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Category: Communications

What Salespeople Want Prospects and Clients To Know

(An open letter from Salespeople the world over to clients and prospects)

Dear Prospect,

As an ethical, professional, courteous sales person, there are some things I repeatedly encounter when interacting with clients and prospects that cause me some concern, and I think with a little education we can clear them up and interact on a more effective and profitable basis.

1) I’m not trying to trick you, steal from you, or talk you into something that you don’t want or need. I’m a professional, and as such, know that it’s much more productive and profitable for me to keep long-term clients than it is to turn and burn a host of one-time victims. I thrive on repeat business, and the last thing I want to do is pull a fast one on you or take advantage of you.

2) The more you tell me, the better I can help you achieve your goals. You wouldn’t lie to or withhold information from your attorney, and you shouldn’t be lying to or holding out on your accountant, so why do you feel you need to be guarded in your conversations with me? Are you afraid if I learn something I’ll use it to talk you into buying more? I’d rather solve your complete problem right the first time, so you’ll refer me to your friends.

3) I talk to people all day long for a living, often about problems similar to yours. I might have picked up a thing or two from those conversations, and that makes my knowledge more complete and recent than yours is likely to be. That knowledge deserves some respect.

4) Just because you think you can’t afford what I have to offer at the moment, doesn’t mean it’s a waste of my time to get to know you and your challenges. Take the meeting anyway, you might be surprised at what you learn, and at how I can help you no matter what your budget. Maybe not right this second, but at some point along the way.

5) The more you trust me, and the better and reciprocal our relationship becomes, the more value you derive from it. Salespeople are out on the streets all day learning and solving problems in creative ways. I know things that might be of help, at no cost to you, if you just give me a try. The risk is really minimal, and the return can be tremendous.

6) I have an ethical obligation to keep your private and corporate information to myself. I also have an ulterior motive to do so. I won’t last long if I go around blabbing client info to other clients, will I? I’m a professional, in it for the long haul, and keeping quiet serves any number of purposes.

7) You won’t hurt my feelings by calling and telling me you bought from someone else. As a professional with some experience, I’ve developed a pretty thick skin, so don’t worry about my reaction, I can assure you it will be professional and appropriate. Please have the courtesy to return follow-up calls, don’t just let them go to voicemail and ignore them, hoping I’ll get the message – it’s rude and counterproductive.

8) We can all use a hand once in a while. If I’ve done a great job, tell me so, and then tell two colleagues who can also buy from us as well. That’s the real currency salespeople live off of, referrals. It takes thirty seconds, is painless and free, and would really make my world better.

9) The reverse is also true: if I screw up, please tell me quickly so we can fix the problem, get a solution worked out, patch things up and move on. Don’t let those issues fester and then just stop returning calls for no apparent reason – it’s not healthy.

10) I’m just as anxious to solve your problem as you are to get it solved. The sooner we stop dancing and start producing, the faster we’ll both get where we’re going. I’ll be happy to answer any questions for your superiors, cover your behind, make it right, do whatever is required to protect our relationship, so stop worrying about it and start fixing it sooner rather than later.

Hope you find this helpful in our interactions in the future. I think you’ll find if you keep these things in mind, you’ll get more of what you want, at lower cost, faster, and with greater enthusiasm all around. Be the hero of your own situation, and help me help you!

Sincerely,

Joe Salesperson

If you found this enlightening and valuable in your business pursuits, be sure to sign up to receive this blog in your inbox regularly. And don’t forget to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

June 7, 2014
Planning Tools You SHOULDN’T Use

Hopefully, if you’re a corporate marketer, brand manager, Marketing Director or Manager, you and your organization have a marketing plan that is reviewed every 4 months and updated, adjusted, reworked to maximize return on investment and protection and polish of the brand.

If you don’t, you’d better get one.

Most folks work toward having that plan include several different ways to measure their progress or success, often on a monthly or quarterly basis. Good for them. Not everything is directly measurable, but there are some indirect measurements you can use to gauge your effectiveness. Use them. Always.

For those of you forming a plan, here’s a few common things that marketers face when crafting a plan internally. Picture the planning meeting, and get a good bead on the personnel included in that meeting. These are things you shouldn’t succumb to from those in that meeting:

5) “We did it last year and it worked.” Marketers are supposed to be innovative, progressive, forward-thinking. Before you even get to the “and it worked” part, you should have a response ready that shoots this down. If you’re not moving forward you’re going backwards. Its a new year, use it.

