SALES AND MARKETING…

Sounds obvious but examine your daily activities and determine how much time you actually dedicate to each.

There is no doubt that preparing your books for year end is vital but without focusing on sales and marketing there won’t be too much to show in your financials.

It makes me wonder how and why so many businesses shut the sales team away in the room far down the passage on the other side of the building to get on with selling when they need consistent mentoring and management.

For the most part sales teams know what their targets are and usually have a good knowledge of the products and services on offer however, most fall way short on efficient day to day sales activity.

Whose to blame.. No one really.

Mentoring a sales team takes a great deal of time, energy and effort and often an internal person assigned to do so has more than enough on their plate. Finding new exciting, motivating or inspirational sales techniques is seldom top of their agenda.

Sadly this makes the mentoring process of sales teams seem rather fruitless.

Imaging knowing that all the hassle of keeping your sales team in top form is no longer your problem and that the quality of the content generates scalable results… Far more accessible than you may believe!

Here are a number of points that will help focus your sales team and their efforts:

1. define their daily activity.
2. help each staff member realize that they are in charge of their own income.
3. have tracking and accountability measures in place.
4. equip staff with the necessary tools.
5. team up members that complement productivity and result.

Most people, sales people in particular, beat themselves up for constantly being on the brink of failure. Where as their real failure is missing the opportunity to recognize successes in both great and small circumstances.

Earl Nightingale, a pioneer in the audio development space has a simple yet profound description that changes the perception and challenge of ‘pie in the sky success’,to be more practical and realistic in its individual approach.

In his recording ‘The Strangest Secret’, Earl describes success to be the working towards a worthy ideal. Notice how it is the working towards the ideal that determines ones success and not necessarily the achievement of it.

This worthy ideal spans all walks of life and is driven by the passion you may have towards a particular calling, career, task or goal. Earl gives the example of a mother striving to be the best mother possible, the school teacher working to always teach to the best of her ability and the sales person giving their all. The mere fact that a meaningful effort is applied is significant enough to be recognized as a success.

To illustrate this form my point of view, here are a few examples of my successes:

• I succeed at being ethical in my work.
• I work hard to meet targets
• I finish major canoe races like The Duzi Canoe Marathon
• I work hard at making my marriage happy and life giving.

Notice how most of these success examples seem infinite, and that’s because they are.

You see, my successes are driven by my goals and I succeed by constantly working towards them. There are always ups and downs in the pursuit of a worthy ideal but the real success is in not giving up or letting go.

What is your success?

List all the areas in your live where you are working towards a worthy ideal.
If you have none let the establishment of a worthy ideal be your first success.

Recognizing successes, great and small is the starting point for achieving great goals in life.

Retail has the added advantage of having a destination for clients and consumer appeal but the B2B market often lacks both. If you are expecting a surge in sales from a social campaign you may be disappointed. The most important aspect of social media within the B2B market place is the initiation, development and consistency of a conversation. It is said that social media is the new word of mouth and yes can generate sales but not specifically or directly.

If you can maintain the conversation whilst engaging potential and existing clients you are well on your way to spreading the message of your brand.

Remember that the objective of any marketing campaign is to help your prospects and clients make an informed purchase decision. Social media can facilitate this objective and be reinforced by the support of the community that has had an enjoyable experience with your business and hopefully recommend you to their social community. These recommendations can be influenced by your encouragement to the community by some or other motivating factor, these could be discounts, competitions or some other offer of added value to your brand.

Every client and company I deal with wants their website ranked high in Google. This makes sense, as websites that rank well are more visible to potential clients. What few people realise is that to rank well in Google and other search engines such as Yahoo etc your website needs 2 elements that will increase its performance.

Content is king!

Google favours websites in excess of 100 pages, in fact a site 300 pages is even better. This means that for your website to perform well you need a ton of relevant and frequently added content. The interesting fact about content is that Google sends out what is known as ‘spiders’ that scour the web pages worldwide to find out what’s new on the millions of websites out there, known as crawling the web. This is beneficial if you make use of the frequency these ‘spiders’ visit your site. If nothing new happens on your site these ‘spiders’ visit your side almost every thirty days. On their next visit if they discover something new (mostly test based) they will half the time until their next visit – roughly 15 days later. Again, if something new happens within the period between visits the time is halved this continues until Google visits your site in minute intervals. This means that your site will be indexed far quicker. Now the amount of content required may seem impossible to develop. There are methods however that will make this content creation possible.

Remember – Grow your business without wasting money on advertising.

Take the free marketing assessment and I will throw in a free consultation that will help you further.

