©2019 Cornelius Butler How To Sell In The 21st Century™. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed, mechanical or electronic form (including recording or photocopying) without written permission, except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles or review. Every effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. Neither the author or publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestions in this book. All rights reserve for translation into foreign languages. ISBN-97816767663925 (Paperback) For information on quantity discounts or on having this title customized for your company, please email the publisher at howtosellinthe21stcentury@inspiresuccesspublishing.com
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to the late-night up-all-nighters, the crazies who believe they can have an impact in the world; the ones who have the audacity to dare to believe
in their dreams; the ones who start a business serving the world around them to make it a better place by providing a product, goods, or a service and crazy enough to believe they can get paid for it. This book is for you, the early-to-bed before everyone else, early-to-rise while the rest of the world is still sleeping; the ones who invest in themselves first and when their feet hit the floor the very next day, awake with that entrepreneurial hustle, mind, spirit, and drive.
CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE HOW DID I BUY MY FIRST ONLINE PRODUCTS?.................................5 CHAPTER TWO IS IT TIME FOR A MARKETING UPDATE?............................................10 CHAPTER THREE HOW TO GET MORE CUSTOMERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY..................17
CHAPTER FOUR HOW TO GET MORE PEOPLE TO JOIN YOUR MAILING LIST...........30 CHAPTER FIVE THE SILENT SALESMAN: HOW TO HIRE THE GREATEST SALESPERSON ON PLANET EARTH..................................................................................................... 34 CHAPTER SIX IDENTIFYING YOUR EXISTING SALES PROCESS AND HOW TO ENHANCE IT 40 CHAPTER SEVEN YOUR COMPANY’S MOST VALUABLE ASSETS: THE ECONOMICS OF A LIST.....................................................................47
CHAPTER EIGHT HOW TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING......................................57 CHAPTER NINE THE MARKETING TOOLS AVAILABLE TODAY AND HOW TO USE THEM CHAPTER TEN SCALE YOUR BUSINESS; DOMINATE YOUR MARKET...................66
61
CHAPTER ONE
How did I buy my first online products?
I
am a business owner in the network marketing industry, and I have been in this industry for more than twenty-three years. Just like any other business, no matter what the industry is, my numberone objective is to make a sale, recruit a new business partner, and keep customers coming back
to purchase more products on an ongoing monthly basis. Now, that’s what it looks like in a perfect world. The marketing method I use to get in front of more customers is magazine advertisement. This allows me to get in front of more customers faster, but through trial and error, I learned that an advertisement is no good if you have no way to capture your customers’ information. My advertisement would send my prospects to my website homepage, where I hoped that they would just magically sign up or leave me their email address so I can follow up with them at a later date. But what my website was doing was only making my prospects aware that I existed. I had great advertising content but no way to capture my future clients’ information. I quickly learned that I needed a landing page or “squeeze page.” I asked a friend of mine who knew website coding to build me a landing page with a submission button, and he did. Generating my own leads was great, and now I consistently had new people to talk to. For about a year and a half, people would see my ad in the magazine and fill out my landing page, which was programmed to notify me that I had a new lead or a client. This was awesome for me because I figured out a way to generate my own real-time leads. This was cutting edge technology at the time.
But as we marched into the future, I notice that my lead generation had slowed down and no one was filling out my landing page, or for the ones that did, inputted bogus information to see if I was a scam. My technology had suddenly became outdated. One day, I made two purchases online and, shortly after, the purchases arrived. I asked myself, “How did these items show up in my office?” Thinking outside the box from a customer’s point of view, I documented my buying experience, and here is what I came up with. I was on a social media site and an ad caught my attention: Some guy driving around in his car with a book in his hand while he was driving. I identified with the product he was promoting, so I clicked on the ad to hear what the guy was talking about. His pitch was simple, short, and straight to the point with a call to action. I clicked through to his website, and here is where I notice a huge difference between his squeeze page and mine. His landing page was dynamic. It had a video that explained the product, benefits, and why I should buy it, compared to my static, outdated landing page. I said to myself, “I now see why no one is filling out my landing page.” The guy on the landing page made me an offer I just couldn’t say no to. He offered me his best product for free, and all I had to do was cover a small shipping and handling fee. I thought, “Even I can cover that cost for this product.” Immediately upon my purchase, I became a paid lead for the seller, and a new client or asset to his mailing list. Now, how is that for getting someone to fill out your landing page with accurate data instead of bogus information? I received my book in the mail and, after getting the book, I started receiving email communications from the seller with hot new updates as they become available for future or current products. I guess you can say the business customer relationship did not end at the point of sale but is still digitally ongoing. I also sometimes receive a voicemail without the interruption of my phone ringing. I think it’s great, because I can get a nonintrusive way of getting updates without the pushy salesmen tactic.
The technique adopted by the seller teaches us a very important lesson about the world of digital advertising: You have to plan every step of the way. The process of attracting a potential buyer, getting the buyer convinced that he, indeed, needs your product, getting him to give you his contact information for further advertisements, and getting him to part with his hard-earned cash is quite tasking, yet it can be extremely rewarding. To be a successful online entrepreneur, you need the understand the intricacies of every step of the process, constantly work hard to develop the viability of your digital marketing campaign, and implement constant changes to your marketing model to make sure that you keep increasing income with every passing month. I like to tell people that marketing and advertising are perhaps the most scintillating and delicate activities in the world. Marketing has always been a science and an art, and the 21st century’s digitized form of marketing makes this fact even truer. You need to understand perfectly how to use all the resources available at your disposal: well-designed and catchy images, spectacular and concise videos showing the benefits and advantages of your product, and brief-yet-comprehensive information that explicitly states why the customer should buy your product and not one of the hundreds or thousands of other brands available just a few clicks away. Digital marketing is therefore not something you should just dabble into; it is a critical aspect of your online business that can make or break your career as an online entrepreneur. Like the science that it is, it has standards, yet ever-evolving rules that should be followed for success. Yet, like the art that it is, you need a lot of creativity and innovation to make it work. Therefore, to run a successful digital marketing campaign, you need to learn to express your creativity, stick to the general guidelines and keep evolving and keeping up with the latest trends to keep getting your products the exposure they need for you to make those sales.
Selling in the 21st century has become both traditional and internet-based. Most small and medium size businesses sell more on the internet than the traditional start-ups. The 21st century has seen a substantial shift of marketing from the traditional marketing to more online digital marketing methods. From YouTube ads, Facebook targeted ads and pop up ads on popular websites, digital marketing helps to direct traffic to your online business where prospects can become people who know like and trust you or your brand and then be converted to eventual sales. If you’re not taking advantage of this powerful platform and don’t know where to start it’s not your fault. I hope that this book can provide you the valuable tools you need to move your business into the 21st century. In the twentieth century, the little guy was always out-spent when it came to advertising, and was always dominated by the big corporate giants who had deep pockets to invest in marketing campaigns. At every major sport broadcast, you could always find the major corporate giants pumping in serious dollars into advertising. And it was not only in sports, it was extremely difficult for entrepreneurs who were just starting out to break into the mainstream market because the richer and more established brands practically bought all the exposure. The erected huge billboards on turnpikes, they advertised in magazines and newspapers. They dominated television and radio adverts. The big guys were practically everywhere, and the newbie didn’t stand a chance. Everything changed however, with the coming of the 21st century. Corporate giants understand this simple but effective sales concept; getting in front of a massive amount of people to sell their product, goods or services is extremely critical. Corporations had the means and resources to do so. But in the 21st century, if you are equipped and armed with the right information, the little guy can sell like it’s Super Bowl Sunday every day of the week and you don’t even have to invest a million dollars for a thirty-second-time slot. It is my sincere hope that within the pages of this book you learn how to market your products or services in a way that lets you be profitable from day
one. So, looking back from a customers point of view, I believe I bought that guy’s product because I was offered a very nice product on a page that directed me to the sale with an easy route to purchase.
CHAPTER TWO
Is it time for a marketing update?
T
hink about the times we live in today. We live in an era where the greatest amount of wealth has been shifted and is up for grabs for those who have the knowledge to take advantage of it. Knowledge is at our fingertips and information travels at the push of a button. None of this
existed 35 years ago. Marketing in the times past for the small business owner or entrepreneur was solely on word of mouth advertising, flyers, post cards, and direct mailers. The objective of marketing back then is still the same today. How to get in front of more customers or foot traffic fast? Technology as leveled this playing field and made it very affordable for the small business owner or entrepreneur to obtain this objective. I believe that this is the missing piece to the marketing puzzle for the entrepreneur / small business community that I hope to fill that gap. For most entrepreneurs and small business owners the topic of social media, and website traffic is well known but very little understood. We live in a time where there are six different generations in the marketplace to communicate with and how do you meet them at their level? These are the names of the Generations: The G.I. Generation born from 1901 to 1926 The Silent Generation born from 1925 to 1945 The Baby Boomers born from 1946 to 1964 Generation X born from 1965 to 1980
The Millennials Generation Y born from 1981 to 2000 The New Silent Generation Z born from 2001 to present Source of Generation: marketingteacher.com
In the world we live in today, word of mouth advertising should no longer be your sole source of marketing efforts because of the power of the internet and all of its connected devices. If you understand how to effectively use this tool, then the little mom and pop shops can easily sell like a corporate giant. The reason why the small business or entrepreneur has been dominated in the marketplace when it comes to media advertising is because of the price barrier on buying media. How much will it cost you? TV Ads: $63,000 to $ 8million for a national Spot. Radio Ads: between $300 and $5000 a week depending on the location Print Ads: A Full page is about $500 to $397,800 Source: webfx
This is what it would cost you to acquire a customer. Corporations reach more customers in the marketplace by investing a consistent amount of dollars into buying media. The concept is to get in front of more people fast. The platform they use to dominate their market space and maximize their media dollars is through using billboard, radio, Newspaper, magazines and television ads. All these platforms are networks that allow any business that can afford to pay, the ability to sell to the masses. With the old way of buying Cable, Newspaper, Magazines, Radio, and Television ads small businesses and entrepreneurs were priced out. But technology has disrupted the status quo and shifted the power into the hands of the small business owners and entrepreneurs.