4) “Our competitors did it last year, and it worked.” See above, plus how do you know if it worked? Unless you have espionage reports from inside the competing firm, you’re guessing. Plus, if you’ve stooped to the level of stealing from your competitor, why bother planning at all, just steal theirs.

3) “We don’t need new research, we know our customers.” Contrary to popular belief, your “gut” is not a primary research method, and won’t yield adequate or accurate data on your customers unless you have only one – you. Field intelligence is invaluable in helping to shape perceptions generated by research data, but if you use it as the basis of your planning, you’re missing a large part of your potential customer base. Why guess, when you can KNOW.

2) “Customer Service only deals with whiners, we don’t need to include their data in the plan.” CSRs and receptionists who answer the phone are a major source of information on your brand perception and characteristics. They are also key sources of information on the clarity, transparency and effectiveness of your sales promotion efforts. When the complaint call volume rises, it does so for a reason. Find out why, and fix it. Then take the list of those affected, and send them something nice, and ask them to tell their friends how nice you’ve been. Converting complainers to evangelists is a very effective way of expanding your reach and polishing your brand. Listen to the CSR traffic and respond quickly, include that metric in your plan.

1) “We don’t have results yet, but it looks like it’s working.” Some initiatives take longer than others to bear fruit. Unless you’re a start-up, you have at least some transactional data to work from, and can project results from that to gauge effectiveness of your previous efforts. If you really can’t get a bead on the impact of a campaign, don’t build your new initiatives based on that one – you could end up throwing good money after bad. Your plan needs to be broad spectrum enough and flexible enough to work around such issues without affecting the whole program.

Now that you’ve killed off all the bad ideas in the meeting, you can entertain the new, innovative and intriguing ones that you’ve forced everyone to come up with by taking away their crutches.

If you liked the thoughts presented here, find the best tools for marketing planning in my book, “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

June 5, 2014
Face-To-Face Works Best

If you’re a small business owner or manager, you’ve probably been focused on new customer acquisition for the last year or so, just trying to survive. You’ve probably tried and tested numerous methods of “getting the word out” in your local business community, using supposedly “tried and true” methods, like publication advertising, fliers in public places, trade shows, maybe e-mail campaigns, social media promotions, maybe some direct mail, coupon packs, maybe even radio or other types of mass media. If you’re like most we’ve worked with in this situation, the results from these efforts were mixed at best.

What most of these types of promotions lack is brand recognition in the local community, and lack of focus, both geographically or psychographically, being off message or appearing in the wrong place to the wrong audience.

Even in this day and age of technology and social networking, the most effective method we’ve found to initiate and foster working, professional relationships is fact-to-face networking. More information about you and your business, your integrity, your honestly, your competence and capability can be transmitted in a fifteen minute conversation at a business mixer than in a YouTube video, a Facebook profile, a LinkedIn resume, a brochure or direct mailer.

Professional business networking is a conversation with a point. I’m not talking about those business card pass out fests, where you’re only goal is to gab and grab as many cards as you can and get out. I’m talking about educational, informative, honest conversations in a low-pressure, conducive environment, where real professionals can find out about each others’ businesses, get a sense of their goals, approach and vision, where you can gauge their position in the professional landscape, maybe meet some of their colleagues, watch how the interact with others.

It’s an art form, and resembles dating in many ways. You’re looking for common ground, common experiences, common approaches or beliefs, that you can use to base an ongoing relationship upon. You’re looking for people to whom you’d trust your business, one you’ve worked hard to build, and you want to be careful with that particular property.

Of course, there are limitations – you can only be in so many places at once, and you can only meet so many people in a given hour. But it’s not quantity you’re focused on here, it’s quality. There are some numbers involved, but they are less daunting than you might believe. For example, if you go to four events a month, one a week on average, you can probably meet 15-20 people a month. Of those, maybe 50% are worth keeping in touch with or fostering, for various reasons (competitor, never any need for your business, not senior enough to be decision maker yet, etc.). That’s 120 new people a year, each of whom represents a business, a circle of friends, associates, colleagues, family, neighbors and other relatives, who probably total approximately 50. That’s 6000 connections a year, every year, who now have access to you, if you’ve made the right impression on each of the initial contacts – meaning you haven’t talked their ear off, wasted their time, have expressed a sincere interest in their business, asked meaningful questions, haven’t said anything offensive, etc.

