JointSourcing and Time Savings and Team Building: 3 Things that Go Together
In the first quarter of this year, we (the Sales Renewal team) have spent more hours than we’d like to admit discussing our inner clockworks. How do we make decisions that affect the team…who decides…how do we decide which stories deserve full-length treatment and which end up on the cutting room floor.
Stories? Agile groupies know what we’re talking about. And so does writer and speaker Bruce Kasanoff, as he clearly demonstrates in his recent article on LinkedIn.
Pondering those “inner clockwork” type things is important, even (or in our case, especially) to growing sales. JointSourcing is all about making the most efficient use of resources – ours, and our clients’. That’s why we ponder things like time management, both in internal company meetings, and in discussions with our clients.
Now please – go read Mr. Kasanoff’s article – and then get back to work, eh?
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Get back to work (after you read this), ok?
Show Your Stuff vs. Showcase Your Services
Among the responses to our post about REI’s “personalized commercials” was a very thoughtful reply from Marc Cica, Director of Advancement for the Shenango Valley Catholic School System in Hermitage, PA. Cica pointed out that video can be an ideal communication tool for non-profit organizations. When it’s done well, video can be personal, motivational, even inspirational.
Don’t Overdo It
“What I am very much in favor of is the use of personalized video messages, when used judiciously and not overproduced. What I mean is, the video should be raw and personal – not scripted. They should NEVER look like a fancy commercial that was crafted by a slick marketing company, and the videos should be SHORT, not longer than 2 minutes or so, ” said Cica, who is responsible for marketing at the recently consolidated diocesan school system.
He went on to explain that taking the time to address an individual (using video) is more about the message than marketing:
“We use social media to find members of our various constituent groups and to drive them to our new websites …(and) we plan to use personalized video messages as a key component to reach out to them with targeted, individual messages.
We envision sending out video thank-you messages to donors and supporting businesses; to welcome prospective students/families who contact us through on our website and to invite them for personalized school tours; to motivate volunteers or fund raisers during important school initiatives or capital campaigns; and to recognize faculty members, Board members or staff members for above-and-beyond commitment/excellence.
Where this article describes how REI has begun to use personalized video messages to promote products, video messages can also be used for other industries, organizations or groups. … Technology enables us to simply create a personal message quickly and in a very cost-effective manner by using social media or email. We believe that the recipient will appreciate the special attention they are receiving and recognize that we truly are interested in them and highly value them and/or their contributions.”
As Cica clearly points out, video has many applications – not all of which are commercial, and like many of the “new” offerings on the social media and content marketing landscape, the application of video messaging isn’t new.
Back to the Message
Concord Flower Shop has offered video education to customers for years. We’re in production with another client, a custom furniture designer, to create some helpful how-to clips for his customers.
Of course we have to mention what is new (and growing) and that’s Vine, Twitter’s six-second video tool. Restaurants climbed on Vine right away, although until smell-o-vision is a reality, we think video is better for showing the drape of a blouse than the cut of a meatloaf.
What do you think? What would you like to do with video? Thank your top customers? Educate them? Show them your newest products?
Whatever you do, give the message careful consideration – then show ’em your best side.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Should you add video to your marketing content? The bigger – and better – question to ask is, how can you best communicate with your audience?
JointSourcing in Action # 2: Sales Renewal’s Synergies & Cross Fertilization Kicks Up Client Sales
The Concord Flower Shop is doing very well in Concord MA, thank you very much.
Sales Renewal has been helping The Concord Flower Shop grow its sales since 2009, and thanks to its ongoing optimizing of the e-commerce site, it now captures a large share of the business of prospects searching for florists who deliver to Concord MA.
Having succeeded in Helen’s primary service area, Sales Renewal turned its attention to about a dozen nearby towns where the business also delivers. Sales Renewal chose to begin with the neighboring town of Acton, and-without charging for its research and time-created a new page for the ConcordFlowerShop.com website, specifically designed to attract natural search traffic and convert it to Acton-based flower sales (i.e., purchases from buyers who live in Acton, as well as from buyers who want flowers delivered there though they live, and are presumably searching from, somewhere else):
- To garner maximum traffic, Sales Renewal used best-practice search engine techniques to optimize the page for the carefully targeted keywords.
