How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 30

JointSourcing in Action #1: Sales Renewal Wins Battle Against Google Adwords On Behalf Of Client

It began when analysts at Sales Renewal noticed the poor return on investment one of the firm’s clients was receiving on their Google Adwords search ad campaigns.

In response, Sales Renewal asked the ad agency it had subcontracted on behalf of the client to investigate. As is typical of such specialized firms, their view was narrowly focused on their area of expertise, and on traditional advertising metrics like CPC (cost per click) and CTR (click-through rates). Those measures seemed to show the campaigns were performing well.

Unable to pinpoint the source of the problem, but nevertheless wary of what they saw, Sales Renewal immediately recommended canceling the previously planned ad spend increase. Later, Sales Renewal decided that the campaign’s poor ROI-even if the reason why was still a mystery-required cutting the client’s Google Adwords budget in half (something no ad agency would volunteer to do, as their compensation is tied directly to the ad spend). As Sales Renewal pressed Google Adwords for a remedy, the search giant’s early denials and demurrals eventually led to a $200 credit offer, provided the client would drop all future claims.

Convinced there was a larger problem, however, Sales Renewal rejected the settlement offer and kept digging, ultimately pinpointing a complicated technical glitch deep in the ad tracking system. Because of this, for every ad landing page a visitor actually saw, Google Adwords was charging for 5.78 click-throughs!

“If you had enough time and technical expertise, this is how you would do it.”

Faced with Sales Renewal’s detailed and accurate analysis, Google Adwords yielded and provided a credit that fully funded the client’s Adwords advertising campaigns for six months.

There were three elements to Sales Renewal’s success with Google: perspective, expertise & tools and motivation.

• As a General Contractor, Sales Renewal is focused on the big picture and how all the pieces work together, not just performance within a narrow silo like advertising.
• SR also had the expertise and tools required to monitor return on investment, dig into problems and convince Google over several months its technical evidence was sound.
• Probably most important, however: thanks to its innovative JointSourcing Solution that shares risk and reward and aligns the economic interests of Sales Renewal with its clients, Sales Renewal is as motivated as its clients to cost effectively grow their sales.

As Keith Loris, CEO of Sales Renewal Corp., often tells our clients, “If you had enough time and technical expertise, this is how you would do it.”

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 29

A Powerful, Cost Effective Way to Market Locally: A Business Sign

Many online sources of business advice have online myopia: they seem to believe that marketing didn’t exist before Google or that the only way to market a business today is through the Web.

At the risk of sounding like the old guy who yells at the kids to get off of his lawn, “hogwash” I say.

In fact, one of the most powerful, cost effective forms of local advertising is as old as business itself: the business sign. I know it might be surprising to think of the sign on your building or store as advertising, but if you think about the key elements of advertising–branding, impressions, ability to bring traffic through the door–they all apply to signage.

And while the cost of a great sign that can really put your business on the map, help you stand out and be easily remembered might seem high at first, business signs last an eternity in comparison to most online ads (10 years, if you obtain it from a high quality manufacturer). This means that from a cost-per-impression perspective, business signs can be dirt cheap.

Sales Renewal knows this first hand because one of our clients, Metro Sign & Awning, is one of the biggest sign designers in New England and we created a free Signage ROI Calculator for them that compares business signs to other forms of advertising. Here’s the comparison that results when some pretty typical numbers are input:

Seems to blow all the other forms of advertising away doesn’t it?

Our point here isn’t to sell you a new sign (though contact us if you’re interested because we’re sure Metro Sign will be happy to help you), but to remind you that marketing happened before the Internet was invented by Al Gore, and that some of the old ideas and methods are still relevant–maybe even more so–today. This underlines the importance of always looking widely for solutions and not to simply follow the herd or rely on today’s “hottest” fad.

Because sometimes, if you’re looking to do more cost-effective local marketing, the answer can be right outside your front door.

The 6 Best Practices That Will Grow Your Sales in 2014

Sales Renewal clients are accustomed to hearing the term JointSourcing – a unique business model that combines pay-for-performance with expense sharing. The model means that we focus on not simply what works, but what works cost effectively. The key to growing sales through JointSourcing is a multi-pronged approach to sales and marketing.

The six key “prongs” we focus on when creating a JointSourcing plan for our clients are:

1. Website Marketing

• This includes building a website that is written with your customers and prospects in mind. (Start by Choosing the Right Domain Name.)
• Optimize your website for search engines – all the right keywords and search terms in all the right places.
• If you sell locally, in a physical location, be sure to also maintain a local presence on the web.