If half of those connections actually investigate further, and elect to do business with you, that’s 3000 new customers a year. With an average order of $50, that’s $150,000 a year off single-transaction new business alone, let alone referrals, repeat business, upsell, and a host of other interactions. All for having a drink and a chat once a week. Not too shabby.

Face-to-face interactions allow you to be you, and represent your business in a way that no other media or method allows. Making the connections is only half the battle, following up and nurturing those relationships, keeping them fresh and active is another story altogether.

Go forth and network, and you don’t even need an Internet connection! Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

June 4, 2014
Who Do You Seek Advice From?

Before all you English majors go off on me, I know the title is making use of poor grammar -but “From Whom Do You Seek Advice?” doesn’t really “sing” when used as a headline. Nuff’ said.

The real question is, how do you select, solicit and filter advice on the topics in your life and work that matter? Most folks have an informal network of influencers and advisers, people they turn to when they have a question, want to validate a choice or point of view. Some have a small circle, some have a very large network of various family members with a range of levels of expertise. Sometimes its just that you want to hear another opinion, from someone who thinks like you do, who will dilute and sugar-coat their stance and feed your own back to you, just as a feel good.

But sometimes, picking the right expert really matters. Sometimes its a case of hiring a professional who you happen to know under other circumstances. Selecting a realtor, picking a doctor or dentist, finding a tax preparer or accountant, an attorney for non-criminal work. Most of those selections are based on referrals or references from our known network of advisers. Sometimes the professional themselves is part of the network! But how do you really make the choice? Is it emotional, is it pragmatic, is it price sensitive, is it strictly relationship based?

Studies have shown that reaching those influencers is the most powerful way to prompt word-of-mouth transference of brand and product information. But how do you find them and reach them? Most of the advisers who are non-family are close friends from various stages of our lives. College roommates, fraternity brothers or sorority sisters, high school buddies, team members from sports activities, vendors of various services we use routinely – familiar faces. To find these people and gather them as a list for someone else is virtually impossible – until now. Social media does exactly that and more. Those influencers and advisers are now called “friends”.

That’s the real power of social media – reaching the influencers of your target audience. If you wanted to build the killer marketing app, it would be one that selects all the Facebook pages from people that fall into your target demographic based on data presented on the pages, and selects the five most prolific friend commentators that appear next to a question mark. You’ve asked the audience for help with a question, and those top advisers answer it. Select them and market to them socially, and they will bleed that influence into the key purchaser. We can only dream . . . so far.

For now, we’ll have to settle for joining the online conversation in a corporate but personal way, and hope that those influencers see us, hear us, and most importantly, believe us, so that they pass along the attributes we offer to their list of “friends”.

Keep at it, the tech geniuses will eventually create the key that unlocks the real monetary power of social media, and when they do, look out . . .

Did you find this interesting? You can more like this delivered right to your inbox weekly – for FREE! Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

June 2, 2014
Be An Agent For Change

At it’s root, marketing is about change. Changing perceptions, changing appearance, changing buying behavior. But if marketers are to conquer the C-level chambers and earn a real seat at the management table, they have to be an agent for change in the business. Simply executing within the frame isn’t good enough any longer.

It’s up to us as marketers to lead the charge into the future, to examine and adjust business models, to question the status quo and come up with workable solutions, without reservations, obstacles, roadblocks, and excuses. Lots of platitudes surround this type of behavior, but the ones that i prefer are “Better to ask forgiveness than permission” and “If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward, there is no standing still”. Food for thought . . .

CMOs have it within their power to revolutionize their businesses, they just have to give themselves permission to do it. Use the powerful imagination you were blessed with and put it in gear to create the next step in the logical growth path of your business, or better yet, leapfrog the next step and go ahead by two! The competition will never catch up!

Change effected is usually change managed. Making changes for change’s sake is a short-lived phenomenon, one that shakes things up, but doesn’t move the needle for long. To affect long-lasting change, the path must be plotted before it can be blazed. Note the spelling, Plotted, not Plodded. You don’t have to take a year to plan the next two – change can be made quickly and still be lasting. Better to try five or six different things now than plan one thing perfectly.

Go forth bravely, boldly, and be a change agent – you’ll be surprised what just the change in mindset will bring . . .!

