Bill Brelsford :: Small Business Marketing Consultant

Author Archive for Bill Brelsford

How to Get More Business From Fewer Leads

Monday, June 17th, 2013

Most small business owners and salespeople that I work with are pretty good at closing the deal once they get in front of the right people. What they struggle with is getting in front of enough of the “right people”.

In marketingspeak, we refer to the process of attracting the right people as lead generation. When most people think of lead generation (or leads), they naturally picture a sales funnel – that diagram that seems to show how if you just pour more people into the top of the funnel, more customers will trickle out of the bottom. This viewing of marketing as just a numbers game leads to a lot of frustration and wasted marketing budgets.

People Not Leads

It is important to remember that we don’t want leads. What we really want are customers, people who buy from us regularly. And we don’t want just any customers; we want profitable customers. Profitable customers who refer us to other profitable customers like them.

Borrowing from Stephen Covey, we need to start with our Ideal Customer in Mind. We need to take the time to understand which customers we are best able to serve. Who are the customers who appreciate the value we bring to the table? Which types of projects are your most profitable? Which ones suck the life out of you and your staff? If you are having trouble defining your ideal customer, start with this question – who do you not want to work with?

Understand Their Buying Process

Once you can identify what your ideal customers look like, you can begin to research their buying process – the stages they go through when making a purchasing decision and the information they need to move from one stage in their process to the next.

Once you understand how your ideal customer makes purchasing decisions you can begin to examine your existing marketing content to make sure that you have content that educates and builds trust for each stage in their buying process. By having relevant content in each stage, you increase your chances of attracting ideal customers no matter which stage they are in. You also increase your chances that they will stay with you as they continue along the process until they are ready to make their purchase.

Fewer Leads, More Conversions, Bigger Deals

Armed with a narrowly defined target audience and a thorough understanding of that audiences buying process, you are now ready to build effective lead generation campaigns. When you do, you will probably notice that the “marketing math” of the sales funnel gets turned on it’s head. It is very common for business with effective lead generation campaigns to see a decrease in the number of leads they receive. However, these leads are typically much more qualified leading to higher conversion rates and higher sales figures.

The next time you work on your lead generation system, remind yourself that leads are people and work to attract the type of people with whom you want to have a long term working relationship.

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Categories : Small Business Marketing

Tags : lead generation

Mapping Your Sales & Marketing Processes

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, June 11th, 2013

I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of having a marketing system before you try to automate it. This means taking the time to learn how your customers make their buying decisions and aligning our marketing efforts with the stages of their buying process.

In Duct Tape Marketing, we use the concept of the Marketing Hourglass to evaluate a marketing system, make sure we are aligned with the customer’s buying process, and make sure we have processes and tools to help potential customers move from one stage to the next. If you are not familiar with the Marketing Hourglass, here is a quick summary of the stages:

Know
Like
Trust
Try
Buy
Repeat
Refer

Most buyers, particularly in the B2B world, go through these 7 stages – the part that varies is who is involved in each stage and the speed with which buyers move from one stage to another.

The Marketing Hourglass is a great tool to make sure we have marketing materials that address the needs of buyers at each stage of the hourglass. In addition to marketing materials, we also need some procedures in place to help guide buyers from one stage to the next. This is where marketing automation often comes into place – by helping to identify which stage a buyer is in and then deliver the appropriate information to them.

When mapping out the processes you want to automate, you may find it helpful to ask yourself (and you team) these questions:

When I do X, what do I want the buyer to do?
What happens next if they do (perform the action above)?
What happens next if they don’t?

Now, I realize we would love for our buyers to jump directly from Know to Buy, and occasionally it happens, but most of us need to do a little bit more work to land new business.

Beginning with the end in mind, marketers and salespeople in the B2B world typically want to get people to the Try stage. The Try stage often consists of free consultations, audits, reviews, assessments – offers that facilitate face-to-face meetings and help start sales conversations.