2. Content Marketing

• Create good-quality content (for your blog, via downloads and white papers) on a consistent basis.
• Let people know you have this great content via social networks that are appropriate for your prospects and customers. (Want some tips for building your Facebook business page?)

3. Social Media Marketing

• Grow your social network – join groups, forums; interact with customers and peers – and spread the word about your business by creating fresh content for your network. (Here’s a real life example of how it works.)
• You can also look beyond the obvious major networks – have you considered using Reddit for your business, for example?
• And of course, your customers are often your best ambassadors – use customer reviews and testimonials to your best advantage.

4. Customer Marketing

• Keep the customers you have happy and earn ongoing revenue from them with E-mail newsletters (and remember to continually test your message!)
• Loyalty programs – from multiple-purchase discounts to special membership programs – are another way to generate revenue from loyal customers.

5. Paid Marketing

• Quick to start and offering near real-time control, advertising in general and Pay-per-Click advertising specifically, can be a very effective way to get your products or services right in front of prospects who are ready to buy.
• And with the right targeting, messaging and offer, direct [paper or email] marketing is hard to beat for growing B2B or B2C businesses.

6. Strategy and Management

• No marketing program should be contemplated without benchmarks and continuous improvement built right in. That’s why businesses need to employ all of the analytical tools and best practices available in order to be continually assured their sales and marketing programs are cost effective and yield the best R.O.I. (And please don’t forget the old fashioned telephone, because Marketing ROI without Call Tracking is Like Baseball Stats that Exclude Away Games).

Will 2014 be the year your business maximizes its online sales and marketing to grow sales? Sales Renewal can help get you started. Contact us to find out how.

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 21

Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising Can Grow Your Business…

… But Doing It Cost Effectively Isn’t As Simple As They Claim

Google AdWords’ promise for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is alluring: “Want to grow your business? Put your message in front of potential customers right when they’re searching for what you have to offer.” Bing AdCenter will tell you: “You can reach millions of unique searchers… Pay only when your ad is clicked on – it’s that easy.”

It is easy to get pulled in by the apparent simplicity of online advertising. For as little as $5 a day, you can start an online advertising campaign. Just choose your keywords, write some ads, select your geographic target, enter your credit card, and turn the campaign on.

The Benefits of a Pay-Per-Click Campaign

In fact, the benefits of using PPC in your online advertising efforts are clear. In addition to the relative simplicity of setting up a campaign, pay-per-click advertising offers you:

• Campaign Control: You have quantifiable control over your target audience, location, and keywords. Customized campaigns and specialized URL placement allows you to increase relevant traffic to your website.
• Conversion Control: Because you create targeted landing pages to match your relevant keywords, you can design different pages for visitors at different phases in the Customer Buying Cycle.
• Cost Control: Among efficiencies like geo-targeting and keyword targeting is a little known feature of PPC – the ability to remarket campaigns. So, if the user searches your keyword more than once, you can bring up your ad again – at no charge to you.
• Customer Control: You can choose the number of times the customer will see the ad so they don’t get bombarded with ads every time they search the keywords. This way, you ads stay fresh in prospects’ mind.

And PPC offers benefits that you cannot get from any other method of paid advertising or online marketing. For example:

• Pay for What You Use: With PPC, you pay only for the ads that are clicked on. Compare this to print advertising. No matter how targeted your postcard mailer or newspaper ad is, there is guaranteed to be a portion of the list or subscription base that is not relevant to your business.
• Immediate, Measurable Results: You see results with PPC right away, often in the form of increased traffic within minutes or hours. You can (and should) monitor these results on a daily basis and use them to make immediate, informed changes and tweaks to your campaign. Compare this to SEO, which can take months to bear fruit and therefore months before you know what’s working and what needs changing.
• Dependable Process: Any updates or alterations to the advertising platform are announced well in advance. Compare this to SEO, where you are quite often at the whim of algorithmic changes, ones that leave much to guesswork.

PPC Done Right: Not As Simple As They Lead You To Believe

But it is also easy to lose sight of how much time and attention your PPC campaign needs to be done right and to be cost effective. This can be a major challenge for businesses trying to set up and run a campaign by following the “simple” instructions provided by the search engines.

