Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Quality In Your Marketing

How long is your sales cycle? How many people or companies are in your marketing nitch?

Looking at the B2B world, as a posed to the B2C side of business, Sales cycles are probably longer, there is more limited brand recognition. Trying to keep that sales funnel full and running can be a nightmare for the B2B Marketing Manager. So what can you do to keep you from walking round with your tale between your legs?

1) Project Your Target Sale: B2B sales cycles are extended and dare right complicated. As the size of the company goes down the more confusing it gets because you are working with fewer bells and whistles and dollars to keep you on track and headed in the right direction. Prospects might be less familiar with you. Lots of times your entire marketing campaign is working in a hodge podge of erratic disjointed efforts that you hope can come together as one message. Stop, sit down and take a deep breath, Your marketing needs to be put together like a classic dance, a beautiful tango, filled with passion and love and you go on till the music has stopped. Most people don’t stop dancing until the song has ended, so too you’re marketing. Your prospects need to worm up to you over a period of time. They need to feel comfortable with you before starting the buying cycle. The question is how long is that cycle going to be?

2) Give More Than You Take: Instead of asking for the sale give your prospects something of value, first! If you are having quality interactions, posting value in your interactions and blogs, it your content is specific and helpful you are on the right track. Using and posting content marketing to educate your prospects about what is important to them (that you can help of solve for them) and giving a solution helps to take your prospects down the decision path, not the yellow brick road.

3) Short Is Good: Try to keep your content short as opposed to long. Even if your service or product is a completed sale KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid! The experts say no more than 45 lines (please don’t count the lines in my blog) and no graphics unless they hammer home a key point.

4) Have Measureable and Meaningful Objectives: No fluff, no embellishing, get to the point, quickly and directly. Then measure what you have done. There are more marketing automation tools out there, and many are free for the looking. Find them, down load them, and use them.

5) Ready, Fire, Aim. No!: Prospects are precious. They are not a throw away commodity. You don’t have time or money to mess up your message. You can run a split program if your list is big enough or your pockets have enough money or you can post two different marketing messages on different SM networking sites and wee which one gets the better pull.

6) The Customer Isn’t Always Right: Two things come to mind. The first by my sales mentor Hank Trisler, The customer might not always be right but they are still the customer, and the right customer is always right. You as a marketing need to know the difference between a right customer and a wrong customer. That is where nitching yourself as tight as you can helps you know the difference. Know your ideal customer. You want as few duds to go to your sales team as possible. There time is important also. They might see fewer leads but over the long run, they will have to work less and gain more, faster.

Larson Notes & Satire: There are a lot of things I could be saying here, but I will keep is short and simple. If you want to get your company growing with increasing your sales, keep yourself focused and remember that not every prospect is really a customer.


Howard Larson
Larson & Associates
Target Marketing & Telesales Professionals for new account acquisition
Making good businesses great and great businesses even better
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P.S. We make telesales for small business affordable by offering programs down to only 15 hours a week. Maybe you could add telesales into your marketing mix call today and find out.

P.P.S. An American Company, marketing American Companies! Call or email to get an appointment to pick my brain (a $125.00 value) for 30 minutes.

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