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| Volume 9, Issue 1 |
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In This Issue:
 Will you pass the two-word test for ultimate presentations?
Connecting [with your customers] one-on-one over the web
14 ways to keep the loyalty when times are tough
 [Marketing] the economics of giving it away
More web ads improve their aim
 Six tools to help tackle overflowing email
Career path: How I became an ethnocentric digital marketer
 Ten signs your customer is tanking
 Training the young [sales] guns
Three mistakes young salespeople often make)
 Successful email marketing is right under your nose
Six free tools for online reputation management
 Credit scores: What you need to know
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Smart presentations: Will you pass the two-word test for ultimate presentations?
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John Windsor, an online columnist for Sales & Marketing Management, is President of Creating Thunder, a Boulder, Colo.-based communications training and consulting company. As author of the popular YouBlog, John offers a unique mix of innovation, communications, sales and marketing ideas. An award-winning marketer, John has held
vice president positions in marketing, sales, and business development and has worked with companies like American Express, Reuters, Staples, and Knight-Ridder.
Create a two-word manifesto to create impact and a lasting impression that will drive sales.
Could you describe in only two words what your product, service or company is about? That's right, only two words to describe your offerings or company's reason for being. It sounds simple, but this is not an easy exercise. The payoff, however, can be tremendous. I was introduced to this challenge at business school, by a professor
straight out of Hogwarts. It was a fringe class that very few people took, but this guy taught us things about marketing and strategy that I had never encountered before or since. And the absolute best thing he made us do was create two-word descriptions
for various companies, products and services. But we didn’t just throw things out like "big flavor" or "faster fesults." No, there was a very specific structure we had to follow:...
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Connecting [with your customers] one-on-one over the web
Pat Sullivan is CEO of Flypaper Studio, Inc., has been honored as one of the "80 Most Influential People in Sales and Marketing History," by Sales & Marketing Management magazine, and has twice been honored with the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.
For anyone who's a sales veteran, odds are you remember the days before the first contact management system (CMS).
You remember and have ingrained the concept of selling as an in-person, one-to-one meeting and then recording what happened. Today contact management and CRM help you to reach out to prospects and send letters, faxes and e-mail communications. For most, this level of convenience was a welcome leap beyond the trusty Rolodex. But on many
levels, it took sales far from its roots in personalization. CRM is great, but it mainly just helps to track and record what happened in the various stages of the sales cycle. And what salespeople are finding now is that they need the ability to sell to more, and to more customers, over the Web in a way that is authentic and
impactful—more personal than what a CRM can deliver. The good news is that new sales tools allow sales reps to do just that. The Web, of all things, is launching a comeback after a long hiatis to the forgotten one-on-one sales and marketing...
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14 ways to keep the loyalty when times are tough
Start increasing your external and internal client loyalty today, without spending a dime.
Whether it is your external or internal clients, you must consistently think of increasing the loyalty factor if you're business is going to thrive. So when times are tough—and the engagement of these groups becomes even more critical to your bottom
line—grasp the opportunity to develop a model to maintain the consistency of your relationship-building strategies...
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[Marketing] the economics of giving it away
In a battered economy, free goods and services online are more attractive than ever. So how can the suppliers make a business model out of nothing?
Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero -- nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods -- from music and video to Wikipedia -- can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free. Which is not to say companies can't make money from nothing. Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple:...
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More web ads improve their aim
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Technologies That Target Messages, Gauge Their Impact Gain With Marketers.
As marketers scale back their ad budgets, some new technologies that make it easier for marketers to track the impact of their online advertising are gaining ground. Products based on these technologies -- such as customized ads that show different products to different users, Web ads hidden inside links in text, and online coupons
-- are part of what is called "performance-driven advertising." That's because the products aim to improve and more precisely measure how a particular ad performs. While no one format is likely to emerge as a silver bullet for marketers seeking to use their ad dollars more efficiently, the advertising industry is betting on these technologies to increase online advertising spending.
Altogether, the U.S. online-ad market is expected to increase 9% to $25.7 billion in 2009, slowing from its year-earlier growth rate of 11%, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer.Internet retailer Overstock.com is becoming a big user of performance-driven ad products. The Salt Lake City company is planning to spend about $15 million, or 20% of its overall marketing budget for this year,
on personalized ads from Choicestream, which makes product-recommendation software, says Overstock Chief Executive Patrick Byrne. To devise the personalized ads, which Overstock started testing a few months ago, Choicestream relies on data the retailer provides about what customers browse and purchase on its site.
Choicestream uses the data to select what personalized products and offers to insert into Overstock ads as they appear to potential customers browsing the Web. Mr. Byrne says that...
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Six tools to help tackle overflowing email
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Cheers. Literally, cheers. When I speak at companies like Cisco and implore employees to find email alternatives, they erupt.
That's how much corporate America hates email. I'm not surprised. We're drowning in it. The average worker receives 200 a day, according to the research firm Basex. What's worse, there's a lot of important stuff trapped in those messages, but if you're armed only with Microsoft Outlook, which treats all messages the same, good
luck plucking out the pearls. Not all email is created equal. Newsletters, status updates, and so forth aren't nearly as relevant to us as a personal note from the boss. What we need are tools that add context and make the inbox less a dumping ground than a jumping-off point for managing our most important projects and relationships.