There is a new way to reach the masses at a price that is very affordable for small businesses who do not think small. How Long it takes reaching 50million users? Airlines…………………………………… 68years Automobiles………………………………62years Telephone…………………………………50years Electricity…………………………………46years Television…………………………………22years Computers……………………………….14years Mobile Phones……………………………12years Internet WWW…………………………….7years Facebook…………………………………. 3years WeChat…………………………………….1year PokemonGo……………………………….19days Source: visual capitalist
When thinking about selling in the 21st Century it is critically important that you understand Your customers are already online. According to internet live stats.com there are currently at the time this book is being written. Over 4 billion Internet users online right now Over 2 billion Facebook users online
Over 7 hundred million Google Plus users Over 3 hundred million Twitter users Over 2 hundred million Pinterest users Source: internet live stats
The sales landscape has changed and it is imperative that you understand where your customers are hanging out. It is no longer good enough to just get a website up and running and to get a few customer reviews on rating sites such as yelp or the BBB. Although these are a good start, there’s a ton of opportunity that you could be missing out on. Smart phone technology is the reason why the sales landscape has changed. The next time you are out in the marketplace do a quick fact check for yourself and see. Look at how many people are on their phones staring into the four to six inches of screen on their cell phones. Most of us do not leave home without our phones. And when we want to buy something or search for something that we are looking for, we pull out our phones, and jump on the internet and do a quick search to find what we are looking for. This little device has taken all the major platforms like newspapers, television, radio, post office, and networking events, and interconnected all these networks into the palm of your hand. Old Media Newspapers
New Media Blogs (clients are reading)
Radio
Podcast (clients are listening to)
Television
YouTube (clients are watching)
Direct Mail
Email (Having a client’s list)
Networking
Social Media (Hanging out)
Source: dotcom secrets
Since your ideal customers are already online, the small business owner and entrepreneur community needs to understand how to convert traffic into customers in a consistent and predictable way. “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins”. A Quote by Dan Kennedy. If you are saying to yourself, I can’t out spend the big corporations in advertising. It is time for you to consider a different approach. As entrepreneurs and small business owners that is what we must do. With 160,000 devices sold in a day, and over 1.5 million smart phones being sold and 163,000 tablets in one day. Consider these facts,82% of businesses have spent less than $50 on Face book advertising 52% don’t use Facebook ads at all Only 9% of businesses are advertising on YouTube. It’s time to throw your outdated marketing efforts out the window and upgrade to the 21 st century way of selling. The success of your business depends on it. In today’s time we live in with this shift in balance of the world wide web, we can no longer be outsold by the major corporations to reach more customers. Apart from all these extremely convincing statistics that lucidly show the untapped potential that lies in digital advertising, there are still a couple of reasons why your business would massively benefit form an internet-based marketing campaign. The merits of digital marketing consist of more than just the fact that you can reach millions of more people within a shorter time frame. It also includes a couple of other spectacular benefits that most traditional means of advertising cannot get you. First of all, digital advertising gives you the opportunity to capture the information of potential customers and people who actually purchased your product. Through viable marketing techniques such as email marketing, you can continue to reach out to these people who have demonstrated an
appreciable level of interest in your product. Automatically, sending regular, periodic emails to these individuals increases your chances of making more sales since these people have already shown interest in your product. Under traditional marketing methods, it is significantly more difficult for you to actually have a specific target audience that you can specially reach out to from time to time at such a negligible cost. The subject of cost brings us to perhaps the most important advantage of digital marketing to the budding 21st century entrepreneur. As stated in the foundations of Economics, money is a scarce resource, and hence, it must be managed with utmost diligence and devotion. For the newbie entrepreneur, the availability of funds for his advertising campaigns is perhaps his most pressing problem – or used to be. Now, things have changed. With a budget as slim as $500, a new business can establish an amazing online presence, reach out to thousands of potential customers via social networks, and make their products as visible as possible through several online means. Digital marketing is extremely cost-effective, and it yields an unbelievable return on investment. In the past, advertising in a newspaper page, on a television program, or a billboard meant you had to spend thousands, or in some cases, millions of dollars to promote your product. However, despite these huge investments on advertising campaigns, most of the rich corporate companies got only average returns on their investments, compared to the returns obtainable online. Therefore, digital marketing is extremely costeffective, making it a powerful advertising channel for the newbie entrepreneur. Advertising online is also extremely flexible and allows you to express your creativity to the fullest to the benefit of your business. For every business to succeed, it must have a competitive edge in the industry; something that sets it apart from the rest and gives it the opportunity to truly shine. However, establishing that kind of leverage used to be quite difficult before the advent of digital marketing. Advertising via mass and print media meant that the giant corporations that could afford these
advertising channels had to adhere to relatively strict rules, putting a limit to their ability to get creative with their marketing approaches. However, on the internet, all things are possible. The possibilities that you can explore are basically infinite, and if you can think it, you can definitely make it a reality in the digital world. Therefore, digital advertising manages to bring cost-efficiency, a wide reach, and an incredible level of flexibility that allows you to even use unorthodox approaches to creatively market your product. It’s a world of infinite possibilities online, truly.
CHAPTER THREE
HOW TO GET MORE CUSTOMERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
O
nce you set up a business, after having the type of products or services you want to offer, setting your vision and mission statement will clearly define your purpose. Next is to identify your business processes and potential customers. We go into business to make a
profit and this can only be guaranteed by selling. Who do we sell to? Customers! You must, therefore, know, as a business owner that your clients are an important factor in your business survival. Once you have a steady inflow of new customers, your client base grows, and you can begin to grow your business gradually. The small customer base you currently have is a great way to build loyalty with your customers. Their feedback would allow you to work on improvements, a development that helps you be confident about your product or services. But you must expand to grow your business, and this is where attracting new customers come in. Generally, there are techniques for adding more customers—more like a process to follow in adding customers. We shall discuss this process first and then; we shall proceed to show you some modern tools you can use for aiding this process. So, what is the process?
Ideal Client Identification
Looking for new customers, or just customers is quite easier if you have a knowledge of who your ideal customers are. It is a bit difficult to know where to start the customer acquisition process if you do not
know who your ideal clients are. Once you have identified the ideal customers’ identity, next is to think about the things that affect their emotions: what makes them happy? What makes them sad? What relieves them? Once you know these, you can begin to think of what to do to affect their lives positively. You must remember that as humans, we are more of an emotional being than logical. In making a purchasing decision, we apply less of logic and more of emotion. As such, a business that would add value must show care for its customers. Next, you have to align the focus of your clients narrowly. This would help you to avoid making broad market statements. Knowing the main focuse of your ideal client base helps you to tailor your market to be more appealing to these groups rather than trying to appeal to the general public. When people feel that your market statement focuses mainly on them, they regard you as a business that regards them and cares for them.
Know Where They Live
Once you have identified who your ideal customers are, the next task is to find out where they live. This is simply about finding out places where you are likely to find them, either online, via media, offline or through emails. The nature of the business you are into would determine the areas where you would look for customers. Some of your customers, if not all, are also on different online and social media sites; in forums and pages, those you may own, or those by similar businesses. We would talk about this later. By attending conventions and conferences also, you can get to meet customers offline.
Understand Your Business
It is important as a business owner that you have a thorough understanding of your business and the industry in which you belong to. This entails having in-depth knowledge and understanding of your
service or product and letting it show in how you add value. A deep knowledge of your service or product helps you in attracting customers. When people, especially those in your customer base and those interested in what you are offering, see that you are knowledgeable about such services or products, they tend to patronize you more. They see you as an authority in such area and have the belief that whatever service or product you offer must be of a high standard. They would come for your assistance, attend your programs and buy your products or services. You must, however, live up to these beliefs; you don’t want to appear as the person who says a lot and does nothing; it’s bad for business.
Be The Answer
Consumers always have economic problems. They know what they need or want, or more aptly, they know what to buy. But the question is, is what they know the right thing for them? This is where you must position yourself. Be that person who helps any customer he/she comes across to make a better financial and economic decision based on their needs or wants. How do you do this? You give them a great reason why they should choose your services or products. Consumers may understand their needs, but you are the expert, you must understand their needs better than they do. Then, you must be able to bridge this knowledge gap by being able to articulate their needs in such a way that they understand it better. When you do this successfully, they do not only see a need to buy your products or services; they also become loyal customers. Because they understand that you care about their utility and emotion, they not only come back for more but also tell others about you. Other ways of being the answer are by hosting webinars to teach people about the services and products you offer. You can also blog, guest blog and network. With a proper and well-structured sales funnel, you can begin to attract more customers through all of these.
Direct Response Marketing
This comes with being tactical. While it is not something that most consumers would be willing to do, getting them actually to complete some specified action, like opting into your e-mail list, is a way to add value to your customers. Once you have a means of being in constant touch with them, it is left for you to develop content that would add value to your customers and send it to them periodically. You must be careful, however, not to make the communication an everyday thing or too constant as this may constitute a nuisance. Once they start perceiving you as disturbing them, they may begin to unsubscribe from your mailing list or other forums where you engage them. Basically, this works by offering something of value to your customers in order for them to join a mailing list, webinars or online forums. Then, once you have them here, you begin to offer them value for free to entice them to your paid products and services. However, you must learn more about direct response marketing to understand how to direct your effort on getting results. Your messages to your ideal clients must be compelling, brief and clear. Show them a reason why they must choose you and a reason why they would be losing out for not choosing you. Let them see that you understand their pain and that you have a solution that would take it all away; a solution that is both fast and affordable.
Partnership or (JV) Joint Ventures
Who do you partner with? Simple: businesses that offer complementary services to your business. Let’s take, for instance, that you offer search engine optimization and content develop services. It would be very profitable and productive to go into a partnership agreement with businesses that build websites. It is a symbiotic relationship; it must be a win-win for both businesses. For one, they can offer your service to their customers as a freebie to enhancing their value addition by introducing your service to the client as a trusted professional. If they did a great job for such a client, he would listen to them and hire you.
