All posts with the tag 'eMarketing'

Patience Is A Virtue – And A Good Rule For Web Seminar Marketing

One of my clients has a web seminar scheduled for October 6th.  An emailing was sent to their prospect list yesterday, and as of this morning 80 people have registered for their webinar. Based on prior monthly webinars, I’d estimate that they will have in excess of 150 executive level registrants by their web seminar date next week. Why is this small business client successful with their webinar marketing program when others may fail?

  1. The web seminars are educational – they do not try to sell their services
  2. The topics are current business topics, related to their vertical industry expertise
  3. The guest speakers are subject matter experts, expounding on a variety of challenging issues germane to the target prospect executives

Of course their first few web seminars didn’t attract nearly as many registrants. Over time, however, they have established a strong following. Today, when they reach out to their prospective clients, their name is known, they are respected as a thought leader in their industry and they are able to readily book web meetings and on-site appointments with these prospective clients.

Beyond the messaging, selecting great topics, finding knowledgeable speakers, and respecting email best practices, this small business has exercised patience, taking a long term approach to winning over their prospects. For products, services or solutions that result in revenues of $10,000, $50,000 or $100,000 or more, this is a great approach. Patience is a virtue and seemingly an important aspect of web seminar marketing too.

For more information on web marketing topics, read Your Virtual Success: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014

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Posted in business, emerging business, Insurance Agency Leads, Insurance Agency Marketing, Insurance Agency Webinars, Virtual Business | Leave a Comment »

It’s All About Your Close Ratio

Do you track the ratios of your prospects to presentations to proposals to closes? These simple ratios can offer tremendous insights into the health of your sales and marketing engine. Further, they can elucidate specific challenges in your business. For example, let’s say that you offer monthly web seminars which result in 100 registrants per month. Of these 100 registrants, 10 move further down your sales funnel (see blog entry called The Prospect Scorecard) and result in individual presentations (10%). Of these 10 presentations, five request proposals (50% of presentations or 5% of webinar registrants), and are deemed “proposal worthy” through your well defined Prospect Scorecard or other measuring system which your company has in place. Lastly, of these five proposals, two close, or 40% of proposals or 2% of the original 100 webinar registrants.

Now that you’ve established your ratios, are you happy with them? If you are, then you may want to increase webinar registrants, allowing more prospects to cascade down through your funnel. Or, perhaps you think that a 10% conversion rate from webinar registrants to individualized presentations is too low. You would then need to determine what should be done to influence that metric. For example, perhaps your webinars need a more compelling call to action, a special offer to move to an individualized presentation, or you could make it easier for the prospect to meet with you by offering an abbreviated one to one web meeting or conference call. There are actually many things you could try to refine your ratios, of course you have to have these in place to do so.

Your company now has simple and easily measurable metrics for your sales process. Extending these measurements to your marketing engine, in this particular case, can be as simple as measuring where webinar registrants arrived from (LinkedIn or other Social Network, ePublishing, eMail Marketing, Referral, etc.) and then tracking the resulting prospects through the sales funnel mentioned above. Many small businesses fail to measure these key metrics, which is really very simple to accomplish. We track all of these for our own sales and marketing efforts at StartUpSelling, Inc. You can read more about this on our website, or in my recently released book, Your Virtual Success: www.yourvirtualsuccess.net.

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Posted in business, emerging business, Entrepeneurship, Insurance Agency Marketing, Insurance Agency Webinars, Virtual Business | Leave a Comment »

A Small Business Marketing Plan for the Web Centric Marketing Era

Small Business Marketing Plan, Insurance Agency Marketing Plan

Small Business Marketing Plan, Insurance Agency Marketing Plan

What type of marketing plan does your small business create each year? Is it a comprehensive and detailed plan that is 10 or 20 pages long or a more concise one to five pages? Is it part of an annual business plan or a five year strategic plan? Companies approach business planning, budgeting and marketing from a wide variety of perspectives.  For the purposes of this article, we’re going to drill down to a marketing specific plan, then further to a web centric B2B lead generation plan.

