by sekaterina | Mar 27, 2018 | Blog, Lead Generation, Marketing Agency, Multichannel marketing, Small Business Marketing Blog, Social Media Marketing |
There’s strong data that, within companies, the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations.
Stephen Covey
Having been the owner of a Vancouver-based integrated marketing and lead generation company, I see a lot of confusion among small and medium sized business owners about what marketing and lead generation really mean. Most of my clients can’t get their heads around how to allocate their marketing budget to generate the highest and quickest return on investment (ROI).
First, I would like to clarify what ROI means in modern marketing. The old approach, where $1000 invested in marketing was expected to generate $3000 in sales the following month is long outdated and unrealistic. Unfortunately, many business owners stubbornly demand that their sales and marketing people to deliver on this strategy… or else.
What is modern marketing then? Shall we cold call prospects randomly, or spam them through email and social media? Shall we break our budgets with Adwords and Display ads? Or maybe the trade show? The answer is that none of those will do it, but all of it combined with smart long-term and short-term activities will. And nothing else. Sorry.
As a marketing consultant with over 25 years experience in sales and marketing, I keep suggesting the famous “80/20” approach is the best solution for lead generation and marketing: invest 80% of your money in long term strategies and 20% in short term activities.
The obvious question is: What is the meaning of long term and short term for marketing and lead generation ROI?
I suggest that long term activities include:
Sounds clear and simple, right? But in reality, business people are doing the complete opposite: Distribution of marketing funds and efforts, which is 80%, to short term efforts and 20% (or often nothing) to long term strategies. And the result is… disappointment. The expectations are not met, marketing and sales people are fired, and eventually business downsizes and collapses.
So, do the right thing: Make an effort to understand and learn what modern marketing is about. Do not believe service providers and sales people who are promising a miracle in the form of a simple one campaign solution. Whether it be cold calling, email, advertising or SEO, it is not going to result in consistent growth for your business. Visit Prospect Solutions to learn about our 80/20 Outsourced Marketing Agency integrated marketing approach and request your Free Consultation.
We look forward to speaking with you and thanks for reading!
Ekaterina Sytcheva
by sekaterina | Mar 27, 2018 | Blog, Lead Generation, Marketing Agency, Small Business Marketing Blog |
Why Hire Cold Calling Professionals?
As a business owner and a salesperson you take great pride in your business and love to sell. Most people like to sell to people who are interested in buying. This is human nature; we love to speak to people who are interested in what we say and do. However, when it comes to a real business situation, we first need to find people who want to listen to our presentation. Getting qualified prospects is one of the major challenges for any business person; for three major reasons:
Prospecting and Sales: Different Set of Skills
1. Prospecting and sales each require a different set of skills. Cold calling either on the phone or in person (door to door) requires consistency, abstract thinking, patience, persistence, telemarketing training, and other prospecting-related skills and personality traits apart from professional sellers. Professional sales is about qualifying the prospect and presenting a solution. It requires professional consultative selling training, product and competition knowledge, presentation skills, listening skills and many other professional sales-related skills.
2. If you are in the position of the executive sales person, you should never prospect by yourself because it puts you into a position not equal with the buyer. This will prevent you and the buyer from forming a business bond, which is a requirement of long-term profitable business relationships.
3. Prospecting will take time off servicing your clients and generating revenue for your company. Your experience, training, industry knowledge and product knowledge are your company’s most valuable assets in you. These skills need to be used to generate revenue by being in constant contact with pre- qualified buyers and existing customers. Your skills and your professional knowledge need to be constantly upgraded by continued learning, thinking and exploring.
Today, cold calling professionals and lead generators requires extensive market knowledge, professional skills, winning strategies and effective management. Outsourcing is becoming the most efficient and cost-effective way to grow a business and supply a sales team with a consistent flow of qualified prospects.
by sekaterina | Mar 27, 2018 | Blog |
According to Wikipedia, the poverty trap is “any self-reinforcing mechanism which causes poverty to persist.” “If it persists from generation to generation, the trap begins to reinforce itself if steps are not taken to break the cycle.” I meet many small business owners who’ve gotten their businesses into a vicious cycle of poor performance and declining revenues because they are unwilling to invest effort, time and resources in marketing and business development.
The reason for this is the limiting belief that marketing of any kind is expensive, useless, unethical, invasive and does not pay off. I often hear “I already tried generating leads by telemarketing and it did not work for me” or “I don’t have time to go to networking events” or “I don’t want to go to appointments unless people are interested in buying”. This type of thinking leads to business stagnation and inevitably, decline.
Today many business owners are realizing that they alone are not enough to grow their businesses. They hire professional people to help them with decision making and marketing. Smart business owners make it a priority to invest in Lead Generation activities and do it smart. One of the smart ways to increase sales is to hire an appointment booking company. I would like to stress that I’m saying “appointment booking company” and not a “telemarketing company”.
Many call centre-based telemarketing companies are not suited to the task of booking appointments for small business because there is a financial and cultural disconnect between people and processes. Appointment booking is more than just finding the low hanging fruit, which is a prospect who is in need to buy right now. It’s a consistent and thoughtful process of connecting, educating, informing, proposing and closing.
Prospect Solutions specializes in appointment setting specifically for small business companies. Our people and processes have many advantages over the typical call centre lead generation environment. Please call for a free consultation and get your business out of the “poverty trap.”
by sekaterina | Mar 27, 2018 | Blog, Lead Generation, Marketing Agency, Multichannel marketing, Small Business Marketing Blog, Uncategorized |
What is Fair Price For B2B Telemarketing?
I recently had a series of meetings with clients who want to implement telemarketing campaigns. These companies have difficulty deciding if they should hire a professional telemarketing services company or do it internally. Most of them are not comfortable paying telemarketing companies fees and were leaning towards the idea of building internal call centres. They were in need of consultation to support their plans and justify the investment. They wanted to know what would be the real cost to run a call centre and what will the ROI be on their investment.
The first part of the assignment is very easy- the daily cost of running an outbound operation consisting of 10 inside business development reps plus a sales manager plus the technology cost would be approximately $2500 (the human resources plus basic cloud-based dialer and crm) per day, which is a cost equal to what a professional telemarketing agency would charge for approximately 80 hours of telemarketing services.
Telemarketing ROI
The most difficult part was to figure the ROI. When will the project break even? Is it going to be profitable?
During my 15 years experience in sales and marketing I’ve come across many managers coming out with perfectly laid-down formulas, such as “if you make 100 calls, you will get 25 conversations, and you are going to sell 5 deals/contracts.” Sounds logical, right? But in reality, it never works that way. In today’s market, the time between first contact and the moment you get the cheque takes weeks, months and often years. So, ROI might be delayed. Sad, isn’t it? How many managers were disgruntled and lost their jobs over this type of corporate sales culture? It keeps happening over and over again.
So, what’s the solution? The answer is to combine these two strategies. Whether you use a small b2b telemarketing agency to test the market and generate qualified business leads locally or a national multifunctional outbound call centre with capacity to execute large volume b2b and b2c campaigns you will be able to provide a great volume of qualified leads to your inbound or outbound sales team. Give these leads to your best sales people to nurture and follow up. The results will be there for many months and years to come.
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