privacy to be comfortable.

So blur those lines and let’s connect!

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linkedin

Better yet, I’d love to talk with you about how you combine all of the elements of social media with your company marketing. Are you getting the most impact from what you’re doing? And would you like to explore combining social, interactive, and conventional marketing? Give me a call or drop me a line.

Another Sign That You Still Need Some Conventional Marketing

2010-06-29T08:30:00.001-04:00

Over the past few months in this blog we've talked about all of the things we do here at Minds On. To say we're a marketing company sounds vague in today's terms of specialization, but it's true. We are audience driven. That means we look at who our client companies are trying to reach and build the tools that can both get to them and carry the messages they want to deliver in the most effective way. Sometimes that means traditional marketing, like brochures and trade show booths. Sometimes it means online, interactive, and social media, or sometimes it's both. But the key is to find a way get to through to that target audience.

We just went through an election primary and a lot of candidates were pushing the envelope on social media. There are some advisors who insist that they spend all of their money on social media. But every night on my drive home from the office, I saw what must have been over a hundred yard signs for a local candidate; someone I’d never heard of before. If I hadn’t seen those signs, ALL of those signs, I wouldn’t have known about that person. It was very effective.

After a few weeks of seeing that candidate’s name hundreds of times, I checked out his website. It was very well-designed, and he was promoting his Facebook and Twitter feeds. It was a well-rounded approach.

And that’s the point. It was well-rounded. It must have been very inexpensive to print and distribute those signs. And it was those signs that got me to his website. For little effort, a campaign can have a printer print dozens of plastic signs and have volunteers distribute them. The signs serve two purposes: one is to highlight the candidate’s name; the other is subtler: you see a sign in a yard and you know that every person with a sign supports that candidate. The more signs, the more support.

If this candidate had gone strictly online, I would have never heard of him. And I’m betting that most of the people who had his signs in their yard wouldn’t have either. It was a combination of conventional marketing and the personal touch of a volunteer showing up at your door and asking you to display a sign that made the difference.

This is something that a lot of people miss: social media is a PERSONAL media. You need an introduction. You take an active role and decide if you’re going to engage or not. And all of the things that help you engage are keys to a successful marketing effort. In this case it was a yard sign… a LOT of yard signs. But for your business, it might be a tradeshow booth, a data sheet, a mailed postcard, or it might be an online video and an e-mail campaign. What matters is that your campaign finds its way to where your customers and prospects live.

OK, so you might not be running for office, but you’ve got a product or service to sell. Are you spending everything online? How are people going to learn about you in the first place? Are you missing out on the simple and effective conventional marketing benefits that a few brochures, an effective business card design, or a well-executed trade show display can bring you?

You should definitely be exploring online marketing and social media, but on occasion, look up from your computer screen and find out where your customers and prospects live and where they move about in the world. It might not hurt to plant a few signs in their yards.

I’d love to talk with you about your marketing, both online and conventional. Are you getting the most impact from what you’re doing? And would you like to explore combining social, interactive, and conventional marketing? Give me a call or drop me a line.

Empower Your Sales Team: Encourage Them to Use Your CRM

2010-06-18T14:15:00.000-04:00

I hear people complain far too often, “I can’t get our sales team to use our CRM. They might enter basic contact info, but that’s about it. It’s useless.”

It’s a shame. A good Customer Relationship Management system can significantly improve your sales processes and give you critical information about your future sales and current prospects. Great data collection will tell you where to place your attention and how to spend your marketing dollars to receive the biggest payoff. I’ve seen organizations that fully embrace these systems discover things about their customers that they never suspected until they collected the data and took a hard look at it. I’ve seen them discover huge sales opportunities and eliminate bottlenecks in their sales cycles that cut out days, weeks, and even months. And I’ve seen it show exactly who on the sales team is doing the work that will keep them successful. Imagine what your sales would look like if you could see exactly what your most successful sales people are doing and then shape everyone else to be exactly like them. That’s what a great CRM can do for you.

It’s clear why sales people resist it. They want to be doing the work of sales, making calls, taking meetings and making the final deal. But the true predictor of future sales isn’t past sales - it’s current activity. That’s what a good CRM will tell you. You can see which members of your sales team are doing the work today that will make them successful next quarter.

But some CRMs are clumsy and difficult to use. Your CRM choice should make it completely natural for your sales team members to capture what they’re doing at every moment including who they’re calling or meeting with, what future activities are planned or promised, and collect increasingly detailed information about the prospects they’re working with. If your sales team is collecting lots of data, but waiting until the end of the day or the week to put it into a system, it will never get done and you won’t get what you need from your system.

There are some terrific options available today. Solutions like Salesforce.com are affordable and very powerful. But some organizations need very specific processes and data collected and don’t find most packaged solutions to be a good fit. We’ve worked with a number of customers like this and built them custom solutions that are designed to be a natural part of their sales workflow.

For example, here’s what our customer, Matt Berry, has to say about the CRM tools we designed and built for Healthlinx:

“The tools that Minds On created for us have absolutely revolutionized how we do business,” says HealthLinx COO Matt Berry. “We’ve seen a huge spike in productivity, a substantial decrease in sales rep training time, and an overall increase in awareness of our sales process. This last piece, the Scorecard, is astonishing. It will transform our business. Each rep knows exactly that their numbers are and we know, too. Everyone is tracking the same thing. And we can get to the root of what makes a sales rep successful.”

You can’t cajole, punish or even torture your sales team into using a CRM, but you can make it a natural part of the sales process. If you do, you’ll take greater control of your business. I’d love to talk to you about how you can do this for your business or how to make your existing CRM a more natural part of your sales process. Give me a call (740.548.1645) or send me an email.

Wasting Leads – Making Your Sales and Marketing Work for Your Competitors

2010-06-11T14:20:00.002-04:00

You want to talk about pet peeves? One of the biggest things that bothers me when I look at an organization’s marketing and sales efforts is seeing it creating and wasting leads. It is all too common, and it’s why many people think that marketing is a waste of money. Frankly, many organizations are wasting their money.

Let’s say you go to a big trade show and set up a goal to create two hundred leads. That’s terrific. And it’s not that hard to do if you have a really big crowd. You set up an attractive booth, you plan an interesting event by giving away items and perhaps one big, cool thing (iPads will be the hot giveaway this year). No problem. You’ve got two hundred new leads

But what are you going to do with those leads?

My bet: nothing. You’ll hand them off to sales; they’ll call on a few and find out that most of them aren’t leads at all. They’re just names. They have no interest in your product or service. They just wanted the squishy ball you gave away, to give to their kids. So sales will turn their attention to other things and let those leads sit.

Even if you have some well-qualified leads, if you generate too many of them, sales can’t effectively follow-up. And if you have leads that really are interested and you don’t follow up with them, they’ll go looking for other solutions. You’ve just created a lead for your competitors.

For you to understand how to focus your marketing, you need to completely understand your sales process and measure EVERYTHING. You need metrics on how each lead moves through your system and what causes it to progress from mildly interested to a full sale. And you’ll need to know the precise characteristics that are required to make someone a lead, not just a name.

Here are the rough categories I use to define leads:

Name – open a phone book and randomly put your finger down. That’s a name. Completely useless. That business card you collected for a chance to win an iPad is also a name. That list you bought is probably just names (or will be until you do something with it).
Suspect – someone that has given you the basic information that matches your ideal customer profile. This could also be someone you have discovered by research. They have the potential to become a lead, but the probability is low. They’re in the right industry; they’re the right size, and they are facing the problems that you solve.
Lead – this is someone that has voluntarily given you detailed information and indicated that he/she is in the market for what you sell. This is usually the category that the previous two are grouped into. For most sales organizations, a lead is still too far down the pipeline to be worth spending time on.
Prospects – these are people you have detailed information on, including the confirmation that they have the budget to make the purchase. You’ll also need to understand who makes the buying decisions (could be multiple points) and how they decide.

If you can make these definitions part of your marketing and sales process AND create a model of what a prospect looks like in detail, you can design a marketing and sales approach that works. If you simply collect names, you’ll be spinning your wheels and any interest that you do generate will more likely than not, end up benefiting your competitors, not you.

It’s better to have ten highly qualified leads to give your sales team than a thousand names. Ten leads they can turn into five prospects. A thousand names they might turn into one — and that will take a huge amount of effort.

And, through all of this, the goal should be to do less, spend less, and get better results. It’s possible, but not if you’re just using your marketing to collect names.

I’d love to talk with you about how to reshape your marketing to create highly qualified leads and prospects, and measure the effectiveness of your sales and marketing. I can show you the types of programs we’ve developed for our customers to do just that and how you can make your marketing work for you, not your competitors.

Empower Your Sales Team – Quarterly Sales and Marketing Conferences

2010-06-03T15:21:00.000-04:00

That old question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” is almost completely meaningless in business today. Things are moving just too fast. Frankly, planning for more than a year is also getting to be too far ahead to predict. To really keep your sales team fully empowered, you have to narrow that window of marketing development and planning, and increase your communications between the sales and marketing teams.

Back many years ago when I worked in a big technology company, we used to hold quarterly sales and marketing meetings where we’d fly in our sale reps from all over North American and hold a multi-day conference. We’d introduce the latest tools, get their feedback on what we were working on next, and listen to what they were seeing and hearing out in the field, and find out what was working and what wasn’t. It was very useful, but also very expensive and time consuming.

If I were doing the same thing today, I’d set it up as a video conference and take up no more than a few hours, maybe over a few lunch hours. There would be no disruption to sales efforts and the cost would be next to nothing.

If you can arrange to get your sales and marketing teams together for these quarterly meetings, here are my suggestions:

Unveil new programs. These programs should be the result of your previous meeting in the last quarter. Frankly, they shouldn’t be a surprise.
Recognize great teamwork. Make a point of recognizing the sales and marketing staff who worked on each new project. Make a point of highlighting great contributions from sales reps and connecting it to the end results. You want sales reps to make time to work on your marketing projects and they will if they see the payoff (and you don’t take up too much of their time).
Reward top sales performance, but don’t just focus on closed deals. Also, recognize the most calls, the most qualified leads moved forward in your sales process, and other milestones that you track. Furthermore, make a point of recognizing their analysis of lost sales and opportunities. This is critical information in shaping your future efforts.
Let them talk about the current market conditions. Find out what they think they need for the next quarter.
Announce your current quarter projects and teams – and note where you might be changing them from by what you’ve learned in this meeting.

In addition to this type of meeting, I highly recommend developing some type of internal online system that can let your sales and marketing team communicative and share information in a much more real-time way. It’s very simple to set up an internal bulletin board, Wiki, or blog.

How are you communicating with your sales team, keeping them fully enabled to meet the challenges they meet in the field? How are you learning about the tools they need to win sales? I’d be happy to talk with you about what we’re doing for other customers and the types of things we see working to make sales more effective. Give me a call or send me an e-mail. And you don’t have to wait until next quarter!

Empower Your Sales Team: Encourage Them to Use Your CRM

2010-05-28T08:55:00.000-04:00

I hear people complain far too often, “I can’t get our sales team to use our CRM. They might enter basic contact info, but that’s about it. It’s useless.”

It’s a shame. A good Customer Relationship Management system can significantly improve your sales processes and give you critical information about your future sales and current prospects. Great data collection will tell you where to place your attention and how to spend your marketing dollars to receive the biggest payoff. I’ve seen organizations that fully embrace these systems discover things about their customers that they never suspected until they collected the data and took a hard look at it. I’ve seen them discover huge sales opportunities and eliminate bottlenecks in their sales cycles that cut out days, weeks, and even months. And I’ve seen it show exactly who on the sales team is doing the work that will keep them successful. Imagine what your sales would look like if you could see exactly what your most successful sales people are doing and then shape everyone else to be exactly like them. That’s what a great CRM can do for you.

It’s clear why sales people resist it. They want to be doing the work of sales, making calls, taking meetings and making the final deal. But the true predictor of future sales isn’t past sales - it’s current activity. That’s what a good CRM will tell you. You can see which members of your sales team are doing the work today that will make them successful next quarter.

But some CRMs are clumsy and difficult to use. Your CRM choice should make it completely natural for your sales team members to capture what they’re doing at every moment including who they’re calling or meeting with, what future activities are planned or promised, and collect increasingly detailed information about the prospects they’re working with. If your sales team is collecting lots of data, but waiting until the end of the day or the week to put it into a system, it will never get done and you won’t get what you need from your system.

There are some terrific options available today. Solutions like Salesforce.com are affordable and very powerful. But some organizations need very specific processes and data collected and don’t find most packaged solutions to be a good fit. We’ve worked with a number of customers like this and built them custom solutions that are designed to be a natural part of their sales workflow.