You can also do this for your customers. “Oh, I have read your request and understand the type of content you would need. I understand that you would also need to create a website. Our sister company offers very economical and unique website design services that are very reliable and trusted. If you don’t mind, I can set you up with their client manager for more explanation.” If this is a client that has seen you as an authority in your field and a problem solver, he would readily listen to you. The value here, for you, is how much more customers they are able to direct to you but to get this, you must also direct clients to them. This is why you must be thorough with your research in choosing whom to partner with.
Following Up
Nurturing relationships, either with customers or other businesses, would help you to grow your client base. It is not just about selling to customers, offering them value without asking for a sale also works. To put it briefly, the focus is for you to focus on the human relationship side of the business and the strength of that relationship. The deeper the connection will determine the the likeliness of a customer telling others about your business. And if the relationship is strong, it would not be a mere telling in passing; they would tell others about your business passionately. This is when you have successfully made such a customer an indirect brand ambassador. The idea is for you to follow up on clients, even after they are no longer buying from you.
TOOLS FOR GAINING MORE CUSTOMERS
Remember the part where we discussed about having a structured sales funnel? Yeah, this is the part where we discuss that. In the twenty-first century, gaining customers is a long chain of inter-twined social media tools. What are these social media tools? These are the social media platforms that you can
deploy to create an integrated funnel for attracting and retaining customers. So, how does this work? We would come to that. But so that you know, using this tool is very affordable. Let’s dive right in.
Blogs
Blogging is part of a whole term of inbound marketing, which is a term for a respective way of creating awareness to your customers without constituting a nuisance, be it they are current client, current prospect or future client. Blogging helps you to address the frequently asked questions of your industry. Even if the topic you discussed isn’t inclusive of a product or service that you offer, it still drives traffic to your website and improves your brand recognition. You can use blogging in two ways, either as a blog owner or as a blog guest writer. Either way, discussing valuable topics to consumers on blogs help them to notice you as a problem solver. For more view, you can share the link to your blog post on other media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. There are other ways of driving traffic to your site; we would get to them later. Blogging allows your potential customer to find your site, especially when you use industry keywords in your blog posts. Lastly, you don’t really have to be a writer to express your thoughts; you can record an audio file and send it to a freelance writer to develop for you, making sure he uses industry-related keywords. A good blog post should end with a call to action; usually a link to a service or product that your company offers.
Treating Pinterest like a search engine can help you to drive more traffic to your blogs and improve your brand awareness. Use industry-related keywords in your pins and board descriptions make your post to
show up more to your targeted customer when they query such words. Don’t use keywords relating to an industry in an unrelated pin as doing this might make people start ignoring your links. The next thing is to optimize your profile. You can do this by putting a call to action within the description. If you do free value-added e-mailing, put the link to such e-mail in your description. In the description also, you can input relevant keywords that your ideal clients might use when they search on Pinterest. In choosing your cover image, ensure that image represents your brand identity. Pay attention to colors and fonts, and ensure it is uniform for all your business post anywhere online. Group boards, like normal Pinterest boards, are also helpful. Join the relevant ones to your line of business. This would help you to put your pins before a wider audience. Ensure that the groups you join have many followers from your target audience. Next is to ensure that your business blog posts are pinned the right way. Use enticing headlines when creating shareable blog post images for your Pinterest also helps. However, you must ensure that your posts are share-worthy by sticking to your brand identity, using vertical images (735px by 1102px) and making sure your posts are easy to read; using legible fonts and sizes, since most Pinterest traffics are from mobile phones. Lastly, don’t forget to promote your pins.
No social media has beaten Facebook’s Instagram in terms of engagement, with over 800 million active users every month. How can you utilize this platform for reaching your ideal clients? •
CATCHY IMAGES: Pictures can pass a thousand words at just a glance and if they do, the viewer
can wait and read the image more intently. Make sure your images catch attention and are of high quality, nobody looks at an ordinary picture twice.
•
CREATE CONTEST: Once you have a decent audience on your channel, you are better off creating
a contest. However, read Instagram's promotional guidelines, community and guidelines and platform policy before you create a contest. What are the things a promotional contest should have? Branded hashtags, amazing media (photo or video), public involvement, time-bound, easy to join and has a relevant price to be won. A contest would boost your brand with organic traffic and also your reach. •
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT: Don’t just care about likes and comments; create
posts that help you to engage your customers. You can write a call to action and attractive captions that encourage your followers to engage your brand. Also, it is important to respond to comments as this would make the customers feel appreciated. Don’t forget to say thanks to customers that use your products, comment on your posts and participate in your contests. •
IMPROVED RESPONSE RATE: Ensure that your response rate is fast enough when people
comment to request something on your post. The faster you reply, the more important you make them feel. •
GET CLOSE TO INFLUENCERS: Building rapport with influencers is like building a partnership.
Influencers have massive followership. These are organic client base for you to reach to, all you need to do is seek permission to tag influencers in your post and get them to comment, although these might cost you a bit.
YouTube Channel
If writing is not your thing and appearing in a video doesn’t bother you, welcome to YouTube. If you can do well with animation, you don’t even need to show your face to engage your customers. Creating a YouTube channel is all you need. Then, periodically, say every week, create short value-adding videos and put them on your YouTube channel. In the comment, you may put a link to your website or blog,
and even your contact information. Make sure your posts are related to your business and consistent. At the end of your video, input a call to action that encourages them to subscribe to your channel. By doing this, they would get notified every time you put up a new post. In putting up a new post, ensure your videos are clear and that the audio is audible without any background noise. Also, when you name your post, ensure to input industry-related keywords that your ideal client might use in a YouTube search. Ensure to put a link to all your social media forum in the comment of your videos.
Because Twitter does not permit the use of too much word per post, most people often think it is not a great place to attract customers. This is not true. All you need to pass a long message on twitter is create a thread, which is simply creating a post and commenting the rest of your message under this post, in multiple posts. In creating a thread, ensure that the first post is detailed but short, catchy enough to make the reader want to read the rest. At the end of the first post, create a short sentence showing the reader that there is more in the comment. Something like, ‘It’s a thread! ’ Or just, ‘#thread’. Ensure that you keep all your post short and value-filled enough for people to willingly follow you so that they can read more valuable posts from you. Often times, most people who feel the value in your post would retweet it to reach even a wider audience. When people follow you, always make sure you follow back. You can also put up single post tweets to introduce a product or service or concepts.
Facebook is the platform that unites all other platforms in creating a structured sales funnel. We shall discuss by taking the available options one by one. Note it that no other platform offers you enough opportunity to brand yourself and your business as much as Facebook.
•
PROFILE: Your profile defines who you are and it is here that you can create a magnetic
appearance for your ideal customers. Whatever you do with your audience, ensure you are either creating something of value or endorsing something of value. Don’t like or comment on posts that do not add value. When you comment anywhere, ensure you are solving the problems of the people on that post or page. Ensure that you provide value in groups where your targeted audience gather. Ensure that your profile image is clean and showcase what you are about. Ensure it is an image where people can see your face clearly, like making eye contact with you. •
BIO LINK: In your bio link is a short paragraph for you to pitch yourself, use it wisely. Make sure
the description here matches your cover image and showcases what you do. Ensure you repeat this elevator pitch throughout your entire profile, howbeit in different forms. Here, you can add a link to your blog or a private group, where you give away free value. In the ABOUT YOU section, you can input information such as your location, business links, page links, social links and courses you have taken part in. The information you are willing to share here depends on you but the more information you share, the better your audience can build a relationship with you. •
ADD FRIENDS: There are two ways to reach a maximum of 5000 friends, which is the maximum
Facebook permit. The first is to add at least a 100 friend every day, although the number may vary depending on how soon you want the funnel to be ready. The other way is to give value in all the groups that contain audiences in your business line. When you solve people problems on these groups by either answering their question or posting insightful comments, they would naturally ask to be your friend. •
GROUPS: Like earlier discussed, people would notice you more when you are a problem solver
or value propagator. But how do you find groups that are related to your field? All you have to do is to search for keywords from the industry you are in and join the groups. By your value-adding activities on
these groups, people would start visiting your profile to know you. Because you have already pitched yourself on your profile, they ask to be your friend and hold you in high regard. Because you have a link to your private group there, they join your group. •
SERVE YOUR COMMUNITY AND FUNNEL OUT: Now that you have gotten people to your private
groups, it is time for you to keep them engage by offering them free value. But in doing so, you make sales. How? When you create an engaging post, always end it with a free offer. Suppose you were explaining about how to lose weight without stopping what you love eating. In the end, you can tell them to watch a free video or read a blog post on what to do and then infuse a link to your YouTube channel or blog post. However, from the blog post or YouTube channel, you already have a call to action that ask them to either submit their e-mail for a free eBook or take them to a page where you display your products and services. Boom! You would start converting your followers into customers. And because you keep engaging them while offering top-notch services, you are able to retain them as customers. •
FACEBOOK ADS: Finally, this is where you have to spend a little. By now, you would have a long
list of fans on your Facebook fan page and private groups. All you need to do is upload this list to Facebook. A Lookalike audience is—an algorithm that Facebook uses to find you an audience of similar profile as your list. That is, Facebook would display your ads to people who are very likely to purchase your goods or services. Now, they would visit your page or website for a single purchase, but because you have uploaded so much value and create a rich community, they would stay and become permanent members. In this chapter, the various techniques that can be used to promote your products effectively on various social media channels have been established. A couple of other general guidelines to ensure the success
of your social media campaigns, and help you to snag more customers for social media networks exist, however. Some of these guidelines would now be reviewed.
Listen to Customers and Engage Them in Conversations:
To promote your products effectively online, it is very important for you to establish a personal connections with your potential clients. It is pertinent for you to create an atmosphere of cordiality and camaraderie to make your potential customers comfortable with patronizing your brand. As much as possible, answer your client’s questions, respond to their direct messages in real time, and show them how exactly how your product outshines others.
When your clients feel like they can actually relate with you on a personal level, they would be a lot more receptive to the idea of patronizing your brand, and they would even be more willing to tell others about your product, thereby organically growing your customer base. As an online entrepreneur, self management is very important. You need to create time for every single activity you need to carry out, including building personal connections with your clients. Project value, and you would reap incredible rewards.
