How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 3 – Hourly Billing!

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales on Valentine’s Day: SalesMemes 31

2013 Business Review: How’d you do?

As you’re growing your business, it’s important to take some time to reflect, month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter, and certainly as you wrap up a year. How’d you do in 2013? Did you realize the sales increases you planned for? Were you able to find time to make plans in the first place?

We hope so.

2013 a Year of Growth

As we reflect on 2013, a few events really stand out for us. We’ll never forget the trying weeks following the Boston Marathon; at the same time, we’ll always remember the heroes who rose up in that terrible time. They reminded us that human beings are here for good. We were pleased to be able to help, however slightly, by creating a website for a local fundraising event that aided victims and their families, celebrating the inherent goodness in people, neighbors and strangers alike.

More recently, we’ve been working with Massachusetts businesses and the Mass Growth Capital Corporation (MGCC) to help their customers grow their sales as quickly and wisely as possible. It’s a partnership that’s a real win-win situation.

And – looking at our internal machinations – we can honestly say we’re managing our time and projects better than ever before, thanks to our entire staff’s dedication to use Liquid Planner for tracking tasks and ensuring our clients’ sales plans are always moving forward.

Keep Moving Your Sales Forward

Speaking of time, we’re booking Blueprint appointments for 2014 already. If you’d like a partner to help you grow your sales and free your time by managing the day-to-day sales and marketing tasks that can distract you from running your business, get in touch.

Then, this time in 2014, we’ll be reflecting on your great year!

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

Say What? Are You Increasing Sales on the Phone – or Losing Customers?

While cell phone service company ads generally focus more on data plans, gaming applications and cameras that take share-worthy pictures than they do call reception and audio quality, reports of the death of phone conversations have been greatly exaggerated.

Customer Service Starts with “Hello”

Whether you’re making outbound sales calls (extending a service warranty, renewing an annual contract) or fielding questions about the most basic information regarding your company (hours of operation, which credit cards you accept), you want your employees to understand that every phone call with a customer is a potential sale.

Have a Common Sense Close

Have you been on the phone with an annoying presumptive-closer? Please, don’t be that guy.

You’re probably familiar with the pitch:

“You can use the card and get tons of points you can redeem at your favorite retailers or for cash, does that sound good? Ok, so to make sure I have the right address are you still at 123 Closethesale Street? In Makemyquota, USA? Ok, thank you for your time Mr/Mrs Nameonmylist.”

First, ick! Out of general human compassion, we have to point out the ends don’t always justify the means. Second, based on (never mind how many) years of professional sales experience, we’ll add that although underhanded sales tactics certainly can result in sales, a shady closing never creates a happy customer.

It’s also the reason why – although most of our clients come to us for help with web design, email marketing, or other online sales campaigns – we spend some pretty focused time understanding how our clients interact with customers on the phone during the Blueprint process.

Have you reviewed your staff’s telephone manners lately? Well, maybe you should.

Minding Your Business Telephone Manners = More Sales, Happier Customers

If you find your staff needs a refresher course in the basics of telephone manners and customer service, we’d be happy to refer you to an expert in proper etiquette. (We didn’t quite finish finishing school.) If you’d like to find out how to use the telephone to beef up your sales, though, we’ve got some pretty nifty tricks up our sleeves. (Ask us for reference accounts.)

About that guy in the photo… Would you take sales advice from Mark Twain? The iconic American author and satirist had some unconventional suggestions to increase sales. In case you didn’t recognize our opening reference to the legend, he was one of many celebrities whose obituaries have been written – and published – prematurely. (Our advice – don’t let that happen to your business!! Contact us to find out how you can breathe new life into your sales efforts.

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

How to Use a Contest to Increase Sales

There once was a sales contest

that everyone agreed was the best.

It rocked website clicks and showed sales upticks

Call Sales Renewal for your contest fix!

OK, obviously we’re not in the poetry business. And you probably aren’t either. But the fact is, businesses can generate a lot of customer chatter (and move new prospects to check out their goods) by running a contest. Photo caption and limerick contests are popular, for consumer goods as well as business-to-business services.

What Rhymes with Competition?

Contests can be useful internally, too. Among other things, we’ve helped our clients use contests to increase employee participation on their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Some of our clients offer incentives for employees who write popular blog posts or frequently-shared posts on Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Feel a contest coming on? Call us – we can help you make sure it’s a winner.

Are you focused on increasing sales in Q3 2013?

We’ve recently conducted 3rd Quarter Planning Sessions with our clients.

Pssst – when was the last time you made a quarterly marketing plan and followed it?