For example, here’s what our customer, Matt Berry, has to say about the CRM tools we designed and built for Healthlinx:

“The tools that Minds On created for us have absolutely revolutionized how we do business,” says HealthLinx COO Matt Berry. “We’ve seen a huge spike in productivity, a substantial decrease in sales rep training time, and an overall increase in awareness of our sales process. This last piece, the Scorecard, is astonishing. It will transform our business. All reps know exactly what their numbers are and we know, too. Everyone is tracking the same thing. And we can get to the root of what makes a sales rep successful.”

You can’t cajole, punish or even torture your sales team into using a CRM, but you can make it a natural part of the sales process. If you do, you’ll take greater control of your business. I’d love to talk to you about how you can do this for your business or how to make your existing CRM a more natural part of your sales process. Give me a call 740.548.1645 or send me an e-mail.

Sales Empowerment Means Flexible, Customizable Sales Tools and Materials

2010-05-19T10:01:00.000-04:00

Everybody has his or her own particular pet peeve. For some it may be that person at the supermarket taking a full cart to the “15 items or less” checkout while you wait in a long line with only twenty items. Or that person talking during a movie.

As you might expect, a lot of my peeves have to do with marketing. One of the biggest of these is seeing sales people cobbling together their own presentations and materials.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat through sales pitches where an otherwise competent sales person has put together a “custom” presentation. They’ve included our logo. They pulled it off a website and it’s distorted and has a mismatched background to their PowerPoint slide. Furthermore, the slides have clip art (word of advice: NEVER use clip art!), every transition in the book, and nausea inducing background colors. Often these presentations are for companies that have carefully thought out marketing and clear branding, but none of that was presented. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen sales people pull out a chart or graph that they’ve put together on their own. It carries the heart of their message, but it’s so badly designed that it’s useless.

I understand why they do it. Sales people have a very difficult job and they want to communicate clearly and directly with a prospect or client. That’s a laudable attitude. Often they can’t or don’t get the help they need from marketing. But every time they put one of these presentations together, or assemble a special little brochure on their home computer, they diminish the impact of your marketing and branding.

Perhaps the thing that most sets me on edge is the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way. All sales teams should be equipped with the basic tools that they can use to sell and reinforce your branding, not take away from it.

For our clients, we often help them build systems that include presentation templates, icons/diagrams, brochures, and sales letter samples – all sorts of tools, each designed to allow a sales person to make minor customization while preserving the company branding and marketing goals. We’ve even gone so far as to create an entire internal e-commerce application that companies can use to let sales people order materials from an online library – things they can customize and download as PDFs or presentation files, or even be printed and delivered directly to them or the client.

By equipping your sales teams this way, you are much more likely to find them on the phone or on the road rather than sitting in a cube struggling with PowerPoint. You have to find a way to eliminate the bottlenecks that your marketing program has created and enable your sales teams... empower them with tools and materials and most importantly, standards.

This is a hot point with me and I’d love to talk with you about how you can enable and empower your sales teams while enhancing your branding and marketing reach.

Do you have a marketing pet peeve? Please share it here in the comments!

Empower Your Sales Team – Let Marketing Take the Lead

2010-05-13T11:32:00.000-04:00

The popular image of marketing is this: Someone trying to convince you to buy something you don’t want and don’t need. I suppose that’s slightly better than the stereotypical image of all sales people as used car salesmen. But it’s still far from the truth, especially in B2B sales. There’s no point in trying to sell people something they don’t need. The key is finding prospects that do need what you sell.

While all sales people are not the embodiment of that overly slick reptile that will do anything to put you in a car today, we have other stereotypes that don’t help as well... The lone gunman or the rainmaker, the “they can get away with anything as long as they beat their quota”. None of these are helpful in your long-term success. Furthermore, they help to create that divide between your sales and marketing teams.

You’ve probably tried to fix this from the top down, but the most effective way I’ve seen to fully empower your sales team and to get marketing and sales to work together, is to have your marketing team take the lead. What I mean by this is to make marketing’s first priority the empowerment of your sales team. This may seem contrary to what most people do. For many companies, they charge their marketing team with generating a certain number of prospects, but I’ve found that this leads to a greater disconnect and doesn’t result in higher sales.

I’ve seen if for myself. Take, for instance, a company that sells a product that starts out at a quarter of a million dollars. The marketing team is charged with generating one hundred leads per sales rep every month. The reps don’t have the time to follow up on a hundred new leads when they’re working with a small handful of prospects that need to close soon and another few that need to close in the next quarter. Management is unhappy with sales because they don’t close enough business. Marketing complains that they generate the leads, but sales does nothing with them. There’s a big disconnect here. Rather than generating one hundred leads per rep, this organization would be much better off generating only ten, especially if these leads are highly qualified.

Marketing departments that really understand their company’s sales cycle and methods should be organized around supercharging the sales effort. Any reps, no matter how busy they are, have time to make at least ten calls. And they’ll want to if they know that all of these leads are eager to talk with them.

These numbers might not be what you need to sell, but you can figure out what you do need. If you give your sales and marketing teams different and separate goals, you’ll probably struggle to have them work together. But if you give them a single goal and charge your marketing team with making it happen, you’ve got a great chance at success.

There are many ways your marketing team and efforts can empower your sales team. I’d love to share with you more of what I’d learned. Feel free to contact me and we can discuss how to empower your sales efforts.

Empower Your Sales Team

2010-05-04T08:58:00.000-04:00

It is a mystery to me how so many organizations have conflicts between their sales and marketing teams. It just doesn’t make any sense. And in today’s business environment, there’s no excuse why it should be the reason you’re missing your full potential in sales.

How many times do you hear a sales person complain that they don’t have the right sales tools and materials? How often do you hear marketing complain that they can’t get sales input on a new brochure or mailer? And how often do you find sales reps wasting valuable time putting together their own presentations and materials?

Here’s a simple step to get things started: send your marketing staff on sales calls. Every member of your marketing department needs to sit in on sales calls with one of your sales reps, both in person and on the phone, and observe how your sales team interacts with customers and prospects. They’re not there to sell, they’re there to watch and learn.

If you can get your marketing team to take just four days a year and sit in on calls and meetings, you’ll find that they will naturally break down any barriers the two departments have built up and you’ll begin the dialog that you need. There’s plenty more to do, but just four days across a year will stir things up.

In return, every person in your sales department needs to devote time to participate in the materials development process in marketing. That means participating in what materials will be developed and reviewing and commenting on materials and programs before they go into production. We’ll talk about that more in a future post.

I’ve got a lot of things to say about empowering sales and I’ll detail some of them in future posts on this topic – Empowering Your Sales Team. And I’d be happy to talk with you about how you can remove this barrier inside your organization and dramatically increase your sales in the coming year.

How I Took a Cruise to Get Away From it All and Still Learned Marketing Lessons

2010-04-27T08:31:00.000-04:00

Our family spring break vacation this year was a Caribbean cruise. It was wonderful. It was great to get away from the cold, gray Ohio winter. And I really needed the time to disconnect, spend time with my wife and kids, and just plain relax.

But try as I might, I couldn’t help but notice that the Holland America cruise line had mastered a number of marketing techniques. They combined customer service and marketing into a seamless experience. They worked at a remarkably sophisticated and effective level. And they did things that every business should be doing. Maybe you should take a cruise and label it as “marketing research”!

Here are some of the things I noticed:

When we boarded we were a little early – but they were ready for that. They took charge of our bags and directed us to a special brunch. There, a waiter greeted us and he told us his name and then asked for each of ours. Now here’s the special part: this waiter didn’t serve us for the remainder of the cruise, but he made a point of greeting us by name any time he saw any of us. He was friendly and open and really made us feel comfortable. I even made a point of searching for him and tipping him when we left. And when I got home, he had sent me a Facebook Friend request!
The next morning at breakfast we noticed that the Captain was seated next to us. He was friendly and open and really set the tone. You could tell that from the Captain at the top down to the waiters and the room stewards, everyone was well-trained to focus on the customer and make our cruise a terrific experience. Sitting there next to him, I could see that he was very much like a Fortune 500 executive – he had 2,000 employees and they each had the goal of not just making our trip special, but to plant in us the desire to travel with them again. AND to spread the word (like I’m doing now!). From the waiter to the Captain, this open, friendly attitude cost them nothing, but created an atmosphere that made the trip memorable. Do you and your employees show the same thing to your customers?
Here’s a terrific idea: the cruise line offered a $500 discount on our next cruise if we signed up for one while we were still onboard. It was a significant savings and timed for when we were most relaxed and receptive. That’s a great idea. Are you offering your customers discounts and upgrades on future purchases while they’re still fresh from their current purchase?
And after we were home, the cruise line has continued to check on our satisfaction and send us e-mails, reinforcing the positive experience and setting the stage for a future trip... excellent follow-thru. Are you following up?

One of the key things that I noticed is that this cruise line understood that they already had our money and we were captive. They could have done the minimum and pocketed the profits, waived goodbye, and headed for the bank. But they recognized that we represented more than just the price of the current cruise: we were potential future customers AND all of our family, friends and acquaintances were also potential customers. To capitalize on that rich potential, they needed to make the current cruise spectacular. Are you doing this? Are you thinking beyond the current project or deliverable you have for a customer? Are you marketing to your customers AFTER you make the sale? How are you convincing them that they made the right decision to purchase from you? How are you reaching the people that might not have made the buying decision, but are being effected by your product our service? Are you making it natural and easy for them to spread the word about your company?

Do just one thing today: find out how the lowest person on your corporate totem pole works with your customers. Are they anything like our waiter on the cruise? Do they make your customers feel special and welcome? And what about you? Do you make sure that EVERY person in your organization is focused on the customer experience and understands how their job also includes marketing? Have you given them the sales tools and training to make that possible? I’d love to talk with you about how you can put these lessons to work for your organization. I’d be happy to talk with you about applying these approaches. And I can show you our vacation pictures!

Sales Motivation Techniques from Great Literature – Captain Ahab, Sales Manager

2010-04-20T08:03:00.001-04:00

Have you read Moby Dick? If you haven’t, you’ve probably seen the movie with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. While Ahab is often used as a metaphor for crazed obsession, few people realize that he was also a terrific sales manager.

One of the key scenes early in the story shows Ahab taking a gold coin, a doubloon, and he calls the crew before him and gives one of the great sales motivational speeches of all time.

“Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke--look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"

Afterwards, he nails the coin to the mast where all can see it.

The gold coin represents a small fortune to the crew, and they soon share Ahab’s obsession for finding the white whale. The sight of this coin reminds them every day about what they’re looking for and what the real goal of the voyage is. They continually drive themselves to a higher and higher performance without the captain having to repeat himself or punish them. They motivate themselves with the sight of the coin nailed to the mast.

That’s the key. Your team has to catch your excitement and obsession about your goals. I don’t recommend driving them “round perdition's flames before I give him up!" However, it is critical that you find a way to motivate your crew. It might not be money – and often it’s not. But what is important is excitement and clear goals. Ahab certainly set that out for his crew. What have you done to excite and direct your team?

Although Ahab’s voyage ended badly, it wasn’t from lack of motivation.

At Minds On we have a lot of experience in building internal marketing and sales motivational campaigns. I’d be delighted to tell you about them and talk with you about how you can find something to nail to the mast and motivate your crew.

Marketing to Your Internal Audience – Tools and Motivation for Your Team

2010-04-13T09:34:00.001-04:00

With so much focus on getting the word out and creating new customers, it’s very easy to neglect your own team especially if you have more than one location. I’ve seen companies with distributed sales teams scratch their heads about why one region does terrific and another completely bombs.

But it’s not a mystery. Does everyone in your sales team have access to the same information? Are they getting the latest intel on what works and what doesn’t? Are they seeing the latest successes, all of the materials that are leading to sales, and all of the training that drives success?

Your first audience for marketing is your internal one. This needs that same, continually updated flow of information that your prospects and customers do. In addition, it needs even more detail, more assistance, and more tools. It would be easy to blow your entire marketing budget just on internal marketing and systems.

How are you keeping your team up-to-date?

We’ve had success doing this for our customers here at Minds On. One of the best approaches is to use an intranet – a full-service internal-only portal of information, materials, and tools. A big component of your intranet should be an internal blog – or even a series of blogs. This lets you communicate directly to your targeted internal audiences and keep them all on the same page. If you tie in an online forum where your team can share what it's seeing and experiencing, you can help to distribute that experience to your whole organization. In the ideal world, all of your department heads would be blogging on what they’re doing to reach the company goals and keeping all of their materials and information updated. You shouldn’t be responsible for absolutely everything.

One exciting Minds On innovation is an online store for all of your sales materials. Imagine this: A salesperson in a remote office has an important meeting with a big prospect. He/she goes to the e-commerce marketing materials store on your intranet and reviews the available materials. There are PowerPoint slide presentations, product sales sheets, white papers, even model proposals. He/she can select the materials needed and even customize them with the prospect’s name, logo, and specific requirements and needs. Then, he/she can download the customized electronic versions or order professionally printed copies. You can even assign print budgets to sales offices or individual staff.

