|
|
| If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. |
|
| Volume 9, Issue 9 |
|
In This Issue:
 Three levels of persuasive conversations
Top 10 ways to keep morale up when slackers pull it down
How to build and maintain a strong new business pipeline
The second hardest part about prospecting
 A sales force built around cold calling
Mad men on branding
The best free software
 How to capture more than your share of the female economy
 Take Your Career from Good to Great
A Secret for Contending with Colleagues
Social media will change your business
 [Inspire interaction]: 4 tactics to boost clicks, encourage social sharing
 Understanding users of social networks
 Three best ways to convert web traffic into sales
How Facebook ruins friendships
 Who's driving Twitter's popularity? Not teens
|
|
|
 |
Three levels of persuasive conversations
"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." —James Thurber.
It's like fingernails down a chalkboard for me. There is a Friday night gathering of the neighbors out in front of the house. The kids are all riding scooters and doing their best to imitate Tony Romo in their game of two-hand-touch football. As one of the 3-year-olds begins to pull caffeine-free sodas out of the cooler and hand them
out to the other kids, the child constantly is talking to every parent and child as he peddles his wares looking for his next customer. Here come the fingernails down the chalkboard…one of the adults makes the comment, "Boy, he sure is gonna make a great salesman someday. That boy sure can talk!" Why does everyone think the best
salesperson is always the best "talker?" It's as if that is the only skill needed to be a good salesperson. In my 18 years of experience in sales and sales management, I have not found that to be true. Some of the successful salespeople I have observed were good talkers, but oftentimes, they were not the best speakers. In fact, the
most successful salespeople I have met were not the best talkers at all. They held a much more valuable selling skill:...
Read the article. Back to top
Top 10 ways to keep morale up when slackers pull it down
Even with strong employee appreciation programs, the slacker attitude can be contagious and infiltrate the workplace.
Slackers shoot the breeze with anyone and everyone, make long personal phone calls on company time, waste their time doing nothing, and can seem almost oblivious to how they affect those around them. The effect they have starts with frustration,
increases to anger, and leads to situations that impede work performance and relationships. Below are the top 10 ways to deal with slackers and lessen their impact on employee morale...
Read the article. Back to top
How to build and maintain a strong new business pipeline
The business of sales is all about the customer—building new relationships while nurturing and growing existing ones.
Truth be told, it is not easy for the majority of companies today to retain and build their client base in these tough economic times. Our customers are more concerned than ever with cost savings. Delivering solutions that save is critical—but not everything. It is imperative that sales organizations deliver an
excellent customer experience— in addition to reliable products and services—to keep current clients and attract new ones. There are many ways to provide outstanding customer service, so sales organizations need to find ways to connect with clients
and prospects on several different levels. Below are tips to keep your business pipeline healthy by differentiating your organization from the competition:...
Read the article. Back to top
The second hardest part about prospecting
The key to getting great meetings is consistency: consistency of methodology used to construct the reach-out, consistency of messaging pushed out to prospects across the different media, you use and consistency of being there early and often.
Having the right people on board to manage the process or using the right kind of firm to manage it for you is key to effectively developing a well-oiled front-end of your new business development or lead generation process. Finding qualified leads and convincing them of your value is no easy task. It takes time, patience, and
persistence. And once found, the job isn't complete. What I've encountered in my world of helping marketing services firms, acting as their outsourced lead generation/business development firm, is there's usually a lot of enthusiasm, energy, and excitement leading up to and coming directly out of a meeting. What
follows is a bit akin to how a car dramatically loses its value as soon as it leaves the lot. Agency principals get distracted with other things (like managing existing business, putting out fires, dealing with personnel issues, etc.), and they don't stay with the prospect well enough to see it through to closure and success.
[Here are five key steps you should take following your initial meeting with a prospect, all of which can better your chances of winning a piece of business:...]
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
A sales force built around cold calling
To thrive in a recession, the sales force at iCore Networks focuses on cold calling.
The Hiring Process
1. An executive recruiter prescreens candidates to find reps with a few years' experience outside the telecom industry.
2. A first interview with sales manager Anthony Chapa. Only 10 percent of candidates advance beyond this stage.
3. Next,...
Read the article. Back to top
Mad men on branding
Mad Men, the sex- and cocktail-fueled paean to the early wizards of branding, recently returned to AMC for a third season, and the second season is out on DVD.
The show, set in the offices of fictional Sterling Cooper during the 1960s, owes its portrayal of period ads and agencies to consultants Josh Weltman and Bob Levinson, both veterans of BBDO and other top shops. Editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan asked Weltman about the days before ads got ADD.
As you look back over period ads, what surprises you most?...
Read the article. Back to top
The best free software
Paying is passé. Use these 10 free software programs instead. Free
is a lovely word; unfortunately, it's often followed by a disappointing product. We have found 10 great free apps that will help you run your business. Some are so good, you might even be willing to (shudder) spend money on them. -- Mark Spoonauer...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Take your career from good to great
Transform your unfulfilling career into something extraordinary using three strategies to overcome common assumptions that hold you back.
Do you ever find yourself asking, "Is this it?" Sure, you've had some successes in your career, made some money, received a promotion or two. Yet you can't help but wonder, "Is this what I am supposed to be doing with my life? Is this the limit of my contribution?" These questions are familiar territory for me. At the age of 35, I
was stuck in a career rut. Then, unexpectedly, my life turned in an extraordinary new direction. Over the course of the next 18 months, I...
Read the article. Back to top
A secret for contending with colleagues
Instead of puzzling over the behavior of others, work on changing your reaction to it, says Peter Bregman.
