When you see an inbound call from a familiar company or brand name, you’re more inclined to answer the call. If you’re a business owner, you know this is true, and so do your salespeople.

Sales is a brutally competitive, uphill battle in this day and age. Why discourage your team by pushing them up a steep hill? Help level the playing field by investing in your brand and executing a targeted marketing plan.

Creating strategic brand awareness is the best investment you will ever make in your business. Name one initiative that brings in customers and revenues better than being well-known for what you do best… You can’t.

Better Mousetrap?

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” This is only true when people believe you have a better mousetrap, and they have to find out about it first!

The more you authentically communicate your value proposition in the marketplace, the better your “mousetrap” is perceived by potential customers. Once you have established a high-quality perception in your market, prospects’ doors open much easier. Your outbound emails and phone calls have not only a fighting chance but a likelihood of being answered or returned.

Sales Pay Dirt

If your brand carries sway, your prospective customer is either curious, willing or eager to answer their phone when you or your team come calling. This is sales pay dirt. It’s the magic merger that takes companies to the next level and improves lifestyles.

Grow Your Business in 90 Days

Once you make the decision to invest in your brand to boost sales, you just need to remain committed and stay the course! Within about 90 days of implementing a new branding campaign, you should start seeing profitable results. Sequencing looks like this…

1. Create or refresh your brand with the focus on unique value – include both visual and verbal elements. 30 days
2. Produce branded marketing communications right away – Don’t worry about perfection at this point! You can easily start with a landing page, an email blast, a press release, a postcard or just a flyer. 45 days
3. Develop a media and direct marketing strategy – use your proven, go-to channels and carefully consider adding new, targeted media. Apply tracking code to your digital communications and utilize your platforms’ analytics to monitor engagement. 60 days
4. Launch and implement a marketing/advertising campaign according to an appropriate frequency schedule – stick to a consistent brand theme and keep reinforcing your core value proposition in creative ways. 75 days
5. Make copious targeted sales calls to prospects in your database – prioritize people you identify engaging with your campaign. Email platforms and social media tracking tools make this easy. There are even certain marketing automation programs with tracking code that can identify individuals who visit your landing pages. And remember, this is sales. Be persistent! 90 days

This simple 5-part strategy should be implemented in a continually repeated manner except for step 1.

Your sales team should always be prospecting and making calls with or without a rigorous marketing campaign. We get that. However, those who sell for Leading Brands enjoy more answered phones and open doors while the unknown, me-too reps deal with voicemail greetings and declined meeting requests.

Become a leading brand in your market and simply sell more!

The post The Magic Merger of Marketing & Sales appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Learn a valuable sales lesson during the pandemic outbreak. Get to know every client or customer on a personal level. It’s amazing what opportunities you may find for new business. And there’s the rub. “New business” is not synonymous with “new customer.” I was taught this by business owners pretty early in my selling career but I’ll admit not learning it very well until I became a business owner.

“Some Web Guy”

A couple of our clients paused services or cut marketing costs at the early stage of the business shutdown. Thankfully, some new projects have rolled in and business has remained steady thanks primarily to current clients expanding their needs. In particular, I got to know one of them for the first time on a personal level, Chief to Chief.

As if by accident, this longtime client, after years of delegating his firm’s marketing to a manager, found out what we really do. In his mind “Chuck Sink Link” was a cost of doing business – just “some web guy” or “someone who hosts our website.” This client (the CEO, not the manager point-of-contact) got on the phone with me after a potential dispute and suddenly the relationship has taken off, and so has new business for both of us!

We finally know each other, and much better!

The client mentioned is a leading netting manufacturer in Connecticut who almost had to furlough many of his employees indefinitely because of a tremendous impact on two of their top markets – Amusements and Construction. He and his engineers turned on a dime to start producing protective masks while netting work is slow. Their employees, already skilled in various stitching techniques, made tens of thousands of critically needed masks.