Encourage Social Recommendations: When you succeed in getting customers to subscribe to your periodic e-mails or buy your product, offer extremely satisfactory information or extremely outstanding services to boost customer satisfaction. After doing this, implore your customers to tell their friends and family about your product. If a customer is suitably satisfied with your product,
information, or service delivery, they would usually be more than willing to spread the word about your business. This is the new word of mouth advertising in the 21 st century. You can also encourage them to follow your brand’s social media pages and share your posts on their social media accounts to boost your visibility. Offer incentives such as discounts or free products to people who refer a specific number of individuals to purchase your product. This would make people more willing to promote your brand, and thereby get you more sales.
Respond rapidly to Complaints and Enquiries on Social Media
A cogent fact that you must note is that how you present your brand on social media channels can make or break the image of your brand. When you are lackadaisical about responding to complaints and enquiries about your product on your social media accounts, it sends an implicit message to people that you represent a brand that doesn’t care about its customers and potential clients. Whether you are communicating with actual customers or potential clients, respond as professionally and quickly as possible to enquiries and complaints, and under no circumstance are you allowed to vituperate on your social media channels, take a political stand that may oppose the beliefs of your clients, or insult people that you feel are being rude. Stay neutral, stay professional, keep your eyes on the goal, and watch the credibility of your brand shoot through the roof. We discussed ways to help you get more customers using social media accounts, and other means. Be sure to implement these guidelines in the day-to-day running of your business.
CHAPTER FOUR
How to get more people to join your mailing list
T
he internet brought an ease of doing business that many business owners appreciate. With social media especially, news about a new brand launch for instance can travel around the world in seconds. Does email have any relevance in today’s business landscape? For many
marketers, email is just a traditional medium to send electronic correspondence. Well, not for them that have tested and tasted the power of email marketing. According to studies by the Direct Marketing Association, an email marketing campaign by itself can generate 4300% ROI for a business in the United States. There are a few reasons why marketing through email is a powerful tool for growing a business; •
The major and unique advantage of email over other internet tools for marketing is its direct
nature. Everyone whose email address is on a mailing list receives promotional emails as they would personal emails. As much as social media platforms are personalized, content in a newsfeed is not as direct as in email. •
Most people who have emails would not let a day pass without them checking for new mail. The
power of emails lies in its ability to be both professional and social. •
Customizing an email is an inexpensive yet highly effective internet marketing channel.
Flexibility with emails means that content sent to email list subscribers can be on a wide range of topics.
•
The process of signing up into a mailing list involves email verification. This action is aimed at
filtering through the mailing list to make sure that only people who are double sure they would love to receive promotional material in their emails to. Can the product or service offered influence the rate and growth of an email subscription list? Not really, but what does is the nature of incentive given to subscribers. It matters less what is being offered, asked, created, being built or sold and more on what the customer is getting in return. The analogy is quite simple: an online visitor visits a website. By the time they are leaving the site, they need no reason to hang around, why would they? The goal of an effective mailing list is not just to have a ton of subscribers, majority of whom do not have the intention to patronize your brand. You want a mailing list that helps you to communicate with people who are interested in, and who will benefit from the extremely valuable information you would be sharing via your periodic mails. To achieve this goal, you need people that are interested in your brand, your product, and the information you have to offer. There is no use amassing a lot of people who are practically useless to your brand on your mailing list. Therefore, here are a couple of guidelines to help you get people that you actually need, and that actually need you on your mailing list:
Develop Trust from the Onset:
To get people who would actually be interested in patronizing your brand on your mailing list, it is quite important for you to get them to trust you from the onset. In the world of online advertising, there is a lot of deceit and too much of scams, people are taking unscrupulous routes just to sell their products, and it is fast affecting the integrity of a lot of online businesses. Therefore, for people to trust you enough to sign up for your periodic mails, you need to make some promises to get them to trust you. State to them
that you would not be sharing or selling their contact information as some unscrupulous businesses do. You may be surprised to hear it, but some businesses actually go ahead to sell their customers’ contact information to spammers and other shady characters. Establish trust from the onset, and you are on your way to building a great customerseller relationship with your subscribers.
Show That People Value Your e-Mails: There is no better way to project credibility than to show your potential subscribers that other people are actually benefitting from the information you share via your emails. It would make a lot of sense at this juncture, to mention the actual number of people on your mailing list if you’ve managed to rack up an impressive number of subscribers on your list. Through your ads, on your blogs, and through your other means of advertising, show people the benefits that other people are deriving from your e-mails. You may also share testimonials of people who have managed to improve aspects of their lives connected to your product by following the instructions provided in your e-mails. As much as possible, let people realize the value they’ll derive from subscribing to your mailing list.
Encourage Sharing of Your e-Mails:
After convincing people to join your mailing list, then the work has only just begun. You need to ensure that you consistently deliver high-quality and practicable information in all your e-mails. Do not just advertise, you must actually give as much free value as possible in your e-mails. When your content contains valuable information, then you can move on
to the next step: encouraging people to share your e-mails to their friends and if possible, social media contacts. This would greatly help to boost your visibility and promote your brand’s growth.
Conclusion
People are always in need of something – giving it totally free puts them in thanksgiving mode. What better way to say ‘thank you’ than to share their contact details? The most successful offers that get tons of people to voluntarily opt-in for email marketing are centered round resources that people would otherwise have bought. Software, eBooks, reports, or chapters of a best seller are real value incentives that people would find hard to resist.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Silent Salesman: How to Hire the Greatest Salesperson on Planet Earth
I
f it was possible to hire the greatest salesperson on planet earth to work for your small business and he or she agreed to work under the following terms and conditions would you let him or her have the job? The silent salesman agrees to never take a vacation, never call in sick, or never
complain about taking a break. This person is responsible to meet and greet every one of your customers that he or she comes in contact with, - with the same message and enthusiasm on a consistent ongoing basis. The silent salesman’s only job is to tell your company’s story with compassion, get your customers engaged, make them an offer, get your customers contact follow up information, and even offering your customers an up sale of your products if they want it. He or she will be like a tour guide to your customers leading them every step of the way through the sales process, by giving your customers a step by step action to take in the online world the same way you would do in the offline world. The silent salesman is great at leading your customers from your home page to the checkout page. Basically, by hiring the silent salesman will increase your bottom line and make you more money. So how do we find this person you might ask? Who do you think is the greatest salesperson on planet earth to better tell your company’s story or mission? That would be you, Right? There is a better way than your website to engage your customers buying experience and capture your prospects information. All of this can be done by using the power of video
to tell your story and switching your website to a sales funnel. A sales funnel is a series of webpages that you lead your prospects through to the checkout. It’s the shortest distance between your home page and the checkout page. If you ever bought something online before, outside of a major retail or big box chain, it’s most likely you purchased it from a sales funnel. The question is often asked what is a sales funnel? In its simplest terms a sales funnel is the replacement to the website. The same way CD’s replaced cassette tapes, and DVD’S replaced VHS tapes. It is a more effective way to generate more sales, get more customers, or promote an event. Websites had its era back in the day, but with the birth of mobile smart phone technology if you really look at the production of your website today, the question you must ask yourself is, how many people who visited my website last month were converted into customers? Are people filling out my mailing list? How much revenue did my website generate? The website is the soul and heartbeat of an ecommerce business and its purpose is to sell. But in the 21st century selling has become more than just a static webpage with a list of products or links that connect potential customers to the about us section, home page, products link, etc. Some websites have become like brochures in cyber space that only inform your client through words text and pictures. Today’s customers are on the go and most if not, all of them carry their technology in their hands through smartphone mobile technology or tablets. Today’s customers identify with companies and brands that can connect with them on an emotional level rather that a logical level. What better way to connect with your potential clients other than using the power of video to tell your companies story or mission. The silent salesman can connect with your clients in a way that the traditional website just can’t, with static pictures and text. The ability to tell your company story,
mission, or brand with video and connect on an emotional level is the pathway to selling success in the 21st century. The 21st century is not just about making a sell but making a connection with your clients and solving a problem or providing a solution that your clients did not know existed until they met you.
And doing it in such a way that provides your clients more in worth value than what you receive from them in cash value. The key to selling and winning in the 21 st century will not come from the company with the better product or service, but the company than can provide the best customer buying experience. The company that can engage the customer and provide some assistance throughout the buying experience will be the company that will extend the customer buying relationship beyond the first initial sale. Creating customer relationship profiles alongside the typical buyers’ profile will be the backend success and competitive edge your company needs to always blaze the trail in the 21 st century, instead of just merely competing. The business who always set the standard is always the business that others look to for innovation. Having a relationship with your customers is the best way to ensure your company’s success for today’s times and the years to come. Imagine having a CRM customer relationship manager where you knew when your customer’s anniversary or birthday was, and you automatically sent them an email or text congratulating them on another year and a reminder to not for get to make that special purchase. You could even make them a special offer with a discounted price. Remember it’s about giving more in worth value than you receive in cash value. Having a customer buying relationship and the ability to make offers instead of selling products is the sure way to online selling success. A silent salesman can walk and engage your clients through the special offer or promotion and in the process make them feel like the most important person in the world. Your client’s
special day or special occasion is exactly just that, special, so why not share a vested interest in your customers? When you get to this level of customer engagement it becomes more than just selling but rather sharing and engaging. The demand for customer service expectation become set to high, and will your company be able to deliver above and beyond? That is the question. It is easy in my opinion to exceed your customer’s expectation if you have the mindset to not just meet your customer’s expectation but to exceed their expectations. Always being in the creating mindset will always exceed your customer expectation because you’re doing something that has never been done before. And if you do it in a way that would make you feel like the most important person in the world. Your pathway is set to success always raising the bar. Putting the heart and soul into your business by hiring the greatest salesman on planted earth can be the most cost effective business decision you could ever make or acquire for your business because no one can be more passionate or heart felt and compelling that you sharing the power of your story about how your company got started or what the mission or cause is. That is why you are the greatest sales person on planet earth. Since nobody can be as passionate about your business as you are, incorporating a spectacular video that presents your product as irresistibly as possible into your sales funnel is an absolute necessity. To ensure that your video is an absolute success, here a few tips to help you along the way:
Grab Your Audience’s Attention in Seconds:
There is an inexhaustible supply of information available on the web. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and other social media channels offer an endless
stream of videos, pictures and posts by several individuals trying to jostle for the attention of social media users. After a few minutes on the web, most people are already bored with the endless information they have access to, and they are looking for something that can actually capture their attention and hold them spellbound. It is your duty to perform that function: be what they have been searching for. For you to effectively do this however, you need to capture their attention first, or else they would only scroll past. So within the first three to five seconds of your video, make a powerful impression on your audience and keep them glued to the edge of their seats instantaneously. Use the power of story telling, bright colors, flashing lights, moving items and other components to make your video instantly attractive. Be the Lord of the Rings when it comes to telling your companys story and not the PBS in telling your story. Facts tell but stories sell. Keep in mind that you are jostling for attention with literally hundreds of millions of other online brands for the attention of your prospect, so make those first few seconds count.
