Sales: Closers, not marketers

They’re not the same.

This is something I know rationally, but when I stumbled on an article, it was really a “duh” moment. I’d fallen into the same trap I advise our clients against: Wanting to grow sales, but grouping all 3 of sales, marketing, and biz dev together.

When you have a small business, you’re in the business of solving some catch-22′s – you need the marketing, sales, and biz dev in order to generate the income, and need the income to pay all those people – right?

Not entirely. Fortunately, marketing is the easiest to outsource… closing, not so much. You’re presumably an expert at whatever you do, but need to communicate your benefit to the audience, and that’s a science in itself.

Marketers: Scientists + Artists, not closers

As you’ll see all over this website, Big Relevant Traffic + Irresistible Profitable Offer = Success. That’s a bit simplistic, but if you have a complex sale, it’s a heck of a lot easier to delegate marketing (a.k.a. communicating benefit + offer) than it is to delegate closing, at least until you can have a full time trained sales guy/gal/team – and before you hire them, you need to have leads.

Without the leads, they’ll fall flat. Great closers are rarely great marketers, it’s just not the same skillset, interest, disposition… marketing is more like science and engineering, and a lot of computer work finding audiences to communicate to. Sales is of course, a “people people” skillset. “Hugs and handshakes” type of guys/gals are rarely content to sit behind a computer analyzing PPC ROI (pay-per-click advertising return on investment) or bounce rates by demographic.

Biz Dev: Farmer / Recruiter Types

So don’t do it. Even if you can only afford 1 person for sales, marketing, and biz dev, it’s better to split that role up and work something out. Once the leads come in, you can close yourself, then hire a sales guy/gal and focus on biz dev (generating lead-sources and joint ventures that produce more business, which is really more like a recruiting role), then eventually hire that out and focus on PR (public relations and publicity)… and after that, sell your company for millions and retire, or rinse and repeat with another company. Or keep it as a cash cow and play golf.

But it all starts with the leads. We can, of course, help.

Before you start, realize you’re probably great at one of these roles but not all. If you are, you’re a unicorn, or else delusional – but this is a good thing, because as you hire people, find those who are better at that one task, and thus increase your company income. Personally, I’ll take more cash over personal pride any day when it comes to hiring vs. doing it myself. For owners of existing companies, take a look at your sales team (which might be only you, or include you) – how much more effective would your sales team be with more incoming leads? Can time-per-sale be reduced and still keep the closing ratios by using more video or better qualifying leads? Segmenting and delegation will increase quality of work due to more focused, more accountable workers. Even if you wear multiple hats getting clear about the exact separated role will help you do a better job, help you grow faster, and help you reach your goals.

If this strikes a chord with you, and you want more leads – call us. We can help.

Gold Nugget: Someone calls and says “how much do you charge?”. Joe replies “What’s more important to you, value or price?”. Of course most people will him and haw a bit and then it’ll open a conversation – during which you educate them on HOW to shop and why you deliver value.

Joe Polish is a great marketer who focuses entirely on mid-range and up businesses i.e. CEO’s and business owners who generally make a million or more.

What’s great about working with clients like that is they (you?) have the resources to put plans into action. Many times, a good marketing plan doesn’t require really that much money or time, but it virtually always requires _some_ money and time. Startups have it tough – you can’t afford to be wrong, so you need to invest more time and take lower risk, tried-and-true marketing methods… but these always have lower results.

Innovation carries risk (and potential reward).

In the above video, skip ahead to about 17:00 in if you’re in a hurry. It’s marketing gold.

Mike Koenigs interviews Joe Polish, who reveals some gems like educate your clients HOW to shop and you’ll command wider margins.

For the extra-credit folks, here’s the video he references with Sir Richard Branson

First, the problem can be somewhat macroscopic or microscopic, meaning, certain times of the year might be much more busy than others, other times you have certain days of the week which are particularly busy.