Through our very first live conversation, the client discovered that we do scalable eCommerce websites, digital advertising and social media marketing. He then treated us like a business partner instead of “the web guy” and we’ve since built an eCommerce website together that generated about $50,000 in mask sales the first two days, resulting in hundreds of donated masks to organizations in need like homeless shelters, hospitals, first responders and nursing homes. The valued employees are at work, earning paychecks and their netting business is again having an upsurge in sales.

The Deeper Conversations

I’ve had deep discussions with several other clients during this apparent “reset” in the economy and our mutual support has been fortified. Together we are keeping busier than ever while being deeply concerned about the companies we know of that need to make difficult decisions. The wisdom and compassion we have shared with each other are among the intangible values I can’t put a price on and wouldn’t do without.

Hopefully, we’ll remember the really important aspects of work relationships as so many of us are forced physically apart for a while longer. It’s a great time for discovering who your suppliers and customers really are and how you can help make each other better at what you both do.

The post When is it okay to get personal in business? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

A “conversion” in marketing terms is any action a consumer does as a result of receiving your message. So if your message fails to generate conversions, your target audience may as well be you and your dog. And if your dog, like most, hasn’t the ability to make purchases, you’re out of business!

You could reach a thousand or a million members of your primary target audience and still fail to generate a single sale if your message isn’t clear and relevant. Your message must have value in it; a reward associated with taking a converting action like clicking a link, sending a text or picking up the phone. The value can be as little as satisfying a curiosity or as big as finding hidden treasure.

In sales, put the cart before the horse!

Who says a horse can’t be harnessed to push a cart full of goods instead of pull it? Before you spend too much money and time on developing the best media execution plan (the horse), make sure that the message delivered to your audience is deliciously enticing (the cart – full of perceived value). Push the cart yourself if you need to. It’s your message that converts people into believing they should “buy now, download or learn more.” Focus on what’s in the cart while you continually push, steer and course correct your trusted media workhorses.

What’s My Message?

Find out from every good customer what brought them to you. What first made them tune in and think, “I think this is the right fit?” What tipped the scale in your favor? What is it about your performance and delivery that keeps them with you? Do you enjoy doing your best work? Why?

The Media of Neighborhood

I was struck by the story of one business owner’s largest sale which catapulted him to “set-for-life” success. He received a call from the uncle of a teenage boy who used to wash his car. The kid happened to ask him what he did for work and the man took the time to engage the youth in a careful explanation of the exact nature of his business, even though he was running a bit late for an appointment. Thinking nothing of it, a few days later he got a call from the boy’s uncle who explained how his nephew described this man’s business as exactly the kind of service he had been searching for and couldn’t find until now. There was no media involved here, just a brief conversation with the car wash kid for the biggest sale ever!

Internalize Your Message to Externalize It

What about your company is truly world-class, i.e. best-in-class? Understand this deeply! Ours happens to be brand-directed content writing and creative production. Every sale I’ve made resulted from my message being understood by one person at a time. A few of my best clients are referrals from non-clients; people who read or heard my message and recommended me without knowing much about me or my background. They just liked what they heard and how it was presented, so they told someone.

Take the time to get your message straight and great! A great business message has the power to convert complete strangers into your best customers.

When ready, ramp up the horsepower!

When you have great messages that are proven to convert, by all means, develop a solid media plan to make a few good prospects aware of your value. And if some kid happens to be curious about your work, fully satisfy that curiosity and thank him for being interested.

The post Media channels don’t convert. Messages do! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

So, why is there so much reluctance among some businesses to develop and maintain an effective advertising campaign?

Jumping into paid advertising, especially in an untried medium, is a scary proposition to a lot of small business owners who must dig into their own back pockets to help fund an effective campaign. Aren’t you reluctant to spend a significant sum on a service whose success relies on the whims of other people, in other words, isn’t predictable? That’s what advertising is but thankfully, those whims can be effectively harnessed into buying action if you play your technology, data, messaging and media cards right.

Your return on investment depends on a few simple factors – reach, frequency and relevance. These are the crucial elements of a campaign and if you put effort into all three, you should see a positive ROI.

