Sales lead - Better Closer

10 Secrets to Blogging for Sales

June 14, 2010 By Bill Rice

Bettercloser.com - Blogging for Sales

One of the hottest topics in the sales community right now is lead generation. Not just the big marketing programs that your company runs (and you rarely get any good leads from), but personal lead generation. Marketing efforts that you can start, manage, and see results from without any significant investment of time or money.

One of the best forms of personal lead generation is blogging. It can be, and probably should be, the anchor point of all your sales lead generation tactics.

You may be under the false impression that a great lead generation blog is all about being a great writer. That’s wrong. Of course with practice you will become a better writer, but there are a few steps that will connecting with you compelling enough to overcome the fact you’re not an award-winning author (yet).

1. Get Started

There is a reason Get Started is number one on this list. This simple point can’t be overemphasized. You won’t generate a single lead thinking about blogging, imagining a perfect logo or theme, or wishing for all the fancy gadgets on bigger websites.

Your customers don’t care anyway. They came there for one thing–information. If they wanted beautiful design they would have gone to a marketing blog.

2. Keep Going

Starting is half the battle. Keeping your blog going is the only way to win. Put blogging into your schedule. Make it a necessary element of your sales process and routine. Determine a good rhythm and stick to it.

Frequency isn’t all that important as long as you’re consistent. You can blog once a day or once a week. Just find a pace that works well in your schedule and stick to it.

3. Write to Prospects

One of the biggest mistake I see lots of bloggers making is writing to their industry peers. Unless you selling products and services to these people…knock it off! Write to your prospects.

When you sit down to write visualize your customer. Write the conversation you want to have if you get that appointment you so desperately seek. You might be surprised how many prospects call you to have that conversation–in person.

4. Write About Customers

(Hopefully) you work with customers everyday. Share these stories. They’re references and give your readers, your prospects confidence that you can help with their problem too.

Customers often feel like they have a unique and complex need. In reality, that is rarely the case. Chances are you’ve seen the problem and solved it many times.

The really neat thing about this misaligned reality is that when your prospect reads or hears your perfect representation of their problem, they often assume you must be the only one that can solve it.

How cool? Your blogging probably just remove some competition.

5. Answers Customers

How many questions do you get from prospects, customers, partners, and friends everyday? Take a second and stroll through your email inbox. How many of those unanswered emails are asking the same question? How many of them would make a great blog post?

One of my favorite tricks is to take an email and answer it, in great detail, on my blog. Then I can point this and all future emails like it to my new blog post.

This yields two benefits: First, your customers get a far more thorough answer than you whave time to give in an email. Second, you’re going to attract several people that have the same question, but would never know to ask you.

6. Be a Storyteller

How-to writing is usually boring. First this, then this, step one, step two, and if all goes well you get this. Yawn! Learn to tell stories.

People are captivated by reality. People love to hear war stories. People often internalize these stories into their own vision of the future. Stories get you calls like, “I read your article. Can you do that for me? I have this similar situation…”

7. Bring them Value

This is another secret that often gets mangled in translation. I will try to be really clear about what value is to a blog reader or online community member:

Value is educating people about things you are an expert in
Value is bringing your readers special offers
Value is introducing your readers to complimentary products
Value is asking them to buy things that will improve their life, business, paycheck

Value is not equal to free. Sure you might give away free advise or stuff from time to time. However, real value is bringing your readers a distinct advantage because they know and read you–even if they have to pay for it.

8. Be Direct!

This secret flows directly from number seven above. Don’t be shy about telling your prospects what you want them to do. Be direct. Tell them what websites to visit. Tell them what products to buy. Tell them when you are bringing them the best deals and exclusives.

9. Be Brief

No one has extra time. And even great authors like Hemingway knew the magic of brevity. Part of the value of your blogging should be to deliver what your customers need to know clearly and quickly.

10. Leave the Ending to Readers (Customers)

Your ultimate goal in blogging for sales is to engage your readers. Maybe even engage them in a sales conversation. That means drawing them into the conversation.

Try this by leaving the ending to them. Like this…

Do you blog for customers? What are your tips and tricks for bringing in prospects? How would you end this blog post?

Filed Under: blogging, Lead Generation Tagged With: Advertising and Marketing, Blog, business, FAQs Help and Tutorials, marketing, Money, Sales lead, social selling

5 Tips for Sales Improvement This Week

October 19, 2009 By Bill Rice

Often we are looking for silver bullet systems or recipes for success, while ignoring the basics. In my experience 90% of big sales improvement comes from getting back to the basics. These basics will have an immediate, measurable impact on your sales numbers.

Let’s put it to the test. Here are five fundamentals of sales. If you focus on them they will increase your sales this week.