There are many marketing related activities which fall under a small business marketing plan umbrella. Some of these (listed alphabetically) include:

  • Association Memberships (Chamber of Commerce, etc.)
  • Blogging
  • Brochures
  • Client Testimonials
  • Club Memberships (Golf, Tennis, Other)
  • Direct Mail
  • eBrochures
  • eMarketing
  • ePublishing
  • Events (for both clients and prospects)
  • Networking Organizations
  • Newsletter
  • On-site Seminars
  • Pay Per Click (Google PPC Campaigns)
  • PR and Client Testimonial Creation
  • Promotional Items
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn)
  • Telemarketing
  • Trade Shows
  • Traditional Advertising (Magazines, Yellow Pages, Radio, TV)
  • Web Seminars
  • Website
  • White Papers

That’s already a long list, and we’re just getting started. Small businesses can’t tackle all of the activities above, in fact, they should only focus on a few of these each year, and many would agree that they should focus on lead generation oriented activities which will help keep their pipelines full and active. Let’s review some of the better lead generation activities from the list above:

  • Direct Mail
  • eMarketing
  • Pay Per Click (Google PPC Campaigns)
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn)
  • Telemarketing
  • Traditional Advertising (Magazines, Yellow Pages, Radio, TV)
  • Web Seminars
  • Website

Granted, networking oriented activities can generate leads, though these should be pursued in the normal course of business in a manner most comfortable to the individual salesperson. Thus we are focusing on quantitatively oriented (easily repeatable and highly measurable) lead generation activities. This list is more manageable, but still needs to be culled to ensure proper focus on the respective lead generation activity.  A decade ago, traditional advertising, telemarketing and direct mail might have been the preferred path for most businesses. Today, only one of those activities should remain on our list, and as you will see below, the remaining items are all web marketing centric.

  • eMarketing/Web Seminars
  • Pay Per Click (Google PPC Campaigns)
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Blogging, ePublising
  • Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn)
  • Telemarketing (for smaller profile prospects)
  • Website

Our small business marketing list has now been culled to a manageable level. You may have noticed that eMarketing has been paired with web seminars. This is because many small business marketing experts find a higher B2B response rate to eMarketing initiatives when leveraging educationally oriented webinars as the primary call to action. SEO, search engine optimization for Small businesses, results in the organic display of your business website at the top of the search engine rankings (Google, Bing or Yahoo search engine results). You probably noticed that this is now bundled with blogging and ePublishing, since those elements are often necessary to achieve page one search engine results. Organic SEO is a gift that keeps on giving; it does not require fees every time a prospect clicks on your name. PPC, or Pay Per Click ads, appear at the top and side of the Google results, and require that your business pays anywhere from $1 to $5 per click, depending upon the competitiveness of the search term. My recommendations for a B2B lead generation, web centric plan often focuses on the following:

  • eMarketing/Web Seminars
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Blogging, ePublising
  • Social Media Marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn)
  • Website

This is a manageable list for almost any business, and a cost effective outsource if the business lacks the internal expertise to accomplish these tasks.  A professional up to date website is essential for any small business. The website should be optimized for your specific keywords (benefits, workers comp, truck insurance, etc.). Your small business SEO initiative may need to be regionalized or localized (workers compensation Massachusetts).  Social media marketing, a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is fast and easy for most businesses, a full blown social media initiative would require a greater investment of time (creating and managing a group, offering content, responding to discussion groups, etc.). Blogging and ePublishing are essential and extremely helpful for most businesses. Fortunately businesses can often leverage their blog content and publish it in well known, online article directories. Lastly, a successful eMarketing and Web Seminar campaign can often yield the best results for small businesses. An ideal series might have 5,000 0r 10,000 targeted prospect emails combined with a monthly webinar. Be wary of email list brokers advertising inexpensive email lists. We’ve seen business lists where the first and last names are merged into one field and many of the emails are info@ or sales@ type emails, a definite problem when it comes to professional eMarketing. EMarketing is both an art and a science, businesses must ensure it is done properly, professionally and obey the CAN-SPAM act.

Web centric small business marketing is now a critical foundation for any small business wishing to grow, your business should be well on the way to implementing these initiatives. That said, don’t attempt to do too many activities at one time, you’re better off doing a few marketing activities really well than accomplishing a dozen in a haphazard manner.

For more information on small business marketing read Your Virtual Success: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014

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Are the days of B2B cold calling/telemarketing over?

