All posts with the tag 'StartUpSelling'

Insurance Agency Marketing – Walking the Walk

We review hundreds of agency websites and discuss marketing with a comparable number of agency executives.Many agencies are now embracing insurance agency marketing and embarking on insurance agency web marketing initiatives. These agencies often seek the help of outsourced marketing organizations, particularly with technical challenges like insurance agency websites, insurance SEO and insurance agency social media marketing.

It can be challenging for insurance agencies to determine where to find quality insurance agency marketing guidance. Self proclaimed experts are often lacking in one or many areas, and it can be challenging for agencies to separate high caliber marketing agencies from weak imitators. We often review insurance agency websites that have been recently completed, only to find that even the most fundamental insurance agency SEO tasks remain uncompleted. We find agencies which have invested in eMarketing tools but have little if any understanding how to use them.

How does your insurance agency differentiate quality insurance agency marekting services from organizations which do not have the necessary expertise, even though they look and sound like they understand insurance agency web marketing? Here are a few tips to better assess those which walk the walk versus talk the talk.

  1. Validate – where’s the beef: Insurance marketing agencies should be able to demonstrate 10 or 20 (or more) insurance agency websites and insurance agency SEO projects that they have completed, look good, have been thoroughly Search Engine Optimized and utilize a professional blog. Remember, if a marketing agency is good at telemarketing, it doesn’t mean they understand the nuances of websites. Check the rankings of the marketing agency’s own site – if their SEO results are weak, and their Alexa ranking is poor (over 1 million globally or 100,000 US for example) they are likely lost, and your agency is unlikely to glean quality website or SEO assistance from them.
  2. Measure – it’s hard to fake the numbers: If you’re interested in an insurance agency eMarketing and webinar program, ask to see content from actual campaigns, and ask for the resulting metrics from those campaigns. An insurance marketing agency that is proficient in these areas should have many examples, going back multiple years.
  3. Content – the pen is mightier than the sword – if you have a good pen: If a marketing firm claims they understand both marketing and your industry, they should be able to answer all your questions by pointing to one of their blogs or ePublished article. If the insurance agency marketing agency is light on content, they are probably light on skills or bandwidth. Review their website, their content, their blogs and ePublished articles, and you’ll get a better sense of their proficiency in the areas which you seek assistance.

Yes, your insurance agency needs current marketing tools and technology to better compete in a highly competitive market. Since it is likely your agency lacks the expertise to accomplish all the necessary insurance agency marketing and insurance agency web marketing tasks, it’s appropriate to seek the assistance of a viable insurance agency marketing agency. That said, do your due diligence, it’s important that the marketing firm you select can deliver quality results, on-time and within budget. It’s all about insurance agency marketing expertise, make sure the firm you select can truly walk the walk. For more information: http://www.startupselling.com/insurance-agency-marketing.html

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Posted in Insurance Agency eMarketing, Insurance Agency Leads, Insurance Agency Marketing, Insurance Agency SEO, Insurance Agency Web Marketing, Insurance Agency Websites | Leave a Comment »

The Prospect Scorecard – A Simple Way for Salespeople and Businesses to Improve Close Ratios, Forecasting and Communication

Great selling starts with great prospect identification and qualification. Salespeople and businesses need to quantify prospects in such a way that they can improve close ratios and pipeline forecasting accuracy. To accomplish this, you need to use something I call a “Prospect Scorecard”. This Prospect Scorecard, combined with a simple but accurate prospect identification method makes it much easier to quantify your current pipeline and thus improve close rates and forecasting accuracy. It can also be used to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing programs, because you can more readily judge (or score) the quality of incoming leads. This technique will work for essentially any company.