This approach offers several advantages. First, it puts the latest materials in all hands and they have up-to-the minute materials available to them. Next, it keeps your sales staff from “going rogue” and creating their own materials. You never know what the quality of those will be – and often they’re very bad. It also allows you to control your branding and imaging. This is a critical component that’s often overlooked in sales materials. Every time you “touch” several prospects, you want to reinforce your brand image and strengthen their perception of your company. By providing customizable materials to your staff, you also control what they can’t change. That’s a very good thing.

The key is this: Get the latest information to your staff all the time. Just like you need to keep communications open with your prospects and customers, you need to do the same for your staff. The payoff is big. If you can keep all of your team completely up-to-date, you have a much greater chance at sales success.

I’d be happy to talk with you about how you can inform and motivate your sales staff. I’ve got some great customer examples I can share with you, so give me a shout!

How to Waste Your Marketing Budget – 5 Ways to Spend Money and Receive Nothing in Return

2010-04-08T10:46:00.000-04:00

Before we founded Minds On, I spent years “on the other side of the desk” working virtually every job in corporate marketing. I know what it’s like to be responsible for the bottom line. I know what it’s like to be responsible for results. I also know what it’s like when budgets are tight.

I also know what happens if you don’t manage your resources well. It’s so easy to blow your budget and not get anything in return. Here are five ways that I see businesses wasting their marketing budgets today:

Spend on Google Adwords and online campaigns without a targeted Web site to capitalize on the clicks. Online advertising is so attractive. It’s cheap (sometimes) and it’s trackable. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, and then it’s usually only pennies; however, what too many don’t realize is that it doesn’t matter if they click on your ad – it only matters if they become a prospect or customer. That will only work if the customers click through to your site and find a clear message that connects with them. Don’t start a campaign to create traffic until you’ve updated and focused your site on capturing their interest and making it easy for them to become a customer.
Pay for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) before you have a clear and up-to-date Web site. SEO is the new form of black magic that everyone is anxious to invest in having. We’ve got to improve our Google Rankings! But just like point #1, if you don’t have a Web site and focused campaign to take advantage of increased traffic, it is a waste of your time and effort. The fact still remains – you can improve your rankings by providing focused content and updated frequently about your products and services.
Buy a list. It’s so tempting to buy a list of names and titles and e-mail addresses, but unless you’re planning on going the full-blown direct marketing route and blast out to tens of thousands of names, you’re unlikely to stumble across any potential customers. Do you want your sales people trying to call on a thousand cold leads or ten hot prospects? You can do more to build your own lists and get more bang for your buck.
Blow your budget on a single marketing effort. This may be the most common error I see. A company only has a limited budget, so they plan one big mailer, or one trade show, or one e-mail blast. It’s the Hail Mary pass of marketing, and it rarely works. What do you do next when you don’t generate enough leads for the whole year? Even with restricted budgets, you need to find a way to have activities and actions that reoccur. You need a plan that lays out a full year of marketing. Going “all in” is rarely a good idea outside of a poker game.
Go dark. Hold onto your money in hopes that sales will pick up. Yes, you are wasting your budget if you don’t spend it! I’m surprised I have to still bring this up. If your sales are down and the budget is tight what should you do? If the answer is “cut marketing and enter a death spiral” you might want to rethink that. When sales are down you need to INCREASE marketing. You only cut back when sales are through the roof. Marketing is your sales lifeblood. Seriously, if you cut your marketing, what do you think will happen to your sales?

I think you should always be cautious with your marketing spending, and the best way to do that is to have a clear strategy and plan. When times are tough and money is in short supply, don’t just hurl the ball down the field and pray. Get a plan. Experiment. Try something new. But don’t waste your money.

I’d be happy to talk with you about building a year-long marketing effort and how to use whatever budget you have to achieve your sales and business goals.

The Webmaster’s Dead! Long Live the Content Managers!

2010-04-05T08:40:00.001-04:00

I’ve been designing, building and managing Web sites since 1993... almost twenty years now. Back then, there was usually one person responsible for everything in a company Web site, the mysterious and powerful “webmaster.”

However, things were simpler back then. Web sites were only a few static pages. Most of them were very crudely designed, and there was very little interactive content. One person could handle a little design, figure out the technical basics and how to wrangle a little HTML – one person could handle it all.

It didn’t take long for things to become much more complex. As design quality improved and the technical side became much more complex, it got so that you just couldn’t find all of the talents you needed to run a complex company Web site in just one body. Webmasters became the technical talent buried somewhere down in IT. Unfortunately, they also became the bottleneck and gatekeeper. It seemed like it took weeks for the smallest change to be made to a site.

For a lot of companies it’s still this way. That’s a shame because it doesn’t have to be. Distributed “content managers” or “subject matter experts” can manage a well-designed, modern site. By using technology like Content Management Systems (CMS), departments can create their own content or update existing pages in seconds, all without disturbing the site design elements or without any technical training. The simplest type of CMS is the type of thing you see with most blogging engines, like Google’s Blogger or Wordpress. You can have this type of thing built right into your blog to manage every page and piece of information.

Fresh content is the key. There’s a lot of information that should be on your site, and it should all be updated frequently. View “What’s In Your Web site?” to see the types of information that you should have on your site. If you have to wait for a webmaster down in IT to update your product data sheet, it might take weeks to happen. That’s valuable sales time lost.

In order for this to work, you need to have a clear structure and a plan. You have to determine who is responsible for each type of information on your site. You need to establish standards and guidelines for writing styles, and you need someone in each area to act as the editor – that final line of defense – before anything is published to the Web at large.

At Minds On, we have customers who have to update their websites on a near daily basis. They couldn’t keep up if we didn’t supply them with tools so that they could do it on their own. Most small and medium-sized companies don’t even have a technical staff. That means that their existing employees, the ones who already have a plate-full, will be the ones maintaining their site. If you don’t make it easy for them, it’s not going to get done.

So while the term webmaster may be dead, you need to think about all of the content managers you have or need in your organization. You have to supply them with the tools to manage their sections of your Web site, and you have to provide them with quality guidelines and the goals and expectations for creating new content and updating what you already have. If you want your Web site to be a successful part of your sales and marketing efforts, this is the approach that will pay off for you.

If you’d like to learn more about content management and how we do this for our clients, get in touch. I’ve been doing this for nearly twenty years now, and I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned and continue to learn about building and maintaining killer Web marketing efforts.

What’s in Your Web Site?

2010-03-30T09:49:00.001-04:00

In “ The Three Secrets Of Successful SEO – Three Hard Truths” I talked about the need for fresh content which is frequently updated for your online marketing.

Blogging is only one type of content. There are several types of content that you need AND need to keep fresh. Depending on your type of business, you should probably have the following:

Product sales sheets/Info
White Papers on your industry and issues
Product demos, including video
Portfolios
News & events
Case studies – real world, specific customer examples
References, reviews, and press

Take a look at your site. For each type of content, take a look at when it was last updated. Was it within the last month? When you look at each piece, do you say to yourself, “Nothing more could be said about this”?

Here’s the real kicker: If existing customers visited your site, would they find ANYTHING new from when they last visited. If not, why would they ever visit again?

Frequently updating and adding these types of content are the backbone of your online marketing. The first thing that fresh content does is wake up the search engines and improve your rankings. Next, fresh content gives your customers and prospects more and more information to help convince them to buy from you – or stay with you.

The beauty of this type of content is that it can be “multi-purposed.” The information you create for a sales sheet can be used to update your product page AND be used as a PDF as well as a printed version. The same thing applies to almost everything else. Also, this fresh content can be used for e-mail campaigns, direct mail (“Visit our site to download our latest whitepaper on product X”), and to support your trade shows and face-to-face meetings. These are tools your salespeople need.

You should set a goal to give your sales team at least one new piece, or a significantly updated piece, once a month. I really think you should do more, but if you do at least that, your Web site will stay fresh and you’ll end the year with twelve new sales tools. That’s a goal worth having.

We’re doing some cutting-edge things with content, including a unique system that allows our customers to set up an “intranet” and provide their sales teams with an entire library of marketing materials that they can customize and receive as electronic versions OR order print runs. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. This is the type of thing that’s helping sales teams stay sharp when others are having difficulty selling in a tough economy. Today you really need an edge, and that edge should be more and better information about your products and services in the hands of your sales team, your customers, and prospects.

Want to do more with your content? I’d be happy to sit down in person or via video chat and talk about how you can create lead-generating content and keep your Web marketing fresh.

Let’s Link Up! The Three Types of Web Links that Take Your SEO Through the Roof

2010-03-18T09:25:00.002-04:00

In a previous post named “The Three Secrets of Successful SEO – Three Hard Truths” I laid out the three simple rules to succeed with Search Engine Optimization for your Web site.

Here they are again:

Write great, clear content about your product, services, and company and things you deeply care about or have an interest in doing.
Update it frequently.
Responsibly build real links.

Today let’s focus on that third point: Responsibly build real links.

If you listen to what Google and the experts tell you about SEO, links to your site are a critical component in determining how you’re ranked, but link-building is one of the most difficult tasks. In the early days of the Web, people tried “link exchanges” where you’d sign up with a service and other sites would put up pages of links on their site, including a link to yours, and you’d put up a similar page on your site. The problem is this: It doesn’t work. Google and the other search engines can determine the relevance of the other site to yours. Furthermore, if they just see a page of links to totally unrelated companies, they ignore them. Sometimes, they even penalize you, too. The last thing you want is to fall to the bottom of the rankings.

Your links have to be relevant. Here are the three types of links you want:

Links from the press – including established print and online reviewers, bloggers, online news, and industry sites.
Links from your customers.
Links from industry analysts, associations, and related bodies.

So, if you’re in the business of making eel-skinned wallets, a link coming from a software company Web site doesn’t do anything much for you, but a link from a fashion site is incredibly useful.

It takes time to build links. You’ll need to approach it like farming. It’s a long process of planting the seeds, nurturing them, and maintaining them over time. Anyone who tells you that he/she can do it for you overnight is conning you.

Fortunately, the Web is designed for linking. What you have to do is make it completely simple and natural for others to link to you. For press, you want to supply them with a special section of your site where you give them product photos and images in various resolution, your logos in both color and black & white, company data sheets, links to other reviews, and clear contact info for your designated press person. Moreover, here’s the critical point: If anyone from the press contacts you, you drop EVERYTHING and bend over backwards to help him or her. A favorable review, a mention of your company or product, a quote from your executives – all this is worth thousands of dollars in paid advertising. Reporters and writers quickly learn who they can turn to when they’re short on time. You want to be one of those people. Give them your personal cell number. Tell them to call you anytime.

For your customers to link to you, you’ll have to do something unnatural: You’ll have to ask them. Most will say no, and that’s OK, but you’ll be surprised at how many will say yes. What you’ll need to do for them is very similar to what I’ve recommended for the press, but for customers, make it even easier – package it all up in an email and send it to them. Make it completely simple, easy, and effortless.

Working with industry analysts and associations is more difficult, but the payoff is worth it. You can’t just sit back and wait for them to contact you. Once again, you’ll have to get in touch with them, make sure they consider your product or service, and make it easy for them to get review copies; or better yet, put them in contact with your best customers so they can hear those glowing reviews. Work as the intermediary and be as helpful and easy to work with as possible. Set up an e-mail alert so you can respond to any request from an industry analyst immediately.

Furthermore, here’s something that often completely screws up a link-building effort: Don’t change your Web site URLs. Your Web site should be designed with very simple links to your product and services – links that NEVER change. If they are long, complex, system-generated links, they’re very likely to change. If you change a URL, you break the potential external links and they become useless... Worse than useless! It’s very frustrating for a prospect to follow a link and get one of those annoying “Page Not Found” errors. Police your external links and make sure they all end up at a payoff for you. If you find a link that no longer works or has moved, change it on your side (301 redirect scripts) so the page is redirected to where it should go.

You might have the best product or service in your category, but if you don’t have the link infrastructure, no one will find out about it. It’s not easy or quick to build, but a strong link infrastructure is a valuable asset. It will bring you new business.

If you don’t have a link-building campaign as part of your marketing plan, you need to stop and think about what you’re missing. Give me a call or send me an e-mail – I’d love to talk with you about how link-building can be an integrated part of your online marketing.

The Three Secrets of Successful SEO – Three Hard Truths

2010-03-16T08:15:00.000-04:00

I’ve already told you that “Your Web Site is not a Brochure”. Now I’m going to tell you the three secrets that will increase your search engine rankings and bring you more prospects and customers. But let me warn you, these fall into the category of “hard truths”.