Using this example, we would first decide how we can get folks who fit our ideal customer profile to Know about us. Lets pretend you decide to conduct a targeted post card campaign. You can begin to map out your process by asking the questions above:

When I send the postcard, what to I want the prospect to do? If you follow our recommendations about direct response advertising, you will want them to call your office or visit your website in order to trade (additional) information about themselves for a special offer. You can then continue share information with them that will help move them to Like and subsequent stages.
If they take that action, you will need to follow up – typically by sending them the information they requested.
What happens if they don’t respond? Will you try again? How many times? Will you follow up the same way (postcard) or will you try something different (a phone call)?

Wash, rinse, and repeat until you have your process mapped out. Once you have your processes mapped out you will be in a better position to decide what collateral you need to develop, what tools you need to buy, what skills you need to learn or outsource, and which metrics to use to measure your success.

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Categories : Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Automation, Small Business Marketing

Two Ways to Get More Marketing Done

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, June 4th, 2013

One of the challenges that small business marketers face is balancing new projects (install a new CRM system) with the ongoing, day-to-day marketing activities (following up with the people you met at a networking event).

To balance these activities, along with all of the other hats that small business owners wear, we often talk about the idea of “living by a marketing calendar” – or creating the habit of scheduling appointments with yourself to work on your marketing system.

One way to make good use of your scheduled marketing time is to identify and create systems that will free yourself from the redundant, repeatable, daily tasks that every business must perform. By creating systems to handle these type of tasks you can free yourself to focus on the high value activities that will grow your business while maintaining your piece of mind that the “grunt work” is still getting done.

My two favorite weapons for getting more marketing done are marketing automation software and my virtual assistant. What works for me may not work for you when it comes to specific tools and solutions, but one thing I do believe is key this – you have to have a system before you can automate or delegate it.

Therefore, the first step is to map out your process(es). You can then use your map to determine what tools and resources you need to automate and/or delegate the different steps in that process.

Using the networking example from above, your process may look something like:

Decide whether to follow up with each contact
Enter information into your contact database
Classify them as a potential customer, a potential referral partner, or both
Contact them for a 1 on 1 meeting
Connect with them on LinkedIn
Add them to your “Gain Top of Mind” sequence or process
Add them to your “Maintain Top of Mind” sequence or process
etc

You process map can help you determine what needs to be done, when, and by whom. Some tasks, like sending and email reminder, can be fully automated. Other tasks may only be partially automated but require a personal interaction to complete – automating the scheduling of a follow up phone call on your calendar.

When working through a process map, I find it helpful to ask the following questions:

What action will I perform?
What do I want them to do in response?
What if they don’t?
If they do, what’s next?

One hint, if you try to do this for your entire marketing system in one sitting, you will become frustrated and overwhelmed. Start with one set of processes, turn it into a system, automate and/or delegate as many of the steps as possible and repeat.

Live by your marketing calendar and use that time to build systems in your business and soon you will find that 1+1 can be >=3.

photo credit – Hubspot

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Categories : Small Business Marketing

Tags : marketing automation, marketing calendar

LinkedIn’s New Navigation Bar

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, May 28th, 2013

LinkedIn has been making a lot of changes and updates to their user interface recently, so things may look a little different if you haven’t logged in recently. For the most part, I feel these changes make the interface cleaner and improve the product, but just like everyone else, it takes me a while to adjust when someone changes or moves “my stuff”.

Recent LinkedIn changes include:

Added support for displaying visual content on your profile
Contact management enhancements
Facebook Like Mentions
Alumni Mapping Tool

LinkedIn has also made changes to the navigation menu, most notably making search more prominent and comprehensive. Here is a short video from the folk’s at LinkedIn demonstrating the updated navigation bar

LinkedIn just recently announced the update to the navigation bar, so it may be a while before you see these changes in your account.

