Non-podcast blog posts.

customer retention

How to Retain Customers For Life

As a business owner or marketer, you likely face a similar set of challenges every day.

  • How will you attract new customers?
  • How can you keep your customers engaged?
  • How will you create a sustainable model for revenue growth?
  • How can you add automation throughout the entire marketing process?

In today’s ever-changing consumer environment, it will take all this and more to retain your customers for life. One of the most effective models for how you can make this happen is called customer lifecycle marketing.

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Leaving money on the table

10 Ways Retailers Can Stop Leaving Money on the Table

Leaving money on the table

This is a guest post by Brian Laney, originally featured on the AlertTech blog.

Do you know what you need to do to create lifelong customers? Want to know what retail technology industry leaders are using to help maximize their profits and build customer loyalty?

Smart retailers are always looking for ways to increase profits. These 10 strategies will help you stop leaving money on the table.

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The Two Biggest Challenges Faced by Small Business Owners – And How to Overcome Them

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No matter what industry you’re in, if you own or manage a small business, you’re likely to suffer from the same two major challenges as other small businesses:

  • Lack of cash
  • Lack of time

There is no denying that running a small business can be difficult. In all my years in business, and all the interviews I’ve done with other business owners, I’ve realized there are a number of common problems, the top two being time and money (and not necessarily in that order).

Here is some practical advice on how to address the challenges that otherwise will sink your company.

Problem #1: Cash Flow

moneyproblems

The number one challenge of small businesses is cash. Even if a business is profitable on paper, it’s astoundingly easy to hit the bottom of your bank balance.

Solution #1: Find a Way to Generate Recurring Revenue

My last company, an outsourced IT services firm, almost didn’t make it. The standard sorts of projects we were working on just didn’t create the kind of consistent cash flow we needed and – even after a few cash infusions, including mortgaging my house – our bank balance was hovering near zero.

BUT, we were about to land a new client. It was a big contract, and would certainly put us in the black for quite some time. I had a great relationship with the client. All seemed to be headed in the right direction.

Sadly, after a lot of hard work trying to win the contract, they told me they’d decided to go with another firm!

We had a great relationship, and they told me they wanted to work with me, but we didn’t offer what the other firm did – a monthly service contract with remote management (which at the time was new technology). The monthly contract also meant a fixed (predictable) expense each month for the client.

From my perspective, it was predictable revenue for the IT service provider. I asked for a couple of days to be able to redo my proposal, got my partner to figure out the technology end of it… and we won the contract – which meant that we now had money coming in each and every month. (yay!!)

More importantly, we had a new business model. One that was much more stable, and much more valuable.

Starting out each month at zero is very likely to kill your business. That’s why I strongly recommend building in a recurring revenue model, so that you automatically have income coming in each and every month.

This is one key to how I’m growing my marketing agency. The other piece of the puzzle is getting the leads so that my recurring revenue clients can find me. That’s where inbound marketing comes in.

Problem #2: Limited Time

We all have a limited amount of time in which to do our work.

As a small business owner, this becomes painfully obvious. You may end up finding yourself work hours so long that you wonder why you started that stinking business in the first place.

Solution #2: Create Systems to Automate As Much As Possible

robotLuckily, there are ways to maximize the time you do have available.

Focus on Bringing in Money

First, stop trying to do everything yourself. Prioritize your top activities – these should be revenue generating.

Set up a routine so that you’re focused on what brings you results (in the form of revenue) before all else.

Systematize What You Can

Second, get yourself set up with smoothly running systems for the things that need to be done repeatedly in your business.

If you’re not familiar with the now classic E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, it’s well worth a read. The big takeaway of the book is to get out of the minutiae of your business, by developing systems. There are a number of benefits to this:

  • Because you have figured out exactly how you’re going to do a particular task, that task requires less mental time and energy
  • It allows you to easily train new employees (or outsourcers) to do the repetitive tasks
  • It allows you to grow your company more efficiently
  • It allows you to automate tasks, saving even more money because you don’t have to worry about labor

My Favorite Way to Automate

I’m a huge fan of Infusionsoft. It’s a seriously powerful automation software that allows me to:

  • Lead generation on my website
  • Customized, personalized follow up lo leads to help convert them to customers
  • Email marketing
  • eCommerce
  • Offline payment processing
  • Digital product delivery
  • Automate internal processes

Here’s the caveat to all of this: Although I’m a big fan of Infusionsoft, its strength is in helping you convert your website visitors to customers, and managing everything behind the scenes during and after that process. If you aren’t getting enough traffic to your website, Infusionsoft won’t be enough in and of itself. That’s why I also use HubSpot – and a solid inbound marketing strategy.