Here they are:

Write great, clear content about your product, services, company, and things you deeply care about or are interested in.
Update it frequently.
Responsibly build real links.

That’s it. Those three things will improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and bring you new prospects.

What? It sounds like work! That’s the hard truth part.

Over the past year or so I’ve been pretty busy and let the whole exercise thing slide. Since I just turned forty and was getting out of shape, I joined a gym at the first of the year. With the help of a determined friend, I’ve been hitting the gym EARLY every morning.

It was awful. It hurt. I did not want to do it. but I’ve kept at it.

Guess what? I’m down over fifteen pounds, and I’m feeling and looking great (if I say so myself)! That’s because the hard truth about fitness and health is this:

Portion control and watch what you eat.
Exercise more.

Hard truths are usually hard because they don’t offer a magic or easy solution to life’s problems. Getting fit is just like attracting visitors to your Web site. I’ve seen our SEO at Minds On improve dramatically since I started blogging regularly late last year, and I only publish about twice a week. Businesses that are publishing daily and even multiple times a day are seeing terrific results. And, the search engines notice. Google, in particular, pays little to no attention to your keywords and meta tags (you really should click that link – it’s very revealing and straight from the horse’s mouth).

What Google and the others are looking at is your human readable content. That’s who you want to talk with anyway – humans. Google, Bing, and Yahoo will all categorize you better if you are frequently talking about your business, the industry you serve, the problems you and your customers face, and what your products and services provide to your customers. Look at this: A recent survey done by HubSpot.com found that social media and blogging were rated as the most cost - effective lead generation method, “below average cost”. If you look at your Web site and see that you haven’t updated ANYTHING in over a year, that’s the reason you do so poorly on search rankings. No amount of messing about with keywords is going to change that, but a couple of blog posts a week will. I’m seeing that for myself.

It’s a commitment. I know from first-hand experience how hard it is to sit down and write, but there are very few things that will work better. We’ll talk more about publishing frequency, social media, and link-building in later posts.

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to do it alone. For my fitness goals I have a buddy to make sure I work out, show me how to do it right, and keep me on the straight and narrow. You can get help with your content and media plan. Moreover, if you need more than coaching, you can get help writing your content, too.

I’d love to talk with you about how to make continually fresh content an integrated part of your online marketing plan. Drop me a line or give me a call and I’ll share with you what I’m learning with this blog and how you can put it to work for you and your company.

Your Web Site is not a Brochure

2010-03-12T08:28:00.000-05:00

Minds On is a full-service marketing agency, but the core of our business and expertise is Web site planning, design and development. After building Web sites for almost twenty years now, I’m still surprised at how little thought most medium-sized business put into their sites.

Very few businesses have product or services so in demand that they only have to tell the customers how much it costs and where to buy it. If your product or service isn’t that easy to sell, then you’ll need to take advantage of every tool you can. A well-designed site can be one of the most cost-effective ways of doing that, but it can also be a complete waste of money if you don’t approach it strategically with clear marketing goals.

I have an exercise for you. Go and take a look at your Web site. Try and think like a potential customer. Can you figure out from only what you can see or read on your site why they should buy from you? Can they learn everything they need to know about your product and your company? Could they easily ask for more information, view demos, see what your customers are saying? Do you leave the site with positive feelings or frustration?

Web site design is not a one-size-fits-all exercise. Your business is nothing like every other business up and down the street. To build an effective Web site you have to understand where it fits in your sales process, what role it plays in brand building, and how it supports your marketing at every stage of sales, including the ongoing support of your customers.

So no, it’s not a brochure. That doesn’t mean it has to be expensive. It just means that it has to be fully integrated with your sales and marketing.

It’s your choice. Do you want your Web site to be a check off on a list so you can say, “Yeah, we have one of those,” or do you want to take advantage of one of the most effective marketing tools ever developed?

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting in depth on this topic – be sure and stop back to read more. Better yet, give me a call (740) 548-1645 and I’ll be happy to talk to you about how you can shape your Web marketing into a more effective tool to drive your sales.

Let Me Give You a Brochure – Why “Conventional” Marketing Still Works

2010-03-10T09:51:00.000-05:00

I’ve mentioned before that Minds On is a full-service marketing company. We have special expertise in Web and interactive design. So why do we bother with the old- school marketing warhorses like brochures, white papers, sales sheets, and well, PRINT?

Because it works! With the advent of Web sites and e-mail marketing some people got the crazy idea that they didn’t need any of the sales materials that worked for them for years. “We can save all that money we spent on printing things. Now we can just tell people to visit our Web site.”

Electronic versions of your standard documents work if you never meet a prospect or customer face-to-face. But if you show up without any kind of printed material, how are you going to maintain that initial impression you just made? You have to Always be Brand Building. Even the smallest item, like your business card, can have a huge impact.

You do need terrific online materials, but why restrict yourself to just a few approaches? You should use every tool in your belt. Sometimes a brochure that you hand prospects can be the thing that drives them to your site a month later. It’s persistent in a way that an electronic message never can be. If you keep sending them physical items – a personal card, an industry article, a postcard – you’ll keep extending the impact of your product and your brand.

There are ways to save money on printing. I like digital print solutions, and we do a lot of that for our customers here at Minds On. The days of printing tens of thousands of brochures at a time are probably gone and that’s fine. But you can achieve the same quality with cutting-edge printing technology that’s available now. I’m not talking about printing from your inkjet printer, but full professional quality print, one copy at a time (or as many as you’d need for an event).

We’ve even set up a special tool where your sales people can customize materials and receive them as electronic versions (PDFs) or order printed versions. I’ll talk more about that in a later post.

You need to equip your sales team with the tools they need to close business. Do they have the product brochures, sales sheets, case studies, white papers, and all of the materials that will demonstrate to their prospects that your company knows what it’s doing? Are you going to send them out empty-handed?

I’d be happy to talk to you about how to use conventional marketing techniques and integrate them into your online marketing approaches.

Hey, isn’t that Tom’s Truck? Always be Brand Building.

2010-03-04T08:30:00.003-05:00

Remember that classic scene in the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross” where Alec Baldwin terrorizes a group of salesmen with “ABC. Always Be Closing.” This is a terrific movie with some stunning performances from some amazing actors, but I wouldn’t use it as a sales-training video. Perhaps I should show it for what NOT to do.

I don’t think you should always go for the close. You don’t always have a fit for what the prospect needs. Often there’s a long process before you can even consider closing. On the other hand, you should always build on your brand and understand what your marketing impact is every time you’re in front of a potential customer.

I recently wrote about How My Business Card Won New Business a Year Later and I heard from a lot of readers about how it struck a cord with them. The more I talked about it made me think about all of the little things we can do to strengthen our brands and increase the impact of our marketing.

Here’s a little something that I did, and it’s amazing how well it works. I’ve already talked about my Ford F150. It’s big and red and very visible, and I went and bought vanity plates for it, “MINDSON.” I can’t tell you how many times people have said they’ve seen me around town, and they say, “I saw you out in the Minds On truck.”

I could have put anything on those plates, but by putting our company name on, reinforces the brand. For a couple extra bucks I now have a mobile billboard, and it has a clear and positive impact. Just like my business card, you might not act on it the first time, but every time you see it, it reinforces our brand.

Today people are so distracted and bombarded by messages. You have to do everything you can to build your organizations’ brand. Every time you touch a prospect they grow in appreciation of what you do, offer, and provide. You want to build on the quality and positive feelings they might have for you. That means really thinking through EVERYTHING you do from a marketing and brand perspective.

Always Be Brand Building. Now if I could only get Alec Baldwin on film saying that we’d have something we could show sales teams!

Are you doing everything you can to build your brand? I’d be happy to talk with you about shaping your marketing tools and sales processes into a winning sales effort.

How Blogging Made Me a Local Celebrity – Or at Least Eddie Merlot’s Made Me Feel Like One

2010-03-02T09:18:00.001-05:00

Back in December, I published a piece titled. “Dine Out, Come Back Soon: How Restaurants Can Use Personalization to Create Repeat Business” about a terrific experience I had dining at the local Eddie Merlot’s restaurant. At the time I heard from a lot of you, both about your experiences in dining and about the approach to personalization marketing.

I had a chance recently to visit the restaurant again – we made reservations so the whole family could celebrate my birthday. Let me tell you this...these people pay attention! When we arrived the general manager, Vitto, greeted us personally. They had prepared a special table for us by the piano and James, our wonderful waiter from our last visit, was ready for us. I can only imagine what it’s like to be on the red carpet at the Academy Awards, but it must have been something like this. Vittorio was right there and he insisted that they bring us a selection of appetizers. The shrimp cocktails mesmerized the kids – they thought it was like something out of Harry Potter, belching fog and smoke (dry ice, but still very cool)!

The entire meal was just wonderful. I can’t say enough. Even the little details were perfectly done. My son got a kick out of the waiters scraping the tablecloth to clear the crumbs, and James noticed this. They presented him with his own Eddie Merlot’s crumb scraper at the end of the meal. My daughter told me, “They made me feel like a princess.” To a parent, that is priceless. James and Vitto ended the night with complimentary desserts all around.

Why the special treatment? Well, first, this is a great restaurant with amazing service. But more than that, they pay attention. My blog piece brought them business – people had told them that they’d read it and came there because of it. They recognized and understood what good word-of -mouth means – or in this case, good word via blogging.

I continue to get postcards and e-mails from them, but it’s still the standard, non-personalized stuff. It would be wonderful if they could extend that marvelous personal touch experience my family gets when we’re in their restaurant to everything they do?

Eddie Merlot’s is quickly becoming our favorite restaurant. You’ll notice I didn’t mention the food, which was great by they way. However, good food wouldn’t mean as much without the wonderful, personal attention to service.

Do you have a plan to help your customers spread the word about you? Do you help them blog and tweet about your business? And do you capture it and use it to amplify their recommendations. If their experiences aren’t what you’d want, do you have a way of addressing them promptly and effectively, turning them to strongly positive ones. I’d love to talk with you about how to build a 2-way social media component into your marketing and help you dramatically extend the reach of your marketing.

1:1 Gone Bad – Wasting Your Marketing Budget

2010-02-24T09:42:00.000-05:00

I preach a lot about the virtues of 1:1 marketing. I see how effective it is for our customers here at Minds On. I know that I respond to it when I get well-managed messages, but I also know how badly it can go wrong.

You probably get these, too, but you may not be as sensitive to them as I am. The other day I got a direct mail piece from a competitor. That’s always interesting, but I was quickly amazed, and frankly dismayed, when I saw how badly they had mangled their opportunity and dollars. It’s a real shame how far off they were.

The first rule of 1:1 marketing is never talk about 1:1 marketing. No wait. That’s Fight Club.

The real first rule is this: Make sure you have good data. This piece was evident that they had very bad data.

First, they had my name wrong. They had the wrong title. Right off the bat,they’d left me with a bad impression. If they were trying to send e-mail to a bad address, it wouldn’t have even gotten to me, but with direct mail, they paid for printing and postage and fulfillment which was a pretty costly mistake.

Nonetheless, they were trying so hard. They used the 1:1 technique that I really like: The personalize URL (PURL). However, since they got my name wrong, the URL was wrong, too, and there’s no way that any prospect is going to follow a personalize URL that gets a name wrong.

At this point I just shook my head and dropped the piece in my “marketing gone bad” pile. Such a waste. It’s actually hanging in my office to remind me what not to do.

Marketing costs money. I don’t care if you’re using the less expensive options, like e-mail and social media. It takes time, and as we all know, time IS money. So, if you’re going to all the trouble of using 1:1 techniques and cross-media, you really do have to be careful.

That means working with good data.

Here are some quick tips to making sure you have good data.

Clean your data. Make sure you have deliverable addresses. There are a number of ways of doing this. The United States Postal Service provides the data and many database marketing tools have this integrated. Use it.
Run a test campaign before you launch your full one. Make it simple and offer something attractive so that recipients will respond and update their information.
Use your sales team to update their customer and prospect records. This is the perfect exercise for them to do on “Call Days”.

“Spray and Pray” isn’t very effective. And if you’re tightening your budgets, you need to make sure that every dollar counts. You might have an engaging message and offering, but if your data is bad, your opportunity is wasted. That bad impression you leave will stick around.

It’s not very exciting, but getting your data straightened out is a key marketing step. We work closely with our customers to do just that. The end result is a much higher connect rate and amazingly high response rates. I’d be happy to talk with you about shaping your marketing tools and sales processes into a winning sales effort.

Breaking through the Barriers – Getting Attention and the Price of Admission

2010-02-19T14:25:00.001-05:00

The other day I received an e-mail from someone that I didn’t recognize, but the subject of the e-mail was “RE: Meeting Request.”