For more on becoming an agent of change, subscribe to my blog above, or follow me on Twitter @docpoulos – let me know what you think! and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

June 2, 2014
10 Things Marketers Can Do To Help Them Succeed In 2014

As the year 2014 hits the mid-point, I wanted to give readers some forward thinking, rather than reviewing the past year’s events – we all know what happened, and we can’t change it anyway. So, here’s a few basic things to keep in mind as you move forward through the new year:

10) A “Market” Never Bought Anything – people buy things and services and ideas. When you think about or talk about your “Target Market” keep in mind that a market is actually a group of people, with ideas, moods and feelings of their own. If you can conjure up a visual image of a representative of that group, it can help focus your ideas and your copy.

9) It’s The List, Stupid! All the creative design, top quality printing, conscientious mail services or hot offer in your direct marketing fails miserably in the wake of a bad list. Do your homework, check all the possible angles, find lists that make sense, that are fresh and accurate, and that have a recognizable reason to buy your product.

8) Sheep Get Slaughtered, eventually. If you’re trying a new technique, a new media, a new idea or trend that’s being touted as the next big thing, ask yourself “How does this help me reach my stated goals, and how will I measure its impact?” If you can’t answer those honestly, you really don’t have a good reason for doing whatever it is. Just because a competitor is doing it, or “everyone’s” doing it, doesn’t make it right for you.

7) Be True To Your Brand. Period. When you get ready to launch a new campaign, or start a new service, dust off your brand characteristics inventory (you have one of those, right?) and review those traits, and see how well your new idea matches up or illustrates those attributes. If you miss more than 25% of them, rethink the idea. You’ll do more damage putting out off-brand stuff than you can make up in incoming revenue or awareness.

6) Test, Test, Test – You can’t do enough research, you can’t know enough about your customers, but their buying behavior in a real situation tells the strongest tale. Test as many variables in your mail campaign as you can, and trust the response data. When it comes time to review your results, the data will back you up a lot better than your “gut”.

5) The Harder You Work, The Luckier You’ll Get – Ideas are like those tempera paints you used in grade school – the more you throw at the wall, the more color you get to stick. Keep churning out ideas and executing them as best you can with your time constraints and budget – if you throw out ten ideas and three of them bomb, that means the other seven were good enough and made up for the three duds. You win.

4) Strive for “Works Well With Others” comments – the more people you involve and get ideas from, the better those ideas will become. It spreads the workload, spreads the blame, and takes advantage of cooperative vibe that really generates the good stuff. Don’t try to be Superman and do it all yourself.

3) Lead By Example – Show buyers why you have great products or a superior service, don’t tell them. Don’t talk about features, illustrate benefits. Demonstrate, don’t describe – you’ll be surprised how much more powerful your approach becomes.

2) Good Enough In the Mail is Better than Perfect On the Drawing Board – You can massage copy all day long, try different shades of blue until you’re blue in the face, but it’s not making you any money if its not in the mail. That doesn’t mean hurry through it, it just means don’t worry it to death.

1) Trust The Data, Listen to Your Gut, Value Others’ Ideas – It all comes down to pushing more work out the door and having it be productive, effective and impactful. Don’t let ego make you an impediment to your own success. Keep fueling the idea machine with every resource you have, and you’ll succeed in spite of yourself!

Now, go forth and market effectively in the balance of 2014!

If you found the above list valuable, you can have this type of information delivered right to your inbox weekly, just subscribe to this blog above. And don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

May 30, 2014
Integration and Personalization Keys to Success

Every marketer is trained from the beginning of their career to attempt to get the most value from their marketing dollars – everyone knows that they’re scarce enough without wasting them! Usually that means running leaner, tightening expenses, negotiating fees, cutting costs, avoiding waste. These measures assume that there is nothing you aren’t doing to boost performance, increase awareness or response, extend reach or build frequency, expose the brand more widely or selectively. One of the most effective strategies we’ve seen pay off is media integration to drive support of the central message.

As it turns out, American audiences like a choice. Who knew . . .? But good direct marketers know that if you offer a prospect too many choices, they may make none at all. No joy there. But if you offer them a choice and they don’t know you’ve done it, everybody wins. That’s what media integration is all about, creating those choices in the background. And, as an added bonus, which choice the buyer makes tells you something about them, absolutely FREE!