Conclusion

I hope this post has been helpful to you. If you’d like more of an Infusionsoft review, you can find that here, or check out this excellent demo of the software here.

If you have any questions about the software, I’d be happy to answer them. Just post a comment below, or contact me directly.

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Selling Strategy: How to Become a Trusted Advisor to the C Suite

selling strategies that establish trust

The key to understanding how to sell into the C suite doesn’t come from understanding how to sell to c-level executives, as much as it does from understanding how they buy.

C-level executives don’t care about the features, advantages, and benefits of your product.

Instead, they care about how much of an impact your product or service will have on helping them to solve their biggest problems.

Think Like a C-Level Executive

To understand what is important to the C-suite, you need to think like them.

For example, below is a small sample of some of the top problems that many of today’s top C-level executives face:

  • How do we increase market share?
  • How can we ensure that we continue to meet earnings expectations?
  • How can we increase our profit margin?
  • How can we create a sustainable competitive advantage?
  • How can we increase operational efficiency?
  • How can we ensure that we keep our investors happy?
  • How are we going to stay compliant with regulatory requirements?
  • How can we lower the cost of a service call?
  • How can we lower the cost of acquiring new customers?
  • How can we attract more of the right talent for our team?

Making a Positive First Impression

no-idiotsThe C-suite is not looking to be sold on why your product or service is the best/cheapest/fastest, etc…

If you begin your conversation with them by talking about your how awesome your company and product is, the chances that you will be referred to one of their staff, or ignored altogether, is extremely high.

The key to making a positive first impression with the C-suite is to show them that you are genuinely interested in helping them solve their business problems, regardless of whether or not you have a product or service to fit the bill.

While it’s true that you probably do have a solution of some kind (which they also realize), making your stuff the topic of early conversations is a huge mistake.

Focus on Building Trust

The best way to build trust with someone is to focus on helping instead of selling. This is where the field of sales has drastically changed in recent years.

Thanks to the internet, today’s buyer has easy access to more information about your company, your products, and your competitors than ever before.

The days of the sales rep holding all the power are long gone.

Today, the customer has the power, and they know it. As a result, positioning yourself as their most trusted advisor has never been more important.

What hasn’t changed is that every executive still has just 24 hours in a day, and as a result, they need to ensure that they get the maximum benefit from every hour of every day.

As a buyer, I don’t have time (or interest) in hearing you tell me all about why your product is the best.

Blah…blah…blah…

I can read all I want online and I can easily see what other users are saying on sites like G2Crowd.

However, it’s unlikely that I know about the vast array of helpful resources that are available to me to help me solve my most important problems.

If you selflessly help me to solve my greatest problems, I’m much more likely to trust you…and (eventually) I will become interested enough in your products and services to want to buy from you.

Step 1: Starting the Conversation

Whenever I’m talking with a new prospect or existing account for the first time, I have only one objective: to learn as much as I can about the problems they are most interested in solving.

HellowebAs a result, I spend the vast majority of my time asking questions that will help me to understand their problems and top priorities.

These are the things that they are most likely to allocate resources to solving.

So that you better understand how to do this, let’s suppose that I work for a large software company, and I’m tasked with selling their CRM product.

If my conversation started at the C-level, I sure as heck wouldn’t be asking them about what kind of features they are looking for in a CRM! (If my conversation started with a user, then I might ask about features they need.)

If I did start by asking about features, they would see me as just another CRM sales rep and would have little interest in talking with me again in the future. At best, they’d refer me to someone lower down the totem pole.

Instead, I’d be asking them things like:

  • How much revenue do you need to produce to hit your numbers this year?
  • How many new customers do you need for that?
  • What is a customer worth?
  • Do you have customers like this now?
  • Where did they come from?
  • What does it currently cost you to acquire a customer like this?
  • How many sales reps do you have?
  • What does each one cost you?
  • What percentage of your reps achieve quota?
  • Will you be hiring more reps this year?
  • How many?
  • How will you find them?
  • Besides hiring more reps, what else are you planning on doing to increase the number of leads into the top of your funnel?
  • What does the current sales process look like?
  • Do you have insights (from data) into which parts of your sales funnel are working and which aren’t?
  • Is repeat business going to play a big role in hitting this year’s revenue targets?
  • What does customer retention look like?
  • Do your sales and services teams have access to the same pieces of customer data?
  • How does your team handle support?
  • Do you have field support reps?
  • How do you manage them?
  • How do they get access to the information they need while on the road?
  • Have you investigated any technologies that could help to improve customer service?
  • What have you looked at?
  • What is working best for you now?

The list of questions above is only just a fraction of the questions that, over time, I need to ask the customer if I’m to truly understand what their greatest challenges are.