It didn’t take me long after I opened it to see that someone had just gotten past one of my barriers to marketing messages and sales pitches. Normally, I would have just hit the Delete button, but something else caught my eye. They were offering me a $50 Starbucks gift card for viewing a 30-minute demo.

Another barrier breached.

So I slowed down and read their message, and what do you know? It was on a topic of interest to me. These guys were good.

This one e-mail was a perfect example of how a clever subject line and offer could catch someone’s attention. We use these techniques for our clients here at Minds On, and I’m always impressed when I see others using them, too.

First, this e-mail campaign was directed at me specifically. They had discovered that I was interested in their category of software. They had my name, e-mail address, and knew that I was a decision-maker. This same message directed at the guy in the office next to ours might have been a complete miss, but they had zeroed in on me. That’s impressive.

Next, they used a simple and effective method of initially getting my attention. Some might call it a trick, but it worked. I wouldn’t recommend overusing this specific one. However, once they had my attention, they stepped up their game and offered me something — they recognized that my time is valuable, even for things that I’m interested in, and they recognized that they’d have to pay for that attention. The $50 amount was right on the nose because $10 or $25 would have been too little, $100 too much, too desperate. The $50 offer for Starbucks - I stopped and seriously considered their message.

Their message was short and to the point. They introduced the topic, invited me to view the demo and were very specific about the time requirement, just 30 minutes, and listed four short bullets about what their solution would do.

Most importantly, they made it very easy to sign up and equally easy to tell them to stop bothering me.

They got my attention. They had to pay for it, but attracting qualified prospects and closing them quickly is worth paying. You have to decide how much you’re willing to spend to attract qualified prospects for your own company.

Here are the key points:

Use only really good data. Know who are your likely prospects, their names, addresses, and titles. Also, if you can, know when they’re ready to purchase.
Find a way to break through their barriers. Don’t limit yourself to one technique. Use Cross-Media techniques to break through the barriers.
Give them a reason to talk with you TODAY. How much would it be worth to you to close business this month, this week, today? Offer your prospects some real value to give you more information about themselves and to help you understand what they’re looking for and how they’ll decide to purchase.

You can put 1:1 techniques like these into play for your marketing and sales. It’s one of our top strengths, and I see it work for the clients here at Minds On. Furthermore, it certainly worked for this company. I’d be happy to talk with you about shaping your marketing tools and sales processes into a winning sales effort.

Save Me a Place in Line. I Want an iPad.

2010-02-17T08:30:00.003-05:00

It’s been a couple weeks now since Apple introduced the iPad. I can’t get over how much attention it has generated in people proclaiming either their undying love for or their outright hate of the unreleased device. I can’t see the hype dying down anytime before they release it.

I’ve made up my mind. I want one.

I’ve been accused of being an "Apple addict", but it’s more than that. I think this thing is going to be really useful. I’ve been carrying around my trusty old Macbook for years. It’s not glamorous, and it never was cutting-edge, but it works really well for the work that I do on a daily basis. I read and respond to a LOT of e-mail, surf, Skype, prepare proposals, and review work before it goes out to our clients. It’s a great machine, but I will admit, it’s not the best device for using it as an electronic portfolio to show our work to prospective clients.

That’s why I want an iPad. I think a lot of people discussing what it does and doesn’t do, what it has and doesn’t have, are missing one really important point. You’d have to watch the video to understand it: It’s made to share. It’s designed so that you can sit next to or across from someone and share what each other is looking at; even let both interact with it. If you’re showing something to more than one person, it can hook up to a projector. You can’t do either of those things easily with an iPhone, and the iPad seems to be a more natural way to display a portfolio like ours.

I think it will also be a great way to take notes during meetings. In fact, I’d love to see an app that would let me type notes AND record audio at the same time. That would be worth buying.

Oh, and books! Reading books on the iPad looks sweet, and I read a LOT of business books. The iPad definitely has it over the Kindle just for the fact that its monitor is color, not black and white. Add to that the multimedia capabilities, and I can imagine reading books with color photos, interactive graphics, charts and tools, even video from the author. In addition, did you see the Sports Illustrated demo on it? Amazing. I have a feeling I might need more than one. I’m sure it will be in demand at home.

Give me a call in April after I’ve purchased mine and had a chance to get use to it. I’d be happy to bring mine out and show you the Minds On portfolio on it!

Personalization in Action: Ford Knows My Truck and Me

2010-02-11T09:57:00.003-05:00

On this blog I talk a lot about 1:1 marketing. The work we do for customers and companies that I see are taking advantage (or not) of this approach. Here’s a simple campaign that I found very effective.

I drive a Ford F150 Sport truck. I love it! As you’d expect, the dealership and the company should know a lot about me. After all, they sold me an expensive item and I filled out a LOT of forms. Nothing unexpected there.

The other day I received a customized mailer from Ford about tires. They had estimated the amount of mileage I must have had on them and they were very close. They took the opportunity to let me know it was about time to think about new tires and gave me some information about what tires I should replace with the existing ones. They encouraged me to go to my local dealer, which they identified, to replace them.

This is a terrific piece in a number of ways:

They demonstrated that they knew me and what I had purchased from them, and when.
They also showed me that they had good data – the ability to estimate my mileage.
They did NOT offer a discount. Frankly, you don’t have to if you catch your prospect at the right time just before they become aware of their own need. They planted the seed and gave me the information I required, getting my need resolved.

It’s all about good data, sales process, and Cross-Media. You probably have a lot of data about your customers, too. Consider this: How many customers do you lose a year? Do you have a model of why they leave you? If you know why they left, you should be able to examine the rest of your customers and predict which of them might leave. Then you can get to them BEFORE they make any decisions, help them to see the value you provide, or offer them something that keeps them tied to you.

Ford did a good job with this mailer. It’s easy to see why they’re the only domestic car company that’s doing well without taxpayer help.

You can do it, too. Those same tools and approaches that the biggest companies have access to are available to even the smallest companies and the most modest budgets. You just have to use the data you have and integrate it into a consistent approach using both custom online and print tools. I know it sounds complex, but I’m here to help!

Are you getting to your customers and prospects before they make up their minds? I’d be happy to talk with you about shaping your marketing tools and sales processes into a winning sales effort.

Sales Process: Are You Persistent or a Pain?

2010-02-09T08:30:00.006-05:00

It’s hard not to be conflicted about sales. We’ve all had to deal with that stereotypical car salesman or that guy in the blue shirt and name tag that just won’t leave you alone to look at new TVs. And those of us who have to sell our own product and services have to continually ask ourselves, “Should I call that prospect again today?”

I’m the chief salesperson for Minds On, so I wrestle with this for myself, but we also work with our customers in helping to build their marketing programs and sales processes. Finding that right frequency to connect with your customers and prospects is critical. There’s no set rule. It really changes from customer to customer. It’s about finding and establishing a rhythm.

And I do know persistence pays off. Recently I had an experience with an insurance agent that cold-called me. We spoke briefly about new company insurance, and I agreed that it was worth looking into. But when he called back to talk more, I was just too busy to respond to his messages. He didn’t give up. He remained pleasant, didn’t plead or beg. He called regularly until it got to the point that I began to admire his tenacity. And then the time came when I was actually sitting at my desk when he called and I spoke with him. He got my attention.

I also saw the same thing out of Saleforce when I recently looked into their product. I was very impressed with their sales process and the orderly way they dealt with me as a prospect, along with the fact that they actually listened to me, heard what I had to say about our decision process, and took that into account.

That’s really the key. You have to understand how your prospects decide and be there to assist them at every step. If you don’t know how they decide to purchase, then you’re at a disadvantage and might miss out on earning their business.

Here are a few brief tips:

Be persistent. Let your prospects know when you will contact them and then keep your promise. If you can’t connect, find a way to let them know you kept your word, then repeat until you do connect.
Mix it up. Don’t just rely on the phone, or e-mail, or any one method. Using Cross Media approaches can help you break thru the barriers.
Ask your prospects how they decide to buy. Be curious about their process and incorporate it into your sales approach. Be ready to answer their questions and concerns they raise at every step.
Know when to back off. The last thing you want to do is annoy your prospects. It’s almost as bad to appear needy – that means they’ve got you where they can negotiate strongly on price and deliverables. Persistent is good, pestering is bad.

It all comes down to having the right tools and the right process. A sales team equipped with several different ways of communicating with prospects and a solid method of moving them through the sales cycle will be much more effective than one that just has a list of phone numbers and a PDF brochure. If you and your sales team can present yourselves as relaxed, helpful, and knowledgeable, you’ll be much more likely to land the business.

Are you persistent or a pest? I’d be happy to talk with you about shaping your marketing tools and sales processes into a winning sales effort.

How to Gain and Maintain Mindshare

2010-02-05T08:27:00.035-05:00

We’ve just been through another period of Apple media frenzy. We’re guaranteed at least two of these a year. You were either completely swept up in it, like I was, or were probably bored of the whole thing. But I’m betting that you knew about it. It’s very difficult to ignore with all of the media and what seems like the entire Internet saturated with speculation over what will be the next “iThingy”.

How is it that Apple manages this? It doesn’t seem that long ago that everyone was predicting the company’s doom. But now not only are they selling record number of Macs, but they totally dominate the music player AND music sales markets, and they have turned the cell phone market on its head. And now with the iPad it seems that they are on the edge of dominating yet again one or more new markets.

An old Sterling Commerce colleague says it’s quality. While I agree with Randy on the quality of their products, I think there’s something more here, something we can all use to improve our marketing and sales success.

What I see Apple doing is a very methodical, step-by-step expansion of their brand into wider and wider markets. And they focus on mindshare – making sure that everyone is thinking about them as often as possible.

Apple has persistently improved not only its products, but continually focused its advertising and messaging. Even their name and logo have evolved. And it’s working. All they have to do is announce an event and the rumor engines go into hyperdrive. Everyone speculates about what they’re up to, and what’s next. It’s an amazing amount of free publicity and advertising.

How are you gaining mindshare with your customers and prospects? Here are some tips that I believe can help you gain and maintain mindshare the way that companies like Apple:

Be persistent with your marketing. Single shots, attempts at “home runs” and concentration of your marketing efforts into one or just a handful of activities are real barriers to your success.
Educate your market. One of the best ways for you to gain and maintain mindshare is for you to stop selling and start educating. Find ways to educate the market in which you sell – not about your products, but about the problems they face and the successful approaches they can apply. You, or someone in your organization, needs to be a “thought leader” and become your company’s chief educator and evangelist.
Use more than one marketing medium. If you only use web banners, eventually your customers become blind to them or any single method. Cross Media marketing allows you to break through barriers and connect directly with your prospects. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
Experiment. Not even Apple is successful with every new product. The Apple TV has yet to take off and Apple claims that it is a “hobby”. I think it’s evidence that they’re experimenting and might eventually come out with something that really does take the market by storm. You have to experiment, too. Try social media techniques, like blogging and tweeting. Try 1:1 approaches. Redesign your business card.

You can capture your prospects attention, but keeping it focused on you over a long period of time is very difficult. It means that you have to be committed to a continual stream of new information. That means a completely different type of marketing plan than most businesses have in place. I’d be happy to talk with you today and discuss how you can build on your marketing and sales success.

How My Business Card Won New Business a Year Later

2010-02-03T11:49:00.007-05:00

I was reminded the other day about how important the little things are in marketing.

A prospect called me out of the blue and told me he was ready to get started on a project with us. This is someone that I’d met with over a year ago, given him a business card, and we had a few conversations. I started out contacting him frequently, but I wasn’t getting any response. It was clear that he wasn’t ready to do business – yet.

After holding on to my card for over a year, the time was right. So I got the call and we have a new customer.

I’m proud of our business cards. We designed them with a lot of the principles you hear me talk about. They’re an unusual size and a substantial paper stock, that sets them apart and I think it causes people to hold onto them. We use both sides. And probably most important, the cards have a picture of the person, in this case, me. This helps the person that I give one to remember me and to respond to me as a person, not just a name.

I’m like anyone else. I like instant gratification, immediate success. I don’t see why everyone I meet wouldn’t automatically want to become a Minds On customer! But I’ve been around long enough to know that’s not how it works. It’s generally accepted in marketing that it takes ten to thirty “touches” before a prospect wakes up to your existence! And I understand the basic marketing principles. That’s exactly what happened here.

Even in today’s electronic, social environment, you’ve got to use solid marketing principles.