Insert Text in Your Video:
To ensure that you actualize your goal of effectively passing your desired message across to your potential clients via your videos, incorporating texts into your videos is a must. As mentioned earlier, people are more impatient than ever, and attention spans are at an alltime low. Therefore, in combination with techniques to capture your audience’s attention in the first few seconds, you must also use texts to highlight critical aspects of the information you are trying to pass across. Texts would also allow people who watch
videos without activating the sound option to grasp the basics of the information you are trying to pass across.
Provide Value with your Videos:
The most effective way to advertise your product via videos is not to make the advertising aspect of the video the most obvious aspect of it. Be more focused on providing valuable information through your video, and then show people how they can improve their lives through your product. Life is all about give and take, and this maxim has never been truer than in the case of digital advertising. People need to notice the potential in your brand, so you need to show them that you are not only trying to shove their products down their throats, but that you are actually passionate about improving their lives, with your videos and with your products.
To make your videos as effective as possible, it is also important to shoot with high quality equipment, shoot in prescribed dimensions, focus on a goal in your videos and choose your thumbnails as early as possible for ease of organizing your videos prior to, and after posting them. Your videos are a critical part of your sales funnel, hence it is essential that you make them spectacular.
CHAPTER SIX
Identifying your existing Sales process and how to enhance it
Y
our sales process in the 21st century should be no different than what you did in the 20 th century. The only slight difference should be is that you are doing it electronically. I was always taught that a process is something that you put in place that is ongoing and never
ending. You can make enhancements to the process or improve the process, but you never change the process. Why is this you might be asking? Most major corporations’ philosophy is this, if we are going to take the time, energy, and effort to provide a thought provoking ideal or concept and commit it to paper. You have no right to change the process without approval. By changing the process, you just decided to waste everybody’s time, energy, and efforts. Processes can always be improved, or even enhanced because the application of a process has become outdated with the changing of time. You should never change the process. It is your foundation that brought you your success. If your sales process in the past was to have people come into a store front to make a sale, and it worked in the past don’t change that. Although I do agree that the internet has brought about a change in the way we do business and interact with each other, the application of your business should still be the same. Let me explain; when you look at your smart phone and engage with it all you’re really doing, is doing what you always have done offline in the past, digitally. For example, if you look at an old stereo
receiver component and think about how you had to navigate the settings to switch and turn on the cassette player or the phonograph player, you would have to physically turn a radio knob button listed under the settings. That was, and still is the existing process to activating the different components that need to be played. With technology the process is still the same, your only now doing what you have always done digitally. The designers of technology did not change the process. They only change the application of the process from offline to online. The foundation is still the same. Whatever it is that brought you the success in the 20 th century should only be enhanced in the 21st century through the use of technology. So, what is your sales process? What do you do, or have done when you get a customer to say yes, I am interested in your product and I want more information, or I want to buy? The Sales processes:
1. Call our toll free 800 number to talk to a rep 2. Book an appointment for consultation 3. Come on down to our physical location 4. Ask for our free information package 5. Logon to our website to make a purchase By identifying your sales process after you have reached your ideal customers is the key to updating your marketing system to utilize technology in the 21 st century. Using technology and social media should either enhance your business or put your business on steroids. Having a fundamentally sound sales process with the use of technology should work in the same manner as an old stereo component set. Simply because you are doing what you have always done before, you’re just doing it electronically.
Because of the ease of access and the use of social media it is quite easy to have a misconception that all I have to do is get a website up and running or establish a fan page or some other social media page and the customers will magically come beating down my door. Selling in the 21 st century is like cooking with a cookbook. You need all the right ingredients and the instructions on how to apply the ingredients to be successful. When you begin to market in the 21 st century the first thing I would recommend is to discover what type of buyer are you looking to attract. Are you looking to attract the “oh my goodness, I got to have this right now type of buyer”, or are you attracting the waiting room buyers? This is the person that will purchase at a later date. If you picture your marketing process like a circle with three key elements in them, it would help you get a better understanding of who you are looking to attract or help with your product or service. Picture two circles within each other one that has an inner circle within a bigger circle. Located directly inside the center small circle is a small little dot. This represents the “oh my goodness, I got to have this right now” type of buyers. Ninety five percent of the marketers on social media fight for the attention of this group of people. The second inner circle represents the waiting room buyers. These are the people who will buy from you at a later date. This group of people get the opportunity to know like and trust you, if you take the time to build a relationship with them. Selling in the times past has always been about building a rapport and relationships, so why would it be anything different in the 21st century. Remember continuing to do what you have always done in the past, just do it electronically. And the third circle represents the people that just will not purchase from you at all. Having this visual should give you an ideal of where you should be spending your time, marketing dollars, and efforts.
The question is, which circle is the biggest? You can explode your business with your future buyers. When communicating with this section of people the key to success in your marketing efforts will come from providing valuable content and branding. We do this in the 21 st century by utilizing the power of video to demonstrate, entertain, educate, or engage our audience. The smart phone is now the new television, radio, news feed, or newspaper and your customers are on the go holding the new broadcasting network in their hands. When you are providing your content or value to your audience always provide a solution to a pain point or a problem that they could be dealing with or might not be aware that one existed. By doing this puts you in a position of posture of trying to help provide solutions to the customer and not trying to sell the customer on your products goods or services. Using the power of video to demonstrate or to show a solution to a pain point is what always have been done before through television commercials, radio ads, and newspaper ads. In the 21 st century we now have the opportunity to Sell Like a Corporate Giant because the small business owner or entrepreneur is no longer priced out of these new electronic networks which has the power to reach a broader audience at a viral rate then what then old networks did. The settle difference in 21 st century digital marketing vs the 20th century marketing are so settle in the change of application, but the effects are hugely different and is a key and critical component to the success of every small business owner /entrepreneur who understand the changes and takes advantage of it. In the 20th century the major corporation could afford the media to run a national major campaign using billboards in high targeted traffic areas, such as freeways and major sports arenas. They could spend between one to five million dollars for a thirty second time slot on T.V. most viewer watched broadcast day. Super bowl Sunday.
What audience do you think they are targeting? The oh my goodness I got to have this right now buyers, or the waiting room buyers? This the perfect example of branding because they demonstrate using video to educate, entertain, or provide a solution to a pain point. The call to action is always driving that traffic into their existing sales process using branding. “Hey, come see us at your nearest Big Blank store, or pick up the phone and call Big blank at 1-800- big blank, where the sales are crazy. The subtle difference in the 21st century is you can market to the same amount of people or even more for quadruple less the amount of money that major corporations spend on super bowl Sunday using social media. Using this platform lets you target your audience where only the perfect customer sees your product. Unlike a billboard alongside the freeway where everybody gets to see it. Social media only the perfect customer get to see your advertisement. To improve your sales funnel and get as much conversions as possible from your online adverts and marketing campaigns, it is pertinent for you to follow a couple of important tips:
Be Visible on Social Media:
This is one important aspect of digital marketing that just can’t be evaded. You have to be where the people are. You need to have a solid and reputable presence across all major social media channels for you to reap the best results from your digital marketing campaigns. Once again, it all boils down to self management. Schedule specific time slots during the day that you would dedicate to communicating the importance and values of your products to your social media followers. It is also important that you engage your followers in meaningful conversations, and make them feel as highly regarded as possible. Respond quickly to complains and inquiries, direct social media users to your blog where
they can find information that’s more related to your product, and overall, offer nostrings-attached information. All these steps are important to the success of your social media campaigns, and of course, the long-term success of your brand.
Share EBooks, Videos and Other Information Products:
To project your brand as a business entity that actually cares about projecting value and showing credibility, it is important for you to share information that not only helps to promote your product, but that helps your customers to make their lives better in the long run. Put a spectacular degree of effort and care into making your free information products, as they will provide an insight to readers and watchers on how you’re the performance of the products and services that you offer for money. Some entrepreneurs make the mistake of doing a wishy-washy job of their free information products because they think they won’t be getting paid directly for it. However, these free information products, including information shared via periodic e-mails, have been shown to have very high return on investments. You need to understand that in the world of online advertising, a lot of your earnings would come in as a result of activities that you believe you’re are not being directly paid for, hence it is important to put as much passion as possible into any activity or free product that’s meant to help promote your product.
Focus on Search Engine Optimization:
Keywords are an essential part of digital marketing, and you can’t afford to overlook these critical, yet frequently underutilized pieces of potential. Keyword research helps you to realize the terms people are using to search for particular products in your niche, and allows you to incorporate those terms into your posts and your adverts, thereby improving your visibility, and allowing people to see your posts on the first page of Search Engine Results when they search for products and information related to your product category. Therefore, as much as possible, to achieve a successful online advertising campaign, it is important that you carry out extensive research in the trending keywords in your niche, and incorporate them into your blogposts and your adverts.
To further boost the efficiency of your sales funnel, it would also be helpful to share information related to your product via newsletters and a brand blog. It is also extremely important to establish great relationships with influential individuals online who can help improve your product’s visibility.