Thankfully, there are a raft of very exciting tools -- many of them free -- that can help you prioritize email and even avoid it altogether. (Yes, really.) [Here they are]...
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Career path: How I became an ethnocentric digital marketer
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I started to tear up at lunch today while talking to Lizie, a young woman who works with me. She’s from Mexico, and about a year ago she didn’t know a CPM from a CPA.
But I hired her because she was bright, driven and eager to learn. She’s so driven that this past holiday season, while home in Guadalajara, she took time out of her personal schedule to visit some local advertising agencies. She came back with stories of how she’d ended up teaching an impromptu class
on online advertising to a hungry audience. The pride I felt when she told me this took me back to my motivations for starting Consorte in the first place.
It was 2005 and I was working for The Carlyle Group’s venture fund. My job was to find companies for the fund to invest in, and I was actively watching the online advertising market for new opportunities. At the same time, I found myself at a crossroad in my life and was feeling very disconnected from my culture.
I realized the only person I spoke Spanish with was Isabel, the woman who took out the trash at my office. I began to wonder how I could combine the business skills I had developed as an investment banker, corporate lawyer and VC with elements of my ethnic identity. I thought about who I was:
a thirty-something, Mexican-American female, homeowner, number 8 of 11 children, Spanish-speaking, Ivy-educated, athlete, avid salsa dancer. As I looked at myself, I discovered that I am a bundle
of contradictions… and as such, a pretty good representation of the Hispanic market today. We’re
diverse, and no single approach will satisfy the entire market. That’s when I hit on the idea of
developing a new approach to Hispanic marketing...
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Ten signs your customer is tanking
When it comes to credit risk, watch closely for these red flags in companies you depend on.
The shaky credit markets make spotting a soon-to-be insolvent company increasingly difficult for credit managers. "It's hard sometimes to determine who's really about ready to go out of business, versus who is having tough times, but they'll make it," says David Beckel, president of the National Association of Credit Management. To
avoid losing future payments, companies should be on the constant lookout for red flags -- signs that a customer is having serious financial problems. The following don't necessarily indicate that a client is in contingency mode. But any of them
should trigger a warning bell for your credit department that the customer deserves close monitoring, and that perhaps their payment terms renegotiated...
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Training the young [sales] guns
A program at MIT offers a window into the minds of Gen-Y sales reps
Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar has said salespeople must commit to a lifetime of learning. If that's true, then the 33 students who participated in the second annual sales competition at MIT's Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last November appeared eager to begin that journey.
Sweaty-palmed but confident, they auditioned their smoothest closes before a panel of judges from the real world who cheerfully put the rookies through the wringer. In the day's first challenge...
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Three mistakes young salespeople often make
Jeff Hoffman, co-founder of Basho Technologies and an adviser to the Sloan Sales Club, says new salespeople commonly make these errors:...
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Six steps to instant revenue: Successful email marketing is right under your nose
If you believe that you know everything there is to know about email marketing, then you also probably believe Al Gore invented the Internet.
Unfortunately, for most marketers, email marketing remains an educated guess predicated on seasonal and industry trends. What most marketers do not realize is that they have an opportunity to send out intelligent, high-performance email campaigns based on true consumer desires. All they have to do is take advantage of information
that is readily available. Online behavior is not limited to purchasing activity alone. To truly understand someone's buying potential, you need to see more than that. You need to know what they are looking at, what they are searching for, and what they
have recommended to friends. These online activities are just a few of the behaviors that allow marketers to gain a better understanding of what consumers are truly interested in. [Here are six strategies that marketers can immediately adopt by using existing online customer information to create highly successful email campaigns]...
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Six free tools for online reputation management
Online reputation management consists of tracking your brand and reacting when necessary.
Though sometimes tedious, brand monitoring can save you from a potential disaster when someone cites your name in an article that misrepresents you. Aside from protection, it can help you proactively join conversations around your topic area, helping to get
your brand name out there. It's almost 2009... and if you aren't active online you are missing valuable opportunities to advertise your value to the world—through articles, blog entries, social-network profiles, comments, videos and more. As both a content producer and consumer, your name is being spread
throughout each of these circuits by people you might not even know. In fact, research firm IDC finds that there is more content being created about you than you create yourself.
There are also hidden costs associated with poor email campaigns. It may cost just a few dollars to send an offer out to a few thousand recipients, but if marketers continue to send out irrelevant email campaigns, reliable customers will chose to opt out—and recouping those lost subscribers is costly.
[If you want to know how to track your presence and monitor your brand, then you are in luck. Below are the top 6 tools for your online reputation management program. They can be used for product and corporate brands in addition to your personal brand. Use each to search, locate and respond when necessary.
Also, they can be leveraged as part of your marketing strategy, to discover your audience and market to them directly]....
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Credit scores: What you need to know
You may not have checked your credit score lately, but there’s a good chance someone else has.
If you have applied for a mortgage or a loan — or even received a credit card offer in the mail — someone accessed that three-digit number to help determine the amount you can borrow and the interest you’ll owe on it. So what goes into this all-important score? And how can you make sure you’ve got a good one? The term credit score usually
refers to your FICO score, a number based on a formula developed by the Fair Isaac Corporation. Fair Isaac looks at a summary of all your credit accounts and payment history. [However] If you’ve got...
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