After some experience, you’ll have the confidence to invest more as you begin to measure the results based on actual response rates. The great thing with digital is that results get better and better as you dial in your data-driven campaign to more qualified prospects!

When do you advertise?

Ask yourself a couple of questions.

• Have traditional business channels like word-of-mouth, networking and direct sales taken a pause or lagged in bringing in enough new business?
• Are you unable to devote sufficient amounts of time to develop your sales & marketing channels due to other business priorities?

These are key questions that should lead you in the direction of at least a test marketing campaign with a sufficient advertising budget to move the needle in revenues. Determining the campaign scope and duration depends largely on your sales cycle. The goal is always a profitable return on investment and you can accurately calculate the cost per lead and cost per sale in real dollars & cents.

How do you measure success?

Let’s say your average new customer takes about one month from an initial inquiry to placing an order. In as little as 60 days from a campaign launch, you should be closing on some new business and have a bevy of leads in your sales pipeline. Unfortunately, there’s no surefire way to forecast your actual advertising ROI until you have sufficient data gathered from the digitally tracked campaign. But you can begin to make educated calculations within the first 90 days in most cases.

Hitting Paydirt

After a few months of dialing in your messaging and target market based on specific interests, you will begin to have a throttle-like ability to manage business growth and it can be very profitable!

Digital advertising campaigns using Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms work fast because they actively find the people you’re looking for while those people are happy to see your ad pop up, answering their current need.

Campaign effectiveness and tracking accuracy are the two reasons so many corporate marketing budgets are moving out of traditional print and broadcast, which are expensive and hard to measure, to digital which can predictively deliver results when it’s professionally managed. That’s how advertising works in the 21st Century!

The post Knowing When to Advertise appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

When I was a young, aggressive salesman, I worked my tail off to get new business and produced enough to be valued. I cold called like crazy, set appointments and made presentations day after day. It was a constant struggle, though, to sustain business growth as it ebbed and flowed in spite of continuous and mighty selling efforts.

Meet Richard

There was one senior guy on the team named Richard who had all the giant accounts and he just sat there on the phone discussing business and taking big, fat orders. Either that or he would meet with his clients at the plant and entertain them as they kept an eye on their work. I suspect they also enjoyed Richard’s company and getting out of their own office for vendor meetings with a trusted, high-quality supplier.

His cup runneth over!

The real kicker about Richard was this. In spite of his already abundant sales success, most of the new business inquiries calling in would ask for Richard, and it drove me nuts! He never cold called and he never had to bang the phone for appointments like the rest of us. The biggest and most profitable business just flowed to Richard.

I liked Richard and we became fast friends but I also envied his ability to take in lucrative business without seeming to compete for it. What did he have that the rest of us didn’t?

Over the course of time and even a few career moves, it finally became clear why Richard excelled. He understood quality and he never cut corners. While I was trying to figure out ways to lower costs or match competitive price quotes just to win an order, Richard was increasing the prices his clients would pay while at the same time adding value to the total package.

No Surprises!

The primary value that Richard added was quality-assurance. Richard’s clients knew that if they worked with him, they would get the best quality products available. No shortcuts, no surprises; just predictable high quality at a fair, negotiated price.

Meanwhile, the corners I cut in quality specs to compete on price were making some customers question the value they could expect from me in the future. It took me far too long to realize that not everyone wants more for less. I assumed price meant everything and I was trying to appease prospects I assumed were cheapskates.

Give back… to your competition!

True, there are plenty of cheapskates out there but in reality, there are lots of good people in the business world who understand what things cost. “You get what you pay for.” Those were Richard’s people! They knew that Richard understood the vital nature of high quality in manufacturing. When other people like them heard of Richard’s business approach and they needed our products, they called Richard, who else? And when Richard sensed cheapness or price challenges from a new business prospect, he would cheerfully (and wisely) refer them to competing manufacturers whom he knew would cut profits just to keep their machines running.

Be the person you would call!

The lesson here is that if you’re looking for more qualified sales leads, maybe you need to focus less on sales promotions and more on delivering premium quality to all your customers every single time you do business. Quality reputations can only be earned. If you’ve earned yours, go ahead and promote it!