Picture a barstool (don’t lie, we KNOW you’ve seen them). They have three or four legs and a seat, or platform. The level of effectiveness of that device degrades in direct proportion to the number of legs – start removing legs and the stool gets less stable to the point where it won’t stand alone, or even becomes dangerous. You can sit on a one-legged stool, but it’s not for the feint of heart! On the other hand, a five or six-legged stool can become unwieldy or unstable too – keeping all those legs the same length and flat is a challenge, or at best the extras are redundant and wasteful.

What do barstools have to do with marketing? An integrated campaign to build awareness or drive enrollment or response can have several types of media integrated, each adding to the stability, and the effectiveness of the campaign, each message supporting the other media and the offer platform, like the legs of the stool.

Say you were promoting a conference. You have a great list of prospective attendees, responsive, accepting of the brand, happy evangelists for your organization. You have good, extensive file info in each record, including phone number, mailing address, e-mail address, some transactional info and more. You’ve got a terrific speaker line-up, a highly relevant topic, a great location. Sounds like you’ve got a good shot at success, but here’s how to maximize the number of bodies in those seminar seats – tell the prospect about the conference in multiple ways using different media.

You could mail to them, and the mailing could include a PURL that leads to a personalized landing page that showed their participation with your organization in the past year (or what they missed, in the case of a newbie). You could also send them a personalized e-mail with a slightly different PURL link embedded in it, that drives them to another page that shows their best choice in hotels or dinner location. You could also launch a robo-call or volunteer phone bank call a few days before the conference, directing them to the registration site for a last minute discount on airfare from a consolidator/partner. The e-mail also has a phone number included for audio registration, the e-mail has a reply feature for questions, the phone call lists an e-mail address as well as the web registration site address, and the registration page has a phone number for inquiries. You’ve now come at the prospect from three different directions, sent essentially the same message (attend this great conference) but shown them different facets of the conference, shown the benefits in the outgoing vehicles, and given them a choice as to how to respond to you (mail, reply e-mail, web registration, return phone call). Plus, the way they choose to respond or register tells you what mode of communication is the most convenient or effective for them, information you can use to reach them more effectively next time – FREE!

Those three directions are the legs of the stool – each media supports the message platform, and feeds the other media: web, e-mail, voice, print mail. This sort of campaign might make it tougher to discern just exactly what is driving response, but as long as the response is strong and the meeting is full, the job is done, and most of these are trackable now so that dilemma isn’t as problematic as it once was.

You can drive response to one media or another, but giving the prospective attendee a choice as to how they want to respond increases your odds of a response almost exponentially. Personalizing each medium makes each more effective than the generic version, further strengthening the campaign. By adding to your integration scheme with low-cost supports, (e-mail, and volunteer phone calls) you’ve maximized your resources and gotten the most bang for your buck, in some cases doubling or tripling your effectiveness, without doubling the cost.

Check the campaigns you have running and see if they could benefit from an integrated approach. It may be a little more work, even if you re-purpose elements like graphics, copy, forms, e-mail templates etc. but the results are definitely worth it.

If you found this valuable, and would like more like this delivered to your inbox weekly, just subscribe to this blog above, and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

May 28, 2014
Are You Prepared for a Communications Crisis?

In the general hierarchy of life’s priority, when you think of crisis, the marketing department is probably not the place to call. But if you’re a business that’s facing a natural disaster, a tampering case involving your products, an on-the-job accident or other damaging event, that call to the marketing department is one of the first and most important. But if they aren’t prepared to handle a communications crisis, it may not help.

Is your company prepared for a scramble drill in communicating effectively to convey the proper information, using the right tone and messaging to quell customer fears, or creditor agitation or anxiety, and deal with intrusive media inquiries? If not, now might be a good time to craft a plan, get it reviewed and vetted by all other departments for accuracy and feasibility and get it put in place – before the crisis occurs.

This plan should include the following:

1) List of personnel involved: Who is the designated spokesman for your company, who comes next if that person is not available? Create the hierarchy so that the job tumbles downhill logically. The person needs to be credible, well-spoken, and to understand the goals and ideals of the company thoroughly so that any statement made to the local or national media is believable and makes sense.

2) Who internally should be contacted: List of people will vary depending upon the nature of the crisis, but at bare minimum, the CEO, CFO, VP Operations, General Manager, VP Marketing, and in-house Counsel should be included on the list. Your plant security company should be informed immediately, and if the crisis involves injury or death of staff or contractors on the site, the local police department, local first responder services if needed, and local utilities that service the site, including Hazmat services if required.

