Create a 90-Day Marketing Plan

There are times throughout the year that we need to evaluate how well our marketing plan is doing and consider changes that we may need to make to improve it's effectiveness. I often suggest that companies try something new, rather than creating a one-year marketing plan or a five-year marketing plan, why not try creating a 90-day plan?

While it's important to always monitoring your marketing it is vital in this economy to be diligent and watch where you spend your marketing dollars as well as track how effective your marketing campaigns are.

Customer Success

Here’s the big fact: 98% of all dissatisfied customers were not dissatisfied because of a quality problem with the product or service purchased. In 98% of the cases their dissatisfaction was related to their perception of how they were treated by the people they dealt with.

McDonald’s Restaurants notes that over 70% of the complaints that were serious enough to be escalated to a manager where “the clerk was rude, uncommunicative or would not listen to me.” These complaints had nothing to do with the quality of the food or the speed it was delivered.

Η αξία στην παραγωγικότητα, δεν έχει να κάνει με την εργασία μόνο…

Η ταχεία ανάπτυξη των αναδυόμενων αγορών προκαλεί δραματική αύξηση της ζήτησης πόρων και η προμήθεια πολλών πρώτων υλών έχει γίνει πλέον δύσκολο να εξασφαλιστεί. Οι τιμές των βασικών αγαθών είναι πιθανό να συνεχίσουν να αυξάνονται και θα παραμείνουν ασταθείς. Οι βιομηχανικές επιχειρήσεις αισθάνονται ήδη τις επιπτώσεις στις τελικές δραστηριότητές τους, ενώ οι δυσκολίες αυτές φαίνεται πως θα συνεχιστούν, αν δεν ενταθούν κιόλας. Κατά συνέπεια, το μεταβλητό κόστος των βιομηχανικών επιχειρήσεων έχει αυξηθεί.

Για  παράδειγμα, μεταξύ 2000 και 2010, τα μεταβλητά κόστη μιας δυτικής εταιρείας χάλυβα αυξήθηκαν από 50% σε 70% των συνολικών δαπανών παραγωγής της, κυρίως λόγω τους άλματος στις τιμές των βασικών αγαθών. Για μια κινεζική εταιρεία χάλυβα, το 90% του κόστους παραγωγής είναι πλέον μεταβλητό. Και για έναν κατασκευαστή τηλεοράσεων LCD, η ενέργεια αντιπροσωπεύει το 45%  του συνολικού κόστους παραγωγής.

Inside Sales Gains Prove Valuable to Bottom Line Revenues

Last week, the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals (AA-ISP) met for their annual Leadership Conference, which was held this year in Chicago. Sales leaders and sales experts from around the world showed up to share the latest best practices, statistics, stories, and ideas to help Inside Sales gain even more credibility and professionalism.

I wrote about my experiences on Day 1 which you can read here.  Most of the smartest folk on sales leadership were there, even though there were a number of other sales-related conferences going on that week. See below for a list of great folks to follow if you want to learn the best that there is about what veteran Inside Sales writer, analyst, and researcher calls “Remote Professional Selling”. 

When Prospects Change Their Minds

Sales is all about getting people to change their minds. Whatever their current solution might be, your job is to convince them to buy your company's solution instead. But sometimes, after you've worked through the whole sales process and gotten a handshake agreement, the prospect will suddenly tell you that he's changed his mind. Or worse, you'll try to set up an appointment to sign the final paperwork and find that the prospect has vanished.

These situations are terribly frustrating because by this point, you believe that it's a done deal. You've probably told your sales manager to expect the order shortly and if it's a big sale, you may have done some bragging to your fellow salespeople. And now you have to tell all of those people that your sale has evaporated.

10 Sure-Fire Ways to Build Sales for Entrepreneurs

Some entrepreneurs and small business owners (and their salespeople) are talking about the stock market. Others are strategizing on and successfully growing revenues. Which camp do you fall into?

Here are ten sure-fire ways to grow revenues in your business. You don’t need to do them all to be successful, but you DO need to do a number of them. If your business is at a plateau and needs a jump start, put these sales strategies into place and then roll up your sleeves and work to make them happen.

1. Have a very clear brand promise / value proposition – how do you add value to your customers, and why should they work with you?  Can other people articulate this? DO others talk you up? 