CHAPTER SEVEN
YOUR COMPANY’S MOST VALUABLE ASSETS: THE ECONOMICS OF A LIST
A
s a business owner, getting the business running means sourcing for all the factors of production; land, labor, and capital. The most common errors for most business owners is the level of the intrinsic value they give to things like land and capital, which are basically
assets and liabilities. An ordinary business owner worries about making money, forgetting that money is a result of a process and not the process itself. A good business solves a problem and by doing so, makes money for the owner. In previous chapters, we have discussed the various processes, methods and guidelines to follow towards creating a successful business. But the question that remained largely unanswered is who or what is your most valuable asset as a business owner? The answer is simple people! There have been diverse arguments over who is more valuable to you as a business; your employee or your staff? Well, I’d say people; either as your employees or your customers, people have a similar effect on the success of your business. As such, I shall discuss the most valuable asset to your business in two categories; people as your employees and people as your customers.
PEOPLE AS YOUR EMPLOYEES
In the dynamic and the ever-changing business environment the world has become, it is no longer the size, extent, aesthetic, or value of a businesses’ tangible assets that differentiate them from others and competitors. It is the human assets that do. When employees move from one workplace to another, they leave behind their impact, either negative or positive, that either adds to or removes from the culture of the organizations they are leaving behind, especially if they functioned in a managerial role. The employees that leave an organization can be replaced by merely employing an equally competent person to fill their roles. This is merely a physical replacement as the knowledge and skillsets of these people cannot be replaced exactly by the new person. There is a difference in orientation; a difference in how the new person adapts to the processes and culture of the organization, which if slightly negative, can spell doom for your business. As such, it becomes pertinent that before you can even impress your customers who you think are the only most valuable asset, you must build a team of employees that would guarantee the customer satisfaction goods and services that you need. So, how do the employees affect your business? •
Provision of quality goods and services: the employees are essential for the coordination of land,
labor and capital to answer the questions surrounding a good business; such as how to produce, what to produce, for whom to produce and what to produce. When the people brainstorm and answer these questions to produce a finished good or design a sustainable service, their day to day hard work needs to be over seen, direct and coordinated to the delivery of these goods and services. If they don’t get this right, you will end up with poor products or services that cannot satisfy the utility of the consumers and there would be no platform for you to retain such customers anymore. •
Employees are your first customers: You heard that right! Customers are kings; employees are
as such kings because they are your first customers. Before an employee can work diligently for the
progress of your business, they must have successfully bought your idea that you offer a great product that they can be associated with; bought your promise that their welfares would be catered for. If your customers are dissatisfied and unhappy, their performances will drop, and it would reflect in the profitability of your business. Who would pitch your sales to the customer? Employees, but they have to buy your ideas and policies first. •
Employees are your business ambassadors: This is not a battle you want to lose; that the
employees are dissatisfied enough to spread negative words about your business. Not only would you eventually lose such an employee but attracting competent workers would become a challenge for the business. How often do you hear people willing to work for an organization who perceivably maltreat their employees, irrespective of whether the rumors are true or not? An unhappy employee spreading negative news about your company, either active or has left your business, is a sabotage that you must afford. In addition to this is the fact that an unhappy employee would be demoralized and would lack motivation. In the end, the performance becomes unsatisfactory and your business starts pushing out poor product or services, which would eventually chase customers to your competitors. In the 21st century customers are not loyal; you must consistently put in efforts to retain their loyalty. A happy employee would always be loyal to your business and as such, you can guarantee the platform upon which you can build a customer satisfaction process or procedure. How do you make employees happy as one of your most valuable assets? The first thing to do is to train them. As much as the employees would like to keep giving your business the best of themselves, you must also reciprocate this value by giving them something of value; something that helps them to grow in their careers too. And this is training. It is not something that occurs all the time, but your employees would feel more valued when you add value to them. The second is remunerations that are not money, chief of which is showing concern about their health and well being. You could give an employee a
hundred dollars as a bonus, and he would not value it as much as if you use the hundred dollars to buy him skincare, hair-care or general healthcare products, or even just a gift. There are other ways of making an employee happy; increased pays, team bonding, healthcare and promotion as when due. You can implement as many of these as possible within the scale of your business to keep the employees happy. Only then can you be sure of retaining your customers.
PEOPLE AS YOUR CUSTOMERS
Despite the volume of discussions generated by businesses in discussing the importance of customer service to businesses, there still exists a high degree of confusion about the real importance of customer service. This is evident by the fact that there are companies, who are notoriously known for poor customer service, that are still prospering in their industry. The fact, however, remains that customers are important to the success of most businesses. The fact put simply, is that good and reliable customer service would boost any company’s reputation and profitability tremendously. As such, we can agree that a positive relationship exists between business success and customer service, irrespective of what success means to different companies. However, it is important for any business to not put many resources into or spend too much on improving customer services only to end up worse than where they started. This is why it is essential to strategize and plan rather than spend to much. What is most important is building customer service operations on a moderate budget and still achieving substantial success. So, what is the importance of customers to your business? •
Good Service, More Customers: it is now common knowledge that the sales and revenue, and
hence profits, of any business, would increase with strong customer service. Recall that we have discussed extensively in previous chapters that customers tend to buy from and build trust with
businesses that show them empathy, understand their needs and improve their utility. According to a research done by AmericanExpress the results concluded that seven of every ten United States’ consumers agree that they have done more business with companies that have great customer service. What is more interesting than this is that, according to the same survey, consumers said that they are willing to spend about seventeen percent more money on businesses with good customer service.
Source:
(https://about.americanexpress.com/press -release/wellactually-americans-say-customer-service-better-ever)
•
Unlimited Effect: the effect that a good customer service that retains customers can have on
your business is quite extensive. Like earlier hinted, a satisfied customer would willingly refer your business to others without you spending a dime on such free advertisement. A satisfied customer would return to buy more once they have exhausted the unit they purchased. However, businesses may not feel these effects if they do not measure the outcomes of the effort, they put into reliable customer service. Comparing the degree of increase in revenue with the degree of increase in the cost of improving customer service is a good way to know if it is actually the customer service operation, not other factors that can increase revenue that brought about the increase in revenue. •
Budgeted Customer Service: Now to some good news—great customer service do not
necessarily mean that a business has to spend a great deal of money. Businesses must only learn to take free steps to improve their customer service operation. Among such free is to ensure the presence of a personal touch in dealing with customers. In essence, show that you care about them and their need. A good example is remembering the details of a customer when they deal with the business. It is annoying to have to provide your detail anytime you have to deal with a business that you consider yourself a loyal customer to. Having a customer database would go a long way to help businesses in achieving this. Another step would be to maintain positive tones when dealing with customers. The customer looks at your business as a problem solver. When they come with their complaints, feedback, or requests, don’t
act aloof or keep saying things that you cannot do. Focus on things that you can do as an alternative to getting them away from things that you cannot. Don’t lie to customers or promise things that you won’t do and don’t give the air that you don’t have a solution to what they want. Another of such step is to reply to customers requests or queries promptly and ensure that concerns are promptly resolved. When you do this, customers see you as someone who cares about their concerns and are even willing to forgive small mistakes that may occur in your subsequent dealings with them. Having an easy to navigate, simple and attractive online self-service option is another great way of saving the customer’s time and resources. What this does is to remove some of the burdens of dealing with customers from your staff, giving them enough to process customers’ feedbacks towards improving on your customer service operations at no extra cost. Related closely to this is the development of an online community for consumers of your product to post their questions and get answered by other consumers who have used the product. It is a sort of experience for the customers involved, but it would be wise to moderate this community to ensure that people are not supplying erroneous answers.
DEFINING SUCCESS AS A BUSINESS OWNER
Before we can say a process or event is successful, it must be that we have a set of goals and objectives that must be achieved to term such an event or process as a success. In the same vein, the relationship that exists between providing great customer service and achieving business success is only as successful as how your business defines success. In the modern economy, most businesses are basing their business success on social impacts. Frankly, every business should do this. It is difficult for a business with great social impact to not be accepted by a vast majority of the customer community, and such acceptance would only transcend to increased sales and eventual profitability. This is why most businesses are now using customer satisfaction to gauge the degree of success of their businesse. It is
essential to note that the more positive praise a business receives from the general public, the higher its tendencies to experience increased sales that would boost its revenue and profits. Customers are everything to a business, so are the employees. In a more general sense, people are everything to a business and are as such the most valuable asset a business can own. The earlier a business owner knows this, the better the sustainability of his/her business. To help you improve your relationship with your employees, and thereby reduce employee turnover in your organization, a couple of ideas may come in handy for you:
Consistent and Effective Communication:
The bedrock of any relationship, whether personal or professional, is effective and constant communication. Without communication, the link between two people, or a team gradually begins to thin out, until if finally crumbles into nothingness. You are not allowed to let that happen with your employees. Ensure that you communicate with them as frequently as possible, keep building the team spirit, and attend to all complaints as soon as possible. It is also very important to encourage your employees and constantly appreciate their efforts at helping to grow your start-up.
Keep Work Flexible:
The era of rigid, bureaucratic workplaces is fast phasing out, and new generation companies are fast adopting more flexible and congenial workplace practices to foster creativity, promote camaraderie among employees, and ensure better employee efficiency. Different people deliver their best results under different conditions. You do not need to
constrain your employees to abide by a stringent set of rules to get them to be productive. While discipline and organization of activities is absolutely necessary, it is also important for you to formulate your workplace policies in such a way as to allow as much flexibility as possible.
Celebrate Achievements:
A proven way of keeping your employees motivated and geared to achieve their personal and organizational goals is to join them in celebrating their personal achievements, and organizing celebrations, however small, to commemorate the actualization of set organizational goals. The celebration of significant achievements goes a long way in boosting the morale of your employees to perform even better.
To improve the satisfaction of your customers, some effective tips to follow include:
Impress Every Customer:
Give every customer a personalized treatment. Offer them tailor-made services as much as possible and show that you genuinely care about the problem they have, and how you intend to use your product or service to help them. Genuine interest in your customers is perhaps one of the most important aspects of customer service. So, as much as possible, offer excellent and personalized services to your customers and follow up with them for reviews on how they perceived your product. Their reviews would help you make
improvements to your product or service delivery. A personalized treatment is also likely to make your customers more amenable to spreading the word about your product.