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Every time you ‘stop’ marketing you need to restart.

Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of guerilla marketing teaches that your marketing needs to be like a circle with a beginning and no end, not like a line that has a start and ends in the courts of bankruptcy.

This means that you need to consider pre and post-sale marketing. Once a sale is made the deal should not be considered closed or won. There is definitely a form of success; this success needs to be seen as the beginning of a profitable long-term relationship.

Developing relationships with clients sets the platform for further transactions. If your offer is not unique or if your competitors are very active and regularly poach your clients, you need to build better bonds with your prospects and clients to prevent them form being lured away.

Relationship building is time consuming but well worth the effort.

Systemizing your relationship building may include systems like CRM and Constant Contact Management. These help you automate relationship building that results in securing long-term and profitable clients that are loyal to your brand, company and bank account.

Keep your marketing momentum, automate your marketing and build your business.

Previously I wrote about content being king and the fact that Google favours websites in excess of 100 pages and 300 pages to be even more preferable. The next strategy that generates better results in the SERP is inbound authoritative links. An authoritative link is a website that contains content that has some relation to yours linking to specific pages on your website. You may be able to convince a handful of people close to you to exchange links, whether relevant or not is debatable, as part of your link building strategy.

Google ranks websites that have in excess of 30 000 relevant incoming links. It may seem impossible to gain such a number of authoritative links pointing to your website but the odds are in your favour if you implement a simple yet effective web strategy.

Based on content creation that you already have or that can be constructed for you and distributing it to the correct channels and automatically building links pointing back to your website.

Tied in with your content strategy, link building will boost your position in Google.

For as long as marketing and advertising has been the driving force behind big business, smaller companies have tried copying their marketing strategies with results that are less than desirable. This results in the general opinion among small business owners that marketing is expensive and does little to generate business.

These general options are true. So true in fact that the majority of small business owners have become so jaded by their own marketing activities that they have chosen not to market their business. Other business owners have heard stories of failed marketing attempts and they too shy away from actively growing their business.

Why?

Everything you know about marketing is wrong! That’s why!

How can I say that everything you know about marketing is wrong? Look around, look at the marketing you see every day. We are bombarded by TV commercials, radio adverts, billboards and print advertising and as a result this is how we have now learnt to market our businesses. This could not be further from the truth as to how we should be marketing our business.

The type of marketing we have become accustomed to has its origins in the 1950’s. This was before TV had been launched in South Africa and the two largest advertising mediums were radio and print, although nowhere near as competitive or costly as it is today. The 1950’s is known as the era of the brand builders. Brand building worked off a simple formula adopted by advertising agencies, used even in today’s era of marketing and advertising. This formula is so simple and yet out of reach to smaller businesses as the cost escalates in to the millions. The brand building formula, ‘C&R’ is how they base all their advertising and marketing expertise. C&R translated into laymen’s terms is Creativity and Repetition Advertising. Simply put, develop a creative catchy advert and repeat it so many times that it sticks. Almost like throwing mud onto a wall. If it is dirty enough some will remain behind and leave a lasting impression.

It is frightening how many millions this type of advertising can amount to, keep in mind that advertising is only one element of the vast array of guerrilla marketing tactics at our disposable. Here is a brief example. A number of years ago I was involved with a large corporate advert in the motor security environment. They commissioned a budget of R3 500 000 for the production of their advert. The ad was cute and portrayed the essence of the company and the service provided to the public. Excluded in that hefty production bill was airtime fee across the variety of TV channels in SA. This amounted to a whopping R4 000 000, which delivered three months of airtime. The company then ran short of budget for the second half of the year and decided to rebroadcast the same advert for another R4 000 000, with far less effect. In total R 11 500 000 was spent on the ad campaign and not one sale could be tracked from the ad campaign.

Can you see how you have been trained to believe that TV, Radio and Print adverts are the way to market your business? As a small business you can market yourself for far less and generate generous results.

Jay Conrad Levinson coined the term Guerrilla Marketing in 1984. He is known as the father of Guerrilla Marketing and is considered a pioneer with his take-no-prisoners approach to marketing for the small and medium-size business owner. Jay has authored and co-authored over 35 books, selling more than 20 million copies worldwide. His skills and marketing tactic have become part of the curriculum in many universities worldwide as they recognise that the standards of marketing have changed.

Adopting Guerrilla Marketing Tactics into your business is key to growing your business at an affordable marketing budget. There are over 100 marketing weapons, according to Jay, that should be considered when planning a marketing activity in your business. One of which is database marketing, using technology as a delivery vehicle.

