To help you reach your sales goals
Archive for January, 2010
20 Ways to Recognize Your Star Clients
Jan 28th
20 Ways to Recognize Your Star Clients
By Michael Krause
You know what makes your organization unique. You’ve identified why your customers value your products over the competition. With those fundamental but critical items in place you’re ready to focus on you customers. Are you clear on whom your best ones are? Crystal clear?
As a general rule you want to spend about 80 percent of your time on your clients who are the most profitable and embrace your reason for existence. This usually works out to be the top 20 percent of your customers. These are the people who will give you the largest profit margin for your efforts.
There are other benefits for identifying your top 20 percent. You can confidently implement strategies that:
• eliminate spending too much time on those who give you the least amount of return for your efforts.
• create targeted marketing campaigns for specific customer categories.
• establish incentive programs to move less active customers into your top range.
• develop a relationship package to secure relations with your valued customer groups (such as a bronze, silver, gold or platinum level).
You can also assign specialists to focus on specific aspects of your customer segments. These can include someone dedicated to the large accounts and strategic alliances, a relationship manager responsible for managing current clients and up-selling, and a hunter who looks for new business where no current relationship exists between a customer and your organization.
In order to choose your top 20 percent you have to segment your customers into niche categories. It’s quite possible to have multiple categories each with their own top 20 percent. Here are twenty questions to help you accomplish the task.
1. Where is the revenue coming from?
2. What are your customers passionate about?
3. Who gives you the greatest profit margins?
4. How do they purchase? (Credit, cash, corporate account, checks, PayPal.)
5. Where do they purchase (Brick and mortar, online, catalog.)
6. What do they purchase? (Which services? Which products?)
7. What are their purchasing patterns? (Once a year, many small items, a few larger items.)
8. Where do they live? (In an apartment, condo, city, suburb, development, out-of-state.)
9. Where do they work? (In a home office, downtown, office park, mom & pop store.)
10. What attributes do they possess (Consistent, fickle, committed, particular, loyal.)
11. What types of people, places or things do they like?
12. What do they value?
13. What do they read?
14. When do they read it?
15. Where do they read?
16. What types of meetings, groups, or classes do they attend?
17. What do they value? (Education, money, service, philanthropy.)
18. Who complains the most?
19. What else do they purchase?
And most important,
20. What type of people are you attracting to your business?
How to Conquer the Strategic Growth Ghost
Jan 21st
How to Conquer the Strategic Growth Ghost
By Mike Krause
If you don’t know exactly what you’re selling and why your customers are buying, strategic growth will remain a ghostly apparition–always elusive and never materializing. And if your organization isn’t growing, it’s dying.
Most businesses, at some point, were able to provide these answers. But over time organization leaders become so immersed in their business they lose perspective and fail to work on it. Eventually, they’re left wondering how the competition incrementally stole the marketshare.
Here’s how to stop it: know your unique selling proposition (USP) and your unique value proposition (UVP).
What’s your USP? What do you sell that separates you from your competitors? This is not an elevator speech. This is a clearly distilled statement about what you do in 8 words or less. You should know it. Your executive staff should know it. Your sales staff should know it. Your clients and prospects should know it. Your receptionist, phone operator, and in-house mail clerk should know it. This statement is one of the single most important selling guides within your organization.
Here’s the other one.
What’s your UVP? Why do your customers do business with you? What is their perception of you? Maybe they see value where you don’t. Perhaps they like the color of your logo or the aura of your company culture. Maybe it’s your location, convenience, expertise, friendliness, reputation, price, knowledge, visibility, coolness rating, or frustration with a competitor–whatever it is you need to know it.
Be open to learn that what you think are reasons your clients are buying may not be their greatest influencers.
Are your ideal customers who you think they are?
Are you channeling your USP resources into a package your customers want?
Are your customers attracted to you because of the uniqueness of what you provide?
Alignment between USP and UVP equates into real strategic growth. The ghosts are gone. But by now you have correctly guessed this alignment requires maintenance. It relies upon paying continuous attention to your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). And to do that you need your USP and UVP.
Wondering where to start?
Try this for USP: at your next staff meeting place a big box next to you. Pass out sheets of paper and pencils then ask attendees to write your organization’s USP. Don’t warn or prompt them. You’re trying to collect a true snapshot of their understanding. Their answers will tell you how much work you need to do in this area.
Try this for UVP: make a list of all your current assets that collect prospect and customer opinion of your organization and then use them to listen to your customers and collect their input.