We present three solutions for you:

1. Pipeline monitoring tied to your marketing budget. This means when you can see a slow time coming, you increase your marketing time/money expenditure. The paradox here to watch out for is not budgeting to get yourself busy, and then being caught with no available budget, and not enough business to even re-invest. That said, as you gain clarity into your business financials, and also see a pattern of marketing-spend-to-new-incoming business, you’ll be more clear about what cash reserves you need to maintain. Assuming you have even a few weeks of burn available (i.e. cash required for operations) then variable-method-advertising such as Google PPC can be indispensable at helping you get busy again.
2. Self-Scheduling tools. To avoid overly busy vs. overly slow, we are working on a new color-coded calendar system that prompts clients visually to schedule on slower days when possible. By presenting clients with feedback data tied to your calendar / schedule, they’ll help you out (and get better service themselves) by choosing less busy days.
3. Outgoing “Push Marketing” (active marketing vs. passive wait-for-clients-to-come-to-you marketing) tied to your pipeline and expected work load.

Frankly, most small businesses are always pushing for growth, as are many commissioned sales professionals. This creates a roller coaster income effect, caused by getting very busy on fulfillment and thus spending less time on marketing, which then causes a dip in new incoming business or quotes issued, followed by a burst of marketing and sales activity which creates new incoming leads and business – but since it takes some time for leads to turn into cash (depending on your industry this varies. Auto mechanics might only be a few days, but Real Estate Agents typically take months from lead to cash) this leads to income that’s all over the map.

Required to Implement This Idea:

• Knowledge of your average lead-to-paycheck incubation time / sales schedule
• A CRM of some type so you are handling your leads in a repeatable, predictable way
• A graph of your incoming leads, so you can clearly see patterns. Ideally, this would even have some projected closing i.e. if you know referrals close with 80% reliability but cold-generated internet leads close at 33%, then you’d have a graph of projected income weighted by method.
• Marketing systems that allow scaling. Generally, you’ll want to use your most profitable lead-gen methods all the time, so really this means you’ll resort to variable-cost, less profitable lead-gen during lean times in order to keep the money flowing. That said, when you’re potentially running out of gas you don’t want to try something too new, so the time to experiment is when you have some cash on hand, and when in a higher risk situation, use tried-and-true marketing methods. For most offline-sale businesses (i.e. auto mechanic, plastic surgeon, real estate) I’d recommend using PPC and postcards all the time but pause certain campaigns when you’re busy and rely only on referrals, while in slow times you can then increase the spend short term in proportion to average sale time.

2012 Jan Update: Note this has the client’s photo and local-style homes woven in (this example client is in Hawaii). This edit also was voiced by the client (add $300, we need to adjust the timing throughout the entire video)

Older Video

We have the following assets and services available to help you generate reverse mortgage leads and borrowers:

• Pre-Made Licensable Reverse Mortgage Marketing Video. This powerful yet soft-sell video gently educates while pre-handling some of the most common objections. Add it to any website and/or landing page, optimize it for youtube and other video locations, drop into your facebook page, and more. Each video is rights-buyout, one time, branded with your name, phone, and URL. Also available are short leads creation videos that offer a free kit in order to produce leads. One-time investment of just $399 includes upload to your youtube channel, SEO-tagging, and custom render branded to you with a simple one-time-license buyout. Once we’re done, you’ll have a short snippet of code you use anywhere, multiple websites, autoresponders, add to your email signature, you name it. You can even burn it on DVD. Needed from you for the video:
  • • Phone you want on the video
    • URL / Website
    • Company name you want to appear
    • Optional but recommended / free: YouTube login and password.
    • Optional: If you want a different picture on the cover of the DVD 3D graphic above, let us know (please choose one off iStockPhoto.com unless you have legal rights)
    • 
• Reverse Mortgage Website Design – Act now to get discounted pricing, since we don’t yet have any examples to show, despite having built over 100 websites (including forward mortgages)[editor's note: CEO Roger was a mortgage lender from 2001-2006 and somewhat trained in reverse mortgages]. We can help you dominate your local market, add SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click advertising on Google and Facebook). We can of course set up forms and applications, landing pages, etc.
• Reverse Mortgage Facebook Fan Page Creation. Facebook is especially powerful for reverse mortgage marketing because it allows exact targeting by age – show your ads to only people 62+ in zip codes or states you choose.
• PPC Setup. Swift Marketing has Google-certified expert staff to help you generate your own leads using Google Adwords, which is the top and right-side of Google’s main page for various related search terms.
• Reverse Mortgage Marketing Banners & Display Media Creation. This is especially powerful when used with PPC and “remarketing”. We can help you add a tracking cookie to your website then surround your leads as they travel the web, seeing your ad, which can help bring them back and push them over the edge to start the process.