It’s easy to create a prospect scorecard (or virtual prospect scorecard if you’re a virtual company or self employed individual). First, start with your top ten criteria for an ideal, in profile client (if you don’t have ten, you can select 5 or 6). Criteria can include items like industry, revenues, growth, target buyer title, specific technology requirements, total employees, solution needs, and other attributes relevant to your ideal prospect. Once you have identified your top ten (or whatever number you select), you can rate them on your scorecard on a scale of 1 to 10, a 10 being your perfect prospect and a 1 not even worthy of discussion. We currently use a 5 point scale on our own scorecard, and our sales agents consider anyone less than a 3 as an unlikely prospect. If they aren’t a 3 or better, they don’t even make it to the pipeline. The scorecard helps salespeople match their prospect against specific and quantifiable criteria selected for your ideal prospect profile, turning the subjective into the objective. They can also compare their current prospects with prior opportunities which were won and lost, and match their current prospects against this historical information. Prospect scorecards are easy to create and useful for almost any type of company.

Once you have created your scorecard criteria, you can simply add ideal buyer attributes, or to simplify the process, a prospect identification acronym. The acronym we use is “BUD”, which stands for Budget, Urgency and Decision maker. If we are speaking with a principal or CEO, and they understand the pricing paradigm, we have a capital “B” and know that the budget will not be an issue. If we are speaking with a marketing manager and they are uncertain, we have a lower case “b”, and they are a less qualified prospect. The same holds true with urgency and decision maker. If we have all three, and the prospect score is a 3 or better, we know they are very likely to become a client.

BUD can be modified for your company. For example, perhaps your prospect identification acronym will be BUNT (Budget, Urgency, Need, and Timing). What’s an example for “Timing”; a new person or organizational change is causing your prospect to rethink their needs and their service provider, thus the timing is a capital “T”. The prospect identification acronym needs to be short and simple, and should include critical qualification elements of your sales cycle. I remember using the scorecard and BUD at a high tech, high growth company about 10 years ago, as we rapidly ramped up our pipeline and sales volume. Salespeople would frequently walk into my office and say, “I have a BUD-qualified prospect.” Or they might ask for help, “can you come to XYZ Company on Thursday, they are a 9 on the scorecard and BUD qualified.” We were all speaking the same language, having turned subjective terms like “good prospect”, “hot prospect” and “well qualified prospect” into quantifiable terms like “a 9” which is “BUD qualified”.  Make this part of your everyday language and weave it into the fabric of your sales culture.

This is a win for both the salespeople and for management, as this simple process makes it easier to communicate, forecast and close. More information is available on The Prospect Scorecard in Your Virtual Success (Career Press): Available at all major bookstores and Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Virtual-Success-Finding-Profitability/dp/1601631014/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275487494&sr=8-1

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The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss – Fact or Fiction

I enjoyed reading the 4-Hour Workweek, it certainly offers an out of the box thinking paradigm. Ferriss takes us on a journey from his 12 hour days as the workaholic owner of a dietary supplement company to a globetrotting life of leisure and a 4-hour workweek. Along the way, Ferris reviews his perspective on the “New Rich (NR)” and “Lifestyle Design (LD)”.

The New Rich abandon the concept of deferred lifestyle enjoyment (retirement) in favor of the creation of luxury lifestyles in the present. Ferris refers to this as Lifestyle Design, meaning people who follow this path enjoy their lives now, not when they turn 65. Ferris offer a “New Deal” for the overworked and underpaid, or even for ultra successful workaholics. He calls his new deal, the “DEAL”. DEAL stands for: Definition (changing the rules of the game), Elimination (killing the notion of time management), Automation (puts the rules of cash flow on autopilot through outsourcing and other innovative means), and Liberation (mini-retirements, mobility and a luxury lifestyle for the New Rich).

Ferris does have a remarkable personal story which includes the author dropping out of Princeton, failed attempts at early entrepreneurship, a stint as an overworked and underpaid technology salesman, and the successful start-up of a dietary supplement company, albeit with the requisite 12 hour work day. Ultimately, however, Ferris escapes to enjoy a virtual, globetrotting, completely mobile lifestyle of the “New Rich”, which leads him on amazing journeys to the Far East, South America and other exotic global venues.

Along the way, according to Ferris, he learns six languages, becomes a professional Tango dancer, hosts a TV show in China, wins a national kickboxing championship, challenges some world champion cage fighters and dabbles in motorcycle racing. If that isn’t enough, he also becomes a Guinness world record holder. The 4-Hour Workweek offers a glimpse into an alternate lifestyle if not alternate reality for many, particularly for those who have fewer attachments and whose lifestyles are in greater need of balance. Ferris offers some truly innovative, out of the box approaches to the nine to five grind.