As I work my way through these questions, some of them will provide me with the opportunity to ask more detailed follow up questions, and it’s these “2nd and 3rd layer” questions that are most likely going to give me the really deep understanding of a problem that I’m going to need to understand if I’m going to be helpful.

Remember: asking questions isn’t about just completing a checklist. Instead, it’s about ensuring that your customer gets the impression that you are genuinely interested in helping them to find a solution to their problems….even if that solution isn’t something you sell.

When a customer sees you asking this many questions instead of talking about your own products, two things are going to happen:

  1. They are going to appreciate your interest in their problems
  2. They are going to start trusting that you are putting their needs ahead of your own

Step 2: Focus on Helping (Not Selling) to Build More Trust

If you take the approach I’ve described above from the start, you will have taken the first step towards becoming a trusted advisor.

What you do next will either move you closer to that goal or further way.

keyboard_helpLet’s assume that in your first conversation with your customer, you learned that they had the following priorities and problems:

  • They need to hire 50 more sales reps this year
  • They don’t have enough insight (data) into which parts of their sales process is working / not working
  • There is a disconnect between sales and customers service
  • They need to increase revenue by $100,000,000 (each new rep will have a $2M quota)

Is now the right time to start talking about a demo for your CRM product?

Definitely not.

If you immediately start trying to sell them on why your CRM is going to make life easy for their sales reps, you will erode trust.

If you continue to focus on helping find solutions to their problems, you will build more trust.

The great thing about helping is that it’s actually not very difficult to do…once you clearly understand what your customer actually wants help with.

In this case, you know that your customer needs 50 new sales reps.

If you were smart, you would have also asked them if they thought finding 50 sales reps was going to be hard to do. If they said no, then they likely won’t really value any help you might offer.

However, if they said yes, you have a terrific opportunity to build trust by offering help.

What kind of help can you offer if you are a CRM sales rep? Plenty.

For example, you could:

  • Offer to connect them with another of your customers that has already built a very large sales team so that they could learn what has worked for them and what mistakes to avoid.
  • Interview a number of HR professionals that have proven expertise at hiring sales reps and then provide them with a recording of your interview or an article that summarizes your findings (or you could just point them to content created by others that provides similar insights)
  • Send them links to helpful content (blog posts, eBooks, webinars, books, etc…). The content needn’t be created by your company. It need only be helpful.

As you are sending your customer this information, it would also be a good idea to continue to talk with them to learn whether or not the information you are sending is actually helping. If so, how? If not, what could you be doing better?

If you needed to hire 50 sales reps, do you think you might value receiving help like this? Do you think that you might see the person who provided the help in a more positive light?

You bet you would.

Step 3: Be Reliable

When you go away on vacation and need someone to look after your pets, who do you call? Do you call your friend Dave, who sometimes forgets to call you back or make good on his promises? Probably not.

Instead, you call Kate because you know you can absolutely count on Kate not to drop the ball.

Being reliable (doing what you say, when you say you are going to) is a major part of building trust with people.

When you are in meetings with your customers, take notes. They will notice it. If you don’t, they will notice that, too.

When you say you are going to send a link to an article this afternoon, do it. Sure, you could send it tomorrow, but that isn’t what you said you were going to do…and not keeping your word, even on something that is seemingly trivial, will erode trust.

Remember, reliable people are trustworthy people.

Step 4: Be Personable and Connect Emotionally

Not every person in the world is going to become your new BFF; however, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t strive to make personal connections with your customers.

To do this, don’t start asking them a bunch of questions about their family on your first encounter…unless, of course, they start asking you questions about yours.

Instead, at the appropriate time, volunteer some information about your family. Maybe your daughter just got her first tooth (mine just did), or maybe your wife loves to rock climb and had recently shared some wonderful photos with you.

By offering up your personal stories first, you are opening the door for them to do the same, and if they do, you then have their permission to ask more about their life outside of work…and when you start to connect on non-business issues like family, you build more trust and rapport.

Remember, we are more likely to trust people we feel a connection with.

Step 5: Write

These days, having your own blog is dead simple, and you can be up and running in 10 minutes or less. Once you have a blog, start writing.

Kiana's first plane ride!

Kiana’s first plane ride!

Why write, you ask? Simple, it allows you to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry by demonstrating your expertise on topics that your customers are interested in.

Why do you think so many people think being an author is such a big deal?

When you write well, and people like what you’ve written, they will also develop an affinity for you.

If you want to be a trusted advisor, you must continually be on the lookout for ways to help your clients and the best way to learn about new things is to write about them.

Additionally, if you give them access to parts of your personal life by sharing personal stories and photos in your writing, you will also be giving your readers even more ways to feel an emotional connection with you.