My answer to this question is, “it depends on the industry and prospect profile”. Telemarketing (or cold calling) can be very effective when properly approached and applied to a specific niche and B2B target profile. There are many newer methods of marketing  B2B products and services, but  highly targeted, niche cold calling can still prove effective for your B2B business. Ultimately, however, the days of cold calling will come to a close as eMarketing, Social Media Marketing, ePublishing and other web centric methods prove to be more effective and less expensive. But today, cold calling or outsourced B2B telemarketing can still be highly effective for certain niches and prospect profiles.

For example, one of our clients is a truck insurance agency located in the southeastern U.S. This insurance agency focuses on smaller trucking firms with 2 to 50 trucks, though most of their prospects fall within the 2 to 15 truck range.  We currently provide them with an average of 6 appointments per week in only 10 hours of calling per week. We have seen the scenario repeatedly for transportation insurance agencies targeting smaller profile trucking companies, and, we’ve seen it for B2B clients which focus on a vertical niche, everything from sales consulting, to CPA firms, from training companies to cloud computing software solutions.

Though our preferred approach revolves around a fully integrated, comprehensive and web centric approach to marketing, we have found consistently high yield results for these vertically oriented companies, which have seen returns anywhere from 2X to 10X on their telemarketing investment. Cold calling can also be done on a tailored basis by sales people, calling high in their targeted prospect accounts, which combined with a personalized email can yield effective results. We describe the difference between salespeople’s cold calling and telemarketing from a numbers perspective. Our appointment setters are expected to yield about 25 calls per hour, documenting changes in position, direct phone number and of course delivering pitches along the way. This means that in 60 hours of calling per month, the phone is dialed about 1500 times, or 18,000 times per year when fully extrapolated. Sales professionals time is much better spent on other activities, they do not have the time or patience to deliver this volume. Obviously, telemarketing is not just about volume: a well defined and consistently refined script is essential, resulting in an appointment every two hours, which is subsequently very worthwhile to the salesperson, CPA, small business owner or producer (using insurance agency jargon).

Thus, in our opinion, though the days of telemarketing are dwindling for many B2B companies and industries, there are still instances where it is highly cost effective, if done professionally and properly, where high quality B2B telemarketing can yield cost effective results.

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Posted in business, Entrepeneurship, Insurance Agency Leads, Insurance Agency Marketing, Insurance Agency Webinars | Leave a Comment »

Should Smaller Agencies Focus on Marketing Plans or Lead Generation Plans?

Is there a difference for small agencies when it comes to a marketing plan vs. a lead gen plan? How much should a small agency invest in marketing vs. lead generation, and which is more effective? Does your agency allocate a percentage of revenues to determine marketing spend each year? Do you have a formal budget or no budget at all? Do you create a formal marketing plan with measurable goals, and if so, what aspect of this plan is allocated toward lead generation? Or are you of the philosophy that it’s the producers’ job to dig up leads, after all, that’s why you pay them commission in the first place.

The answers to these questions can vary greatly by size of agency and type of agency, but here’s my perspective on smaller agencies, which I’ll identify as $5 Million in revenues and below. Most of these types of agencies have limited budget and bandwidth, and many don’t have a VP of Marketing (or a dedicated marketing person of any type). Some of these agencies create a formal marketing plan at the end of each year, and create a budget to accomplish their goals. For example, a $4 Million agency may allocate 1% to 10% of their revenues for marketing, representing a range from $40,000 to $400,000 (these numbers are all over the board with some agencies allocating almost nothing and others allocating more than 10%). This money is likely to be allocated across many purposes. Some of the marketing activities which agency CEO’s recently mentioned include:

  • On site seminars for clients and prospects
  • Event sponsorships
  • Club memberships
  • Telemarketing (in house and outsourced)
  • Association sponsorships
  • Branding and design projects
  • Trade shows
  • Updated Website
  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
  • eMarketing & Web Seminars
  • Social Media
  • Newsletter
  • Blogging & ePublishing
  • Printed materials

Is there a logical order for all of the above “marketing initiatives”? How can a agency determine the relative importance of each of these? Should the typical small agency focus on an overall marketing strategy or a lead generation specific strategy? For small agencies I typically recommend a one page marketing plan, and that this marketing plan should be lead generation centric. Small agencies need to be able to change direction quickly, they need to be fleet footed and outmaneuver competition, including much larger organizations with bigger budgets and greater resources. Thus, a marketing plan created in the 4th quarter of last year, may need to be changed in the 2nd quarter of this year. The best way to do this is a one page, bulleted marketing plan. For example:

