Category: Marketing and Lead Generation

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Finding Your Innate Marketing Genius with Christina Frei #269

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Finding Your Innate Marketing Genius with Christina Frei #269

Today’s guest is branding and marketing expert Christina Frei. She has developed a proprietary process that identifies finding your Innate Marketing Genius in business owners. In this episode we chat about the having the right marketing mindset through your avatar. Next we discuss practical tactics sellers can use to prospect and convert leads into opportunities.

Building Trust Before You Meet Them

The Innate Marketing Genius focus first on you understanding you through your avatar. Next it discovers if a lead is a good prospect for you. When meeting a lead ask these questions:

  • What is the  core strategy that will give you a home of discovering your ideal clients?
  • What is this way of being (for you) that is so easy that it becomes an engine?” Start one way, that branch out.
  • What are the right conferences and tradeshows?
  • What are the right conversations?
  • Do you want to be a speaker?
  • Do you want to host a  webinar to build trust.?

From these answers you line it up against your own personal marketing genius avatar.  The process that is two-fold:

  1. Figure out your type with the assessment tool
  2. Six step process that identifies the marketing genius. Defines your archetype and create the core strategy.

I completed the assessment and this was the result:

Go to https://innatemarketinggenius.com/ and click “Take the assessment”

How To Find Christina Frei

Christina is easy to find online!

Lastly, the tool I use to find and guess a strangers email is hunter.io.  Good luck!
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Digital Prospecting vs Cold Calling with Ken Guest #267

ken guest sales babble

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Digital Prospecting vs Cold Calling with Ken Guest #267

ken guest sales babbleToday’s guest is Ken Guest, an associate at the Ruby Group.  Ken  has extensive experience in sales and is the author with Mike Jones a new book titled “Digital Prospecting – Finding, Nurturing, and Closing Sales with Social Technologies”.  Ken and I talk about ways to use social media to learn about prospects and then use referral selling to make connections.

Social Prospecting not Social Selling

Ken believes it’s difficult to sell with social media. Better to leverage the information in social media to better understand the buyer.   He believes in connecting with all the people you already know in LinkedIn. Once connected, look if they know anyone who might be a qualified prospect. If they do ask for an introduction.

Ken found that on average, 7 out of 10 people will know the person well enough they will agree to an introduction. Also, 4 out 7 will  agree to a first time conversation. Not all clients will not give you referrals. But that’s OK, the vast majority will.

Make the introduction through an email.  When you get it,  “reply all”, taking ownership to set up a chat. The follow up emails should look like you typed them. To your best ability,  customize the email for the reader.

Two Week Cadence

Ken believes you should wait two weeks between sending emails.  Don’t look too needy. People are busy, give them time to agree and chat. You will get a response.  Digital prospecting via referral selling is the foundation of Ken’s entire prospecting process.  He even sends prospects homework (cross-out the topics you don’t want to talk about) to ensure their time is respected.

Cold Calls and Cold Emails

There is a very low response rate when coldly reaching out. In some situations you have no other recourse. But if you can avoid it, do.

  • Make sure the emails look personal.
  • Speak a bit about your value proposition.
  • Benefits they will experience.
  • Reference people and companies they MIGHT know.
  • Share how prior to working with us, companies have found some good experience.
  • At the end of the email, “…it would be disrespectful of me to presume anything about your business. If you would be open to a conversation  I would certainly welcome it and if you have no interest feel free to let me know that too.”   

Again use the two week cadence. Expect a 11% response rate. Not all bought. Forward back the original email and get a 17% response rate.   In two weeks,

“I’ve sent you a few emails, I haven’t heard back  and have the feeling you simply have no interest. in learning about me or how I work with companies and you’re too polite to tell me that. If you could be kind enough to confirm my suspicions I won’t bother you anymore. ”  The response rate is 71%   Less than 10 people would say “don’t bother me”.  Most would be apologize why they’re not responding due to time.

How To Connect with Ken Guest

This is Ken’s email:   ken,guest @ sandler.com

Connect with Ken on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kjguest/

To get his book “Digital Prospecting”  you can find it at shop.sandler.com

Lead Generation Strategies

Overcoming Sales Fears

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Anti-Transactional Selling with Bill Keeler #266

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Anti-Transactional Selling with Bill Keeler #266

Today’s guest is Bill Keeler, founder of Market Makers, a small business sales development company based in Richmond, Virginia. Market Makers works with local and mid-sized organizations to grow their top-line revenues and does by offering different services to locally owned companies. In this episode Bill shares his views on anti-transactional selling.  In fact, he doesn’t believe in selling, he believes in buying. Only the buyer can make a decision, not the seller. Despite what some sellers think, you can’t make prospects buy. 