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Categories : Referral Marketing, Technology

Tags : LinkedIn

Duct Tape Marketing on creativeLIVE

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, May 21st, 2013

Small business owners will have a unique opportunity to work on their marketing systems when creativeLive hosts John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing for a 3 day, live workshop. During the workshop, John will lead a small group of business owners through the process of creating a small business marketing system. That workshop will be streamed live over the internet and will also be available for purchase after the event.

creativeLive provides free live online workshops taught by world class experts. creativeLIVE was started by sports photographer Chase Jarvis partnered and Craig Swanson. They wanted to create an online space where professionals photographers could teach specific skills in multi-day seminars to aspiring photographers via live video. Since it began in 2010, more than one million individuals from over 200 countries have participated in creativeLIVE’s free online seminars.

Instructors on creativeLIVE have included New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling authors, Pulitzer Prize winners, Emmy nominated directors, and many other award-winning professionals.

creativeLIVE offers course in 6 different categories:

photography
business
software
design
video & film
lifestyle

John will be conducting his 3 session workshop on June 26th, 27th, and 28th. Here is an outline of the topics he will cover in each session:

Session One
- Strategy Business Model
- Perfect Marketing Strategy
- Inbound Marketing Model
- The Marketing Hourglass
Session Two
- Content and Lead Capture
- Blogging and SEO
- Email and Social Media
- Mobile, Conversion, and Analytics
Session Three
- Advertising and PR
- Referral Generation
- Selling System
- Tracking and Planning

As I mentioned above, small business owners can watch the workshop live on those dates or they can purchase assess to the recorded courses after the event.

For more information about the workshop, visit the Duct Tape Marketing page on creativeLIVE.

I’ll be hanging out in the chat room, so be sure to swing by and say hey.

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Categories : Duct Tape Marketing

Tags : john jantsch

7 Marketing Metrics Every Small Business Should Track

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, May 15th, 2013

When it comes to marketing your small business, how do you know how well you are doing?

One of the biggest challenges small business owners face when it comes to marketing is determining what’s working, what’s not, and what to do about it. Specifically, they want to know where to spend their limited time and resources in order to grow their bottom line.

In order to answer those questions, two things need to happen. First, you must treat marketing as a system and second, you must build the habit of collecting and evaluating metrics that tell you how that system is performing.

If you are just beginning to use metrics to help improve your marketing, don’t get bogged down in the plethora of marketing metrics you could track. Try to select a few that will help you answer the key questions you have about how your marketing system is performing and how you can tell if those results of those efforts are improving.

To help you get started, here are 7 metrics you can track that will help you determine how well you’re doing in the different phases of the customer life cycle.

1. Visitors – helps you determine how you are doing at attracting traffic to your business. I am referring to traffic in the broadest sense here; depending on your business, traffic may include visits to your office or store, people calling you on the phone, visitors to your tradeshow booth, or people visiting your website.

2. Opt-ins – help you measure how well you are capturing leads. Lead capture involves collecting contact information from your visitors, along with permission to follow up. While lead capture is often associated with online marketing, it applies to offline marketing as well. For example, a local grocery store may ask customers during checkout if they would like to receive updates when fresh produce arrives.

3. Hot Prospects – tracking the number of prospects who have shown signs that they are ready to engage in a sales conversation is a great way to determine how well you are nurturing leads. Hot prospects may be those who have requested a free consultation, asked for a proposal, or walked into your physical store. What behaviors do your prospects exhibit right before they buy?

4. Sales – tracking the number of hot prospects that convert into sales can let you know if you need to work on your sales process – either collectively or with individual sales staff.

5. Customer Satisfaction – scoring can help you determine how well your customers believe you are delivering on your promises and the expectations that you set during the marketing and sales process.

There are many ways to measure customer satisfaction. One popular method is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Like most things in marketing, consistent execution and following up are your keys to success no matter how you measure customer satisfaction. Make sure you follow up with both unsatisfied customers (to see if you can rectify the situation) as well as satisfied customers (to collect referrals and/or testimonials).

6. Lifetime Customer Value (LCV)– is a way to assign a dollar value to the long-term relationship you have with your customers. LCV can help you determine how well you’re repeat sales, cross selling and up-selling efforts are performing.

