It’s looking like it will sell out at least 10 days prior, so get yourself registered now!!

www.iimaonline.org

See you there!

Seth’s top 4 are especially good:

1. Selling is hard. Harder than you may ever realize. So, if I seem stressed, cut me some slack.

2. Selling is personal. When I make a promise, I have to keep it. If you force me to break that promise (by changing processes, features or a rollout schedule) I will never forgive you.

3. Selling is interpersonal. I am not moving bits, I’m trying to change people’s minds, one person at a time. So, no, I can’t tell you when the sale will close. No one knows, especially the prospect.

4. I love selling. I particularly love selling great stuff, well marketed. Don’t let me down. Don’t ask me to sell lousy stuff.

Thanks for the intro Seth; so let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Sales and Marketing should be 1 system. It doesn’t matter what size your business is, if there’s people hiding out on one side of a wall generating leads and throwing them over the fence to the sales team, there is a huge disconnect. That disconnect could be costing you over 10% of your gross revenue.. and don’t even get me started on profitability!

A little more love and a lot more communication on both sides of the equation could mean millions for your organization.

1. Understanding what is working and what is not.

2. Understanding the campaigns well enough in advance that reps can have very relevant conversations with inbound prospects

3. Knowing what leads are ready to buy, which ones will have immediate objections, and which ones will need to be ‘warmed up’ first before an opportunity will even develop. (if a rep doesn’t know this going in, they may be telling a customer who is ready to buy why they should buy – this could equal a lost opportunity! On the flipside, reps that don’t understand the objective of your campaign will disqualify leads quickly that perhaps need some initial engagement from them but you anticipate will not close until further down the line.

Many B2B sales organizations today generate leads through multiple channels and they magically appear in the rep’s CRM system, salesforce.com, ACT! etc; which is great, and ultimately can mean that they are at least not going stale (many B2B leads are 50% less likely to close after 2 business days) but we still have the problem of sales reps not knowing if the lead is ready to buy, ice cold or even what their search term was in many cases. If you want your reps to close the most business at least ensure there is enough information delivered with a lead for them to open with the right questions and the right approach! Give them something to start the conversation off, and finally coach them; I coached my reps to think long and hard about the keyword, and create an opening question that contained an exact phrase match, their incedents of getting shut down dropped to almost nothing!

Most of us are finding that if we want to beat our competitors, we need to make the most of every visit to our site. If we’re a software company, we pay AdWords $3-$5 per click just to get someone to our landing page!

Why Marketing Automation?

1. Conversions – Squeeze More Out of Your Existing Site Traffic

If you are a serious online marketer and probably spending somewhere between $2000 and $100 000 in online every month. If you are, Marketing Automation is more than another buzzword. A marketing automation system is like the difference between a smartphone, and running around town with an email device, a camera, a cellphone and a little black book full of addresses – insanity!

2. Execution Time – More Campaigns in Less Time:

Most marketers are still spending days stitching together a simple email to web campaign and at the end of the day, are challenged to determine ROI. If you’re one of these, don’t worry, you’re not alone, but the tide is turning, and today’s ‘rocket science’ of A B testing landing pages, lead scoring, automated drip marketing, are tomorrow’s standard.

3. Analytics, Sitemaps, Split-testing, Landing Pages, and Email Campaigns All Under one Roof

Some marketers get turned off by the price of these systems, but once they’ve added in email marketing costs, custom programming for landing pages, excessive time spend building and submitting google sitemaps..it’s clear that there’s big returns to be had.

4. Align Sales and Marketing

People talk lots about this, but where the rubber meets the road is if sales reps are calling the right people at the right times and having releavant conversations with them.

5. Prove Return on Investment on Everything You Do in Real-Time:

A lot of marketers have started to pay attention to the ‘New Breed of Content Management system;” now dubbed “Marketing Automation.” To confuse things, my latest search on google, showed that everyone and their dog is now claiming to have a marketing automation offering.

Tommorrow’s post will explore purchasing a marketing automation system in more detail

A Comprehensive Marketing Automation Technologies – Download FREE report:

1. Regular & Plentiful Content

Not that volume alone will make you a star, but it’s a good start. Chances are, as long as you’re sure what business you are in, you will be climbing the right rankings wall.

Most marketers simply don’t post enough content with enough frequency!