Four Step Anti-Transactional Sales Process

During the sales process, Bill asks the following questions and fills out a form. Busy clients appreciate the moment for self reflecting on their business.
  1. Take an “anti-transactional selling” approach when selling
  2. Identify your clients and sort out A, B, C and D:
    • A: Clients who are a perfect fit
    • B: Similar to As, but somewhat different
    • C: retail buyers, who fit sometimes
    • D: never sell to them, they never fit
  3. Figure out what makes you unique, why customers buy from you.
  4. Provide help with staff, tools and process to prop up areas they struggle

Once you know what they need you can prescribe the RIGHT prescription.

Every meeting is a sales meeting or a meeting with someone who can help you with the next sale.

How To Find Bill Keeler

How To Find Captain John Helmers

    • Here are the photos of the graduation ceremony on Facebook
    • This is his the Captain John Helmers LinkedIn profile
    • Post on LinkedIn  with photos
    • Newspaper article
    • What is Army Ranger School 
    • Here are the photos of the graduation ceremony on Facebook

How to Prospect and Generate Leads

Turn those meetings into business. Listen to these past episodes now!

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Perfect LinkedIn Strategy with Brian Basilico #264

Brian Basilico Sales Babble

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Brian Basilico Sales Babble
Brian Basilico is a long time marketer, author, speaker and online  strategist who became interested in understanding the process of prospecting on LinkedIn.  After a year of experimentation with LinkedIn Navigator he found it doesn’t work. After a bit of research he came to learn about a series of tools that work with LinkedIn. Together he calls this the Perfect LinkedIn Strategy.

Three Prospecting Sales Tools

According to Brian, Nimble, Crystal and 366 give you direct access to your customers in the shortest amount of time. Collectively these tools capture data on your prospects and allow you to contact the person in the style they prefer.

Nimble CRM

Nimble is a CRM Gmail plugin that leverages and manages contacts stored in your Gmail.  We’ve discussed this in the past. Just last year Jon Ferrara was a guest on  Sales Babble .     $20/mo  for a subscription and it’s the foundation of Brian’s system. Similar to Saleforce, Insightly and Base, this CRM contains the lions share of your customer contact demographics.

366 Tool

366 is a tool that can best explained as a combination of LeadPages, Mailchimp, HootSuite, and email drip marketing campaigns (Similar to Active Campaign).   It can feed from Nimble, and build targeted emails campaigns based on tags. Tags are based on the Crystal profile (see below).   $50/mo for a subscription.

Crystal Tool

Crystal uses Linked and social media to create an instant DISC personality profile using AI.   Creepy and cool all at the same time.  It will recommend you on how to approach a sales call.  According to the company it’s 83% correct,  $29/mo for a subscription.

Evernote

This is a phone app that can scan business cards. Once scanned it sends out a welcome email.  Next it sends a LinkedIn request using Zapier push the information into Nimble.   $69/year for a subscription.

OPEN Prospect Stages

Brian mentioned the OPEN process he uses to walk prospects down a sales pipeline. OPEN is an acronym:
  • Oblivious – clearly not qualified
  • Pondering – interested in learning more
  • Engaged – plan on buying soon
  • Need – needs to buy now

Depending on the stage, you give the prospects different content (email drip campaign from 366) until they reach the need stage. Once they arrive at that state it’s time to call them. This requires three different levels of campaigns.

Social Media

According to Brian,  Social Media is a relationship building tool first, content delivery platform second and a sales too last.  Too often sellers focus on the latter vs the former.

10-10-10 Strategy

Spend 10 minutes/day or 10 people (new or existing) and 10 words. “Just wanted to say hi. How can I help you.?”

Do this daily and you will generate new opportunities. Slow and steady wins the race.