Measure Customer Satisfaction: Use standard parameters to measure the satisfaction of your customers with the product that you are offering is an extremely part of customer service. Follow up with your customers, get their opinions and use their reviews to make necessary improvements. Be careful to distinguish constructive from destructive criticism, however.
Shorten Response Times:
Timeliness is a critical factor of success in any endeavor; running an online business inclusive. As much as possible, respond to complaints and enquiries about your products as swiftly as possible. This will help to boost your brand’s image online and improve sales.
Under-Promise and Over-Deliver:
Everybody loves surprises, and it is important for you to use people’s emotions to your advantage in a good way, as much as possible, when running a business. You can promise a standard delivery time for instance, and then surprise your customers by delivering one
or two days early. Imagine the ecstasy of a customer when his much-expected iPhone or Nike Sneakers arrive a day early because of the efficiency of his fantastic online supplier. Such a customer would be only too willing to spread the word about how superb your business and service delivery is to the world.
Other important customer satisfaction tips include being clear and concise about the product or service you are delivering to avoid confusion and closely watching what your customers are saying about your product and other products in your niche to know how to perfect your service delivery method.
Remember that your people; that is your customers and your employees are the heartbeat of your business, so investing in making them happy will go a long way in promoting the long-term growth of your business.
CHAPTER EIGHT
How to use social media advertising
S
ocial media, is a topic that is well known but very little understood. In this chapter were going to clearly define how to use social media to grow your business. But in order to do that we need to get a sound understanding of what social media really is, what it is not, and how
social media ads really work for your business. If you could sell to anybody in the world who would it be? And how would your product serve them at the highest level? Let’s say you have the next big thing and you want to launch it to the world. Let’s assume that your product is revolutionary and has to potential to go viral. How quickly do you think it could be adopted by millions of users? You’ve probably heard that you need to grow a large following on social media, and get a lot of fans and likes. This is the beginning of growing an audience of customers that you can share valuable content with about your companys message if you go to work and serve them first by providing content that solve a problem . Although when advertising or posting on social media, fans and likes, do not convert into sales initially. This is the beginning of a long lasting relationship of brand building and customer affininty . You want to have raving fans that will enthusiastically share your story with other friends or family members. I call this the new word of mouth advertising. But it all starts with you providing value and relatable content first. This is a give and take relationship. When people get to know like and trust your brand then they will purchase products from you. There is a formula for how to do that and the formula is all based on advertising. For the small business owners or entrepreneur, Facebook is a business and their objective is to generate a profit, keep people
on the platform, and show ads that get clicks. Advertising is simply the method where people must come into a store for example a hardware store, dentist, or financial planner office. People are on the Internet because it’s something that’s new and it can work even better. Facebook determines a good ad by the Click Through Rate (CTR). This is the number of clicks divided by the number of times an advertisement is displayed. This will give you a percentage. CTR is the engine that drives the business world of social media advertising. If you take two advertisers who are working in the same niche and they show their ads to 100 people. Advertiser A gets 2 clicks and Advertiser B gets 5 clicks. Advertiser A has a 2% CTR and pays Facebook an average CPC of $1.00. Facebook will generate $2.00 off the 100 views. Advertiser B with his 5 clicks has a 5% CTR and pays Facebook an average CPC of 1.00 Facebook will generate $5.00 off the 100 views. The big question is whose Ad would Facebook rather show? Advertiser A or Advertiser B? Of course, Advertiser B and even if advertiser B get a discount and pay a CPC of $.75 off their 5 clicks of 100 views. Facebook would still make $3.75. Therefore, Facebook would allow Advertiser B to pay less and still show their ad over Advertiser A’s. Yes, Facebook rewards an Advertiser who has high engagement and a high Relevance Score with a lower CPC. The only way to get a high CTR is to show your ad to people who want what you have to offer. Facebook has a way to show your audience based off age, gender, income, marital status, likes and dislikes. I wouldn’t run an ad on Facebook about clothes to people that like reading books. To help improve the efficiency of your social media adverts, here are some tips to keep in mind:
Make Your Goals Clear: Understand exactly what you want to get out of your social media campaign. If it is a specific number of ad conversions you need per week, if it’s a specific amount of views on your video or a specific amount of subscriptions to your YouTube channel, just make
sure your goals are clear. Make your social media marketing goals realistic and lucid, and then set out to crush those goals and surpass your own expectations.
Know and Understand Your Target Audience:
Depending on the product you are selling, it is important for you to know who is most likely to patronize you and laser your focus on that particular demographic. If you are offering capital advisory services, then you know you should be targeting potential investors, growing companies, and established corporations seeking additional funding to expand the scope of their services. If you are selling professional cameras, you should be targeting photography enthusiasts, and it should be easy to spot these groups of people based on the groups they belong to and their interests and posts online. If you are marketing make-up, then there is no much use creating campaigns targeting men. As much as possible, make your adverts as specific for your audience as possible.
Optimize Your Ads for Mobile: It is critical that whatever you are promoting on social media be optimized for mobile, whether it is a video, a website, or an image. A lot of factors affect the rate of conversion of your ads, and their optimization for mobile devices is one of those critical factors. You do not want to take chances with optimization, because if it is convenient for people to comfortably view an ad, chances are that they wouldn’t bother struggling to look at it at all.
Other important tips to help ensure the success of your social media ad campaigns include paying only for what matters most to your business, using organic posts to inform people about your products, testing ads to measure performance and measuring and recording your results periodically to know where your lapses are, and to effect necessary corrections.
CHAPTER NINE
The marketing tools available Today and how to use them
T
echnology is proven to be one the modern marvel’s that makes our lives easier and faster but none of this will be able without the development of a relationship.
Have you ever received a voice mail on your phone, and it did not ring to disturb you? Come to find out it appears you missed a phone call from a VIP trying to reach out to you. It makes you feel kind of special as a customer even though you know it is probably prerecorded. But it is that extra special touch. Now that is what it feels like as a consumer. But as a professional marketer, thought leader, a person of influence, some one that is out to change the world with your company mission or product. This is just another awesome tool you can use to engage and connect with your customers. Small business voice mail drops. Send to your list a special promotion via voice mail. This works well for any industry. It’s a great way to stay connected. Right here is where we must look at our operating procedure. Is our website really producing the results we want on a monthly basis, or is it just another bill and a brochure to inform our customers? What are your numbers? How many visitors visited your website last month? How many of these visitors were converted into leads? It’s time to take inventory. We spend a lot of money on our websites having them designed and it has become the heartbeat and engine of our business. But if the main function of our business is not performing then we are dyeing a slow death. How profitable and functionalable is your website? Measure how many leads did you capture last month. Did your website generate any sales, or
did you just pay for your hosting service again? Most business owners struggle to get people to come to their websites or even get in front of enough people for the marketplace to know that you even exist. Re targeting is another way to continuely to rebrand your companys message in front of your ideal customers. Using FaceBook Pixels is like giving every visitor that comes to your website home page or landing page and leave, a brochure about your company to look at when they log onto Facebook. If you are running ads on Facebook your message will show on their page. What is your current sales model? There are four types of sales models.
1. The log onto our website sales model 2. The Call to book an appointment sales model 3. The come on down to our local store sales model 4. The register for our webinar sales model The bigger the price of your product the more time you will need to spend with your clients. Lawyers , or auto dealers, genuely use the come down to our store location sales model because it will take more time to share your companys value with the customer and see if your product is a good fit to solve a potential proble the customer is having. If you are in the coaching business you will need to use the webinar type of sales model. This is where you can show case your ability to provide valuable content for your clients and solve a problem they might be facing. If you do this right and have a call to action at the end of your webinar you should have no problem getting new clients to subscribe or purchase your services. Remember it is a give and take relationship first. If your in the business of e-commerce and product sales you will use the logon to our website type of sales model and thus this is where your customer buyer journey begins. Using a sales funnel will give your customers a step by step action throughout the buying process.
An invisible shift in technology has broken all the rules of the status quo, defied all conventional wisdom, and leverage the playing field for every entrepreneur and small business owner who are keen enough to notice this shift in technology and take advantage of it. If you are not interacting or engaging your potential customers through the use of sales funnels you are losing money. This software system is so powerful that it will allow you to beat out your competitors by becoming more profitable than they are and capture and convert more traffic than they do. Having a sales funnel depending how you set it up will allow you to capture your buyers email address for future promotionals updates and it will tell your customers what is the next step in the buying process.If you have ever purchased something on Amazon before you will notice that Amazon gives you suggestions of what other people have purchased based off the product you just bought. This is the next step in the sales process call the up-sale. This is how you could increase the value of the product you are offering to your clients by making an offer of additional comparable products that support the product they just bought. For example, they buy a phone they might also need a cell phone case or car charger. Using a sales funnel will allow you to shape and engage the customer buying experience. Salesfunnels are just one of the many tools of the 21 st century you can use to massively help more customer solve a problem with your product. For the readers of how to sell in the 21 st century you can go to www.hts21c.com and get a 14day trial of any one of our hight converting sales funnels or all three funnels. 1. The applacation Funnel to generate leads 2. The tripwire Funnel to generate sales. 3. The webinar Funnel to run an online event. Before the internet and consumption of digital goods, the use of a product could only spread as fast as you could manufacture the physical good. You would first need many millions of dollars in capital, a plant, a workforce, and inventory. Then, once the product is ready for distribution, you’d need mass advertising, word-of-mouth, sales channels, and press coverage to stand a chance.
Even then, if the product is really revolutionary, you’re looking at a decade or more for it to get widespread adoption. Atoms Versus Bytes Automobiles took 62 years to be adopted by 50 million users. The telephone took three years just to be in the homes of 50,000 people. However, these are both physical goods that need raw materials and skilled workers to produce, and economies of scale play important roles in the costs of their production. They are made of atoms – and atoms must abide by the laws of physics. In the modern era, however, you don’t have to produce a physical product to generate revenue. You can conveniently offer a virtual product, an information product, an online course – anything that possesses commercial value, and even make more money than people selling actual physical products. Several tools exist in today’s market that can give you the edge you need to dominate your market. Some if these tools include:
Analytics and Data Tools: These software tools show you important information relating to the performance of your adverts and your website or blog. Google Analytics is a very popular analytics tool, and it gives you information about audience demographics, popular keywords and actions taken by people who have viewed your ad, website or blog. Other analytics software packages include SumoMe and analytics sections of social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
SEO and Blog Content Tools: These software packages help to print out effective keywords to be used in your ads and posts, and help you to perfect your ads and posts for
optimum visibility. Google Keyword Planner, Yoast, and UberSuggest are some of the software packages in this category.