Promote the one thing that separates your quality from the rest. Promote it everywhere you can.  If a prospect happens to see your company promotion and call you after also getting a referral, the sale is yours! And that was Richard’s secret to easygoing sales success. He promoted quality assurance and all his customers backed him up.

Make best-in-class quality your goal. Communicate what that really costs and clearly demonstrate its value. Then deliver the best quality consistently to build your reputation. Your marketing and sales efforts will work better as the quality seekers in your market find from you the really good stuff they’re looking for.

So first ask, is your stuff really that good?

The post Quality Sales Promotion appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

The more thinking and engineering that go into technology, products and services, the better they will perform (or be perceived to perform). But when it comes to marketing, sophistication and complexity muddy up your messages.

If you have an important message to convey, keep it simple, even if there are nuances. Why? Because the rest of us are mostly babes in the woods. Remember that only you think exactly the way you do and can perfectly connect your own dots. Your job is to simplify it all for the rest of us!

What about the nuances that really differentiate us, you might ask? If nuance is what differentiates your product or service, then your messages should be all about nuance. If a unique aspect of your business must be fully understood by your audience for them to take action, make it the primary message.

If complex, build your message in stages.

Be prepared to articulate every granular detail of your value delivery but save those details until your audience wants or needs to know them.

A Simple 4-Step Approach

If you need to make your message understandable and actionable, there’s a methodology you can use called AIDA (Attention – Interest – Desire – Action). To apply AIDA in your marketing messages and throughout your selling process, take your prospect through these communication stages:

Attention – Make your audience notice and listen. Make a bold, singular promise.

Interest – Once listening, build interest in how you will enrich your customer. Reveal some key features that will help them. You can further differentiate your offering with nuance and sophistication as long as your prospect wants to remain engaged. This is really the make or break stage because interest can be lost as quickly as gained. You must move them into wanting your product, or there’s no sale.

Desire – One way to know if your prospect has reached the “desire” stage is by the questions they ask. If the questions focus on recommended service levels, budget ranges, or what implementation involves, you and your prospect have reached the closing stage of the sale and are ready for…

ACTION – Unless your message is acted upon, why bother with branding, great web design and advertising? Why have salespeople? Your calls to action can be anything from e-commerce or contact links on your website to full-blown contract negotiations, depending on what you’re selling.

It’s best to hold your most sophisticated or complex product/service benefits for when you may need them, such as convincing a senior engineering team that your technology is superior. Give them the building blocks to decide for themselves.

Provide the Navigation

In marketing, the complex features do belong somewhere on your website with a clear navigation path. If your home and landing pages have a strong primary message, your visitors will go deeper to learn what they need to know, and hopefully place an order or call you with questions.

Content is gold.

You have limited mind space and attention spans to work with. Avoid muddying the water by keeping your initial marketing message simple. A powerful first impression can set the ball rolling from attention to ACTION faster than you expect.

The post Keep marketing simple! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Emails lack the moving energy to solve problems or improve situations. They become buried, static messages that seem to give the sender permission to set aside important business until a response email is received, especially when there are unknowns or questions between the parties.

Clearly, we’re not talking about email as a secret weapon in communications. There’s a much older tool that works business magic.

How many times have you become deeply engaged in an email thread that lasted several days or weeks? The subject line may have nothing to do with the last several emails. Each party is busy with multiple things and the discourse is interrupted by hours and days of delay. Situations on both ends are always changing in the meantime.

A project gets stuck, so finally, you pick up the phone and call your fellow emailer to figure out what’s going on in real time. A few simple questions are answered on both ends and the project is full steam ahead! That was easy! When analyzing the whole thing, you realize an earlier phone call or two would have eliminated days of back & forth emails.

The telephone is the next best thing to being with another person face to face. The telephone encourages and requires dialog. There’s no visual body language so you must rely on a 2-way conversation to make a phone call have any effect. It requires active listening for not only words but vocal tones, breath & sighs, and other audible cues.