A few months ago my wife Eleanor came home upset after an incident with one of the parents at our daughter's school. That afternoon, when Eleanor said hello to Michelle, Michelle completely ignored her. Thinking maybe Michelle hadn't heard her, Eleanor said hello again, this time louder. Again, no response. Michelle wasn't speaking on the phone or in a conversation with another parent. She was able to respond, she just refused to. Eleanor was getting the silent treatment. Not one to give up, she said hello a third time. Finally, Michelle mumbled something without looking up and walked away. Eleanor wasn't friends with Michelle. They had only spoken a few times in the past, most notably when she called Eleanor to complain about something our daughter did. Still, she was thrown off balance by Michelle's cold shoulder. It was one of those small things that's hard to get out of your mind. She wasn't expecting it. [At this point, should you still be surprised when your boss for the 100th time doesn't invite you to a meeting? Or when you send a colleague a nice email and it goes unanswered? Again. Here's my advice:...]
Read the article. Back to top
Social media will change your business
[BWN Classic]
Editor's note: When we published "Blogs Will Change Your Business" in May, 2005, Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds. Truth is, we didn't see MySpace coming. Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation. Despite the onrush of technology, however, thousands of visitors are still downloading the original cover story.
So we decided to update it. Over the past month, we've been calling many of the original sources and asking the Blogspotting community to help revise the 2005 report. We've placed fixes and updates into more
than 20 notes; to view them, click on the blue icons. If you see more details to fix, please leave comments. The role of blogs in business is clearly an ongoing story. First, the headline. Blogs were the heart of the story in 2005. But they're just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic
communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter—they've all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. Social Media: It's clunkier
language than blogs, but we're not putting it on the cover anyway. We're just fixing it...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Inspire interaction with promo emails: 4 tactics to boost clicks, encourage social sharing
SUMMARY: Here’s an article for marketers looking to get more out of their weekly email promotions or coupons.
We interviewed a marketer from Chick-fil-A to learn how they made their promotional email program more interactive, and have built stronger relationships with subscribers. New content and features are generating an average 15% CTR, and 75% of
subscribers said an email inspired them to visit a store. Plus, email drove the growth of a Facebook fan club from 25,000 to 1 million in less than a year...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Understanding users of social networks
|
"Women actually say things, guys give references to other things."
|
If the ongoing social networking revolution has you scratching your head and asking, "Why do people spend time on this?" and "How can my company benefit from the social network revolution?" you've got a lot in common with Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski.
"All first drafts are terrible. I don't care if you're Hemingway." "What comes out unfiltered from anyone's mind is mud." The first two quotations come from writing professors whose names I've since forgotten (and they were quoting other people whom they'd forgotten). The last one is one I just made up myself. But regardless of the
source, the advice is sound: no email should be clicked-to-send without revision. I've found that for your average email, the number of revisions largely depends on the number of recipients. Here's my experience:...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Three best ways to convert web traffic into sales
These days, the tech-savvy small business is using search engine optimization to steer customers to its home page. But once those online visitors land, how do you get them to buy?
Sure, you can pay a lot for site analytics that give you insights into those potential customers' shopping habits. But small-business owners now have a variety of simple yet effective tools to tempt visitors into opening their wallets. Here are the three best ways to convert Web traffic into sales:...
Read the article. Back to top
How Facebook ruins friendships
|
|
|
Notice to my friends: I love you all dearly.
But I don't give a hoot that you are "having a busy Monday," your child "took 30 minutes to brush his teeth," your dog "just ate an ant trap" or you want to "save the piglets." And I really, really don't care which Addams Family member you most resemble. (I could have told you the answer before you took the quiz on Facebook.)
Here's where you and I went wrong: We took our friendship online. First we began communicating more by email than by phone. Then we switched to "instant messaging" or "texting." We "friended" each other on Facebook, and began communicating by "tweeting" our thoughts—in 140 characters or less—via Twitter. All this online
social networking was supposed to make us closer. And in some ways it has. Thanks to the Internet, many of us have gotten back in touch with friends from high school and college, shared old and new photos, and become better acquainted with some people we might never have grown close to offline. Last year, when a friend of mine was hit by
a car and went into a coma, his friends and family were able to easily and instantly share news of his medical progress—and send well wishes and support—thanks to a Web page his mom created for him. But there's a danger here, too. If we're not careful, our online interactions can hurt our real-life relationships...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Who's driving Twitter's popularity? Not teens
|
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said. Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s
unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations. “The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew
Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster. Twitter, however, has proved that...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
Forward to a Friend:
Do you have a friend that would like to receive Sales&MktgWatchsm?
Perhaps you know a peer within your organization, or associate at a partner company that would
benefit from applying to receive this publication. Inviting a friend to experience the benefits
of joining the BusinessWatch Network is easy! Just FW: this newsletter to the person you know who
may have an interest and ask them to click here http://www.businesswatchnetwork.com Your friend will be glad you did!
|
|
|
If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from Sales&MktgWatchsm
simply change your status,
or send a letter requesting opt-off to:
The BusinessWatch Network Privacy Mailbox, 1321, Marblehead, MA. 01945
DISCLAIMER: Sales&MktgWatchsm and the BusinessWatch Networksm are service marks of DMS.
All other trademarks or service marks contained in this email are the property of their respective owners.
At the time of publication, all links in this e-mail functioned properly. However, since many links point
to sites other than businesswatchnetwork.com, some links may become invalid as time passes.
DMS Inc. supports the DMA Privacy Promise and
Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice. We are committed to the proper use of
email and to protecting consumers from fraudulent or inappropriate
offers. Privacy Policy
|
|
|
| |