- To convert that traffic into as many buyers as possible, Sales Renewal used best-practice advertising techniques to set up the page along the lines of an advertising landing page.
Combining the two disciplines, Sales Renewal calls this type of web page design a Natural Search Landing Page.
Sales Renewal is perhaps unique in that, rather than being a specialist in just one narrow discipline, it operates as a Sales and Marketing General Contractor. In that role, its in-house experts regularly work with and oversee outsourced specialists, all cross-fertilizing each other’s thinking and planning on how to improve each client’s sales results.
In addition, Sales Renewal’s unique JointSourcingTM Solution sets it up to share the risks and rewards of its clients, so the company is heavily incentivized by its contributions to the client’s advertising expenditures and the commissions it earns on the client’s sales. As a result, Sales Renewal continually strives to produce long-term sales increases in cost-effective ways.
The new Natural Search Landing Page for flower business in the town of Acton went live in June, 2013.
After six months of activity, Sales Renewal’s analysts crunched the numbers and were happy to discover that The Concord Flower Shop‘s Acton-based business:
- Grew significantly faster than the company’s overall online sales.
- Ranked first in year-over-year sales growth, compared with its business in every other nearby town.
- Grew more than twice as fast as its business in the number two most-improved town.
Of course, no one can definitively prove the new Natural Search Landing Page caused these great results: because the page was totally new, there is no “before” to compare with the “after”. However, the circumstantial evidence is strong and persuasive.
Having proven the concept, Sales Renewal is now extremely busy putting up other carefully crafted Natural Search Landing Pages for The Concord Flower Shop and our other clients. We’ll report on those results as they become available.
JointSourcing Produces Win-Wins
The development and implementation of the technique that kicked up sales in the town of Acton for The Concord Flower Shop was a direct result of Sales Renewal’s unique and powerful JointSourcing Solution.
No conventional marketing service vendor – whether working in advertising, PR, social media, search engine optimization, content marketing, or anything else – would consider experimenting with a new marketing approach without securing payment for its billable time. Firms operating under conventional contracts have no incentive to invest the hours needed to conceptualize, develop, and fine tune brand new approaches to building business online. But JointSourcing automatically aligns Sales Renewal’s economic interests with those of each client.
The result is a series of win-wins that result from Sales Renewal’s innovative, cross-pollinated thinking and a willingness to take risks at its own expense.
JointSourcing continually drives Sales Renewal to consider new and better alternatives to existing online paradigms and best practices. When the chances of success look favorable, the people at Sales Renewal gladly break new ground and experiment with new techniques that offer the potential to help their clients succeed.
What Is JointSourcing?
JointSourcing is a unique business solution that effectively makes Sales Renewal a partner in a client’s sales and marketing success. As a partner, Sales Renewal charges significantly lower professional fees, and earns commissions on each JointSourcing client’s revenue. As part of the deal, Sales Renewal also pays a percentage of each client’s big ticket sales and marketing expenses, such as advertising and direct mail campaigns.
By design, JointSourcing automatically aligns Sales Renewal’s economic interests with those of its clients.
The natural result is a lighter burden on the client – with no need to select and oversee specialists, help in prioritizing and paying for sales and marketing expenses, and reduced demand for nuanced judgments and decision-making – combined with improved sales and marketing effectiveness.
Simply put, JointSourcing allows any company to “outsource” its sales and marketing functions to Sales Renewal, instantly adding a new layer of marketing intelligence a client organization can rarely equal. The company literally functions as a “general contractor” for all the client’s sales and marketing efforts, continually assembling and managing the specific team of “best-of-breed’ in-house and outsourced experts that each client needs to grow at the best possible pace for their budget.
JointSourcing puts Sales Renewal in position to oversee and control all the client’s sales and marketing service vendors, to replace poor performers with better ones, and to upgrade performance across the client’s entire marketing effort.
Under JointSourcing, the key members of the client company team have enhanced freedom and opportunity to remain focused on what they do best, while Sales Renewal takes full responsibility for developing the most successful sales and marketing strategies possible, cost-effectively driving up the client’s sales volume and profitability.