Free Reverse Mortgage Marketing Tips:

1. Use Facebook for reverse mortgage marketing because it allows targeting by age. Never before has it been quite so immediate and easy to profile by both age and location.
2. This is old, but still tried and true – based on title / abstract data pull a list and use direct mail based on time-of-ownership and low LTV or no loan / free & clear title to send direct mail. In the end this may be more expensive than facebook, but is more reliable and reaches a different audience.
3. Internet usage by seniors who have already retired is statistically higher than those immediately preceding retirement – so bet on the race, not a single horse… meaning to maximize revenue and leads production, you can choose more than one marketing avenue and done right, each amplifies the other by raising awareness and brand recognition.

Imagine when someone pulls their car up to your repair shop, or comes into your office or clinic for a consultation, instead of handing them a clipboard and pen, you instead hand them an iPad to fill out.

What’s the benefit? Glad you asked!

• Reduce the data entry by you. Ok, so it only takes a moment to type in their info, but add up that few minutes over time and you see some real time savings. I’m sure you, your staff, your receptionist has better things to do. Depending on your software, this might be something we can import automatically; worst case your receptionist just has to copy and paste an email until it’s connected.
• Wow the client with immediate marketing. The iPad can play a little video welcoming them to the clinic, help them learn more, qualify them with additional forms or use the device to gather more info.
• Pre-Educate the client before meeting. Show them upsell, cross-sell opportunities, prepare them for your appointment, educate them about your procedures or work – you have a device that plays video in their hands, so it’s a chance to leverage your time and wow the client simultaneously.
• Kick off marketing automatically. You can have a thank-you handwritten note already in process the moment they fill out the form. Add them to your newsletter, prompt them to refer you on facebook, refer their friends, and increase your client-self-duplication ratios.
• Save the environment. Sure, a few papers here and there isn’t a big deal – but add in the ink, transportation, energy making the paper then printing on it, the chemicals for the pen… technically, the iPad has a cost too: electricity, but the net impact to the environment is there, and in aggregate and over time, a substantial reduction of waste.

To get started, just send us the document you want converted (fax, or take a picture with your phone, or better yet, email us the original source document as a word file, etc.) and we’ll set it up.

Note we password protect this by default, so information on the form is not easily web-accessible to just anyone, even though it technically resides on the internet on your website.

We’ll test any product to tell you if it’s “Magic Beans”.

There is never a shortage of people selling snake oil – products that don’t work nearly as well as advertised. Sometimes, they even purposely make them complicated, so they can feed you hope, but make it difficult to implement, because they know it doesn’t work well, or at the very least, are not sure it does work at all.

So, whenever you get some new “Amazingly Powerful Google Dominator-thingy” that promises “all your wildest dreams will come true if you just buy our product”, then sent it our way. We’ll investigate, and send you a score, from 1 to 10, on how likely it is that it works.

Fortunately, in the fluid information pool we call the internet, it’s usually really easy to find this out. If we truly think it IS great, we’ll probably buy it. If we know anyone else testing it, we’ll recommend you hold for just a bit til feedback is available.

The first settlers on the prairie often get arrows in their back.

Google “Product Launch Formula”, and you’ll see a big trend: people pushing for a big launch, all at once. Why?

They know the products never live up to the hype. Combined with a culture designed to make a feeding frenzy, i.e. create demand and tell you you can’t have it, til date X, then hope to sell as many as possible in the first few hours before word of mouth or actual reviews can kill it.

Are all “Product Launch Formula” products bad? Of course not – but beware, many of the products being sold to you, pushed at you, won’t live up to the reputation. It’s human nature to want magic beans, so it’s an easy sale. We want you to focus on the fundamental strategies proven to work, and then when new “tactical weapons” come out that look interesting to you, send ‘em over our way. 99% of the time, we’ll already know about it, may know someone using it, know the guys (or ladies) producing it and help you make sense of it all.

Just contact us through the support system - http://SwiftMarketing.com/support – as usual and ask for a “magic beans test”.

I say “apparently”, because at time of writing, I don’t know how you found Swift Marketing. It’s unlikely but possible you arrived on this exact post via other SEO efforts, random stumbling, recent posts. That said, one thing matters:

How can Swift Marketing
increase your sales revenue?