  • Build targeted 3,000 prospect list with emails
  • Invite prospects to a monthly webinar with a goal of 30 registrants
  • Sales team to call all multiple opens and click throughs, registrants and attendees
  • Meet with 12 prospects per month from this lead gen effort, proposals to 4 and close 2
  • Cost for this program over 12 months: Approximately $25,000

Your marketing plan may continue on with a revised website and SEO project:

  • Update look & feel of website
  • Create Blog and integrate into website
  • LinkedIn, Facebook and Social Media Profiles
  • Refine SEO (Search Engine Optimization – your agency is organically listed at the top ff Google, Bing & Yahoo rankings)
  • Post articles in online article directories (ePublish)
  • Cost for this program over 3 months: Approximately $6,000

You may add a telemarketing project as a standalone, or to supplement the activities above:

  • 10 hours of calls per week yielding 225 outbound calls
  • 4 appointment quality leads per week
  • 2 appointments that move to quotations
  • 1 close on average per week
  • Cost for this program over 12 months: Approximately $24,000

If all of the marketing activities above were accomplished in a period of one year, perhaps your agency allocated $55,000 toward lead generation centric marketing.  If your agency is $4 Million in revenues, the lead generation plan above represents about 1.5% of your revenues. It’s important to measure the revenue generated by this investment. This can be done easily on a simple spreadsheet, comparing opportunities with closes. Ultimately you will be able to create a sales funnel with ratios including: Suspects, prospects, meetings, quotations, closes.

Leveraged in conjunction with a strong referral oriented lead generation program, this type of marketing is often the most effective for smaller agencies. If agencies decide to outsource this type of marketing, it’s easy to change direction quickly, moving from telemarketing to web seminar marketing for example. With limited funds and resources available, agencies need to make every marketing dollar count, and it’s important to have a simple and malleable marketing plan to help grow your premiums.

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Posted in business, emerging business, Entrepeneurship, Insurance Agency Leads, Insurance Agency Marketing, Insurance Agency Webinars | Leave a Comment »

If Someone Hands You a Scalpel, It Doesn’t Make You a Surgeon – You Should Think of Web Marketing in the Same Way

There are many powerful marketing tools now available, everything from eMarketing engines and Search Engine Optimization Tools to ePublishing and Web Seminar Software.  Any of these tools can be very helpful to your business, but placed in the wrong hands, they can be extremely dangerous. Not long ago, a CEO mentioned to me that they were sending out tens of thousands of emails through their eMarketing “platform” and they could do so very inexpensively. Their platform (let’s call it an integrated web site and eMarketing system) could send out as many emails as they wanted. Their provider suggested they contact some email list brokers where they could buy tens of thousands of emails.  They even had some sample emails from other companies they could use.

Unfortunately, their email “blasts” of tens of thousands of emails, purchased from a list broker, resulted in no response. Literally, nobody responded to their offer. This is a good example of placing the aforementioned scalpel in the hands of a layperson. Placing this type of technology in the hands of untrained individuals is a recipe for failure, regardless of the ease of use of the application. This example is laden with huge issues:

  1. The email list they purchased looked like a low quality list, with first name, middle initial and last name all merged into one field, resulting in problematic personalization.
  2. The company was trying to “sell” something in their email – always try to educate or enlighten
  3. The email was graphically rich (a definite issue for many spam filters)
  4. Large scale email blasts often result in your prospects blocking your email address or in some cases your domain.
  5. They already burned their first opportunity to make a positive impression with all of these potential prospects

So before you hit the button and blast out 10,000 or 20,000 emails, and before you decide to run some of your own webinars:

  • Carefully study emails which you receive and like – why are they good – why did you open it
  • Attend webinars which sound interesting and relevant to you – how long are they – did you stay
  • Read a book about these new web marketing topics – read a few
  • Seek advice and guidance from experts in the field – surgeons get training and so should you

Make your web marketing operation safe and successful by combining advanced tools with knowledge and training to ensure the health of your program initiatives.