Is your list a little sparse? Consider:
• Surveys (make sure to provide an open-ended question)
• Social media (yes, another valuable trait of this technology)
• Testimonials
• Case Studies
• Website analytics
• Focus group
• Mixer (a little unconventional but a great way to solicit conversation and thank your customers)
Now you have some tools to get started. Will you use them and conquer the strategic growth ghost or continue on and just hope for the best? It’s your move.
Strategic Planning Questionnaire: Step One for Strong Growth and Sales
Jan 14th
Strategic Planning Questionnaire:
Step One for Strong Growth and Sales
By Mike Krause
Strategic planning. The American Marketing Association defines strategic planning as “the consideration of current decision alternatives in light of their probable consequences over time.” We can all agree this is a critical and necessary part of running a business.
Strategic planning can and should be refined to address two interrelated subjects: growth and sales. In today’s competitive environment, if you aren’t growing you’re dying. How does that work? A failure on your part to grow strategically translates into an opportunity for your competitors.
How can you tell if you have an effective strategic growth plan? If you’re unable to answer the following questions quickly and concisely, your growth plan needs attention.
- How often are your regularly scheduled meetings with your sales team and/or executives?
- How are you measuring success?
- Do you have a spreadsheet that tracks these measurements?
- Can all your employees describe your sales process?
- What exactly are you producing for the company? (Everyone should have a tangible answer to this, including the owner.)
How’d you do? Most people stumble around on those questions for one simple reason; they don’t allow themselves to step outside of their business long enough to work on it instead of in it. The next set of questions will give you that outside perspective. The answers will reveal your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT).
- What value are you delivering to your customers?
- Why are people buying from you and not someone else?
- What are your customers really buying from you?
- What is the comprehensive customer experience?
Your strengths are made up of your core competencies and resources. Think in terms of skills and attributes. What is your organization great at doing? In what capacity do you outpace everyone else? Use your answer to describe your value.
Once you can identify your value, you can strategically search for new opportunities. Collectively, these actions determine your capacity for growth (remember, if your organization isn’t growing, it’s dying).
Look in the mirror: identifying the opposite is equally important. If something isn’t a strength, perhaps it’s a weakness? Once you know your weaknesses then you know your threats. Your flaws are your competitors’ advantage and ultimately threaten your growth and sales. Fortunately, it works both ways.
Share these questions with your staff. Your goal is for everyone to have similar, well-articulated, crystallized answers based on an authentic understanding of the organization. And that is your first step towards establishing a true strategic plan.
3 Succinct Steps to Get Sales through Social Media: How a Small Business Did It (and so can you).
Jan 6th
3 Succinct Steps to Get Sales through Social Media: How a Small Business Did It
(and so can you).
These days you can’t escape the social media buzz. You also can’t escape the recession. During a time when most non-essential businesses struggled to survive, one such organization experienced solid, sustained growth. This is a remarkable accomplishment. This is how they did it.
Madeline’s Catering is a full-service caterer in Rochester, NY. Like many other small and mid-sized organizations Madeline’s Catering found themselves facing the perennial small business challenge-they were so busy providing a high quality service they had neither time nor knowledge on how to sell it. “I’m a chef not a sales person,” says Madeline Neville, Head Chef and owner.
Madeline’s Catering followed a customized 6-week plan organized around specific, realistic action items. Social media played a key role. Here’s what they did.
- Rebranding. Madeline’s Catering built an attractive, new website fully integrated with the traffic driving, social media channels Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In.
- Streamlined Maintenance. To accommodate time limitations Neville uses an account on Ping.fm, a social media management site that allows her to upload new content and update all her channels in minutes.
- Customer Service. Using scripts for phone calls and letters along with an in-take form Neville has a process for systematic follow-up for phone inquiries. In addition, she sought education for herself and staff to assess and improve phone skills and closing techniques.
The results: In six weeks Madeline’s Catering’s website traffic increased 41 percent and phone inquiries have nearly doubled. Their phone call strategies have increased the number of closed sales. This efficient system has streamlined management and improved employee morale. Madeline’s Catering now stands above the competition with a reputation of excellent customer service. Furthermore, time previously spent finding prospects is now used for researching and improving recipes.
The Takeaway: Social media means real business. As a result of their upfront efforts Madeline’s Catering has a distinct advantage over their competitors that translates into benefits in the eyes of the customer.
You’ve probably figured out that Sales Sense Solutions organized the 6-week strategy. And yes, there were other components involved in that 6-week strategy. We decided to share this dimension of the story with you to demonstrate that social media can be a solid sales-driving tool for you even during an extended recession. If you want to read a full version of the Madeline’s Catering case study please visit www.SalesSenseSolutions.com
Please visit http://www.madelinescatering.com/ for all of your catering needs.
We’re also hosting a social media seminar and invite you to join us and learn. Click here to get more information. https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/850393099