You have to create an impression that lasts. Our card is unique – we stand out from all the rest. That means logo, name, and treatment for consistency and effectiveness across all your media and materials. And making it uniquely personal, like my card with my photo, is critical in making that impression.
You have to use all of the tools available to you. That’s why business cards, something that’s been used since Louis the XIV, are still a viable marketing tool today.
You have to create a conversation and let the prospect tell you when they’re ready to learn more.
One hit wonders don’t work. A single marketing program or push won’t generate the prospect you need. Marketing successes are built on little “nudges”, contact at the right time, and the creation if interest and trust. That takes time.
You can’t crowd prospects. Sometime they’re not ready. But if they are really a fit for your product or service, you never give up. You just give them some space and time.
Value – you’ve got to show you can provide a clear value. Everyone wants something out of your prospect. You’ve got to demonstrate that you have something to OFFER.

So it might not be the business card alone, but it’s one of tools that keeps Minds On and me in front of my prospects. Along with e-mail, phone calls, reading news articles about us, even reading this blog, the prospect can keep us in mind so that when the time is right, we’re the first company they think of.

Marketing is a long-term strategy. Does your marketing and your processes allow for the time it takes to create new customers? I’d be happy to talk with you today and discuss how you can build on your marketing and sales success.

The Netflix Experience – Marketing and Customer Service Lessons

2010-01-28T08:30:00.003-05:00

I don’t know how many of you use Netflix but here’s another company that I think is really doing great things with their marketing and shaping their customer experience. I’m a big fan.

First, I’ll note that they use multiple tools to attract new customers – TV ads, direct mail, refer a friend promotions a very good online presentation. Their service is very simple to understand and use. You probably know the concept: pay a low monthly fee and receive unlimited, no-late-fee DVDs thru the mail. Their execution is top notch.

I’m particularly impressed with how they handle problems. I’ve never had to call them – their Web processes are solid, even for missing or damaged DVDs. All-in-all, this company has made dealing with them very easy – so much so that it’s always a pleasure to find a Netflix envelope in the mail. There are very few companies that can evoke that type of reaction from their customers. It’s good for their customer AND it’s good for them – terrific online support and problem resolution is far less expensive than live operator customer support.

I do think they could do an even better job by leveraging 1:1 marketing. I’ve been a customer for some time now, but I still get generic campaign message from them. They have a LOT of specific data that I’ve given them, so they could tailor campaigns directly to me, connecting with my interests and patterns. They have a recommendation engine on their site that extrapolates from the movies I’ve rented to suggest others that I might like. So why not continue that same experience by sending me e-mails about movies I may like, driving me back to their site? Or send a text message that mentions the service level I have, my video rental monthly usage and how I could benefit if I would upgrade? Since I have a very good relationship with them, I’d welcome messages that help me better use their service, connect with my interests, or provide me greater value.

The key to successful marketing today is developing close relationships with your customers. That means using 1:1 marketing techniques, cross media and every tool available to you to attract new prospects and keep the customers you have.

I’d love to hear from you about companies that you think are doing a great job. Leave me a comment here! And feel free to give me a shout to talk about how you can use these techniques to take your marketing and sales to the next level.

Quality vs. Quantity – Why Qualified Leads Matter

2010-01-26T08:30:00.004-05:00

The focus on quality verses quantity was one of my 5 Simple Keys to Marketing Success in 2010 and I think it merits some additional commentary.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a company plan their trade show activities around “collecting leads” and use the old fish bowl full of business cards as proof that they were successful. You typically see such companies giving away something really attractive, like a new iPod. And it works. They get a lot of names.

But the real question is this: Are any of those names actually prospects for your product or service? Simply collecting a large list of names usually results in months of follow up e-mails, expensive brochures mailed, and endless calls and rejections. Why? It’s simple. Just because they gave you their business card doesn’t mean that they have any interest in what you sell. They wanted the free iPod.

So ask yourself: is your current marketing plan designed to collect names or is it focused on attracting qualified prospects?

It’s easy to dazzle management with a high number of hits on your Web site. Traffic is impressive. But that traffic, just like the cards in the fishbowl, may not be useful. This is the key question you have to ask: Is your traffic made up of likely prospects for your product or service?

Like you, I’ve contemplated why there is always tension between sales and marketing. Here’s what I’ve come to believe: Your sales team wants more leads and marketing is delivering them by the bushel basket load. But what sales rep will follow up on a thousand leads? Marketing is unhappy with sales because they don’t use the leads that marketing gives them. And sales is unhappy because they don’t see the leads they get as potential prospects.

But imagine if your sales reps received only ten highly qualified leads a week to follow-up with. Just ten prospects that they could work on and continually nurture? It becomes more manageable, more consistent. And more effective.

Here’s what I suggest (you might need to adjust the numbers to your specific needs): Work with your sales team and have each rep create a highly targeted list of around ten “hot prospects” each month. Have them research each prospect, calling them to gather as much information about the company as possible. Have them detail what the significant pains are in that prospect’s industry. Have them find out how they decide to buy, when they buy, and what are the triggers for making a purchase. Once you have that, you and your marketing team will use this list and the highly detailed profiles that they’ve creating to focus your marketing on attracting more prospects just like these. No more free iPods to the crowd. You’ll design highly focused campaigns that will attract fewer prospects, but ones that are much more likely to become customers.

I’ve found that using 1:1 marketing techniques to create campaigns that are highly targeted and focused based on profiles like these to be very effective in accomplishing this goal. And the companies I see that are doing this well, like Salesforce.com are becoming very successful, even in a difficult economic environment.

So ask yourself: Is your plan designed just to deliver a thousand names or is it targeted at delivering ten highly qualified prospects to each sales rep? Which is really better for you?

This is the time to focus your marketing on attracting qualified prospects and turning them into customers. That might mean working with smaller numbers, but with bigger payoffs.

Of course, once you have that qualified lead, you have to have a plan for what’s next. That’s process. And too often marketing and sales are disconnected on this. But that’s a future topic. I’d be happy to talk with you today about how to shape your marketing plan to deliver high quality, highly qualified prospects to your sales team.

A Week and a Half Without My iPhone – And What it Means for Marketing

2010-01-19T10:42:00.000-05:00

A couple weekends ago I was with my family in Hocking Hills. On the weekends, I try to stay offline to reconnect with my family and focus all my attention on them. On this particular weekend I was having such a good time with my family, that while packing up to go home, I did the unspeakable....

I left my iPhone and was without it for a week and a half.

Maybe I’m an example of the spoiled Internet age, but I’ll tell you, that first week was nerve-racking. I felt like I was getting hives! In addition to being without my phone, I was also out of the office and it was over the holidays. On top of that, I couldn’t remember my PIN to get into my voicemail on the phone, so I couldn’t tell if someone was trying to get a hold of me. I felt anxious the whole time.

And anyone with a Smartphone knows, it’s not just about the phone calls. I’ve gotten used to being able to fill any empty moment by checking my email, the news, tweeting, updating my Facebook page, surfing the Web. Without it, I was lost. What if I had a car accident or ended up in a ditch? I’ve been carrying a cell phone for over 15 years now and it’s hard to remember what it was like before we had them.

On the other hand, not being able to pull out my iPhone and check in every few minutes did have its perks. I think I paid more attention to my family and after the initial anxiety of not having it wore off, I think I relaxed more. The thing is definitely a double-edged sword.

The lack of that tool was almost a disaster, but another tech solution came to the rescue. I was on the way to a prospect appointment when I got stuck in I-270 traffic, a complete stop. I hate being late. I reached for my cell phone to call them, but remembered it was still at the cabin. I almost panicked, but looked down and saw my laptop. I opened it up and got lucky, finding an open WiFi network from a hotel just off the road. In seconds I launched Skype and was able to place a video phone call and let them know I was stuck in traffic and was running late.

I was relieved that I found a solution to a potential problem. And it did provide a valuable lesson: never rely on only one way of communicating.

That’s an important marketing lesson, too. If you rely on only one method or one shot, what will you do if it misses the mark? How will you communicate with your prospects if they ignore their email? What will you do if that single ad you placed in a trade magazine doesn’t work? Even in this high-tech, hyper-connected world, you need multiple ways to get your message across. That’s what I mean when I talk about Cross-Media marketing.

For now, my iPhone is safely back in my pocket. And if you want to talk with me about Cross-Media plans for your organization, I’m sure I’ll be able to get right back to you! Test me by contacting me today.

Getting Sales Processes Right – Salesforce

2010-01-14T10:23:00.001-05:00

Recently I’ve been considering investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution for Minds On and trying something new for our own sales tracking efforts. We have an agency project management package, which is fine for scheduling and task planning, but I’m not really excited about the CRM features. We’ve integrated Salesforce into websites and email campaigns for a lot of our clients, so I decided to research the benefits of using it here at Minds On as well.

As a marketing professional, I am very detail-focused and I must admit that I am very impressed with Salesforce’s sales process and the prospect experience. Here’s a company that seems to understand the potential of online tools and how to integrate them into a live sales force.

We’re a small company, so when I started thinking about selecting a CRM, I was concerned that most packages would be designed for large enterprises – too complex and too expensive for what we needed. And one of the first things I noticed about Salesforce was that they offer five different editions. It looked like it might be confusing figuring out which one would be right for me, but I was pleased to see a big button on the upper right hand corner of the page that said, “Which CRM? Try our edition advisor.” Clicking this button kicked off a brief presentation that asked me to answer some simple questions about my company and its needs. They then gave me a customized presentation that kept prompting me for more information to further customize my options. It was all helpful, informative and very well done. I recommend taking a look at how they do it, even if you’re not in the market for a CRM, as an example of a well-done online sales presentation.

What really got my attention was their process and follow through. After I signed up for the free demo, I got a call from Erin in sales support. She was pleasant and well informed. She answered my questions, and most importantly, verified that I was a good prospect from a sales perspective. At the end of the conversation she made a point of naming who my account representative would be and telling me that I’d hear from him the following day.

And I did. I received a polite email – not pestering or forceful. It was all the right signs that they have a solid sales process and are excellent in their execution. I was very impressed.

Frankly, almost any company, especially those engaged in B2B sales, needs a process like this and the online behind-the-scenes tools to pull it all together. And Salesforce could even take it to the next level by integrating cross media to their sales process.

So, did I go with Salesforce? You bet - I signed up yesterday. They won me as a customer by making their process clear, easy and very simple.

Take a look at your own site. Could a new prospect figure out which of your products is right for them without speaking to a sales rep? Could they provide you with their specific needs as part of a natural flow and presentation? And do you have the sales tools and materials to follow up?

These are all important questions. I’d be happy to help you answer them. Drop me a line!

5 Simple Keys to Marketing Success in 2010

2010-01-05T12:50:00.003-05:00

So, here we are it’s the beginning of another year. Everyone I talk to is rushing to get moving. I also know from experience working inside a Fortune 500 software company that when we get to January the executive and sales teams turn around and say, “OK, what’s next?” Q1 usually sets the tone for the rest of the year. The pressure is back on. Goals and quotas are higher, demands on marketing goes way up. The sales team needs fresh leads!

There use to be time, but not anymore. I think fondly back on the days when we could mail off a campaign concept and have days before someone would look at it, then days more for the return trip. Not any more. Today it’s “Can I see that later this afternoon?” And “let’s pull the trigger on this new concept tomorrow.” Everything is becoming reactive, guerilla marketing.

But does that work?

I think that in the rush there’s a great deal being missed. It’s tempting to get sucked into that cycle where all you’re driving for is more hits on the website, more leads collected. Go to a trade show and collect a thousand names and email addresses. But what good are hits and email addresses if they’re not qualified?

Even the simplest plan is better than no plan at all. In fact, I’ve sat through way to many expensive planning meetings that resulted in a complex plan that was never followed, so I’m inclined to want simple, concrete plans with the ability to quickly modify them and act.

Your plan could probably fit on a napkin – the best typical can. What do you need to achieve this year? What are the hard numbers, the real measures that will let you know if you achieved what you wanted? And what are the key steps that will get you there.

Start with a simple plan like that and add these simple steps and you can’t help but move ahead.

Clean up your data and keep it clean. Remember the old adage: garbage in, garbage out. As I said in Survey Your Customers – 7 Tips To Discover Marketing Gold, this will be an ongoing process, but will help keep you focused on what messages and tactics will work.
Focus first on leveraging your existing customers. This is especially important in rough economic times, but still the core of your business when things are good.
Never stop marketing. Too many are betting the farm on one or two big events and that rarely deliver what you need across the year. You have to be consistent, continually touching your customers and prospects. That’s why you need a plan and not just a reactive stance. If you have a plan that rolls out across they year, you can easily respond and use guerilla tactics when you need to, but you’ll never get consistency and strong results if all you do is react.
Focus on quality verse quantity. This is difficult, but try and get an agreement from your executives and sales staff that marketing is not just about numbers, but about qualified prospects. Who cares if a million people visit your site if not one of them is a potential customer. Set your goals on qualified prospects and conversions, not just raw traffic.
Innovate. Don’t limit yourself to the latest fad or the tried and true. You can leverage all of the tools in your tool belt to create a competitive advantage. We’re finding that cross-media marketing when implemented as a continuous plan can be very effective.