How To Find Brian Basilico

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Selling with FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) with Louis Kreppert #262

Louis Kreppert Sales Babble

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Selling with FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) with Louis Kreppert #262

Louis Kreppert Sales BabbleAre you looking to create extra income for yourself on a full or part time basis?   Do you have a small business selling products and you’d like to expand and sell across the country? Or, do you have a product idea you’d like to bring to market? I believe all sellers are secret entrepreneurs  fascinated with creating their own gig.  Selling them on Amazon may be the solution
for you in 2019. In this episode our guest Louis Kreppert visits the new Fox.Build podcast studio and  explains the nuts and bolts of the FBA Fulfillment by Amazon program.

In this episode we discuss how to sell on the number one e-commerce marketplace, Amazon. We’ll cover all the basics on selling physical products on their FBA, including cost and fees associated with it. Louis will share some  best practices for success and examples of successful products and others that have bombed. By the end of this chat you will be able to confidently know if this a platform for you and the steps necessary to get started.

FBA Way

Fulfilled by Amazon, is  a program where Amazon does all the storing, packing and shipping versus merchant fulfilled, where you hold all the inventory, do the packing and shipping.  FBA provides sellers the opportunity to only focus on marketing and selling.   Their only responsibility is finding customers and meeting their needs.

Elements of a Great Listing

There is one listing for every product. The best way to sell is to create your own listing and differentiate from the rest. Amazon drives prospects to look at  your listing.  Everything is searchable. SEO is key. The words are great but the pictures are what really matters. A great set of photos shows the benefits. The first photo must be shot on a white background. The rest of the photos can be anything else product related but it  should tell a story. Each photo should have 85% image, 15% words at the most.

The Title should sound human (not a babble of keywords). Then add 4 bullet points, 1-2 sentences long.

The ratings,  “1- 5” stars reviews, really matter. People want to see authentic reviews that  reflect reality. If there are no reviews, that’s a hurdle.

Compensation

You can make money as a full-time sellers (third part seller). It’s important to keep your costs down and add value (beyond some commodity). On average FBA takes 50% of your sale. It costs Amazon 25% for the fulfillment services, and keeps 25% for profit.

Example Product Stories

Win – Louis put a bundle together e.g. birthday party bundled set. Got good reviews and it started selling. Views started to snowball. He sells 10 day. Took 4 years to get this product right.

Bomb – Louis had a product that wasn’t unique. Unbundled hand warmers (successful for a while) then the competition found it. started competing then  drove the price to the ground.

Take Away

Take the Amazon university course or hire an  expert like Louis.

How To Find Louis Kreppert

Louis helps struggling businesses become successful through E-Commerce sales and marketing. In 2014 he started his own marketing company:

LK Sales and Marketing helps people focus on selling products on
Amazon and other e-commerce platforms.

Contact Louis in LinkedIn    or you can reach him here:   Louis@lksalesandmarketing.com

Sales Tools

Here are other sales tool you can add to your tool box. Listen today!

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Webinars that Work with Todd Earwood #246

Todd Earwood Sales Babble

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Webinars that Work with Todd Earwood #246

Todd Earwood Sales BabbleTodd Earwood is the founder and CEO of MoneyPath. Todd believes in using webinars as powerful sales tools that will engage customers for years to come, and he helps his clients do just that through Webinar Works. In this  episode Todd and I discuss what it takes to build effective webinars that work. In a world where there is more work than time, we consider the possibility of using automation to tease out highly qualified prospects.

What’s new About Webinars?

A webinar is a video sales presentation made over the web. The presentation maybe live or automated. The webinar can be augmented with technology to advance interest in a product or service. In either case a webinar is a way of getting leads to self identify interest. If a visitor spends a long time on a webinar, they are a hot prospect. This is how you can make webinars that work.

Keys to High Quality Webinars That Work

  • Webinars should private, don’t publish on social media
  • Target a very narrow persona, may only have 1 or 2 people show up
  • People are strongly motivated to avoid pain, not so much gain. Be mindful of your focus.
  • Hook on a persona. For example consider this headline “Top 5 mistakes and pitfall that Z make regarding Y topic”
  • Arm sales with snippet content.  Make separate blogs posts and videos for each mistake and consider it a reusable asset
  • Have two people host the webinar
  • Have polls – leave a comment or use a tool
    • Do you agree? YES or NO or THE POPE IS CATHOLIC
  • At the end of the webinar ask, which question was the most interesting for you?
  • Then ask “now that you’ve been educated on this topic, what’s your next step?”
    1. research
    2. love it going to hand it off
    3. love this topic I need to learn more now

Build  a webform poll on the video page… people will  click it.

