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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.

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”.

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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.

You need more than just hosting.

Hosting from SwiftWebDesigner / SwiftCMS is more than simply space online – it includes backups, security, upgrades, maintenance, uptime monitoring, 24/7 response, and more.

Website maintenance from SwiftWebDesigner.com / SwiftCMS includes the following:

• Hosting, of course, in a tier-one rock-solid data center. Clients in the same data center include major companies like Starbucks, Nike, NBC, ABC, Sony, Volkswagon, Warner Brothers, and more.
• Backups. We back up the entire server, so in the extremely unlikely event of natural disaster, we’ve got you covered. In addition SwiftCMS has a “safety net” “backtrack” feature that allows you to revert to a previous version of a page for many (not all, but most) functions.
• Security. This alone is worth far more than the investment – and we guarantee you’ll take it for granted. You won’t even think about it – but we do. If you’ve ever had your site hacked (more common than you’d expect, usually just for “Malware installation” i.e. simple commercial intent) you’d spend thousands of dollars to have a security professional extract offending code.
• Security Insurance. In the extremely unlikely event someone ever did get into your site, we’d do whats needed to eradicate offending code and evict any hackers that take up residence and “paint themselves a back door”.
• Uptime Monitoring. Will you know if your site goes down? We do, and take action without you even asking to make sure it’s back up as soon as possible. Currently our uptime is over 99.9%, with most downtime as scheduled service in the middle of the night USA time with a maintenance message posted.
• Upgrades. Normally, you’d pay a system admin to keep your system abreast of the latest changes to technology, threats (business or malware), and could easily spend hundreds a month optimizing website load time (which affects SEO, search engine position). With Swift, it’s all handled for you so you can focus on your business. This also included over 100 plugins for wordpress which we constantly research, upgrade and stay on top of.
• SwiftCMS, the world’s most powerful customization of WordPress. We’ve taken the world’s most popular (and powerful) blogging platform, and extended far beyond the typical theme with high end custom features like ajax-y searchable knowledgebase, custom proprietary SEO features on top of the mass-market plugins, image galleries, industry-specific features like restaurant menus, and much more.

We’ll cancel your subscription upon your request, but you need to login to paypal to ensure paypal doesn’t send us future payments! It’s easy.

1. Cancel Paypal so billing stops.
2. Notify us by emailing help [at] SwiftWebDesigner [dot] com or call us.

To cancel on the paypal side, please…

1. Login to https://Paypal.com – using your paypal login and password. We don’t have this (and never should!) for your financial security. Click “Lost Password” if you need to have your password emailed to you.
2. Navigate to My Account >> History subtab (here – https://history.paypal.com/US/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_history )
3. Navigate to “More Filters >> Subscriptions & Agreements >> Subscriptions”
4. Find the subscription to Gendesic Inc. and click Details
5. Click “Cancel Subscription”

This will ensure no further billing takes place. If you are simply changing products (upgrading or downgrading), you can then proceed back to the CRM and just subscribe to any product like a new client and it will instantly be enabled. You won’t need to change your settings or create a new account, provided you use the “Admin >> My Products” screen to order.

If you’re leaving us, taking just 2 minutes to know about how we can increase your business can help you make more money. In some cases, we can solve an “upstream” problem – for example, our online videos are great, but only if you have some web traffic. If nobody is watching them, it isn’t that they don’t work – it’s that you need an audience first. Our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services and software can help, landing pages, direct mail from within SwiftCRM…. we pride ourselves on solving real-world business problems. If you have a good product at a competitive price, then we can help you produce more leads, then convert a higher % of those leads. Contact us for details – it may be you just had the wrong product for your needs at this time.

First, an old fact: 75% “of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its web site”. [Source: Study by B.J. Fogg at Stanford http://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html ]

This is interesting, but dated; my hypothesis is that these days, it’s even higher but also a more complex set of factors that determine trustworthiness. Many of us, by now, have seen thousands of websites and webpages, a barrage of ads, increasingly complex web-based systems like facebook, digg.com and so what instantly creates a feeling of legitimacy is a blend of proven design factors based on our society (i.e. dark or middle blue as a color of trust, for example, as compared to yellow (color for “value” or “cheap” or “bargain”)[note this is sociological; various cultures interpret colors differently]), and an ever-evolving set of more complex ideas like balance, lifestyle imagery (i.e. smiling family pictures, for example), trust logos, social media connection and perceived endorsements, and even factors like page load time. Add mobile media formatting issues, cross-browser, cross-OS issues and you see why having a best of class website is more complex than ever.

Here are the factors listed, however, this data is dated and surely limited in study; to be truly comprehensive one would do extensive multivariate studies over a sufficient sample size – one strong benefit to marketing online is that success is easy to measure and thus improve upon.

1. Design Look (46.1%)
2. Information Design/Structure (28.5%)
3. Information Focus (25.1%)
4. Company Motive (15.5%)
5. Information Usefulness (14.8%)
6. Information Accuracy (14.3%)
7. Name Recognition and Reputation (14.1%)
8. Advertising (13.8%)
9. Information Bias (11.6%)
10. Writing Tone (9.0%)

And that said, there’s more at stake regarding first impressions.

Studies have shown these evaluations are made in as little as 1/20th of a second [Source: Dr. Gitte Lindgaard, Nature Magazine] and trending faster with younger generations.

Last, how one even gets to your site plays a part in the overall conversion – check out http://certifiedknowledge.org/blog/traffic-does-not-convert-the-same-seo-vs-ppc-vs-press-releases-vs-social-bookmarking/

Conclusion: If you’re a business owner, the web is getting more complex, with more at stake, and you need a great team in your corner. Effectively and profitably marketing on the internet is already far beyond a simple in-house project and requires a diverse set of skills and technologies working as a synchronized whole to drive results.

Who Is The Best Website Designer?

It does not matter that in which part of the world you are living or from where you are going to hire a developer for yourself. The only thing matters is that you need to hire a designer who is capable of understanding your needs and requirements, which will let him design such particular website for your business, which will be its true representative. If you will locate such person, then you will come to know that he is the one, who knows his job very well. He will do everything including designing, coding and arrangement of content. If you talk further about the qualities and traits of the best web designer, then the following points comes in front of you.

• He works hard to incorporate innovative ideas, in order to make your website impressive so that it pleases the users.
• In this way, the ranking of your site is also raise, which is one of the ultimate goals of any web developer and the owner of that particular website.
• Installation of analytics is yet another aim of the best web designer.
• Once he is done with it, then he works on the design and color scheme of header or logo.
• If he is efficient enough in the designing, then he will successfully design an eye catching logo.
• According to the web builders, logo or header plays vital role in attracting the attention of web users.
• If you will hire a reliable, trained, qualified and experienced builder, then he is going to assure that the home page and the rest of pages are fairly simple to manage in the coming time period.
• It helps in the process of adding, redirecting or removing the pages from your website.
• Descriptions for all the pages including home page are written uniquely by the best web designer.
• All the professional builders, who are known as the best website designers are efficient enough in terms of using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). In this way, they make sure that the excessive and useless codes are kept away, in order to prevent any problem in the functioning of your website.
• He will definitely try to mention the phone number, emailing address and other necessary details of your company in the most prominent place of your website’s homepage.

It is for sure that after reading the above-mentioned points, it will be easy for you to hire the best web designer.