Clean data, focus on existing customers, consistent and continual marketing, quality over quantity, and innovation - measure everything you do with these things in mind and you’ll be on your way to a successful 2010!

Survey Your Customers – 7 Tips To Discover Marketing Gold

2009-12-31T08:38:00.001-05:00

As I discussed in Cross-Media Marketing: The Silver Bullet To Marketing Success, your silver bullet to marketing success is good data. One of your key tools is the customer survey.

There are a number of free tools out there, so don’t let fear of expense or complex solutions stop you. I like Survey Monkey.

Everything you need to know about how to shape your marketing is right there, with your existing customers. They know why they bought from you and the process they used to decide. They know the real strong points of your product and service – and what could be better. They know your competitors. All you have to do is ask.

A lot of people dread these – I know I hate getting a multi-page survey or hate spending 10 minutes filling out an online form. But there are some terrific ways to collect this data in small pieces and in multiple ways.

Here are 7 tips on collecting information from your customers:

Start with your goals and write the questions you want answers to. Work with your sales team on this. You can help them incorporate simple questions into every customer contact and make sure they’re entered into the customer file.
Make sure your customer service team can enter information, too. This is often the most critical time for collecting information: when your customers are unhappy. Then immediately after, when you’ve saved the day. That’s time to ask a few key questions!
Create mini-surveys that ask a maximum of 3 questions and include them with every piece of customer contact. Almost anyone will answer three questions. Over time you can ask MANY questions in 3 simple bites.
Every request for information from a customer should have a reason why it’s in the customer’s benefit to respond. The answer could be collecting feedback on future product features or services, but there should always be a benefit to them.
Just ask – talking with your customers goes a long way. If everyone on your team that has customer contact knows what questions you want answered, they can ask them in the normal course of business. Just make sure they capture what the customer says!
Offer bonuses to your customers for completing the big form. If you ask them to spend 10 minutes online, make it worth their while. You can really get valuable, in-depth information this way.
Create a culture where you have conversations with your customers and they anticipate participating in surveys and polls. Tell your customers you want to be a better partner and keep your promises.

The more data you have about your customers, the better you will be able to create models for finding new ones. Although data collection sounds mundane, it is the lifeblood of modern marketing. And once you have this information, you can create powerful, cross-media marketing that will produce dramatic results.

Seasons Greetings

2009-12-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

I'd like to take a moment to express my personal wishes for you and yours to have a safe and happy holiday season.

Happy Holidays from the staff at Minds On!

Cross-Media Marketing: The Silver Bullet To Marketing Success

2009-12-18T08:02:00.000-05:00

Everyone is looking for a silver bullet, that one thing that will always work and deliver that marketing magic. What's the secret method that will let me get through to prospects and turn them into customers?

So, OK, I’m here to reveal that secret. Are you ready?

There is no one thing. No silver bullet.

Sorry to be such a killjoy, but it’s true. There’s no single technique or approach that will always deliver the results you need.

But here’s the good news – read the headline on this post - there is an approach that does deliver. We call it one-to-one cross-media marketing. It’s an application of personalization and sales techniques with solid marketing fundamentals and a data driven core. Why does it work? Because it’s not a single technique.

Cross-media marketing delivers multiple, personal touches using multiple media: print, online and even direct contact from sales reps. All driven by the data.

What used to be called a “coordinated campaign”, but was really just a series of separate marketing efforts, can now be a true single program driven from a master database and with technology that can deliver increasingly customized and personalized messages online and in print. That’s a mouth full, but what it means is that you can build a program that is 100% measurable and is designed to grow and build over time. It is a seamless approach that builds a relationship, not a single shot that either connects or misses.

The real secret to this approach is that every single piece is dynamically generated – every piece of print and every email, every web page, text message - everything. The master database and the software tools that drive the individual pieces make it a single, fully integrated approach. All of the customization is driven from the data you collect and continue to collect. It’s leveraging the knowledge you already own about your customers and creating an even more valuable data asset by keeping it fresh, updated, and adding increasingly what you know about each individual.

It’s an exciting topic for me and I’ll be talking more in depth about some specific approaches in some upcoming posts, but let me lay out the groundwork. Here’s an example:

We recently did a cross-media campaign with the goal of customer retention for a client. It started with a direct mail piece that lead to a personalized landing page for each customer. What made the direct mail piece unique was that every postcard had a picture of that individual customer’s sales representative – someone that they would recognize. Since the event was a football game, we painted the rep’s faces, adding an element of fun – something that would definitely capture the customer’s attention and make them look more closely at the card. There were 10 different reps covering 10 separate territories. And since we knew each customer’s name, their location, and who their rep was, we could program the system to dynamically generate a fully custom postcard for each individual.

And, it worked. When the customer got the card, they recognized the company, their sales rep with crazy face paint, and that we knew them and addressed them by name. With this recognition, they were more likely to read the special invitation to the event. We even printed a custom map from their specific location to the event. And if they followed the custom URL, one that was personalized to the individual, not just the campaign, they’d come to a web page made just for them. Once again, not a single site, but one that was dynamically created just for them.

The response rate for this piece was 30 times higher than a conventional direct mail approach. Just think: what would it mean for you if you could increase your marketing effectiveness from the standard 1% response rate to just say 2%? Let alone 30%?

How do we do that? Ancient Chinese secret. OK, just kidding. We do it through software tools and approaches we’ve developed. When you put technology and marketing experience together, it can be a powerful combination.

There’s a lot to talk about in cross-media marketing. Here’s a few of the things I’ll be talking about in coming posts:

The basic stages: Identification, Differentiation, Interaction and Customization.
The technology of cross-media marketing.
Integrating marketing fundamentals into a data driven, technology centered campaign.
How to build a prospect database from scratch.
Customer retention and loyalty campaigns.
Up selling and cross selling.

And, I’ll be talking about some of the customer wins we’ve seen and the details of how we make this successful for clients in coming posts ― but, be sure to drop me a line if you’d like to talk now about how this approach could work for you in the coming year.

Help Make this an Unforgettable Christmas for One Special Family

2009-12-14T21:11:00.004-05:00

I’ll admit it; I’m excited about the Christmas season, but I don’t think anything excites me more than giving a chance to really make a difference in someone’s life. We’ve made it a Minds On tradition to help an “adopted” family each year, but this year, we came across a family who really touched our hearts.

It’s a family just like yours and mine with a hard-working father, mother, and three great kids. But, they have had an unimaginably bad year — one touched by tragedy. They’ve come close to losing absolutely everything. With this in mind, we are determined to make this Christmas a happy one for them.

We’ve set up a “Giving Back” web site – not to draw attention to ourselves, but to invite you and as many others as we can, to help out. We’ve already stepped in and helped with the mortgage and utilities, but there are lots of things that could really make a difference. We invite you to join us by donating items or cash – even time. Help us spread the word: http://givingback.mindson.com

I’ll be updating the need's list and what we’ve accomplished every day. Please follow/join up and be sure to re-tweet — let’s see how far we can spread the word in these few short days before Christmas.

Thank you for taking a few minutes to read this post. We at Minds On wish you and yours a safe and happy holiday season.

1:1 Marketing: Speaking 1 on 1 With Customers and Prospects

2009-12-10T08:07:00.004-05:00

It's tough to break through the clutter these days. Studies show that the average consumer is exposed to 500 to 5,000 advertising messages a day. And that number is going to get bigger with social media. So how do you get your messages on someone's radar?

Personalization.

Ask yourself: What interests you? What gets your attention? I’m betting it’s a message that is aimed right at you and connects with your interests.

Research shows that people respond more favorably to marketing when they feel special and unique. People also respond positively to messages when they perceive themselves as part of a unique group. That’s personalization. And these approaches work even better in B2B marketing, where your targeted customer is looking for reasons not to read that email or postcard. To break through, you have to get personal.

Personalization marketing — or “1:1 cross media marketing” — is the name of the game.

So… How do you do build a personalized marketing campaign?

First you need good data. Garbage in, garbage out is the old saying. Your customer data will be the key to your success. And you can start with only the most basic information and build from there.

Next, the personalization approach works best in retention and loyalty programs. This is because you usually have good data to start with. It can work with prospecting as well, but you have to start with very little data and no relationship. It will take time to build that relationship and warm them up into becoming your customer. But even a little data goes a long way. Over time and based on your increasing customer and prospect data, you can begin shaping your messages to communicate directly with your customers and help them respond more positively to you and your message.

Think about what catches your attention or engages you. It could be:

As simple as your name or company name – but you better get it right!
Location – things around you close to where you live or work
Interests and hobbies – for example, a passion for a certain technology or car
Affiliations – groups that you identify you’re a part of
Products and services you currently have or could upgrade to
People – especially ones you might know, like a sales rep, CEO, or a celebrity endorser
Gender – a special message targeted a you as a male or female

These are just a few basic personalization points, but each one can give you the basis for direct and personal communication. And when users respond, they will give you more information, helping you to further shape and personalize your communications. If you don’t have all the data, you can shape your message to help collect more.

Now think about how this could help your potential audience. And imagine what it would be like from your customer’s perspective to receive personal, tailored messages. (See Dine Out, Come Back Soon: How Restaurants Can Use Personalization to Create Repeat Business.)

These approaches can work remarkably well, but data is the key. If you have good data, you can reinforce that bond between you and your customer. Use bad data and you will drive them away. Address your message to me with “Hi George!” and I’m done reading and probably done doing business with you. My name is Tom and if you can’t get that right, what else might you get wrong?

And never forget the fundamentals of direct marketing. Even in the Internet age, the basics still apply (timing, offer, creative, message, consistency and multi-touch).

But how do you do all of this? It’s a combination of technology and marketing creativity. At Minds On, we do it for our customers with a technology platform that allows us to start with simple, personalized messages and work up to complex interactions of both online and print messages. Moreover, it connects all media points with a single point of ROI reporting and performance — and creates a unique integrated experience for your prospects and customers.

I’ll be talking about some of the customer successes we’ve seen and the details of how we make this successful for clients in coming posts — but be sure to drop me a line if you’d like to talk now about how this approach could work for you in the coming year.

In my next post, I’ll explain about how to use personalized marketing combined with cross-media techniques to get past the gatekeepers and distractions.

Followup: Making a great experience even better.

2009-12-07T12:17:00.001-05:00

On Saturday, one day after my blog post Dine Out, Come Back Soon: How Restaurants Can Use Personalization to Create Repeat Business, I received a handwritten postcard from our waiter, James. It is amazing how quickly I got a response from my post, this is another demonstration that this restaurant lives by their tagline "Experience the Difference". And that they are willing, on top of the marketing they are already doing, to take the extra step and continue that experience to keep me coming back.

If you haven't tried Eddie Merlots located in Columbus, OH, I would highly encourage you to stop by and check it out. The food and service is out of this world. While you're there, ask for James.

Columbus, Ohio
General Manager – Vittorio Borgia
Waiter - James

Reserve your table(s) online now!

Polaris Parkway and Lyra Drive  
1570 Polaris Parkway  Columbus, Ohio 43240

614-433-7307 Phone

Dine Out, Come Back Soon: How Restaurants Can Use Personalization to Create Repeat Business

2009-12-04T11:30:00.001-05:00

I recently had an experience that really brought home the possibilities of how personalization across media could enhance the consumer experience in the restaurant industry.

I’ve been on vacation, so I didn’t get this posted right away, but it’s been on my mind. On the 14th of November my wife and I had dinner at the Polaris Eddie Merlot’s restaurant. It was a wonderful dining experience. Our waiter, James, was terrific, some of the best service I’ve ever had. And the 30-day aged rib eye steak was phenomenal. Every element of our experience there was practically perfect in every way. And when we were at the end of the meal and James asked me to fill out a card to register for their Platinum Club program, I was happy to give them my email and home address.

So I was also pleased that on the 30th I received an email from them and I opened it right away. But this email was nothing like the experience of visiting their location. It was a corporate-like newsletter. It was, well, impersonal. It opened with a greeting from the President, whose picture was there, but they didn’t include his name or a way to communicate with him. And apparently, they didn’t know which of their locations I had dined at. And finally, although they did invite me back, they didn’t offer me anything to get me back in sooner. It was nothing like the great experience we had with James at our table in the restaurant.

For those who know me, I'm an idea guy, so it got me thinking on how we would have attacked this problem at Minds On. We have the technology and creativity to pull this off. And this isn’t an unusual experience for other restaurants and similar businesses.

The question is this: how could we keep the experience alive?

I really enjoyed Eddie Merlot’s and I’m definitely going back soon, but imagine the impact they could have had with me and other diners if instead of this bland, corporate response, I had received a personal email from James! They are collecting a lot of information about me. They know how much I spent, what I ordered, how many guests I had with me, and also key dates like anniversaries and birthdays. They have the data – they just need to use it.

