Josh Kerbel

When was the last time you heard that line?  How about when your last boyfriend or girlfriend dumped YOU on your sorry ass over a bottle of cheap wine at a 2nd rate Italian restaurant?

Guess what, they were lying………it was YOU.  Whatever you were doing, however you were behaving, just something wasn’t there.  You weren’t meeting the other person’s needs on some level.  No biggie, it’s happened to the best of us.  Well, except ME.  But this isn’t about ME, its about YOU

Marketing is exactly the opposite, it’s all about the ME.   Your prospects are practically yelling:

“ME ME ME ME”

“What have you done for ME lately”

“What about Me”

“Solve MY problems!!!”

And unlike a boyfriend or girlfriend who just tells YOU that YOU aren’t meeting THEIR needs, in business YOU have to CHASE AFTER THEM and prove to them how YOU are all about the THEM.  How YOU understand THEIR problems, THEIR needs and THEIR situation.  Basically YOU have to do the exact opposite of when someone YOU were dating dumps YOU, YOU have to resist the urge to stand up and walk away.  YOU have to convince THEM to comeback to YOU but make sure that they think it was THEIR idea to do so.

That,  my friends is the art of lead generation on the internet………..

Coming up tomorrow……….we will take a look and information capture on the web!

but the process  stays the same………..unless of course you have a habit of yelling “BUY BUY BUY” the second you get face to face with your customer – more on this later

For what ever reason, people seem to think that the Internet has changed the steps that a customer goes through before they buy a particular product or service.

It really hasn’t.

The customer still needs to establish a want or need, do some research on alternative methods of satisfying the want or need, compare the alternatives and then make a decision.  Of course we could get into semantics about the particulars of each step, but from a 30,000 foot level, this is how people behave.

What has changed is the method by which the consumer goes through this process.

Think back to 40 years ago and imagine you are buying a house, selecting a private school for your kids, or buying life insurance.

Step 1 – Find someone who sells what you are looking for.  You could ask a friend for referral, open the phone book or maybe walk down the street and see if there is any advertising promoting the above referenced services.

Step 2 – Repeat Step 1 a few times so you have a few different alternatives.  You usually don’t buy the first house you see without having another to compare it to.  You wouldn’t send your daughter to an all boys private school if the first school you found was an all boys school. And you may not buy from the first insurance salesman you find if it turns out they only sell whole life when you need term.

Step 3 – After speaking with the sales representatives, you would sit down and consider alternatives.  Ask you spouse, your friends, your co-workers, your mistress, anyone you thought might have a valid opinion.

Step 4 – You make your decision.

Now flash forward to present day.  How do you go about this process?

Well, there is probably a good chance you would start on the Internet, which is perfectly fine.

But the buying process remains the same for the customer – 99% of the time, they are not jumping at the first offer they see.  They do research, they talk to people, they evaluate and then they buy………just like you.

BUY BUY BUY

So imagine a situation where you are meeting with a sales representative for the first time and the first thing that comes out of the rep’s mouth is BUY BUY BUY.  Every question you ask is met with the same response – BUY BUY BUY.  You are looking for some basic product information, get a sense of how the company can help solve a particular problem you have and all they can say is BUY BUY BUY.

Now, that would be weird, because everyone knows that you need to foster a bit of a relationship and a bit of trust before a customer parts with their money.  It’s only natural.  An especially on a first sales meeting because often the prospect is looking to fill a basic information void they have.

But for some reason, when people get in to marketing on-line, they forget this.  They set up a few PPC ads, link them to some generic web page and you know what you get…………a situation where the company is yelling BUY BUY BUY at the prospect.  The prospects’ questions and concerns are of no value to the company, because otherwise, they would have developed a better way to listen to them.

On top of this, the merchant is oblivious to the best part of selling over the internet……you can develop automated systems to educate a prospect about your product to see if it fits with their situation.  You can use a number of processes to build trust with the prospect………in fact you can use the internet to automatically deal with the most laborious tasks that the average salesperson deals with………..prospecting……..so that by the time a salesperson finally meets a prospect, the prospect is much further along the sales process and has the expectation that the company can help solve their problem.