3) What is your position on the incident? Is it an accident, was it intentional sabotage, is your company responsible in any way, what is your plan going forward? From a public relations standpoint, clarity and direct honesty is always the best policy. The media is tremendously resourceful, and they will find out their version of the truth. Better to give them yours and it turns into a non-story, than to stonewall and let them start digging on their own.

4) Provide only the facts you’re sure of. If you don’t know for certain, simply tell the media that you’re investigating and will keep them informed as things develop in that investigation. Make sure in-house counsel or your of-counsel attorney reviews any written statements for accuracy, or anything that legally obligate your company to do anything in future.

5) Position Your Company As Compassionate, Caring, Concerned. No matter how simple or harmless the situation appears, in today’s environment anyone can potentially be construed as a victim of something. Make sure your company is seen as one that cares about all it’s employees and contractors, or an civilians who may have inadvertently been involved in the incident. Spread the net of concern wide, but make no direct promises, express your concern for the well-being of all, and stress that no matter the cause or level of responsibility your company ultimately takes in the final analysis, they will take great pains to assist and care for anyone affected by the incident.

The real trick is to have a speedy, comprehensive and clear position, and to release it to the media as early as possible. If media representatives sense that you’re holding back or hiding something in any way, they will see it as their duty to get to “the truth” as they see it. Fast response heads this reaction off at the pass, returns control to your hands, and makes it appear that you know the drill and are being cooperative.

Each crisis is different, and each calls for a custom-tailored response. But if you have a plan of action, centralized contact information, a chain of command and a prepared spokesman, you can contain most incidents and concentrate on damage control to preserve your company’s reputation and good name.

If you found this valuable and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog and get weekly updates right in your mailbox, and be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” for your professional library –

May 27, 2014
Event Marketing – The Key To Reaching New Customers May Be Through Their Stomachs

If you own or operate a service or manufacturing business, one great way to show your leadership of your industry and in the local business community is to host an event. There are many benefits, little downside, and if successful it can be scaled up or down or repeated again and again.

There are some basic requirements for a successful event:

1) Guests! Getting enough participation by the right participants is key. Market the event extensively, but create exclusivity by sending actual paper invitations – not just an e-mail announcement of an open house. The invitation requests and begs an RSVP, so that you can get an accurate head count for food and beverage, space planning etc. You want the room to look full but not crowded, and you’d like current customers to mix and mingle with prospects, so they spread the word about the work you do for them.

2) Refreshments – This is a tough part for many people to get right. Gauging the amount, level and type of food and drink to serve a very diverse guest list can be difficult, but there are some guidelines to follow to make it easier.

a) Let the time of day for the event guide your choices. For afternoon events, light appetizers and soft drinks may be appropriate. For a after-hours cocktail event, more substantial appetizers and passed hors d’oeuvres and beer and wine selections might be more appropriate.

b) For a dinner event or awards presentation, a buffet style will facilitate networking, but a sit-down dinner will allow guests to be more comfortable for a longer period of time, and form fewer but closer relationships with table-mates. Get the highest quality food and most sophisticated beverage choices you can afford – these are your guests and customers, doubly important to let them know you care enough to serve the best.

c) Drinks – for open bars, plan on 2-3 drinks per person, average, and keep key brands of each spirit on hand, along with plenty of mixers. For gatherings of over 20 people, hire a professional bar tender, you don’t want your guests being over-served because your staff feels generous when pouring for their favorite customer. Keep plenty of ice on hand, about 2 lbs per person is a good rule of thumb.

3) Venue – if you are a manufacturing business, you have hard assets to show off – an open house type should include a “plant tour” of your production areas and equipment. Clean up extensively beforehand, remove trash, scrap and waste, remove any unused or non-functional equipment, sweep and mop floors, remove signage or decoration of questionable taste from walls, re-install any safety equipment, cover or hide proprietary customer work in progress. If you’re a service business, there may not be much of interest to show visitors, cubicles look the same pretty much everywhere. Consider having the event in your building lobby if it is impressive, or at a nearby hotel.

4) Entertainment – unless this is strictly an open house to greet customers, there should be some additional component to the event to warrant attendance by the guests. If you seek to be a thought leader in your industry or local business community, consider a brief presentation by your top management, including slides or video. Show off your new service or new capabilities, show your point of view and strengthen the reasons for your guests to work with you rather than your competitor. Another avenue to consider is to hold educational seminars, which would highlight how your firm provides solutions to well-known or recognized problems in your industry.