Segmented Follow Up: Follow up with ALL who show up. Break up the signups into groups by interest; follow up who didn’t show up and offer to have them watch the replay.

How To Connect with Todd Earwood

5 mistakes entrepreneurs makes working out an idea

Webinar Works is for you if…
You want to use a turnkey, proven process to drive leads
You think creating content is too much work, much less a webinar
You wish there was a new way to target old prospects or dead leads
You want to discover from first-hand companies who have used this system

Get your assessment here:  https://www.webinarworks.co/salesbabble

Lead Generation Strategies

Let’s keep the babble going. Here are past episodes on lead gen. Listen now!

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The Day Marketing Held Sales Accountable with Darryl Praill #243

Darryl Praill Sales Babble

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The Day Marketing Held Sales Accountable with Darryl Praill #243

Darryl Praill Sales BabbleOur guest is  Darryl Praill. Darryl is the Chief Marketing Officer of VanillaSoft, and a high-tech marketing executive with over 25 years’ experience. In this episode Darryl and I have a raucous conversation discussing the how marketing and sales departments commonly engage (or better put, fail too). This engagement commonly involves finger pointing, name calling and other bad behaviours. Darryl states that sales is not doing it’s job. Secondly, marketing should hold sales accountable for the leads it provides. In the end we find the topic is much messier.

Question Asked of Sales by Marketing

Answer the question….

  • Have you followed up on those leads?
  • What do you mean those leads were crap?
  • Why are you asking me for more leads, I just gave you a boat load of leads?

According to Darryl, too often sales fails to honor the leads it gets. Nor do they share what makes the leads of poor quality. He believes there should be a set of Mutual Rules of Engagement e.g., when sales gets a lead, they will follow up.  There should also be a dialogue describing what makes a good leads and how quick and vigilant sellers will work on the leads.

Issues with Lead Follow Up

What happens today:

  1. 48% of new leads never get contacted
  2. <2 call attempts are made
  3. Average time of follow up  35-60 hours
  4. 1 hour is the optimal time to follow up
  5. 8-12 attempts is optimal

So it begs the question, if sales it not doing it’s job the day should marketing holds sales accountable? Darryl believes it’s not all sales fault, it’s technology issues. CRMs for marketing are very different systems then CRMs used by sales organizations. If only they worked better.

How To Find Darryl Praill

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Marketing Skills Sales People Need with Whitney Cole #239

Whitney Cole Sales Babble

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Marketing Skills Sales People Need with Whitney Cole #239

Whitney Cole Sales BabbleWhitney Cole works with mission driven health tech companies. She finds that companies struggle to relate to the consumer, despite having terrific technology. At many levels they understand the problems, yet struggle to explain it. Whitney calls herself a mission mavin, an expert that makes the complex, simple. In this episode Whitney shares the marketing skills sales people need to generate highly qualified leads.

Separating Marketing and Sales

Marketing gets the leads, but people buy from people. Buying is sales. Marketing is the content you create to nurture a lead. Sales is getting two people to actually speak to one another. The sales team may use some of the content to help close the deal. But closing is mostly a sales responsibility.

Marketing Founded on Your Avatar

An Avatar is an ideal client (for service based businesses). Build an Avatar by thinking of somebody you’ve helped or somebody you know needs your help. Ask what does it look like the day AFTER they buy your product/ services.

Consider and list the results and outcomes from your ideal client. Once you have an avatar sellers can do the following to raise their marketing skills:

  1. Learn how to write and hone communication skills.
  2. Learn how to use emotional language to persuade e.g. skyrocket, unlock the secret, discover, etc…
  3. Google how to write a good blog post and use those skills in all you write.
  4. Listen to your buyers and speak in the language THEY use.
  5. Learn how to write a good headline. This includes email subject lines. Write clickable subject lines with content that will back it up (the opposite of clickbait). Some tools recommended: CoSchedule.com – free email subject and blog post analyzer
  6. Use the Flesch-Kincaid test to simplify your writing or use the hemingwayapp.com
  7. Create different kinds of blog posts and discovered and consumed in different ways: podcasts, videos, infographics, ebooks, articles in Inc. or Forbes Not everybody reads. Not everybody likes videos.
  8. Don’t be everywhere posting, only be where your customer hangs out.
  9. Put content on Quora. Companies should find related questions and do a stunning job of answering the questions with well thought out and researched answers. Make sure and include facts and statistics. Don’t get too salesy.
  10. Reuse blogs on your website on blogging platforms like LinkedIn and Quora.
  11. To get published on Forbes, start by guest posting Business2Community. Google “how to write for Forbes”. to learn the process. Find people in your network who already are published on your target publication. You must write in what fits their publication.