That said, there are other, more realistic approaches to life improvements available which do not require a family transplant to South America, or rapid dehydration to win a kickboxing championship. Ferriss’s extremely impressive list of accomplishments represented a disconnect for this reader, Ferriss is well beyond “above average” in abilities, he is obviously extremely talented. After all, how many people have the ability to be a cage fighter, Tango dancer and learn six languages, regardless of the extra time a lifestyle shift might afford? And how many families can take off on a sailboat for a one year trip around the world, leaving everything behind, including jobs and health benefits? And how can a family of five for example, run off to Argentina for a year or two to learn Spanish? And lastly, how many of us have a company that is earning $40,000 a month to fund such initiatives? Even with these disconnects, the 4-Hour Workweek is an entertaining, interesting and thought provoking read.

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Small Business Judo – Turning Your Competitor’s Greatest Strengths Into Clearly Defined Weaknesses

Judo is a method of turning an opponent’s strength into a weakness and overcoming their physical advantage by skill rather than sheer strength. You can use something I call Small Business Judo (I sometimes refer to this as Virtual Business Judo) to compete against large and established companies by turning their greatest strengths into clearly defined weaknesses. Don’t try to show greater depth of resources or feign an ability which is not at your command. Don’t try to convince someone that you have a broader product line than an established billion dollar competitor if you only employ five people. But you can easily convince someone that you have great expertise in a focused area or that you’ll be much more responsive than a multibillion dollar corporation.

If you were to take a 40 foot cabin cruiser and place it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, nobody would notice it, and even if you were searching for it, it is unlikely to be found. Yet if we were to take the same 40 foot boat and place it in the middle of a small two acre pond, it would be almost impossible to overlook. Small companies should consider this perspective when seeking market share for their emerging business. Some years ago, while leading the sales and marketing efforts of a small software startup, I decided to focus our sales and marketing efforts on a very small and specific target market, small medical offices with one to four physicians, in New England. We touted our local presence, ease of use and superior support, jabbed at competitors’ large, lumbering size, and critiqued their large scale platforms.

We then practiced Small Business Judo to help convey our competitive advantages. Don’t try to be what you are not. If you’re a small software company, don’t try to look like SAP. If you’re a niche integration firm, don’t try to act like IBM. Instead of fighting an uphill battle attempting to show you are superior in every way to an established competitor, take a boutique approach, leveraging their perceived strengths against them, and turning their superior size and marketing muscle into a weakness. Convey a responsive, flexible, expertise-oriented image by saying for example:

• We’re a much more responsive company because of our size
• Because we are a boutique, everyone who works here is an expert
• Your account will be working with our most senior people; there are no junior people at our firm.
• Our product is newer, taking advantage of current tools and technologies
• We don’t outsource your support calls offshore, when you call for support you deal directly with us
• We’re better because we specialize in this one specific area
• You’ll have direct access to our senior most executives
• It is much easier for us to accommodate your suggestions because we’re not trying to service 5,000 clients
• We’ll make you feel like our number one client

These types of statements attack your competitor’s strengths by turning them into weaknesses. You can leverage your modest size and resources as an advantage. Words like flexible, responsive, important, expert, focus, boutique, current and leading edge can make your startup sound like a winner. Imagine the small, swift ship that can change course at the slightest touch of the rudder, while the competitor’s battleship sails on another mile before beginning her turn. Think about the maneuverability of a Ferrari when compared to an eighteen-wheeler, or a jet ski compared to a yacht. Another great example of Small Business Judo can be used when you are competing with a firm that has a large account base and has been around a long time. Let’s say their solution has 1,000 customers installed and yours only has ten, and their solution has been in use for over a decade, whereas yours has only been in use for two years. You could say:

• Our system was written from the ground up two years ago and takes advantage of all the newer technologies
• Because our system is more recently developed it is more compatible than the older systems
• Our code is newer and more efficient than the competition
• We’re more focused than the older traditional companies because of our size and expertise in your specific market
• We’re more responsive because we’re not trying to service 5,000 clients
• We’ll make you feel like you’re our number one client (say it twice!)