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Webinar Tomorrow: Blogging, Social Media and SEO for Lead Generation & Growth

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing for B2B Lead Generation

A brief, complimentary web seminar on Blogging, Social Media and SEO – New Marketing Tools for Lead Generation & Growth is open to registrants. We will review the new rules which apply to marketing and why sooner is better when it comes to social media marketing. Topics include SEO, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ePublishing, Blogging andsocial media marketing – live presentation of the Ezine dashboard and content centric approach to marketing.

* Blogging for Leads
* ePublishing or Blogging – which is better and why?
* Search Engine Optimization – SEO or PPC
* Should my company Link, Friend or Tweet?
* Social Media Marketing or eMarketing for your business

June 17th at Noon ET: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/864983264

For more information: info@startupselling.com

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Office Buildings Are Obsolete and Offshore Drilling is the Result

Your Virtual Success - virtual sales, marketing and business - photo from Flickr

Office Buildings Are Obsolete - "GoVirtual, Baby, Go Virtual"

These days, office buildings simply seem like an outdated concept, a horse drawn carriage in the age of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner jet, a stereo turntable in an iPod era. Of course towering skyscrapers and massive office buildings composed of brick and mortar, conference rooms and cubicles made sense at one time, but with the advent of pervasive internet connectivity and virtual meeting tools, these office buildings are rapidly becoming obsolete, resulting in unfortunate collateral damage like massive oil and gas consumption, unnecessary expense and wasted productivity. Office buildings, though seemingly innocuous, are one of the key catalysts causing us to use 350 million gallons of gas per day, and waste millions of hours of valuable time and productivity. Does is make sense for millions of white collar workers to spend an hour commuting into a city, searching for parking, scurrying across crowded streets to then spend 99 percent of their time working from their PC, talking on the phone, and communicating through email and on-line Web meetings?

Reducing the national commute is no longer a want; it is a clearly defined need as is evident by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling a mile down under the ocean illustrates the extreme lengths we as a society are willing to go to fuel our need for oil and gas. Why do we need so much oil, and why are we importing over 60% of the oil we need? Figures vary, but some, including the NRDC, estimate that passenger cars use up “40 percent of the oil consumed in America”. Many organizations are calling for improved fuel consumption, smaller cars, hybrid vehicles and carpooling. But I look at these suggestions, albeit good ones, as treating the symptoms but not the disease. We could easily cut passenger car fuel consumption in half (or perhaps by as much a 75%), if companies adopted a virtual approach to business, abandoning the tiring and tedious commute and embracing a home office based, internet model.

According to Wikipedia, “Estimates suggest that over 50 million U.S. workers (about 40% of the working population) could work from home at least part of the time yet, in 2008, only 2.5 million employees (not including the self-employed) considered home their primary place of business.” Yes, there are millions of telecommuters and home office based businesses now operating out of their respective homes, but this could and should be increased tenfold.

There are three major factors which need to be addressed to foster a dramatic increase the numbers of home based workers.

1. A new management style will need to be embraced by companies; management needs to be focus on results and not on the close daily supervision and behaviors of individual employees.

2. Workers need to learn how to work from home and get comfortable with the home based office concept.

3. A shift in tools toward cloud computing and away from traditional enterprise applications may be required.

Of these three factors, the first two represent a change management paradigm shift which as we all know can be very challenging and time consuming. The latter is a technology shift, more readily and rapidly addressable, almost everything this writer does is now cloud computing based. My days are now comprised of a handful of Skype calls, several web meetings, eMarketing, SEO (search engine optimization), website makeovers, blogging and Social Media Marketing and Networking, all done in the internet cloud.

Are office buildings and all they represent the underlying cause for the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico? Can we rapidly curb our appetite for oil by adopting a virtual approach to business and commuting? Will the echoes of the Michael Steele and Sarah Palin slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill” someday change to “Go Virtual, Baby, Go Virtual”? I think virtual business and management will be an evolution rather than a revolution, behavioral change lags technological change. This change, however, is happening and it is a change for the better, a more eco-friendly and lifestyle friendly model, and certainly a change for increased productivity and decreased fuel consumption. As this evolution unfolds, what will happen to all those office buildings? I believe they will simply be repurposed, whether they morph to condos, research facilities and light industrial (yes there will still be jobs which require onsite venues), warehouse space, and community, athletic or recreational facilities. Or perhaps they will slowly evolve to some purpose beyond our current scope of understanding or speculation. Regardless of what shall happen to these office building obelisks, encompassing both impressive and generic icons of an anachronistic business model, I think many would agree that it seems like an inherently bad idea to continue to foster a commuter centric model which requires millions of white collar workers to burn oil, time and money in this virtual age.

