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  • Brynn's secrets to making sales

    Marketing AutomationAs most businesses know, the secret to sales is to supply good sales and service that makes your clients' happy. Yes, it really is that simple. If someone is happy with your service they'll tell 5 people; if they're unhappy they'll tell 14. Think about it this way. Would you refer a contractor that did a bad job?

    So, for most businesses, just supplying good sales and service might be enough. However, if you're in a competative industry or have more than one sales person then a business needs to create sales and marketing processes that they know will get them new clients and ensure quality service to their clients.

    My first sales process

    The first place to start is by creating sales and marketing processes that you or your staff can follow, repeat and refine to improve sales. Here's a summarised example of a sales and marketing process that uses an e-newsletter to generate leads:

    1. Send an e-newsletter to people that may be interested in your service - in marketing this is called lead generation.
    2. Invite those people in for a meeting or to visit a web page that explains the benefits of your service - this is the sales stage of the campaign where you show the client the benefits of your service and then make an offer.
    3. And finally, measure the success of the campaign so you can assess whether it was successful.

    You don't need any fancy software to do this. You could even just write it on a piece of paper:

    • When you're contacted, ask how the person heard about you. This tells you if your e-newsletter was successful.
    • When your quote is accepted or a product is purchased write down how they heard about you and how much it was worth.

    This process actually works really well. Here's some general stats we identified in previous years:

    • 84% of people that come in for a meeting become our customers.
    • Our e-newsletter generates an average of $10,000 in additional sales per month.
    • Our TV campaign has more than covered it's costs and got us new Corporate clients in Wellington.

    "If you can't measure it you can't manage it"

    Why pay for advertising if it doesn't work? As a business matures their sales and marketing process needs to get more sophisticated and automated because you don't want your sales people trying to do campaign measurement which isn't their skillset or Management spending money on campaigns that aren't proven to be successful. You either need dedicated marketing staff or an Internet marketing company like ours that has expertise in creating and measuring campaign success. Below is an example of a campaign I created that automatically measured success using Google Analytics Goal Tracking. We know for a fact that this small campaign created an additional $16,000 in annual revenue for our client.

    Goal Conversion

    Google Analytics Goal Tracking is fine for one-off Internet campaigns but when your running multiple campaigns using different media such as radio, TV, print or the Internet it's not good enough. That's when you need specialist marketing automation software such as SugarCRM, SalesForce or HubSpot that measure multiple campaign types.

    We're now on the next stage of our sales and marketing journey where we're integrating sales, marketing and project management into one system that records and compares everything. We've already identified opportunities from new lead sources that we weren't previously measured and we're also now able to compare the costs and benefits of campaigns which helps us budget better for future campaigns. This is just the tip of the proverbial "iceburg" though.

    From a business management perspective, marketing automation is the next big thing on the Internet. Though everyone is talking about Social Networking and Inbound Marketing at the moment both of these things need to be created and measured within an overall marketing system.  We're now experimenting with how that might work best for our clients.

    Anyhow, that's what I'm thinking about this week.  If you'd like to be notified of our latest research FOLLOW our LinkedIn page.  The link is at the bottom right of this page. If you'd like to learn more about how you can improve your online marketing and sales check out our Internet Marketing workshop here.

    brynn :-)


    Brynn Neilson About
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