Leaving new business on hold? Pick up the line!

Your most vital source of business, both new and sustaining, are the customers you already serve. It’s crucial that they keep getting the value they pay for. If important work and deliverables are stalled from lack of written communication, spoken communication like a phone conversation gets things back on track or even ahead of the game. There’s also the opportunity to expand business with customers by talking with them about how upgrading may suit their growing needs better than their current service level.

Call your customers when you need more impetus behind your messages. Your marketing alone may not be enough. Customers often request something in writing after you’ve had a discussion over the phone. If you don’t hang up with an agreement, tactfully recall the key parts of the phone conversation, emphasizing where there was mutual agreement, and respond quickly in written form perhaps both print and electronic formats. Then pick up the phone and start the conversation where you left off, this time with a concrete offer that they can readily commit to.

More Email Busting Tactics that Work Wonders

Ever play phone tag? Sometimes it takes keys in the ignition to put you in front of a person you need to talk with. It’s hard to ignore the person who physically shows up in your office or job site.

Remember that not everyone likes using the phone. Boomers and Gen Xers tend to prefer phone calls over emails. But there are plenty of Millennials and Generation Z people who actually get annoyed by voice calls. Text them and start counting to 10. Your phone will vibrate or ping by 7 or 8. Text messaging gets through instantly and with an air of urgency. And most folks, young and old, don’t want a bunch of unanswered text messages piling up so they respond fast.

Use the Insider Network

You may have been thinking of your business connections on social media, particularly Facebook and LinkedIn. Direct messaging through these channels, especially Facebook, reminds people that you’re friends too and can be very effective. I’ve had fine results reaching business associates on Facebook when other ways failed to get a response. All generations who are active on Facebook tend to like using it for instant messaging and it’s a robust application for file sharing as well.

I feel it’s only fair to add a final word in defense of good old email. I don’t know if this company would exist without it. If you got to this post through an email newsletter, thank you!

The post The Secret Weapon in Your Communication Tool Box appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

I tend to worry a little about business in the summer. I know myself and I know human nature. Summer in New Hampshire is like paradise if you’re an outdoorsman. The calls of the lakes, mountains, golf courses and beaches pull us from our office chairs on beautiful afternoons and sometimes even weekday mornings…

If this summer has taught me anything, it’s that you can maintain strong marketing and sales activity even when you or your shop gets very busy with customer demands. Okay, maybe I’ve been short a newsletter or two in the last couple of months but I’ve managed to maintain rigorous social media marketing and networking activity along with a little paid advertising. The best part is that outdoor summer fun hasn’t been compromised and business goal benchmarks are right on track. Steady growth is being maintained instead of the common peaks and valleys many companies experience in a typical marketing/selling cycle.

The Sales Yoyo

A common marketing/selling cycle looks something like this: Business is slow so new business with current and new clients becomes the top priority. The sales team revs up prospecting, follow up and closing activities while marketing scrapes together the resources for a campaign surge and executes it. Lo and behold, a few months later the shop or office is humming! It’s all hands on deck to satisfy customers’ needs and keep them happy. Meanwhile, salespeople become a bit complacent, enjoying the recent business surge and marketing resources are shifted to help meet other administrative costs. The inevitable business slowdown follows from the lack of new business prospecting and reduced marketing communications. The anxiety of drying revenues starts this stressful up-and-down cycle all over again…

Steady as She Goes…

Steady, manageable business growth results from maintaining good value delivery to current customers and keeping firm consistency in your core messaging to your target audience. It’s not so much about the volume or frequency of impressions as it is about your messages themselves. Avoid the temptations to shift your messages toward perceived new opportunities. Stick with your core values – the business value that you can confidently promise to your customers as well as the human and cultural values that you and your team share and bring to work every day.

If you maintain consistency in your marketing and sales messages (with complete integrity), you’ll tend to attract new business that fits well and that you can better manage. Your clients will know they made the best choice. At some point, you may find yourself with a list of clients whose business you chose to accept rather than chase after and potentially scare away.