First, everyone has a pretty good idea of the “sales funnel” – every potential client starts at the top with “awareness”, and is then moves down through the funnel, through “interest” to “qualification” to “proposal” to “agreement” then finally “fulfillment” and then “referral source”.

Notice I didn’t stop with fulfillment. Our job (your job) isn’t complete til the client is happy with the value delivered, and becomes a referral source. Furtheremore, worthy of study is what happened to the people that fell out of the funnel?

Some are not interested. If you sell a higher-priced, complex-sale product, it’s not going to be an impulse purchase. You can’t sell plastic surgery or real estate on impulse, and even if you did, the transaction would probably fail if the client wasn’t committed prior to payment anyway.

The #1 way to increase sales with no increase in marketing spend
is to solidify your automatic followup -
your conversion ratio of leads-to-sales.

Of course, we think the best way to automate is either using a simple email autoresponder (downside: it’s not very smart, upside, simple to install and set up – recommended is Aweber.com) or better yet, a hosted CRM like SwiftCRM. The upside to the CRM is you can trigger automatic behavior (emails, postal mail, calls, texts, etc.) based on multiple triggers (form-captured-through, date or days after capture, calendar, status of sale, referred-by tracking and more), and add conditions (i.e. don’t market if they’ve already bought!). Taking the time (or just hiring our team) to set this up is a one-time investment that will create an automated marketing factory that runs like clockwork on every single lead that comes through the system.

Swift Marketing can help you generate more leads and incoming potential clients. While the sales roles in companies vary, typically the hand-off of responsibility is for the marketing department (Swift Marketing!) to create a flow of people interested in your product or service. It’s then up to your internal team to educate and qualify and close, though of of course we, swift marketing, can create the incubation marketing and conversion optimization to help the “cream rise to the top” – so you spend more time with people ready to buy, and less time on everything else.

If your primary objective is to create leads (i.e. we’re not experts at retail – but we are at leads generation), then Swift Marketing can help you grow. How? Tell us about your business, and we’ll be happy to show you!

This video references…

• Google Analytics – http://Google.com/analytics
• Google Apps - http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

Frequently Asked Questions regarding Email setup:

• Can I use this with Microsoft Outlook? Yes, and you can synchronize it – see http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/outlook_sync.html
• Do I have to use Google Apps? Can’t I just use your server? The good news is that Google Apps is absolutely superior, so if you’re hesitant to use it, that is simply because you don’t know better – sorry, but you pay us to be your tech experts, and we are tech experts, and they do a great job. It’s always backed up, always synchronized, you can use it from any platform (phone, web, home, office, cruise ship, beach, etc.), it’s highly spam-resistant, gets your messages through without the frequent errors of conventional SMTP settings, and allows us to keep costs low (as email errors are the #1 support issue, and 92% of those are user error!). So, in short, we strongly recommend google apps, use it ourselves, and knowing the competitive technical landscape, believe it to be the best tool out there for the job. Furthermore, there’s not reason not to use it.

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NOTE: To add text to a gallery, you have two choices:

1. Simple and easy: Click “Gallery” >> Galleries >> Edit (or create new); enter text in the description. This is best if you just want a single paragraph without any real formatting; it’s fast, easy, and SEO-friendly. Downside: You cannot really use any real formatting, so if you want a lot of description, use method #2.
2. More control: Create the gallery as normal, then create a “Post” (Not a “Page” – must be a “Post”), and right below the main text-area, you see “Choose Gallery on which the above text will be displayed”. This will cause the gallery to be inserted and displayed along with this post; add this post to your navigation then as usual.

This means IF you are logged in, you will see a editor-only navigation bar at the top.

Only logged-in users can see this; most of your website visitors will not.

WordPress totally rocks the free world, and when combined with the SwiftCMS and SwiftCRM code, it’s an absolutely unbeatable combination for modern website management.

As always, we can help you reach your goals online, and thank you for your business! We are hard at work at a massive revision to our ticketing system, so that you’ll have more control and transparency than ever into work schedules and outsourcing to our team of capable experts.

If you are seeking “How to get rid of the topbar in wordpress 3.1″, don’t worry – your visitors cannot see it.