Imagine this: A properly designed personalization campaign would let James sit down at a terminal at the end of his shift and quickly review and send emails to all of his customers, thanking them for their visit, by name, remind them of what they ordered, when specials are available AND offer them something, perhaps an appetizer or desert, if they return soon. AND specifically invite them to call and ask for James, so he could continue the relationship. And let me repeat: with a timely offer to get me in the restaurant before my birthday. Why wait for that once a year event? What if the customer didn’t provide an email address, the restaurant has the billing address from the comment card – why not send a personalized note, card, or postcard with James’ picture, with an offer or upcoming dining special event?

James wouldn’t have to do the work of writing each email or note – the system would do it for him. That’s the beauty of the way we approach personalization (1-2-1) marketing. And the typical waiter has only a few customers every night, probably less than a dozen points of contact – much like your typical B2B sales person.

A restaurant or any business could benefit by sending consistent messages, driven by the data they already have. And a personalized message is much more palatable than a corporate newsletter (especially for the restaurant industry), so I’d be more open to a new offer every month from James or my local Eddie Merlot’s. And beyond the basics, the program could be designed to continuously capture more information from me, like loved one’s birthdays and events, food preferences, other interests, all things that could be used in future campaigns.

And what if they collected this little piece of information: I own a business. Wouldn’t that merit a personal phone call and an offer for me to hold our company holiday party at their restaurant? Just a small investment in marketing could result in a closer relationship, repeat business, and perhaps thousands of dollars in revenue across the next twelve months.

It’s all about standing out. And personalization marketing is a terrific way to help any business stand out from the crowd of competitors. I think this example can be applied to virtually any business – and especially to business-to-business sales where the relationship is equally critical.

Imagine what this kind of thinking and approach could do for your marketing and customer retention? Are you a restaurant owner that would like to generate repeat business using personalization. Give me a call 740.548.1645 x102 or fill out our contact form and we can talk about how this approach or others might work for you.

Becoming a Thought Leader – Part 2

2009-12-01T08:30:00.005-05:00

In part one I talked about what a thought leader is and what the value of that can be to your organization. Now let’s talk about how to do it.

How do you become a thought leader? This is where the social media tools come into play, along with some good old-fashioned marketing and working the press.

Using what you’ve learned in Understanding ALL of Your Audiences, map out what each audience cares about.
Find the thought leader inside your organization for each of these audiences – you may only be the thought leader for one of them, but I bet you’ll have each of the other audiences covered by your own internal experts.
Start blogging and tweeting. Accept speaking engagements and do webinars. Write for magazines and other online publications. Use every tool available to you to spread your message.
Be unique. Let people see the real you. Don’t go for a vanilla, standardized business voice. That’s boring. Your readers want to know the real you – and they respond very well to strong opinions and new ideas backed up with experience and evidence.
Stay focused on what your audience wants and needs. You’ll have to provide lots of links to your other thought leaders in your area of expertise and what they have to say, too.
Talk about your successes and what you’ve done for your customers. Tell stories about what you were able to do for them.
Read other peoples blogs and publications frequently AND take the time to comment on their blogs. Starting conversations that will link you and other experts is a key part of becoming a recognized thought leader.
Spread the word. Invite your current customers to follow you. Ask for their input. Put it in every other piece of marketing you have. Then start contacting your industry press and followers. Let them know that you’ll be sharing your expertise and opinions. Get them to link to you.
Keep it up. It is a significant commitment of your time and mental energy. It will probably take several months to take off, but when it does, you’ll find that it’s one of the most valuable tools you have.

Creating great content is the key. Don’t be afraid to ask for help with this. You might have the expertise and the thoughts, but don’t have the time. That’s OK. But don’t let that stop you from taking this critical step towards successful sales and marketing in the coming year.

Sounds like work, doesn’t it? Don’t worry. We can help. Here at Minds On we’re not only thinking about these issues, we’re helping our customers implement great marketing programs using ALL of the tools available to them.

Do you have any thoughts on this? I’d love to hear about what you’re doing to become a thought leader. Or if you haven’t started that process yet, let’s talk about what it might mean for your business. Please leave a comment here on this blog or feel free to contact me.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T08:15:00.008-05:00

On this Thanksgiving Day, I’d like to thank our customers, the staff of Minds On, and the local community here in Central Ohio for making this a wonderful year. And a special thanks to those of you who are now following us on this blog and our Twitter and Facebook pages. I really enjoy sharing in the conversations that are getting started.

This is a day specifically set aside for the contemplation of the previous year and the many things we have to be grateful for. I have a long list. I hope you do as well.

All of us at Minds On wish you a happy Thanksgiving!

Becoming a Thought Leader – Part 1

2009-11-24T10:52:00.007-05:00

In my post, 5 Ways to Really Connect with Your B2B Audience, I detailed 5 key steps you can take in driving effective marketing with today’s emerging tools. I’ve covered Understanding ALL of Your Audiences. Let’s move on now to one of the most difficult and valuable points.

Thought leaders are individuals that don’t just know a lot about a particular topic; they’re the ones SHARING their ideas. The best ones are doing so in a continual stream of detailed blog posts and position papers, but also with Tweets in a short, nearly continuous flow of ideas and observations. That focused and persistent contact is very close to what before was an unobtainable marketing idea. But now you really can stay in front of your customers and prospects all of the time – especially if you have something valuable to say to them.

Let me give you an example of someone from the marketing world, Seth Godin. Seth is a popular author and speaker, but using the social media tools, I can hear from Seth every day, see what he’s thinking, let him spark new ideas for me. And I can communicate with him by exchanging comments. His blog, is simple, direct, and very focused. Just a few minutes out of his day and he touches thousands of interested readers.

Guy Kawasaki is another – he’s a terrific speaker – make sure and see him if you have a chance. And his blog and experiments in social media are very interesting.

The fact of the matter is this: not just anyone can become a thought leader. First, you need experience and the insight to recognize what you’ve learned in a particular subject area. And leadership means sharing what you’ve learned and are currently thinking in that subject. It’s a significant commitment. To truly be a thought leader you’ll need to share frequently; and frankly, most business people aren’t able to make the time and mental commitment to do that. But if you do decide to step up and become a thought leader, the potential returns – the payoff – can be significant for you and your organization.

Here’s one big benefit: increased search engine ranking. If you publish just blog posts on your web site every week, that’s 52 new articles about your business, your industry, and the issues your customers face. That will gradually build up the “Long Tail” and increase your traffic.

In my next post – Part 2 – I’ll post 9 steps you can take to become a thought leader.

Give me your feedback
Do you have any thoughts on this? I’d love to hear about what you’re doing to become a thought leader. Or if you haven’t started that process yet, let’s talk about what it might mean for your business. Please leave a comment here on this blog or feel free to contact me.

Understanding ALL of Your Audiences

2009-11-19T09:25:00.031-05:00

In my post, 5 Ways to Really Connect with Your B2B Audience, I detailed 5 key steps you can take in driving effective marketing with today’s emerging tools.

Today, let’s talk about identifying and understanding all of the different audiences you deal with.

Here’s the first thing you’ve got to understand: you don’t have just one audience. In trying to reach the decision maker inside a business, you’ll often discover it isn’t just one person. There are several people, or groups of people, that will have a say in that buying decision. In a consumer sales transaction, marketers are taking advantage of the new social media tools to grow and expand the power of peer influencers. Consumers won’t buy because of an advertisement they saw, but they very well might, based on what their friends and people they admire recommend. You can use those same tools to develop peer influencers for your B2B sales.

But in a B2B transaction, it can become a much more complex and time-consuming process. You’ll need to leverage a combination of media – based on marketing fundamentals – consistency, repetition, and multiple touches – but with additional new tools. And these social media tools are here to stay, so don’t be a late adopter and miss their benefits while your competitors establish themselves as the authorities and masters of these new approaches, informing and influencing YOUR potential customers.

To get started, you need to pinpoint exactly who each potential decision maker is inside your prospect’s organization. The idea is to break the big catchall “audience” into smaller groups and then target your strategy to each group separately. You’ll likely find that these different groups and individuals respond to marketing very differently – reacting to different tone, imagery, and offers uniquely. Your segmentation of these audiences needs to include a very clear picture of who you’re talking to.

The Miller Heiman approach as outlined in The New Strategic Selling defines four basic buyers inside any organization: Economic (also known as executive or “C Level”), User, Technical, and Coach. They care about VERY different things. You have to be able to speak to each of these and address what they care about.

Think about it this way, the user, the person or department that will be using your product or service, has their own specific needs. They probably don’t care what it costs; they care about how it will help them do their job and meet their goals. But the Economic buyer cares very much about cost. They’re focused on VALUE and ROI, not features. They want to know one thing: how does it affect my bottom line. The Technical buyer will have their concerns, including system integration issues, ease of implementation, and the non-acquisition costs. And you’ll typically have outside parties, consultants and trusted experts that may talk with each of these players. They’ll be some of the most important influencers – they’re coaching the team members and helping them achieve their corporate goals. If you can find out who your audiences trust and listen to and talk with these trusted influencers, you’re a lot closer to winning the business.

It’s not easy, but you’ll need to speak directly to each audience and make it possible for them to come into easy agreement that YOU provide the best solution. Each will come to the table to decide with their own concerns. Do they have everything they need to reach that decision? Do they need more than a website? Is there still a role for technical specs, white papers, product brochures, and other conventional materials?

After you have identified and segmented your audience, you need to determine how best to reach each group. Ask yourself the following questions:

What does my audience want?
What do they care about?
What do they dislike?
Do they respond best to email, direct mail, magazine articles, phone calls or in-person meetings?
What triggers them to buy?
What’s your call to action?
What imagery, tone, and message works?
And does it work differently in international markets. That’s a whole topic for the future

John Jantsch, in Duct Tape Marketing suggests, “Let history guide you” in discovering who your ideal audiences might be. With a simple spreadsheet you can quickly identify all of the key information – you don’t need a fancy CRM or extensive report writing to figure out what they bought from you, why, and how they made their decisions. I’d further recommend adding information for sales you LOST, and why. And if you can identify all of the parties who participated in the decision to buy from YOU, you’ll quickly put together a picture of who they might be in future prospect opportunities, and more importantly, what they want and need, and what they’re looking for.

Start a spreadsheet! Down the side list your best customers, the ones you have the best fit with. Then across the top list when they last bought from you, what they bought, and the job titles involved in the decision to work with you. You can add columns at any time, like for what role did they play in the decision, what messages worked with them, and how they responded to separate media types. I think you’ll quickly see patterns – patterns you can use to help drive your messages forward.

Yes, the B2B buying cycle can take a lot of effort and time, but if you’re clear in your understanding of your segmented audiences and stick with it, you’ll find the success and sales you need. You’ll have to be consistent and patient, but I’ve seen it pay off again and again.

In my next post – I’ll post Becoming a Thought Leader.

Give me your feedback
Do you have any thoughts on this? I’d love to hear about what you’re doing to understand all of your audiences. Or if you haven’t started that process yet, let’s talk about what it might mean for your business. Please leave a comment here on this blog or feel free to contact me.

5 Ways to Really Connect with Your B2B Audience

2009-11-17T21:28:00.006-05:00

Blogging and social media are the hot topic in marketing today and for good reasons. These new tools offer some terrific ways to both connect with and have conversations with customers and future prospects. It’s relatively easy to see how this can work for consumer sales, but a bit more difficult in business-to-business.

I’d like to share with you 5 ways that you can really connect with your B2B audiences using these new tools, as well as some conventional approaches. I’ll list them out here, and then over the next few days I’ll post more with expanded details, tips, and tools you can use to start with - benefiting from these approaches today.

Here’s my 5 Ways to Really Connect with Your B2B Audience:

Identify ALL of your audiences and understand what they want and need. In business you rarely have a single decision maker like you can in consumer purchases. You’ll have to find a way to communicate with all of them (and some of them have conflicting interests).
Become a “thought leader.” Show your audience that you understand their industry, what they need, and why they should be listening to you.
Personalize – use technology to give your customers and prospects EXACTLY what they want and need. And let them tell you how they want to get it from you.
Use cross-media approaches to get past the gatekeepers and distractions. You have more than one tool in your belt. Use them all.
Survey your existing customers – they’ll help you understand how to win new customers.

There’s no “Marketing 101” anymore. Things are changing too fast to be contained in a textbook. But we’re working with customers that are getting terrific results using these approaches.

Come back later this week and I’ll expand on the first point – Understanding ALL of Your audiences.

Give me your feedback
Do you have any thoughts on this? I’d love to hear about what you’re doing to really connect with your B2B audience. Or if you haven’t started that process yet, let’s talk about what it might mean for your business. Please leave a comment here on this blog or feel free to contact me.