Before any marketing takes place you need to establish the type of business you are in. You may be a service provider, you may sell products, you may be in manufacturing, hairdressing, plumbing or retail. Which ever it may be, know that your primary business is marketing: marketing your products and services. Marketing is one of the only two activities that drives revenue, the other being sales.

The aim of Guerrilla Marketing is primarily to explore the untapped assets within your business. Those assets are your marketable entities that can and should be used to expose the benefits of doing business with you.

Of the 100 Guerrilla Marketing tactics, around 60 will cost nothing to implement into your daily marketing activities. These can be used in their simplest form, and stem from what is known as the ‘inner reality’ of the business.

The ‘inner reality’ of your business is everything you and your business stand for. This could be the based on service excellence, owner and staff expertise, your guarantee (also known as risk reversal), time in business and other elements that make you stand out from the crowed of competitors.

Taking what we now know from your ‘inner reality’ and matching it to the ‘outer perception’, the experiences and opinions your clients have of your business, is the basis for the development of your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Your USP becomes your superior promise to your clients and prospects of that which they will experience with your business based on other clients’ experiences as well as the ethos of your company.

Once your USP has been well constructed and implemented throughout all communication channels, the competition your audience faces is narrowed as they realise that you must be the obvious choice to do business with based on the superior promise you offer. You must be able to back up your USP with testimonials and references that have been blown away by your offer and service. There you have a number of Guerrilla Marketing tactics in place: testimonials, references and a compelling USP.

One of the most obvious Guerrilla Marketing tactic is known as phone demeanour. This baffles most business owners yet is so simple to implement and get right. Your telephone is the first port of call to your business and so often the people operating the switchboard perform so poorly that every caller must wonder why they have called in the first place. Make sure that every telephonic communication presents the best possible experience for the client. This goes for your voice mail as well as leaving messages on other peoples’ answering machines.

One of the most obvious Guerrilla Marketing tactics, which is usually underutilised, is your business card. Many business cards deliver the least amount of detail, which should be considered a waste of paper and print. Your card should inspire and motivate the prospect to take some kind of action. Next time you are at a networking event presenting your business take a good look at the variety of business cards you receive and separate cards those that move you from those that are not grabbing your interest. Then decide what needs to change on your card. Picture your card as a mini portable billboard that advertises your company.

Spot the other guerrilla activity? That’s right, networking. There are obviously the good and the not so good networking events. Choose those that relate closest to your industry and learn the dynamics of effective networking. This will help to grow your list of potential buyers and even suppliers. Keep in mind that there are always sellers at networking events and very few buyers. This is however, a very good way to initiate relationships for future marketing.

That brings us to another guerrilla marketing activity, relationship marketing. People like to buy from people they like and trust. The fact that they entrust their hard-earned cash into your offer means that some kind of working relationship needs to be established to ease the risk of the business transaction. There are many relationship tools available to small business owners that ‘automate’ the relationship process. These tie into other tactics such as email and digital marketing.

Guerrilla Marketing is everything you do, from the way you answer your phone to your dress code and appearance. It is any contact you have, or anyone representing you, with anybody or company.

Your marketing should start and have no end; it needs to been seen as a circle of events that continue year in and year out. These events should be structured on your Guerrilla Marketing calendar for easy reference and measurement. Every marketing campaign should be structured around your marketing plan. Jay developed the seven sentence-marketing plan which delivers direction and accountability to your marketing efforts. This plan outlines the promotion, benefits, audience and budget of every campaign. Following these basic fundamentals of small business marketing will help your company generate sales and profits without spending unnecessary money on advertising.

If you want to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing call Darryl Now for a free, no-obligation exploratory session!
This session will help you put the right message in the right sequence to increase the responsiveness to your marketing efforts.

Darryl Comley-White

For the past 8 years Darryl and his team at Market Magnet Consulting has helped hundreds of businesses and individuals grow their bottom line profits without spending unnecessary money on advertising. www.marketmagnet.co.za

Is there really any value in developing a brand and keeping the identity of the brand continuous? Truthfully, well yes and no…

At a marketing seminar I was hosting a couple of months back a couple of question kept presenting themselves from the audience: What about branding?  How do I expose my brand? Although the answers to these questions may be obvious to some, rocket science to others – vitally important nonetheless, I opted for the safe answer and returned the question: how important is your brand to you?

The majority of the audience nodded and muttered in agreement that it is very important. As true as this is, many business owners miss the point of branding and so I proceeded with a story.