5) Amenities – make sure the guests feel welcome and thank them for their participation. The little things make a difference when creating an impression. A small parting gift, even if its a branded item (your brand, of course)is fine, but make it a high quality piece. Make sure there is a place to put coats if it’s in the winter, offer umbrella escorts from the parking lot if it’s raining, valet parking if you have a city location, and other niceties will make a big difference in the overall impression.

6) Follow Up – all the entertaining in the world won’t make your business grow (unless you’re a caterer) unless you connect with those prospects both at the event and afterward, when they are back in their own environment and in decision-making mode. A nice Thank You note to all attendees with a personal note in each will do the trick, along with a follow-up e-mail later that week, highlighting some of the advantages and benefits you presented them with at the event should help cement your company in the correct place in their mind for future.

Using events to promote your business and generate new customers is a time-honored tactic that works when you pay attention to the little details and you make it look easy. If you’re not comfortable with all this, maybe have a dry run for your staff a week before to work out the bugs before getting in front of customers. In general, quality will show you off to best advantage, so work with the best caterer, best beverage supplier, produce a high quality presentation with some production value and take advantage of the opportunity and follow up, and your business will grow before your eyes.

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May 22, 2014
Show Up, Suit Up, Follow-Up – Don’t Forget That Last One!

Usually I focus on marketing strategy, tactics and practices in this forum, but I wanted to touch on a more sales and management-oriented topic that has been rearing its ugly head recently – Poor sales personnel practices.

If you’re in sales as a profession, there’s a few simple adages that pave the road to success.

1) Know your market, know your customer, solve their problems, don’t create them

2) Under-promise and Over-Deliver

3) It’s more effective and less expensive to keep your existing customers than to find new ones

4) Always make that last call of the day, no matter how tired or late you are

5) Show Up, Suit Up, Follow-up

If you can keep those things in mind as you go about your daily interaction with customers and prospects, you probably won’t go too far wrong.

Where most less-experienced folks tend to drop the ball is on numbers 2 and 5. Most new folks are so eager to make the sale, they will tell prospects virtually anything to close them, and then when it comes time for the order to arrive or be fulfilled, the customer is left disappointed or worse, feels cheated. At extreme levels this amounts to bait-and-switch, which is a prosecutable offense. You may get a few orders this way, but there won’t be any referrals or recommendations, and the gravy train will grind to a halt fairly quickly, especially in the age of Internet postings, blogs and rating sites for every business imaginable. Word will get out even more quickly and nobody will touch you after that – bad idea.

Number 5 is sometimes a function of time management, sometimes of lack of training, sometimes lack of personal responsibility. The Show up and Suit up portions, most have down, although I’ve spoken with many business leaders in the last few months who say they can’t hire staff that can manage to do even that on a consistent basis. It’s the follow-up that eludes most people, and the one’s that discover this little secret are going to move to the top of the heap rather quicker than his or her competitors. Just because someone was not in a position to buy when you left them last, (some more hardcore folks would say you failed to effectively close them the first time) doesn’t mean that they never will have a need for what you’re offering. Your odds of them calling you when the time comes has much more to do with top of mind awareness and initial impressions than of product quality or benefits.

Effective follow-up must be gauged carefully and is different for each prospect. The tone, medium, frequency and content of your follow-up is critical to maintaining that tenuous connection and reinforcing that initial, hopefully good, impression. The more personal and more specific you can make that follow-up, regardless of the medium, whether by phone, card, letter, e-mail, or visit. General, automated, non-specific stuff will not have the impact or make the connection you need to encourage that prospect to pick up the phone when the time comes. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a hand-written note – it takes about 5 minutes of your time and you’d be amazed that impact it has on the recipient. sometimes a mix of media is appropriate, depending on the volume you need it to cover every week or the type of sale. The only constant you can count on is that if you don’t do it, your sale with go to the guy who does. Sometimes it’s trial and error, but you have to use common sense, especially having to do with timing and frequency. You really don’t want to overdo it – an e-mail every other day is likely overkill . . .

Consistency, reliability and accountability are the keys to good sales practice, and the follow-up should be part of that – if the customer feels you’ll be there before the sale, think how much they’ll appreciate you being there after the sale.

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May 9, 2014