Breakthrough the Fear of Failure

Jeffrey Gitomer, a sales guru and best-selling author, is famous for saying “fail faster.” This is a critical concept for a sales person to grasp early in their career. Like any professional athlete or best-selling author will testify to, you will swing and miss, shoot and miss, write and miss far more often than not. But, that’s okay because it’s the big ones that make them millions.

Sales has the same odds and the same big rewards. You have to kill the fear of rejection. You will hear “no” far more than “yes.” Embrace it. Know that it only means that you are that much closer to a sale.

Stop Getting Ready to Call, and Call

This is the top failure in sales performance–failure to call. Cold calling has become a pariah. However, the truth is that cold calling is the backbone of sales. Fundamentally you have to make contact and get your message out. That usually means calling a few people, setting up some appointments, and introducing yourself.

Sitting back and waiting for someone to find you and discover how you can help them is really making the buying process hard. And that, of course, is not good for your sales numbers.

Stop Picking Leads, Just Grab One

Here is another real sales quota killer–picking leads. Better known as cherry picking.

The thing about trying to constantly find the “best lead”–it doesn’t work and it wastes time. Ultimately, sales leads are often little more than a name, telephone number, and email. What are you going to make your, “this is a killer sale lead” decision based on?

Much like my advice to pick-up the phone and call, just grabbing a lead is about forward motion. Creating momentum has a far greater impact than getting the right lead.

Start Doing a Little Lead Nurturing

Regardless of how effective your sales pitch and charm might be, most buyers don’t immediately pull the trigger. That’s okay. Assuming you have a good lead nurturing program. In fact, studies show that lead nurturing not only keeps that sales lead active and viable, but may also creates a trust relationship that will actually increase the size of the transaction.

Think about it. You can build a strong feeling of reciprocity with lead nurturing. If you have a good system of touch points and you are giving away valuable content you are building buying pressure on that prospect.

Start Measuring Your Sales Process

One big mantra at a high performance sales organization I used to work at was: “What gets measured gets improved.”

If you’re not breaking down your sales process into measurable elements you might as well be “shooting BBs at the moon”–you’re never going to hit your target. Measuring helps you observe and make timely adjustments, before it’s too late. Do you need to make more calls? Is a certain objection eating you up? Are you losing deals in the proposal phase? If you aren’t measuring you won’t know.

Most importantly, do something with those improvement prompts. Work on increasing your leads and call volume. Tweak that sales script. Improve the value in that proposal.

Hopefully you are seeing a theme. So often, whether it is sales, sports, or any other competitive endeavor improvement is often best achieved by getting back to the basics. Try these back to basics tips and tell me how they go.

Effectively Following Up On Sales Leads (bettercloser.com)
“Sales-Ready” Lead…What? (bettercloser.com)

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Filed Under: Sales Training Tagged With: cold calling, Jeffrey Gitomer, Sales lead, Sales process, Salesmanship, Social Selling

Unwinding Good Behavior with Incentives

July 28, 2009 By Bill Rice

There is nothing more dangerous to sales production than rolling out a new compensation plan or incentive program. Often we make these tweaks to reward or encourage good behaviors we see in our sales organization, but I warn…caution is warranted.

I just encountered just such a scenario the other day. Here is an example of how rewards are about to unwind good sales behaviors:

As a brief background, Kaleidico’s Sales Manager (lead management software from my company) is uniquely designed as a pull-based CRM software. This is a very rare feature for lead management, but is incredibly powerful way to discipline sales management. You see, you have to work leads to get leads and it creates a healthy competition for sales leads.

In this particular scenario the client is experiencing an incredible sub-minute initial contact average. Talk about incredible customer service!

The logical conclusion is that their entire sales force is hungry for leads. What’s even better? They are also yielding above average conversion rates and very short sales cycles.

Why the concern?

They want to make a change. A gut-level logical change. They want to adjust lead distribution to reward their current top performers. The new system would round robin (push) leads into each of these selected performers until they hit an allowance cap. Then the lower performers would be eligible for their first fresh leads of the day.

I have been in the Internet lead business for over a decade and have seen about every lead allocation process you can imagine–this one is no exception. So, here are the most probable outcomes and fallacies to this lead distribution scheme:

Top performers don’t need to be hungry anymore, leads just became free
Conversion and contact rates are likely to decline for top performers
Managers now must monitor queues for aging leads or unavailable agents
Opens the flood gates for multiple “special” allocation groups
False assumption that leads received in the morning are best (actually research shows weekend leads are the highest converting)
Good news: Lower performers forced concentration on older leads typically increases their performance

There are certainly exceptions. Lead management is something that should be continually reviewed and optimized for market and organizational changes. However, caution to the wise beware of unwinding good behaviors your current system has enforced.

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Filed Under: Lead Management Tagged With: Customer relationship management, Customer service, Lead Management, Sales lead, Sales Management