Business

The answer to running a successful marketing campaign is using your unique features, advantages and benefits - your differentiators - better than anyone else calling in your market. More importantly, the benefit must match your prospect's values. 

"Beauty is in eyes of the beholder," so to speak. The difficult part of this concept is remembering the beholder is not you. It is your prospect. 

Here's a couple ideas on how to make sure you are talking in prospect value terms which should be the same as your differentiators.

First find the unique quality you bring to the table.  

 Featuring excerpts from the 7 Steps to Successful Marketing 

Our recent blog on the three elements of a lead generation campaign features a section on the 4C's of which content is the most important. Content strategy must be accomplished through very specific forms of content, not simply through sheer volume. The content must also reflect a strategically laid out marketing plan. "Every business is now a publishing business, so you must start to think like one," says John Jantsch, a renowned marketing consultant to growing businesses.

A properly designed sales presentation used in the buy step, gives you control of the information presented, reduces the time to close, sets the stage for installation.

The Sales Presentation is a natural segue to starting a new client phase from the discovery step where you established the face that...  

...the prospect appreciates your value to their firm as elaborated in the previous marketing steps of the Hourglass^SM,

Whether interviewing a found talent or an open position candidate, a defined interview process will pay back dividends as op

“Successfully recruiting a savvy sales staff... 

..relies on you not the candidate.”  

Chasing that elusive next step in revenue generation ultimately leads to increasing feet on the street. You may be considering your first foray into managing a salesperson, or you may be moving to your third or fourth sales type, or maybe you've progressed to the point where you have a sales force with a sales manager in place and the dream now is to go regional, national or  global.

First of three parts - Looking For Applicants

Recruiting a savvy sales staff relies on you creating a corporate culture that makes business exciting, challenging and rewarding for employees. Additionally, people are not attracted to a boring business so you must find those several items that differentiate your firm from others in your industry.

This is not a down economy - your ability to increase sales should be like business as usual the way it was before the bubble and bust decades of the 80's, 90's, and the first 8 years of this millennium. These are the times that every organization is measuring spending against productivity - investment against profitability - features against value.

In a recent blog we found a bit of logic stemming from a fear that professional selling skills are becoming obsolete by social media marketing. Since the Buy Step of the Hourglass is predicated on Discovery, Presentation, and Transaction one will find great use of the techniques learned from conductive selling practices in order to increase sales. Makes sense. The marketing revolution takes most of the "grunt" work out of getting the prospect to a place where they will become a customer which in turn will increase sales. 

Discovery ‐ Have a Plan 

In discovery, the central goal is to discover if a prospect actually fits your ideal target market. If you’ve done a good job in your marketing up to this point, you will usually attract qualified prospects for lead generation. Your lead conversion system should help you quickly make this assessment on an individual basis and continue to deliver the expectations you have set within the initial lead generation activity.

Presentation –The Internal Seminar

Whether across the desk or over the phone, most businesses need to present an offer of a product or service to the eventual buyer. The Ultimate Marketing System tool of choice for this step is something you might call an Internal Seminar. The Internal Seminar is a quasi‐scripted presentation made as part of your initial prospect meeting.