Social Media Marketing Tools: These are tools that help you to automate your social media management, schedule content deliveries and aid with content creation ideas. Examples are PromoRepublic, HootSuite, and MeetEdgar.
Other important automation tools include Email Automation Tools, Visual Design Tools, Landing Page Tools and Content Curation Tools, and other specific software packages dedicated to helping you establish a seamless digital marketing campaign.
CHAPTER TEN
SCALE YOUR BUSINESS; Dominate YOUR MARKET
M
ost people think of a business and start thinking about selling. Yes, a business wants to sell to generate enough revenue to ensure profitability, and hence, the sustainability of the business. But the sustainability of a business transcends way
beyond just merely selling. Yes, you may be selling extensively and gaining lots of customers, but there is a problem that you would soon be faced with; dealing with delivering the needs of all these new customers. This is where scalability comes in. When we say scalability, we refer to the capacity of your business to grow and the capability of your strategies, policies and processes to sustain this growth. The questions to ask are; does the business have a growth capacity? Does your team processes and assets have the capability to accommodate such growth? What are the effects of not having a scaling plan? The first is confusion. Orders would begin to get mixed up and you would realize that you are short-staffed. There would be problems with communication and your rate of production or service delivery would not be able to match ordering capacity of your evergrowing customer base, especially if you have gotten the other things from the previous chapters right and you have a fantastic product or service. All these problems would accumulate to mean one thing, unhappy customers. Most manual or slightly automated processes that worked well during your initial start-up, when the business was still really small, would no longer serve you. You would notice that these processes are not moving fast enough to be able to meet demand. As the manager and business
owner, you would find out that you are constantly busy with figuring out ways to meet demand and placate customer, rather than focus on improvement processes. All these would stress you as the business owner. What if you already have an improvement process planned? This is part of business scaling. When you scale a business, you create the platform for enabling, supporting and sustaining growth and development. You give the business the ability to grow unhindered or without impediment. Doing this requires you to do lots of planning, spending some fund and equipping the business with the required set of cost effective processes, staff, partners, systems and technology. Now, let us discuss the important steps you can execute to scale your business;
Evaluate & Plan
The first thing to do is to evaluate your business. Take a critical look at your business to be sure you are ready for growth. Know where your business stands, it helps to know what is needed to be done differently. A critical part of growth is increased sales. This is why you must make a strategy on the methods you intend to deploy to increase sales. The next thing is to assume that your sales tripled or doubled over a short time and evaluate again. Do you have the staff and resources to take care of new orders, without stressing yourself and others too much? When you evaluate, don’t overestimate the business capability or make an elaborate forecast as this may make you get overstaffed and procure more resources than needed. A good plan starts with a detailed, informed and realistic sales growth forecast that carefully consider all factors such as the existence of competition, the market dynamism and government policies. The sales forecast should take as a decisive factor, the size of new customers, the amount of new orders and the
expected revenue for these increases. Next, create a spreadsheet that projects the increments monthly. Have it in mind that your degree of precision would determine how realistic the sales generation plan you would deploy would be. In the same vein, create an expense forecast, that is, project the costs the business would pay out over this period, also broken down into monthly forecast. The expense forecast should be determined by the technology you intend to add, the number of new staff and their earnings, additional infrastructure and processes for handling the forecasted new orders. Now, critically examine your current profit and loss account and see how these increments would impact the items therein. Certainly, your expenses would go up, but ‘where’ and ‘how’ becomes your primary concern. It is wise, therefore, to create a separate spreadsheet for expenses that would be needed to actualize your sales forecast. This planning requires a great deal of thinking and researching before you can develop realistic cost estimates. However, if properly done, it would help your business to grow and you would be prepared for most eventualities.
Get the Fund
Scaling a business requires spending and you cannot spend what you don’t have. When scaling up a business, there is every possibility that you would need to hire new people to your staff size, upgrade or add to your equipment and facilities, create new process line (especially a reporting system for measuring and managing results) and deploy new technology or update the existing ones. All these would cost you money, but where would you get these funds? For me, I strongly advise bootstraps. However, bootstrapping is slow, and it takes a relatively long time to grow a business using bootstrapping alone. Taking part in a small business grant contest may also. You can research this and participate simply by having a fantastic business story to tell about your business. However, this is a
probable option. A more feasible approach would be to list potential banks funding to help speed up your business. An example of such is a business loan. However, conduct thorough research to determine the bank with the best interest rate to choose in securing these loans. Know and much you would need and apply for this amount only.
Actualize the Sales
While evaluating and planning, you would make an assumption that you would sell more. Now, you need to work towards securing those sales. But how would you know if you have the sales process and structure to help you generate increased sales? It is simple. Just evaluate your sales structure holistically to determine if you have the following:
LEADS: do you have enough lead flow to generate more leads in order to increase your potential client base and hence, your number of customers. If you do not have this or you feel the system on ground is not strong enough to ensure more lead inflow, you might want to increase your PR and bring your business out to the surface some more. Making your customer your brand ambassador can also help, as a customer who feels positive about your business is likely to tell others about your business. How do you do this? By providing top quality services and products that give your customers maximal utility and make them feel cared about.
LEAD TRACKING & MANAGEMENT: you must deploy a marketing and sales system that would not only help you to log leads but also allows you to show the progress you have made with them; a system that helps you to manage the process from lead identification to the conversion of such lead to customers.
ENOUGH SALES REP: once the lead generation and management are ensured, next is to check if you have the sales force to follow through with the leads and close them into actual
sales. This is as important as every other aspect because this is what makes the actual sales happen.
ORDER MANAGEMENT: With an effective sales team, the orders would soon start pouring in. Now, you must check to ensure that you have a robust system for managing the sales orders. You must ensure that each customer gets exactly what was ordered and at the time promised too.
BILLING SYSTEM: once the orders are attended to, the next thing is billing for such product or service. Does your business have an appropriate and effective billing system? Is there a receivable function in place to follow up with billing in orders to make sure that you collect all invoices? All these are what you must ascertain to ensure that sales are securely secured.
Deploy Technology
Scaling a business can be a lot easier and even cheaper when you make use of technology. Technology helps to amplify effort and thus, you can upscale with less labor, with a wise investment in technology. Automation of some of your processes would help you to run at reduced cost and make your work more effective and efficient. Once you deploy technology, ensure system integration. The systems overseeing your different processes must be able to communicate rather than being a stand-alone system. There are, already in the market, enterprise resource planning software for small and medium scale enterprises that can help you to fast track processes and at the same time, give you an integrated business solution. Along with these, you can deploy both network and communication networks like, printers and telephones.
Staff or Outsource
Despite technological investments, you would still need hands to run the day to day operations of the business as well as even man the software. Next, you evaluate if you have enough staffs to cater to your customer. Evaluate your industry to know the average number of customer that one single service representative can successfully handle. Evaluate your manufacturing or production line and determine if you have enough people to ensure meeting your production capacity. How about management level? Do you have enough management staff? It is not every tasks or function that are economical to hire someone to execute in-house. Sometimes, it is better to outsource these services. However, when outsourcing, ensure that you use trusted businesses or people who would not delay your process rate with their unreliability. In most cases, these third parties would have more staff, technological investment and industry know-how to handle such function more effectively and efficiently more than your business. Doing this function in-house may waste your time and other resources. It is rather better that you trust them to a reliable and economical third party to handle.
DOMINATING YOUR MARKET
Now that you know what to do to upscale your business, you would need to own your marketplace to sustain such an upscale. How do you do this?
Understand Your Target Audience
In business, it’s people first. This is why most businesses understand the need to be customer centric. And it is one of the most important reasons why you must understand who your customers are. When
you understand them, serving them the right services or products becomes way easier. When you understand your customers need and serve them their needs plus their want, which you would understand from studying them, you can develop a system to serve them better. Doing this would ensure customer retention as well as the generation of new customers. This is because the old customers would spread goodwill about your business and thus create more willing customers for you at no additional cost. Success is easy to come by when you have this in place.
Develop Market Entry and Penetration Strategies
Whether for an existing market or entering a new market, you must have both a market entry and a market penetration strategy. If you are a service providing business, signing business partnership agreements with businesses whose process line or product deployment requires your services would be a strategy. There are several other strategies that you can develop from studying the systems used by bigger companies and modifying them to work for your own business too.
Partnerships Keep You in Business
You can’t do it all by yourself. Study your business and know your threats and weaknesses. Go into partnership agreements with another business with strength in the areas where your business is weak; a symbiotic business relationship that leaves both parties in a win-win situation. Breaking into a new territory is easier when you are able to partner with existing businesses in that environment.
Strategize to Own the Market
No matter how big you get or how small you remain, there would always be competitors trying to outdo you. But staying ahead of the competition is up to you and the strategies you can develop to run your
business more uniquely. Stretch yourself to beat everyone else in your industry by ensuring a better service or product coverage. You must aim to become the face of the market, as this would help you discover better market opportunities developing within your industry before any other business can notice them.
NOW IS THE TIME TO GET CONNECTED! # HOW TO SELL IN THE 21st CENTURY HTS21C Declaration: I am responsible for the growth of myself, my family, and my organization. The success of my business will be limited or set on a course of expansion by what I know, believe, the actions I take, and who I surround myself around. -JOIN US TODAY “If you would like to join our one on one coaching program feel free to log onto the site below. Our mission is to help small business get the training they need to sell like a corporate giant”. Website: www.howtosellinthe21stcentury.com Subscribe to our PodCast: https://anchor.fm/cornelius-butler Like our Facebook Page : HowToSellInThe 21stCentury @corneliusjbutler Subscribe toYoutube channel: HowToSellInThe21stCentury Cornelius Butler