OK, I’ll say it, “Go Virtual, Baby, Go Virtual”.

For more information, read Your Virtual Success (Career Press), available at Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble or Indie bookstores (or online). Or go to one of my websites: http://www.yourvirtualsuccess.net, http://www.startupselling.com. Has your company, agency, or professional services firm started the transition to a more efficient and productive virtual sales, virtual marketing or virtual business model?

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Tuesday’s Mail – Should Your Tax Dollars Subsidize Direct Mail?

We certainly like our mailman who faithfully delivers our mail, or to be politically correct perhaps we should say mail person or postal worker. Yet on most days, we should simply say why is he coming at all? Though we do receive physical checks each week, these could be delivered twice a week, or we could simply ask clients to pay via PayPal or online transfer. On occasion we receive a letter from a friend, but 99% of the time friend and family communications is now provided through email or social networking. My children’s grandparents, as they near 80 years old, have now moved to email as their primary method of communication.

Last Tuesday, our diligent and timely mail person delivered 11 mail items to our house. All of them were solicitations of one type or another including (see photo): Asian Food, Pool Supplies, Electronics, Cosmetics, Replacement Windows, Credit Card Offer, Window & Gutter Cleaning, University Fund Raising, Household Items, Religious Fund Raising and a Technical School Brochure.  All of this went into the recycling bucket, with the exception of the 20% household item coupon my wife might use. Of course, this store already has our email and could have emailed us the coupon. The University fundraising mailer makes no sense to me, as they have my email and my phone number, and email and call frequently. Even the window replacement vendor has our email as we had conversed in the past.

Don’t get me wrong, I respect the right of these companies to market their products and services, I just don’t think we should subsidize it, or expend time, money and gas to deliver it. Candidly, I’d like to see less trees, energy, cost and waste that is associated with the creation and delivery of paper in general. Direct mail, now known as snail mail, is an anachronism, a phonograph type solution in an iPod age. The post office, which has been running losses of over $1.5 Billion per quarter, recently offered the following statements in their 10-Q quarterly report.

  • “The recent losses are primarily attributable to unprecedented declines in mail volumes that began in 2008.”
  • “The Postal Service projects debt outstanding at year-end to increase over the September 30, 2009 balance by the maximum allowable $3 billion, to $13.2 billion. The $15 billion debt ceiling will become insufficient in 2011.”

Though taxpayers don’t fund the loss directly, the USPS borrows from the treasury to pay for the deficits. The net result is dollars out of taxpayer pockets. Should Congress move quickly here, after all, $1.5 billion in losses per quarter to deliver direct mail does seem a tad unreasonable? Recently, it was proposed that six day a week mail service should end. This is a ridiculous interim step. Discussions should revolve around reducing deliveries to three days a week, and we should increase the fees to direct mail marketers to encourage companies to offer more electronic marketing. There are now many choices available that are more efficient and environmentally friendly than direct mail: eMail, Social Media Marketing, SEO, and Web Seminar Marketing to mention just a few. All of these alternatives are less oil consumptive and less labor intensive than the “596,000 workers and over 218,000 vehicles” the post office uses according to Wikipedia.  Wikipedia continues on to say, the USPS “is the second-largest civilian employer in the United States (after Wal-Mart) and the operator of the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world.” That’s a lot of brick and mortar infrastructure to deliver my 11 pieces of direct marketing “junk mail”, and I doubt we want to run a $6 Billion annual deficit to accomplish this. Is there still a place for the United States Post Office? I think a scaled down version is still called for, there undoubtedly remains a need to deliver paper based documents which are still necessary and important. With the dramatic increase in virtual solutions, email, social networking and digital documents, perhaps three a day per week postal services is more reasonable and more cost effective. Will this scaled down version result in a dramatic reduction in deficits? One would certainly hope so, but at a minimum, it would result in a dramatic reduction in gas, oil and overhead. Regardless, my credo remains, go virtual, don’t go postal.

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The Top of the Sales Funnel – Who Is Responsible?