OR……you could keep yelling BUY BUY BUY at your prospects and have your sales people constantly spending time doing a manual task, like delivering basic product information, that could easily be automated

A perfect example of this is for this search: corporate training solution las vegas

If you take a look at the Raytheon ad, they dont really discuss any benefits of their product offering………but they must be #1 for a reason

When you get to the landing page, you see the typical mistakes (no information capture)  and no way for the customer to easy communicate their needs to the company, but the company is telling you how great they are at” aligning performance among employees, customers and partners” and you say to yourself……..”I just wanted to teach my employees about our new sales process”

Have you ever tired using direct marketing to ask your customers about their needs?  I bet it will work.

Just stop yelling at your customers!!!

If a PPC ad isn’t worth doing well, its not worth doing at all

It’s easy to say yes to that question, but the answer is that it all depends.

The mistake that people make when looking at their click costs is that they do so in isolation of their entire sales and marketing program.   They don’t consider how much a lead actually costs the company to generate in both time and money and how these cost variable change across marketing channels – say the internet, cold calling, print advertising, etc……

Every minute that a salesman spends generating leads is a minute that they are not closing deals and bringing in new revenue.  Even if your sales force is 100% commission, you don’t want them wasting their time on a task that can be completely automated.

What would you rather have?  A salesman that works 40 hours a week,  who you pay $52,000 a year or a $1,000 a week to  generate 4 qualified leads a day – so a cost of about $50/lead or an entirely automated process that runs 24/7 that generates qualified leads for $25 each that you can then deliver to your sales people to close.

This allows your sales people to focus on closing deals, which brings in the money, rather than generating leads, which burns through money.

Sales leads are never free………….even if you are a self employed real estate sales person just starting out in the business and you don’t have a single client yet,  you always have to remember that your time has a cost.

And this is really what it all comes down to is it cheaper to spend money or time generating leads……….I suspect for most people, its cheaper to spend the money.

Ever think to yourself, “I sell an excellent product, if I could only tell more people about it before they hang up on me.”

Or, maybe you like getting hung up on?

But I dare say you don’t.

Are you spending time and resources prospecting for new business? Does your firm have a sales team that is constantly working the phones to drum up business to feed in to your sales funnel?

Are you constantly worrying about your sales quota and bills that need to be paid, wondering where that next customer is going to come from? And when it comes to your sales funnel, do you even really know who should be in it?

Or that your sales funnel should actually be working for you? Can you remember why you went into sales or why you started your own company?

Was it to talk to random strangers, repeatedly get hung up, yelled at, insulted, used, abused in the hopes of selling something to someone?

-Or –

Was it because you genuinely liked helping people solve a problem and make some money in the process.

This is what it comes down to. Either you like the abuse or you want to help people.

If you like the abuse, then this site is not the place for you. In fact, you are probably doing alright in that department already, so just keep on keeping on

However, if you are tired of getting abused and battered about while trying to make your sales quotas or profit targets, then maybe what I have to say could be of value in solving your sales problems.

Two can be as bad as one
It’s the loneliest number since the number one

No is the saddest experience you’ll ever know
Yes, it’s the saddest experience you’ll ever know
`Cause one is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
One is the loneliest number, worse than two

- Three Dog Night

Three Dog Night must have been talking about statistical analysis when they wrote this song.

The worst thing you can ever do in starting to analyze the performance of your website is to look at one or two numbers in isolation.  Pageview mean little in isolation.   All a pageview is when a page is loaded in a users browser

You need to see how views of an individual page relate to the overall performance of you site.  Does your most popular page have a high bounce rate?  Is it getting better?  Is it getting worse?

Or how about looking at the number of total pages views on its own.  Say you see a big spike one day.  Was it because there were more users coming to the site, or the same number of users looking at more pages