2. Relevant & Useful Content:

Even if google can’t figure out with its spiders that your content stinks, you won’t generate many inbound links from others if it is not useful to them and their readers.

As a marketer, and a consumer I love little tidbits that I can consume in some meaningful way.. like the old standby – “10 Tips..” “5 Rules of..” etc..

3. Link to people that are ranking well, often they will reciprocate

Link to other recognized authorities in your industry, wikipedia articles, etc.. and don’t forget to use trackback urls!! These tell others that you have linked to them so they can (and most will) reciprocate.

4. Narrow your focus on your keywords

Make sure your headers, titles and copy have your keywords. Remember, google is smart, so don’t “spam the search engines” it will backfire and get you de-listed for up to 6 months.

5. Get Guerrilla!! Pick a Narrow enough term that you can own it..

Narrow even more!! It’s a jungle out there, get picky .. that’s why I’ve chosen to work only with software marketers.. not because we haven’t done more.

Once you’re on a roll, make sure that you’re not biting off more than you can chew; for example, unless you’re Seth Godin, don’t try to dominate “New Marketing, or Web 2.0″ it won’t work!!

Link / Reference

PART 2 – Coming Next Week! Register / RSS

1. Seth Godin

Where to start with Seth.. while there doesn’t seem to be any debate amongst the internet marketing community, he’s one of the best. He’s not an analytics whiz or a an SEO champ per se, he simply covers the basics.. principles that we can’t fight in marketing – knowing our audience, picking our niches, looking for long tails.

His site with key publications, all worth reading – www.sethgodin.com/

Seth’s Blog – sethgodin.typepad.com

2. SEO Book

SEO book is written by a guy named Aaron Wall. Admittedly, when I joined the board of the International Internet Marketing Association, I’d never heard of the guy.. man that got some funny looks! He’s since become one of my top resources for the nitty gritty of search marketing.

www.seobook.com

3. John Hossak, VKI Studios

A friend and colleague, every time I talk with this guy, I respect him more; he’s the almanac of internet marketing and analytics. They are an Omniture certified shop and have been in the game for a while now. John Hossack has filled rooms at a few conferences accross North America, and he never dissapoints.

John’s Blog

4. Web Analytics Association

www.webanalyticsassociation.org

5. Google Analytics Blog

analytics.blogspot.co

6. Marketing Sherpa

Definitely some of the best money I’ve ever spent!! Great articles and case studies.

www.marketingsherpa.com

We’ve all heard of sales funnels, and we all know what happens when a crummy sales rep is in there:

Nothing!!

A first contact, and half of the prospects are looking elsewhere, maybe even motivated to look elsewhere..

If they survive to a needs analysis stage, they’re likely just to hear all kinds of features and functions..

Okay, enough about that rant.. let’s talk about how us as marketers can waste thousands!

1. Realavent AdWords Text

“Top 10 Ways to solve .. [insert keyword here]

“Three things you should know before considering [insert keyword here]

“Complete buyers resource guide for [insert keyword]

REALAVENT KEYWORDS are #1

2. One page for every problem?

Have you ever called a service line at say .. oh your telco, and before your done sharing your beef with the $10 / hour person on the other end of the line, they’re giving you the answer to the wrong question??

We as marketers are better than that!!

where are your customers coming from? if they asked google for “how to drive the ball further” are they getting the “How to Drive the Ball Further” Landing Page if not, they’re Bouncing!

LANDING PAGE RELEVANCE BOUNCING is #2

3. Clear Call to Action

Congrads! They’re staying on your page for more than 10 seconds.. quick, do something!! So far, all we’ve done is spent a small fortune to get someone to stay on our page for more than 10 seconds! If you’re in the software or marketing services world like I am, we probably spent upwards of $3 for this visit.. so what??

$3 should get you a lead!! who cares about quality, get them opting in to something!!

Now most of you have been to webinars, you’ve heard of targeted landing pages, but I speak with companies with $10,000-$40,000 / month in AdWords spend that don’t have a targeted landing page for every campaign group!!

Now if you’re not in that catagory, the only way you will ever successfully compete with the bigger budgets out there, is to out-convert them, so it’s probably even more important to use and optimize landing pages.

Part 2 to follow! – Register for RSS or Email alerts!