I was previously involved in the music industry where all the artists have is a name and talent to keep them in the lime light.  On more than one occasion I recall sitting with artists in the recording studio as they tried to find a name that was cool, hip and happening. You can imagine the obscurities that came out of those late night sessions, far too many creative minds in a small recording studio and so many crazy ideas. As I was on my way home for the night I profoundly said, “a name means nothing until its famous..” and then left the band in a stunned silence.

Since then every consultation I have with clients wanting to rebrand their company I reiterate those same ‘wise’ words.

A name means nothing until its famous.

This becomes clear when you understand the three elements of brand architecture: monolithic, where the company name is used on all products and services; endorsed, where all sub-brands are linked to the corporate brand by either verbal or written endorsement; and free standing, where the corporate brand operates as a holding company and each product or service is branded to the specific target market.

Relating your business to the brand architecture of which most small business will be classified monolithic, due to the structure and nature of the business, it becomes clear to whom your name (brand) should be famous.

You only need to be famous to those who need your products and services – In other words, your target market as well as your clients and prospects. Exposing your brand any further to a mass market is largely untargeted and usually very costly.

To make a small business brand powerful there are a number of big business brand rules you need to follow.

Firstly your company’s name. What’s in a name?
So many business owners name their business after something that is meaningful to them and miss the opportunity to concisely describe their offer in their name, their corporate identifier. Those most guilty are professional services like attorneys and accountants. With very little creative input they call themselves names like: Johnston and Associates, for all we know they could be a group of plumbers or brick layers.

Consider the name of your business. Is it fully descriptive of your core activity? If it is not you need to consider adopting a brand identity statement. The brand identity statement (BIS) is a short phrase that explicitly describes your offer. Some may confuse a BIS with a slogan. A slogan is usually creative and catchy whereas a BIS is to the point like Marketing Consultant, Web strategist, Pool services etc…

Brand continuity is the next important element. Coming up an attractive name, designing a creative logo and brand identity statement becomes very powerful to those that think you are famous. Your clients are your fans. Your deliverables build brand credibility and trust. You know the saying ‘ people like to do business with people they like’, once a client or prospect recognises your brand as being trustworthy and credible, engaging in a business relationship is far easier. To keep your brand continuous make sure that all marketing collateral and stationery present your brand clearly.

Many large businesses have under their employ a brand custodian that is tasked with the protection of the brand across most mediums from print to television and radio. The boundaries and limitations are often so strict that the logo and any other identifying content require certain perimeter spacing that must remain neutral. This is to protect the integrity of the brand.

Keeping in mind that most large corporations pay millions of Rands in research to develop their brands they need to ensure its integrity. Small businesses can learn from our bigger counterparts. Protect your brand as you are famous to those who know you and you will become a brand to those that will come to know you.

Darryl Comley-White

For the past 8 years the team at Market Magnet Consulting has helped hundreds of businesses and individuals grow their bottom line profits without spending unnecessary money on advertising.

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So often I hear the question, ‘when should I be marketing my business?’

Well truthfully its never too late or too early to be marketing your business. Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of guerrilla marketing describes the activity of your marketing as a circle that has a beginning and no end. He says that if you see your marketing as a line that has a start and has an end, that end may be in the courts of bankruptcy.

So the answer to the question is that your marketing should start as soon as possible and continue for the duration of your business, which would be a very long time if you keep marketing strategically.

There is a catch though.

Very often, many businesses are not yet ‘ready’ to market. This is not necessarily in the case of new businesses or start-ups. These new businesses are usually better prepared to market than businesses that have been around for a while.

I believe that this is why‚
Younger businesses are normally on fire! They present a certain type of gusto that, although not as directed, motivated them to push forward hard with the energy of a steam train. On the other hand businesses that have been trading for a while have become complacent and even jaded by not only their marketing efforts but by their inner reality. This means that there is often internal conflict that prevents them from actively and enthusiastically perusing marketing activities.

The younger businesses run out blindly booking expos and printing pamphlets and start marketing without a strategic plan. The older businesses have done the same. This usually has a positive or negative result. Either propelling the business to a semi stable position where they may settle and become a complacent entity or the marketing efforts fail and they cease to exist.

Even if you don’t have a marketing plan or the budget to have one drawn up for you keep this in mind:
Your marketing is the building blocks of your business. It sets the tone for the future of your dreams. Your marketing efforts need to reach the right audience at the right time and with the right frequency.

Market Magnet Consulting implements the 8 pillars of marketing that will help your business build the marketing momentum you need to succeed.

Space is limited in order to give your business the focus needed to grow strategically.

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