With some practice and a good understanding of both your competitive advantages and your competitor’s weaknesses, you can leverage Small Business Judo to outmaneuver, out position and outsell much larger and more established companies. Today, the size of the company is not the most important factor; it’s the stability, viability and capability of delivering quality results at a great value. If someone is trying to leverage their size against your small or virtual business, just remember to mention Enron, General Motors, Washington Mutual, WorldCom, Conseco and Lehman Brothers, all monster size organizations that filed for bankruptcy. Today, small is good, and virtual is even better.

For more information read Your Virtual Success, Finding Profitability in an Online World: http://www.yourvirtualsuccess.net/

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Good for GoToMeeting

I can host unlimited conference calls, unlimited web meetings and unlimited web seminars for less than $3 per day. Let’s look at what this means to any business:

• Unlimited conference call #s are generated at the touch of a button (phone or PC based access)
• Unlimited Web Seminars (show anything on your PC to as many as 1,000 other people – anywhere in the world)
• Custom landing pages for your web seminar registration and virtual waiting room
• Automatic registration for your web seminar, selecting required or optional registration fields (name, email, phone might be required, but city, state and zip code are optional)
• Detailed registration and attendance reports
• Record the presentation and audio for training, future presentation use or load onto your web site for viewing
• Real time collaboration (sharing) of information – work on the same document at the same time – from anywhere in the world
• Ability to view other people’s PCs (they can show you anything they like on their PC)

That’s a lot of computing power for three dollars a day – perhaps too much? GoToMeeting recently sent an email that they were going to increase prices for companies requiring larger 500 and 1,000 attendees meetings – BUT – they were not going to increase prices for existing customers. That’s a good, customer oriented attitude that shows their loyalty to customer and earns the same in return. Cloud computing solutions like this are relatively new, but great customer service has been around for a long time, virtual or not, for those who understand the importance of customer loyalty. Good for GoToMeeting/GoToWebinar/Citrix – seems like they get it.

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If a Tree Falls in Cyberspace and Everyone is there to hear it – does it make a sound?

Just because you build a web site, send out an emailing, or create a blog doesn’t mean anyone will pay attention. It reminds me of the old saying, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound?” On the internet, everyone is there to hear your message, but it may not make a sound they can or will hear. Thus it’s all about targeted marketing and messaging, bringing a message that rings true to your specific target market, so it will make a clear and compelling sound when it arrives. This is easy to say but harder to do. What we’ve seen at StartUpSelling, at least in the B2B space, is a combination of targeted outbound calling combined with eMarketing, web seminars and a current web site seems to do the trick nicely for essentially any industry. We call this multidimensional marketing and find there is an order of magnitude difference in using a blended approach to a singular approach.

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The Skype Video is a little dark – What’s Up With That!

Let me illustrate some of the virtual changes which are impacting our behaviors today, and are almost taken for granted by the next generation. Recently, I came home to find my daughter and her friend Christie sitting next to each other in front of an HP laptop. There was a voice coming from the laptop that sounded familiar to me, it was in fact coming from their good friend Hannah. Hannah was in Sydney Australia, my daughter and her friend were in our living room in Boston. They were engaged in a Skype video call. The connectivity was amazingly fast, Hannah’s real time video which consisted of her head and shoulders and the background of her dorm room were impressive. She might as well have been in the town next to us, never mind a continent over 10,000 miles away. Even more impressive, the call was free and the software to accomplish this downloaded in a couple of minutes. Welcome to the next generation of technology, cloud computing. According to the AT&T Web site, AT&T began transatlantic telephone service in 1927 initially between the US and London. The initial capacity was one call at a time, at a cost of $75 for the first three minutes. In 2009, on a free Skype video call between Boston, Massachusetts and Sydney, Australia which lasted about 30 minutes, one of the three girls commented about the video looking a little darker than usual, and said, “What’s up with that?!” Welcome to the next generation of buyers, their expectations are high, as is their comfort level with all things digital. If you want to sell to their generation, you need to understand the virtual world. And if you want to set up a cost effective virtual business, these are the types of tools you can utilize to your advantage. www.startupselling.com www.alanblume.com

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