Take Action

Design a content plan. Have a strategy when writing your blogs. Create a set of pillars with topics with content in different formats.

How To Find the Mission Maven Whitney Cole

The Mission Maven website

LinkedIn

Free gift for Sales Babblers can be found here! 

You can DM Whitney at https://twitter.com/Mission_Maven

Sales and Marketing Alignment

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Nimble Social Sales and Marketing with Jon Ferrara #238

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Nimble Social Sales and Marketing with Jon Ferrara #238

Jon Ferrara believes the more people you can help grow, the more you grow. It’s one of the reasons he pioneered contact management and CRM with GoldMine in the 90’s, a company he sold for $125 million, and then he came back to invent the Nimble social CRM for nimble social sales and marketing.

Jon’s core values include building products that help others achieve their

  • passion,
  • plan,
  • purpose

to drive success. Don’t rely on your company to build your network. You own that. In this episode we learn how.

Sustainable Garden

Establish an identity in places where your prospects congregate. Share content often and talk about how they can personally grow. People buy a better version of themselves. Be that version and they will see you as an expert.  Don’t talk about you, talk about them. People are going to hire you based on your network. So, make sure and take good care of your personal CRM.

How To Stand Out

The more digital we get, the more human we need to be. You can get past traditional social sales and marketing by picking up the phone and sending handwritten notes.

5 Fs of Life

This list shows how you get connected and stay connect. Talk about these topics to find the softer side and deeper connection with others.

  • Family
  • Friends
  • Food
  • Fun
  • Fellowship

5 Es of Social Selling

Use this list to build your brand and stand out from the crowd:

  • Educate
  • Enchant
  • Engage
  • Embrace
  • Empower

The more people you grow, the more you grow  – Zig Ziglar

Take Action Today

Sales is the new Service. Service is the new sales.

How To Find Jon Ferrara

To connect with Jon here are the links for nimble social sales and marketing mentioned in the podcast.
This is Jon on LinkedIn and on Twitter 

The CRM we spoke about is Nimble.com  and you can email Jon at jon @ nimble.com

After the Two Week free trial use the discount code  jon40 (40% off)

We are both fans of Hardcore History with Dan Carlin

Social Selling

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Leadsology with Tom Poland #220

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Leadsology – Science of Being in Demand with Tom Poland #220

Today we meet Tom Poland the author of the #1 international best selling book Leadsology®: The Science of Being in Demand. Tom shares the process he uses to get prospects to self select and qualify themselves. We talk about simple marketing techniques, sales professionals can use to find great prospects.

For Tom a highly qualified lead is someone who

  1. Searches and finds your link,
  2. Knows your fee/pricing,
  3. Books a sales call,
  4. Views you as the only (or small set) legitimate choice(s).

These KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are most indicitive of sales conversion rates (for Tom typically 50%).  The trick is to filter out unqualified leads prior to the meeting. Prospects self select.

Creating an Experience

The marketing experiences of the prospect includes:

  • Preselection – only prospects with a set demographic criteria that self select via content marketing
  • Lead Magnet – could be some information of value, commonly a pdf worksheet, essay, or maybe a webinar or live event. He calls this a “honey pot”.
  • A buyer is the intersection of an Ideal Client and a Marketing Message (Value Proposition)

Other Peoples Networks

Leadsology is dependent on the process of leverageing other people’s networks:

  • Find people with similar, but not exact clients
  • Get introduced because it’s free easy fast and simple
  • For partnerships you need: Rapport Respect Relatability Reciprocity 
  • Build networks by sharing your networks.

Take Action Advice

  1. Do some marketing!   Anything!   Don’t wait to be discovered.
  2. Do the Five Day Lead Challenge
  3. Purchase the domain BookachatwithYOURNAME.com to make it easy for people to book a meeting.

How To Find Tom Poland

Tom can be found all over the internet:

Click here to get the #1 international best selling book “Leadsology®: The Science of Being In Demand”

Lead Generation Strategies

Here are past episodes on lead gen. Enjoy!