5 Ways Real Estate Agents Fail At Social Media

Using Social Media Properly

The way we communicate on a daily basis has changed radically over the last ten years. In our ever changing world of communication, social media is what’s in vogue. Everywhere you turn you can’t escape it whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin or one of the many others that are cropping up daily. Social media is a way of keeping in touch with the world around us just like reading the daily newspaper used to be. How many people actually sit down and read a newspaper cover to cover anymore? Probably not nearly as many as there were going back even five years ago. How we deliver news is no longer the same.

With new forms of communication, come new rules of the game. While social media is an information delivery mechanism, it is also a way of socializing as well. Those that are really good at social media will tell you being “social” is what matters most. Building relationships is a big part of what social media is about. 

Survey: Fewer Small Businesses Expect to Hire or Grow

Uncertainty surrounding the federal deficit, taxes and health care is negatively impacting small businesses' revenue and hiring projections for this year and next, according to the fourth annual U.S. Bank Small Business Survey published today.

The survey was conducted online in January among 3,210 small-business owners with less than $10 million in annual revenue. While two-thirds of small businesses surveyed said they are in good financial health or better, only 16 percent expect to increase staff over the next 12 months. When asked the same question a year ago, 20 percent of small businesses expected to ramp up hiring.

Earth Day: 7 Step Plan to Reuse Your Content Marketing

Just as we celebrate Earth Day by setting up processes to preserve our natural resources – recycling and reusing products like paper, glass and plastic – content marketers must consider how to conserve their scarce resources, namely content, budget and employee time.

Similar to being green, content marketers can achieve their goals by rethinking how they use their limited business resources.

To this end, marketers, regardless of company size or budget, must plan ahead to get the most out of each content effort.

Build Your Own Network

Networking is a powerful tool for anyone in business, but it's especially useful for salespeople. Network contacts give you access to opportunities that you'd never have without them. The most difficult part of networking is getting started with your first few contacts. Then once you have the beginnings of a network, all you need to do is treat them right and you'll be able to keep it growing indefinitely.

Classify Your Blogging Business

Choosing the Best Business Structure for Your Blogging Goals

If your goal is to make money from your business blog and you live in the United States, you'll need to claim that income on your tax return. That means you'll need to determine the classification of your business for tax purposes. Choosing a business classification also affects how your finances and legal issues are handled.

Following is an overview of each business classification to help you determine which is best for you and your blogging business.

Sole Proprietorship

4 Blogging Strategies To Keep Your Audience Coming Back

Most website/blog owners know the most common way of having visitors come back to their website is by capturing their email address via newsletters or eBooks.

Marketing Research Chart: Channels tracked by marketers

SUMMARY: In this week’s chart, we learn about the types of channels marketers track and analyze to make improvements to their marketing efforts. Be sure to share your own analysis of this chart in the MarketingSherpa LinkedIn Group for a chance to be published in a future blog post.    

When selecting email marketing metrics, identifying what to measure and understanding a metric’s purpose are the first steps. Selected metrics should be actionable, helping organizations consistently make improvements and gain necessary budget approvals.

We asked marketers … 

Seven steps for successful rollouts of sales technology

My inspiration for this post: This week’s Sales 2.0 conference, my presentation this week at the Marketo Summit on the Automated Sales Organization, and just an overall affection for the incredible transformation technology is driving in sales.   There are amazing things happening right now in the Sales 2.0 space — Sales leaders are accepting technology as part of their keys to success and looking to spend more.  Step one in the tranformation is complete:  Agree that technology can help. Step Two is implementation and roll-out.  As we have learned from CRM, the hard part is getting sales people to use new tools aka adoption.   Sales people are inherently efficient people.  They develop patterns and habits over time that they rely on.  When you introduce something that takes them out of the pattern, they will push back.sales 2.0, sales , crm    There is a process for successfully rolling out Sales 2.0/Sales technology.  I have chronicled here in this post.  

Don't Use Social to Generate Sales; Make Selling Social

Some say we can't value social-marketing efforts directly. Others claim that if we can't attribute a return on investment, we shouldn't be doing it. But maybe we're all missing the point. Maybe the problem is not whether social value can be measured in dollars. Perhaps the issue is that we can't measure in dollars objectives that weren't intended to be profitable in the first place.