7. Referrals Received – is the primary metric we use to measure our referral marketing results. For B2B companies (like my own) I also like to measure referrals given as I’ve found it to be a leading indicator of referrals received.

Once you are tracking these metrics, you will be in a better position to make smart decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts and budget in order to increase sales. For example, you may find that you have plenty of traffic but no opt-ins. Or you may have plenty of people expressing interest (opt-ins) but none of them are converting into leads – leading you to work on lead nurturing.

Over time you will have new questions and will develop new metrics to answer those questions. Don’t forget to periodically review your metrics and drop any that are no longer providing value.

Do you have a favorite marketing metric? Tell me about it in the comments below.

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Categories : Small Business Marketing

Tags : marketing system, metrics

5 Things You Can Do This Week To Improve Your Marketing

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Working on your marketing doesn’t have to be an expensive, multi-month project. Paying attention to the “little things” can produce big results. Here are 5 things you can do this week to work on your marketing and grow your business. You don’t have to do all five – pick one or two:

1. Schedule marketing appointments with yourself. The best way to make progress on your marketing system is to consistently spend time working on it. Get out your calendar and block off 90 minutes per week for the next month to work on your marketing.

2. Refer business to one of your customers. We have all heard the adage that we need to “give to get”, but when was the last time you referred business to one of your customers? If you are a B2B service provider, you probably have all kinds of people in your network who could benefit from knowing one another. Help your customers grow their business and they will help you grow yours.

3. Invite a prospect (or customer) to a networking event. Do you attend chamber meetings, lunch and learns, or other networking events? Why not invite prospects and customers to attend with you? This can be a great way learn more about your customers and their business.

4. Review your (email) Sent folder to discover frequently asked questions. One of the things that bogs down our marketing efforts, is producing relevant content. Whether is content for our website, blog, newsletter, or social media, it often takes us longer to decide what to write than it does to write it.

Most of us find it much easier to answer questions. We answer questions everyday – in person, on the phone, and via email. And we probably answer the same questions over and over again. The questions and their accompanying answers make great marketing content.

The next time you are stuck trying to think of what to write about, take a look through the sent folder of your email program and leverage the work you have already done.

5. Write down 3 ways to identify who is NOT your ideal customer. While it is important to define your ideal customer as narrowly as possible, small business owners often get hung up on this part of their marketing strategy. Sometimes it’s easier to define who we don’t want to work with. Once we know how to identify who we don’t want to work with we can refine our marketing messages, improve our qualification processes, and do a better job of educating our referral partners. Knowing who are ideal customers are helps us do a better job of marketing; avoiding non-ideal customers keeps us out of energy draining “lose-lose” situations.

photo credit - Leo Reynolds on Flickr

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Categories : Small Business Marketing

Visually Display Your Professional Story on LinkedIn

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Thursday, May 9th, 2013

LinkedIn continues to add great features to help us connect, communicate, and build our professional network. The latest enhancement gives you the ability to easily use visual content to share your professional story.

Now you can enhance your LinkedIn profile by including images, videos, presentations and more. This isn’t reserved for artists or those who work in visual fields, anyone can take advantage of this new feature to tell their story. Share data and results in the form of charts, demo your latest software enhancement, show off the latest project your architecture firm designed – you’re limited only by your imagination.

You can add visual files to the Summary, Experience, and Education sections of your profile. Edit your profile and look for the Add File icon. I’ve circled it in red in the screenshot below (click the image to enlarge).

I keeping with social media practices, other members can “like” or comment on what you’ve posted.

Here is a short SlideShare presentation from LinkedIn showing some examples of how people with different job functions can enhance their profiles with visual content.