In those meetings, they heard specific details about things we did during Q2 to improve SEO rankings, reach more qualified prospects at the beginning of the sales cycle, and stay in touch with customers after the sale. Next, we asked them about –

• new business opportunities
• progress on product development and strategic projects, and
• employee training programs scheduled in the coming months

Then, together, we agreed on a strategy to focus (our) Q3 sales and marketing activities to complement and enhance (their) internal sales programs and long-term growth plans. Other than a few emails and phone calls between now and next quarter, our clients are free from the day-to-day management of marketing activities like lead generation, blogging, newsletter and other content development, and ecommerce sales tracking.

As one of our customers put it, “I really like that you’re so focused on results: growing my sales.”

Now that third quarter sales plans are set, we’ll continue to focus on increasing sales while our clients have more time to develop bigger accounts, win new contracts, and – oh yeah – run their business.

Outsourced sales and marketing that don’t charge by the hour?

One of the reasons outsourced sales and marketing programs are attractive is that they offer a way to increase sales and save time. Time to invest in identifying strategic business partners, developing new products or breaking in to new markets.

And while outsourcing sales and marketing saves you time, you’re still paying for the time.

That’s why the JointSourcing model works for business owners who constantly grapple with the time-is-money conundrum. As one of our clients said:

“At first, I thought the pay-for-performance model would just be a great way for me to acquire expertise while keeping my fixed costs low … what I didn’t realize is how profoundly it stepped up my ability to execute. You’re not simply a vendor selling me something; you’re a partner pushing me to realize the growth that I am capable of… .”

An economical way to increase sales and focus your time

Want a partner who is accountable to you and your bottom line? See our website to learn more about JointSourcing. Just don’t wait too long. Time and money don’t grow on trees, you know.

Three Ways to Be Prepared for Google’s Penguin 2.0 Search Update

Nothing gets those in the business of SEO talking like rumors of a Google algorithm change, and it seems that this time around (yes, another change is on the way), Google is trying to preempt some of these rumors by clarifying, in advance, what businesses can expect. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, recently published a video explaining what businesses can expect in the next couple of months, including the algorithmic change called “Penguin 2.0, ” which is targeted to black hat web spam (watch the interview).

In the video, Cutts outlines several areas that businesses should pay attention to.

1. Stay away from link spamming

We believe that Sales Renewal clients can confidently disregard this warning, as we take a “natural” approach to linkbuilding – requests for links on relevant or complementary websites, guest blogging, participation in forums that are appropriate for our clients.

2. Set up Google Authority

While Google Authorship and Google+ may not have the visibility or popularity of sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, rest assured that behind the scenes, Google is working to connect these two aspects of a personal and business profile with search results. Whether a business is highly active in the Google+ realm or not, we recommend at a minimum maintaining your listing, posting regular status updates, and working to increase your followers. Likewise, any blog post that can be linked to Google Authorship can only help your website, as Google looks for these connections as signals of your authority in your field. (Learn how to set up Google Authorship.)

3. Use Webmaster Tools on a regular basis

I know webmasters who are reluctant to use Google’s Webmaster Tools because of frustrating experiences when using it in the past. But Google has made periodic improvements to the tool, and it now has a more useful, more intuitive, easier-to-navigate interface. This is part of Google’s attempt to better communicate with webmasters, providing information about how to deal with a hacked site and more concrete details about ways to handle other technical issues as they arise.

In conclusion, Cutts repeats Google’s message that if you “create a great site that users love, tell their friends about, bookmark, and come back to over and over again, ” you have nothing to worry about.

– Audrey Trieschman

Bigger Sales are Drawn from the Bigger Picture

There’s a reason our Blueprint process is the first step in every relationship with every client. And there’s a reason some of our clients feel a bit perplexed in the process. By the time they’ve gotten to know us well enough to realize that we’re as incentivized to increase their sales as they are, they’re eager to get started.
At that point, the Blueprint can feel like we’re taking a step back. But we’re not: rather, we won’t take another step without completing that 50-plus-question questionnaire with each new client.* Some of the questions focus on operational strengths and weaknesses, others collect sales and marketing history, and a few are designed to get to know your current customers and what they think of you.
Even the bad stuff. OK, especially the bad stuff. But we don’t use their complaints to suggest operational changes or jump to the conclusion that your positioning is bad. It’s part of the larger picture we want to develop of you and your business. That picture – the first one we develop based on your initial Blueprint – is focused on your sales opportunities. But before we can help you maximize your sales, we have to understand your strengths and weaknesses. That gives us what we need to develop the best sales plans for you right out of the gate. As your sales increase, we may make suggestions to help you fix your shortcomings (while we remain focused on sales).
At that stage, we often use a variety of customer review and feedback tools – all designed to quickly identify the best sales opportunities for you. While customer complaints are helpful, they don’t comprise business advice.
In a recent article about angry customers, Phil Libin, co-founder of Evernote, hits it right on the head:
“Customer feedback is great for telling you what you did wrong. It’s terrible at telling you what you should do next.”
Our customers tell us the Blueprint is a great first step, a virtual roadmap showing them where to go, and what to do, next.
*Download a copy if you’d like to see it.