The theory of an efficient sales funnel (or pipeline) is simple enough; pouring high quality leads into the top of the selling funnel will result in more closes flowing out the bottom of the funnel. One question, seemingly on the minds of many salespeople, revolves around the top of the funnel, and depending upon the industry or company, some refer to this aspect as the marketing funnel. Let’s review a simple sales funnel for a moment, specifically one which might be applicable to many small companies. A simplistic sales funnel often consists of suspects, prospects, presentations (or meetings), proposals, and ultimately closes (new clients). It’s called a sales funnel because the graphic used to describe this is a funnel, wide at the top (suspects), narrowing at the bottom (closes). The top of the funnel is normally filled with suspects, which are hopefully in profile suspects. Let’s say that there are 1,000 suspects at the top of your B2B (Business To Business) sales funnel. If you are selling to “C Level” executives, these suspects might have titles like CEO, CFO, CTO, CSO and CMO, and predicated upon your company or solution, you might be targeting a vertical or horizontal market. Your target companies might be within a designated target revenue range of say $20 Million to $100 Million dollars, and may be in a geographic region, let’s say the Northeastern US. There are of course many other variables, but let’s stop here for the moment and consider the prior description to be an in profile suspect for your sales funnel. These suspects then need to be culled to find prospects which we’ll define as interested, in profile, suspects.

Who should be responsible to fill the top of the funnel, culling the suspects and finding prospects? Some companies

The theory is simple: Pouring High Quality Suspects into the Top - Results in More Closes at the Bottom

call for that to be done by their salespeople, particularly small companies or bootstrapped companies. This happens at many other types of companies too, particularly those organizations reticent to add marketing dollars to their current sales funding allocation.  Many companies expect their sales team to cold call, network, attend business functions, industry events and community events and send personalized emails to build their own pipeline, and fill the top of the funnel. Most often, this is a probable path to failure, as these new sales people are often unprepared to tackle the changing world of lead generation as it migrates away from cold calling and face to face networking toward eMarketing, Web Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Blogging, SEO and Web Seminar Marketing, to mention just a few of the new tools being utilized today. In other words, sales people often have good sales skills (working the lower portion of the sales funnel), but insufficient skills (or time) to work the top of the sales funnel.

Many salespeople lament that filling the top of their funnel can be an arduous and challenging process. That’s why so many new salespeople fail; they are not savvy marketers and fail to fill up the top of their funnel with good quality suspects, then culling the suspects to identify high quality prospects. Insufficient qualified prospects at the top, invariably means inadequate results at the bottom. Why don’t emerging or small companies invest more in marketing, and why do so many of them resort to traditional cold calling methods? I think there are a few reasons.

  1. If a small company hires a sales representative at a base salary of say $75,000 and is contributing to health benefits, overhead and certain expenses, they are already nearing an investment of $100,000 per year. Adding say $20,000 in marketing lead generation services to this investment seems like it is simply overhead, overkill.
  2. Some “C Level” executives in smaller firms simply don’t believe in marketing. In many segments, particularly laggard industries, many still look at cold calling and personal networking as a pipeline panacea.
  3. Many old school marketing plans and dollars simply focus on local events, traditional seminars and perhaps improving the look and feel of their web site. Web marketing lead generation is something they may not understand or simply don’t want to invest in yet.
  4. Many small companies lack a formal marketing department, have inadequate internal resources or knowledge and are not comfortable outsourcing their marketing. This dearth of expertise creates a marketing void.

There are likely a myriad of other reasons, but the net results are the same, salespeople that don’t have quality leads flowing into the top of the funnel, won’t have sufficient sales flowing from the bottom. The results are easy to predict in that case, with large sales expenses and a lower company return on their sales investment. Remember, if one of three salespeople you hire fails, the overall costs would be much higher that an incremental and supportive lead generation program. The best advice for smaller companies when it comes to hiring new salespeople is as follows. If you’re going to invest in three new salespeople, but not invest in marketing and lead generation services, consider investing in two new salespeople use the savings toward a marketing support, lead generation program specifically for those new salespeople. And what if the budget is only sufficient to hire one new salesperson with nothing left over? Try to convince the new sales hire to consider a lower salary while guaranteeing a lead generation program to “insure” their success – perhaps you could offer increased backend commissions as you both succeed with this new program. Hiring a new salesperson without a lead generation program is like buying a new car, without sufficient funds to pay for gas. You just can’t go very far with that formula.

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