Don’t just say it. Display it on your LinkedIn Profile. from LinkedIn

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Categories : Marketing Tools and Software, Small Business Marketing

Tags : LinkedIn

Jigsaw Becomes Data.com Connect

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013

Way back in 2008 I wrote my first post about Jigsaw and their community based approach to building and maintaining a database of contact information. Over the years, Jigsaw has been a great tool for small business marketers and sales people – helping them find and connect with their ideal customers. A few years back (I think it was in 2010) Jigsaw was bought by Salesforce.com and soon became Data.com Contacts.

Yesterday, Data.com announced the next evolution of Jigsaw. The Jigsaw name is being retired and is now Data.com Connect. According to the folks at Data.com

“Connect is also now more tightly aligned with our overall Data.com product offerings, making it easier to get data directly where and when you need it—either on the Connect site, or directly into your Salesforce CRM via Data.com Clean or Prospector—to meet your business needs and help you hit your goals.”

If you’re a Jigsaw member, you can continue to access the classic Jigsaw site – the look and brand aren’t changing. This site will eventually be retired so it makes sense to start using the new site – which you can find at www.data.com/connect.

This page is part of the Data.com website and acts as an entry point for prospective members who come to Data.com, and decide to join the community.

If you’re not a member, you can still join for free and earn free contacts with their “give a contact – get a contact” model.

The Jigsaw folks have always been big into community, so they have also launched a new Facebook page and Twitter account to go along with the launch of the rebrand.

If you’re not familiar with the old Jigsaw, now Data.com Connect, here is a short video that gives you an overview of what it’s all about.

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Categories : Marketing Tools and Software

Creating Case Studies the Easy Way

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013

Case studies (or success stories) are a powerful tool for marketing your small business. If you provide intangible services, case studies help you communicate, in more concrete terms, how you help your customers. Case studies can also give prospective customers a sense of confidence in your ability to help them solve their problems since you’ve helped others like them before.

If case studies are such powerful tools, why don’t more small business owners use them? One of the obstacles that I’ve noticed is that case studies seem to stall when they are treated like a writing project. Most small business owners aren’t particularly fond of writing and as busy as they are, the idea of spending an afternoon writing case studies isn’t very appealing.

Creating case studies doesn’t have to be a long, drawn out process. Chances are, you are already doing all of the hard work during your sales process. By taking a little extra time up front to record your notes in a slightly different format, you can produce case studies on a regular basis without a lot of extra effort.

First of all, a case study does not have to be a large document; 1 or 2 pages is typically enough to get your message across. Here is a common format you can use for your case studies:

The Situation – a description of the business, where they are, what is going on in their industry, and their goals.

The Problem – the specific challenges you are helping them to solve and/or the aspirations you are helping them achieve.

Your Solution – the combination of products and services you are proposing to help them resolve the problem stated above.

The Result – what life looks like after working with you.

As you can see, this format looks very similar to a proposal. Even if you don’t create formal proposals, you having these conversations, right? You define the problem, propose one or more alternate solutions, and specify the results the customer can expect to enjoy once your solution has been implemented.

The main difference between the proposal and the case study is that life goes on in between. Other problems arise, additional opportunities appear, we may need to adjust our solution, and the end results may be better (or worse) than originally expected.

But if you take the time to create a first draft of your case study at proposal time (or at least organize your notes) you can transform the process of creating case studies from a daunting writing project into a brief review and update session.

Other Benefits

Waiting until a project is complete to create case studies may be robbing you of opportunities to leverage this powerful communication tool. Here are a few ways you can leverage case studies in your business when you start working on them early in your sales process.

Using the case study format can be a powerful way to present your proposal. It provides a concise way of demonstrating to the prospect that you understand their situation, that you are on the same page, and you are going to help them accomplish their goals.

You can use your draft case study to brief other team members assigned to the project who were not part of the proposal process.

Having your notes organized in the case study format makes it easier to outsource or delegate the writing of actual case study.

Last, but not least, the case study can serve as the outline or agenda for your results review meeting – a powerful tool for maintaining customer satisfaction, identifying opportunities for additional business (cross selling, up selling, etc.) and obtaining testimonials and referrals.

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Categories : Small Business Marketing

Tags : marketing content