For example, if you are reading this post and you’ve never met me, what do you think so far? If you’ve read this far, chances are you’ve enjoyed my post.

Chances are also pretty good that you might like to read a few more. Heck, maybe you’d even like to watch one of my videos.

Remember, writing is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise on a topic, which builds credibility and trust.

Step 6: Build Long Term Relationships

You cannot become the trusted advisor over night. It will probably take months or even years.

One article, or one conversation is not going to be enough.

Building trust requires you to take consistent action over the long term.

Let’s Recap

Trusted advisors are the people whom the C-suite wants to talk to, and as a result, trusted advisors are continually exceeding their quotas. They get more referrals, manage the best accounts, win the most awards, get the best job offers, and keep their customers for the long haul.

If you want to become one of the elite salespeople in your organization, decide today to do what it takes to become your client’s trusted advisor.

Hey, thanks for the info. Now what?

If you need any help with content creation, we have tons of free resources to get you over the hump. Please subscribe to this blog to ensure that you never miss an article.

Have questions or comments? Please contact me.

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Thanks so much!

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How to Podcast and Attract Clients

how-to-podcast-and-attract-clients

Wondering how to attract clients with podcasting?

Podcasting is so much easier than taking a regular ‘sales guy’ approach. You get to be a reporter, and most people respond much more positively to a reporter than a salesman. The number of ‘No’s’ you will get to a request to be a podcast guest will be much smaller than those you get asking for a sales appointment.how to prospect with a podcast

Podcasts can also be an incredible networking tool. People like to connect with industry authorities and as a show host you will be seen as an authority.

Some of the golden nuggets you’ll hear on this video:

  • How to find interesting podcast guests that resonate with your audience.
  • Exactly what to say when you reach out to potential podcast guests.
  • How to determine if this person or their company is a potential lead for your company while you are conducting the pre-interview.
  • How to conduct an interview so that it is attention-grabbing by focusing on company success stories that get your audience saying “I want that result!”

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Streamlining a Marketing Strategy Through Marketing Automation

marketing-automation-strategy

Marketers are always searching for new ways to achieve better campaign results and deliver better ROI for their efforts. The business evolves on a near daily basis, which can make it difficult for marketing teams to reach these goals. Luckily there is something that marketers can use to help their programs run a little smoother while at the same time collecting valuable customer intelligence.

Marketing automation is strategy and software that allows marketers to find and nurture contacts with personalized content streams. This customized content helps to convert visitors into leads and leads into paying customers.

A company can use marketing automation software for all parts of the marketing funnel, not just at the purchasing stage. Leads should be nurtured at every stage, including post-purchase as customer retention and loyalty is crucial in growing a business.

Without marketing automation the process of following up with individual customers and offering an exceptional experience can seem almost impossible, especially for large businesses with vast customer bases. Research from The Annuitas Group found that there is a 451% growth in qualified leads for companies that take advantage of marketing automation software.

With numbers like those, it can be very tempting to make the switch to automation. Here are a few ways to achieve a successful and efficient strategy through marketing automation.

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Race For 20K Agency Challenge

Mineral Update for September 19th

Race For 20K Agency Challenge drip campaign

Hi Bright Ideas readers, Drew again from DrewSanocki.com. As a refresher, I run an agency — Mineral.io — that is competing with Groove in a race for recurring revenue. My agency focuses on delivering services to ecommerce retailers.

I want to share some updates on what we’ve been working on, as well as some open questions I’ve been pondering lately.

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third-call

The Third Call: The Right Way to Deliver a Strategy Presentation

third-call

Having a website that consistently generate leads for you is critical.

So is having a deliberate sales process that ensures you don’t blow it with any of the qualified leads your inbound marketing campaign has generated for you.

As the host of a popular podcast, I have had the opportunity to interview hundreds of other CEOs, and, much to my surprise, not very many of them reported having a really well-defined sales process in place.

Perhaps this was because many of them run smaller (under $10M in rev) companies, or perhaps it’s because they just haven’t thought about it.

In today’s post, I’m going to share with you the third installment in our 3-step sales process: how to deliver a strategy presentation (and avoid writing proposals).

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second-call

The Second Call: How to Build Trust with an Exploratory Call

second-call

When you hit your stride with inbound marketing, you are going to start to receive a steady stream of new leads, and, as we discussed in our last post on qualifying questions, not all of them are going to be worth your time.

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first-call

The First Call: How to Qualify a New Business Prospect

business prospect

Thanks to our consistent blogging and optimized calls to action, we get a LOT of leads from our blog. Sadly, not all of them are a good fit for our services, so ensuring that we focus our attention on the right leads is absolutely critical to our success.

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