So, having a solid message strategy in place, go ahead and enjoy another beautiful-day break while it’s mid-August, and don’t worry about that extra social media campaign you were going to work on. Plenty of business will be there when you get back!

The post The Formula for More Business with Less Stress appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

There’s nothing new about emphasizing the value you provide over the list of features and benefits your competitors will promise to match. This is sales 101 which, in actuality, is practiced by a minority of salespeople, marketing directors and business owners. Most of them still talk about “our people” and “our in-house capabilities” and “our superior customer service” when dealing with prospective customers. This is totally understandable and the natural “go-to” position.

While people, capabilities and service might all be great, they can all be duplicated so price becomes the most important factor in choosing a vendor. You need to shift your language from your greatness to their goals being fulfilled!

Change your language from describing your products, services and key features to illustrating the marked improvements your customers’ experience. You will help them improve their services, please their customers, gain more new customers, save more money, better engage their employees, increase profits and bolster sustainability, to name a few strong talking points.

Go ahead and try this at home!

I’ve developed a simple exercise to help you shift your language and change your business for the better. By way of example, you will easily figure out how to make your marketing communications and sales scripts work much better.  Instead of making you busier with more quote requests and sales haggling, your messages will attract prospects who already feel they want to work with you. Your words will paint a much prettier picture of them in the future and they will want to go there.

Let’s examine two different industry examples of my Value Proposition Exercise. One is for contract manufacturers and the other for Accounting Firms – CPAs. On the left are common product and service features and on the right are their corresponding values to the customer. Care to guess which set of words works better in sales and marketing?

Fully contemplate the question asked and then compare how you would want your customers and prospects to think of you.

The difference in commodity (scarcity) thinking and value (abundance) thinking is plain to anyone. When you have conversations with prospective customers in the “language of love” instead of the language of “me too,” you’ll notice that prospects will more often close the deal themselves instead of you fighting for the order.

I urge you to try this exercise for your own unique business. If you struggle for the right concepts and words, feel free to contact me. I’m happy to assist you in building a more powerful brand identity to better distinguish the unique value you bring to the table.

The post Change your words to grow your business! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Sales prospecting is a vital and long-term business initiative.

You own a business so you’re in sales. You’re on the executive team, you’re in sales. You’re a marketing director – definitely in sales! If you’re in sales, well…

How long have you been doing this sales work of yours and what makes it pay off? What does it consist of? How much do sales cost your business to attain?

Every business has a cost of sales and it can be very high.

Let’s say your goal is to add 10 additional clients this year. What will it take to close business with them and how much will it cost your firm?

Sales activity carries high overhead when you consider the salaries, prospecting costs, travel costs, marketing costs, bad hiring decision costs and administrative costs all required to bring on new customers.

Are there no exceptions to the high cost of sales? What if nine years from now, a prospect you met once at a networking event or on a cold call contacts you and invites you in as the exclusive, pre-selected vendor for their needs. How much did that sale cost? Not much! Especially if you only made one call or shook hands once. However, it probably took more than that to earn the new customer. After all, you have strong competition that’s hungry for this client’s business, so why did they select you nine years after one brief introduction?

My nine-year scenario isn’t hypothetical, it’s a true story that came to fruition this week. The fact is, this real new customer of mine was put on an email list nine years ago after only one cold call visit. No direct contact in nine years, just the same newsletter that you’re reading, emailed every couple of weeks for a decade.

Stories like this happen all the time in business. There are three powerful lessons here. One is for salespeople, one for marketing people and all 3 are for company leaders:

1. Sales prospecting is a long term, sustaining initiative.
2. Effective marketing can be like sales on steroids, set on autopilot.
3. The interdependence of sales & marketing needs to be nurtured for compatibility and continual harmony.

I’ve been selling for a long time in related industries (various marketing services) and I’m making sales this year with people I contacted many years ago, even while working for different companies. The one thing these prospects have in common is they all got on my email list and chose to stay subscribed. The content they receive is continually value driven and must pass a strict quality standard – yours!

The post Think in Decades, Not in Quarters appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.