Keep in mind that:

• Search engines are in the business of making money, so they recommend what will be easy (for you) but will also have the highest spend possible (for them);
• Even though you can start a campaign for as little as $5 a day and you can see immediate, measureable results (see above!), it can take months and months with such a small budget to get any statistically significant results that would allow you to make all the refinements and adjustments that are so key to PPC;
• Advertising online is competitive, and it can literally take your hard earned dollars quickly without the accompanying ROI if you do not know the ins and outs of PPC; and
• There are over 300 settings that can make a difference in spend on a PPC account. And many of these settings need to be managed and changed throughout the campaign – often on a daily basis.

Sales Renewal has found that it is usually worth the investment (10-15% of your ad budget plus a small set-up fee) to work with a professional agency that specializes in PPC to set up your campaign and optimize it regularly (daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your needs). This will save money in the long run as the investment in professional management will more than come back to you in lowered ad costs and higher traffic.

Is your PPC campaign working the way you would expect it to, or would you like to see better results for your advertising dollar? Sales Renewal can help, and is offering a free review of your existing online advertising campaign. New to online advertising and interested in finding out how to incorporate PPC into your sales and marketing mix?

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 14

Social Media and Your Time Investment: the Payoff Isn’t Always Obvious

Small- and medium-sized business owners cannot take their time lightly. So questions like, should I invest time in LinkedIn? or Is a Pinterest presence worth my time? highlight important considerations.

We certainly don’t advocate jumping on every single social media bandwagon. While they all look like free advertising vehicles at first glance, the learning curve and time commitment can be significant. But plotting a course, and staying true to it, usually pays off.

What’s a Florist doing on LinkedIn?

With an unlimited supply of pictures of beautiful flowers Pinterest seems like an obvious choice for a flower shop (Facebook too). The photo-friendly, super-sharing communities are generally good for consumer-oriented businesses building a client base. But LinkedIn?

Maybe not so obvious. However, when you’ve plotted the right course, and are steady in your approach, you’ll probably be rewarded with sales.

And in some cases, thank-you notes. After all, business people are consumers with grandmothers too.

~ – ~ – ~ – ~ –

Want help charting smart social media moves? Need a little guidance and assistance decided which sales and marketing efforts are worth your time? Want to hand off some of the day-to-day details to realize more sales increases? Contact us. That’s what we do.

Why Hire Sales Renewal? We’ll Fire Ourselves

The advantage of outsourcing sales and marketing to third parties is that it takes a great deal of time and skill to become expert in the many technologies and sales & marketing programs required to grow revenue and even more time, skill and dogged determination to continuously do so over the long haul.

While we’ll admit that Sales Renewal is not the only firm that can do this, we truly believe we are fundamentally different because our commission compensations means we’re not motivated to amass billable hours. Instead, our motivation is to increase our commissions by growing your sales. And this alignment of economic interests leads to some very interesting situations.

Billable Hours vs. Productivity – or Why We Fired Ourselves

When we can deliver a service at a world-class level, we will do so; when we can’t, we subcontract it. Do we have an example? Glad you asked.

Initially, we provided advertising services in-house. However, once we realized we were foregoing commissions, we fired ourselves and hired an outstanding ad agency to do the job.

It came down to this: advertising is a skill that might take a lifetime to master because its ground rules constantly changes (Google has to protect its billion dollar revenue stream doesn’t it?). And online search advertising – because the search engines provide lots of “knobs” you can turn to affect performance, pricing, and targeting (and change them weekly!) – is even harder to master. When we took over an account we felt we got about 90% of the way there, but reaching the last 10% was getting increasingly difficult. Quite simply, we realized we’d reached a point of diminishing returns. Extending our efforts in self-education – especially after identifying some truly excellent advertising agencies – didn’t make sense, for Sales Renewal or for our clients.

Although telling our clients that we had effectively “outsourced” their advertising felt a little strange, they welcomed the news, and the results. We were doing a good job with online advertising, but we’d identified advertising experts who could do better. And that allowed us to focus on our clients’ greatest goals: increasing sales.

The difference between Sales Renewal and some other sales and marketing firms is that we’re not satisfied with doing a “good” job with sales and lead-generation activities when we can find others who will do a great job with the same tasks. After all, you wouldn’t be, and thanks to our aligned economic interests, neither are we.

When we partner with a client, we operate as a General Contractor. As such, we expect the best from each player on the team – whether those players are permanent members of the Sales Renewal Team, or specialists we depend on for discrete tasks.

We always aim for great. Want to hire us? Great. If we can’t do the very best for you, we’ll find someone who will.

— Keith Loris