Don’t Waste a Hook in 2013
If you’re in business, the holidays can be so hectic some important things get overlooked. We’d hate to start the New Year with an old lecture, so let’s just call this a friendly reminder about the value of customers.
We’re sure you’ve seen quotes from legendary department store founder Marshall Field extolling the virtues of customer service, and we bet you also know, contrary to some of Mr. Field’s axioms, the customer isn’t always right. Never the less, the customer is always the customer.
Appreciating your customers – even the trying ones – starts with knowing who they are. Only after that can you begin to understand them.
Perhaps you’re familiar with this story from a fishing equipment sales training program. After the leader enthusiastically ballyhooed the lures’ hand-painted eyes, realistic movements of various rubberized insects, and pointed out how well they concealed the hooks, a young sales person interrupted to ask, “Do fish really like this stuff?”
“You’re not selling to fish, ” the trainer replied.
In other words, no matter how great your bait, it’s even more important to know what you’re trying to hook.
In 2013, as always, we wish you good cheer and good selling.
Nate Silver, Marketing’s Wake Up Call
We’re tempted to call it the Nate Silver effect: In the last few weeks a handful of industry watchers have suggested that what companies really need to succeed is a chief marketing technologist.It’s not a bad idea. Obviously, sales and marketing functions are increasingly dependent on technology. The technology choices available today are roughly double what they were last week – and some say they’ll quadruple by Thursday. (That’s a ballpark estimate, you understand – we didn’t run it by Mr. Silver.)
Our point is that while most organizations understand that they need to use technology and social media to grow their brand (and more importantly, sales) few can afford to add a chief marketing technologist to the staff.The problem that many companies fail to address is that embracing social media without employing all of the analytical tools available is a waste of time, and a sure way to misdirect your advertising and marketing budget.
You need to incorporate everything you know about your customers’ buying cycle into your online (and offline) sales strategy. It’s not hard to use Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, and LinkedIn, and Adwords campaigns – but it is hard to use them effectively, honing them to reach and convert prospects that are in different places in the buying cycle.
We spoke about this last spring in our Concord Chamber of Commerce Series. The example we used highlighted our sales strategy for an electric fence company. (See the sample site here.) The company had a good understanding of its prospects, their decision criteria, and buying cycle, and they knew where to find those prospects – but it wasn’t enough. The company wasn’t using that knowledge effectively.
We helped by optimizing keywords for prospects at each stage of the buying cycle, tailoring content to meet them where they were – for example, identifying prospects even before they knew they were in the market for an electric fence. We reached out to those prospects differently than we did to those who were already shopping for fences. We optimized content for them and analyzed their visits to the company’s site. We tracked other prospects – those who came to the site through organic search – and adjusted our online ad campaigns to improve their impressions and interactions with the fence company. Merely posting a special offer on the company’s Facebook page wouldn’t have had the same results.
We know, because we measure those kind of things – and you should, too. Subscribe to our Growth Spurts blog, or contact us now to find out more.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
We’re tempted to call it the Nate Silver effect: In the last few weeks a handful of industry watchers have suggested that what companies really need to succeed is a chief marketing technologist. It’s not a bad idea. Obviously, sales and marketing functions are increasingly dependent on technology. The technology choices available today are roughly double what they were last week – and some say they’ll quadruple by Thursday. (That’s a ballpark estimate, you understand – we didn’t run it by Mr. Silver.)
Our point is that while most organizations understand that they need to use technology and social media to grow their brand (and more importantly, sales) few can afford to add a chief marketing technologist to the staff. The problem that many companies fail to address is that embracing social media without employing all of the analytical tools available is a waste of time, and a sure way to misdirect your advertising and marketing budget.
Free Social Media Blueprint
To celebrate the publication of our first Sales Renewal newsletter, we’re offering a Free Social Media Blueprint.
With a Social Media Blueprint, Sales Renewal can help get you on the right track with your social media efforts. The process includes two hours of meeting time with you to assess your current program and goals for future programs. We then prepare a plan that is customized for your business that will provide direction, make recommendations and offer tips and insights.
Contact us by October 12 to have your name randomly selected to win a Free Social Media Blueprint – a $500 value!