A week ago we had the “Boosting brand awareness by advertising competitor brands“.
The idea was using competitor brands in order to get into the spotlight by comparing or mentioning your brand with well-known brand names, just like Tommy Hilfiger did in 1986 with his billboard on Times Square.

We used the same idea for our brand with different competitors in slightly different markets.

As promised we would reveal the competitor brands.

Post-Click Marketing solutions in US

THE 4 GREAT AMERICAN POST-CLICK MARKETING SOLUTIONS ARE:
    L . . . L . . . . .
A . . . . . C . . . . . . . . .
D . . . . . B . . .
   L . . . . E . . . . . . .

THE 4 GREAT AMERICAN POST-CLICK MARKETING SOLUTIONS ARE:
     LeadLander
  ActiveConversion
DemandBase
  LEADSExplorer

Post-Click Marketing solutions in Europe

THE 4 GREAT EUROPEAN WEBSITE LEAD GENERATION SOLUTIONS ARE:
          EN . . . .
W . . . . M . . . .
  W . . . O .
 L . . . . E . . . . . . .

THE 4 GREAT EUROPEAN WEBSITE LEAD GENERATION SOLUTIONS ARE:
      ENecto
WiredMinds
  WhoSOn
 LEADSExplorer

CRM Sales solutions

THE 4 BEST CRM SALES SOLUTIONS ARE:
    S . . B . .
S . . . . F . . . .
    A . . !
L . . . . E . . . . . . .

THE 4 BEST CRM SALES SOLUTIONS ARE:
    SieBel
 SalesForce
    Act!
LEADSExplorer

On demand CRM solutions

THE 4 GREAT ON-DEMAND CRM SOLUTIONS ARE:
S . . . . F . . . .
S . . . . B . . .
      R . L . . . .
L . . . . E . . . . . . .

THE 4 GREAT ON-DEMAND CRM SOLUTIONS ARE:
 SalesForce
 SalesBoom
     ReLenta
LEADSExplorer

We should have set up a competition.

The question remains: where should we advertise with this as a billboard is not really appropriate as we aren’t addressing the consumer market.

 Any advertising suggestions?

Increase sales or keep sales volume

The hardest part in you business is selling your products or solutions.
Now the recession is going on, companies are on a tight budget and don’t want to spend or invest much. Still you want to keep or increase your sales level.

Increase or keep the sales volume (and profits) can only be achieved by:
- Getting your lead generation and sales team working more effectively (see LEADSExplorer)
- Increase the number of sales reps., inside sales, outbound callers.
- Increase marketing spending for generating more leads.

The first is rather simple to start with by just implementing a java script line into your website pages. However you will need additional sales reps. to call or visit all the leads generated.

Increasing the number of sales people adds to the operating expenses and comes even more expensive if you need to fire them (maybe not in US, but surely in Europe).

Increasing marketing costs increases your operating expenses too and there is even less guarantee on more leads.

Use customers as Sales

In order to reach out to more potential customers, you could use your customers.
They know people beyond your reach and probably know people facing the same problems or looking for the same solutions as they did.

Your customers should:
- Understand the product or solution
- Reasons for buying
As they have experienced it themselves.

Propose your customers to become “resellers” getting a significant discount of your product if they buy more than 2 times as what they are intending to buy.
If they intent to buy just one, tease them with a reseller contract if they would buy 3 or more.
If they would buy 2 of your equipments, propose a reseller contract when they buy 6 or more equipments.

The discount amount would be between their normal discount and a real reseller discount. This is in order to avoid any collusion with your existing sales channel. Do verify if there is no exclusivity with any reseller or distributor in any particular geography or you will be paying a double commission.

The level of discount should be at the same percentage as your current sales costs of your revenue.
Thus if your sales costs are 15% of your revenue, then offer 15% discount on top of the normal discount.
As this “reseller’ scheme will help you to reach new customers that you would never have reached before, you could add on 5% more discount.

The payment terms needs to be discussed and controlled, as you don’t want to be paying their inventory of your products. Thus at best normal payment conditions need to apply. It will even be better if you can make them pay in a shorter time as they have obtained the significant discount.
Just make sure you get paid for the goods delivered.

Put a time frame on the contract as the market, your customers, your resellers will change and this recession won’t last forever.

Reseller-Customer benefit

This method allows to:
- Push more products or solutions into the market
- Your customers take inventory of your products
- Moves the problem of finding leads or customers to you newly acquired resellers.
- Reach to more potential customers you never would have been able to reach.
- Keep costs under control: no need to hire more sales people (no cost to fire neither)

They take the benefit of:
- A lower purchase price for the products or solutions they require
- Having the opportunity to generate income on the sale of the surplus goods.

The goal is to sell more, get more products into the market, in order to generate sales you normally wouldn’t have made.
Of course this Reseller-Customer method is not appropriate for all products or solutions:
- No sales training: thus not complex products
- Generic or widely used products or solutions
- Short to medium sales cycles

However if it is feasible of turning customers into resellers, it will bring you additional revenue.

What are your experiences with customers becoming your reseller?

Cold calling vs products or solutions

After carefully selecting a company as target the next action is cold calling.
In order to generate leads, you can try to call anyone in this organization: from employees, to managers to the CEO.

Much depends on what you are selling:
o Short terms:
   – Consumables
   – Temporary workforce
o Long terms:
   – Investment good
   – Durable products
   – High level management consulting

If you are selling “Short terms”, then addressing middle management is the best solution. If you would contact the CEO, you will probably not being able to get him on the phone or you might even run into problems as he could ban your company from the vendor list.

If you have “Long terms” to sell, then the higher you can enter the organization the more likely impact you will have. “Long terms” appeal to the CEO and can be important for the near future of the company (and influence his own income).

A problem arises when you are selling goods or services that are not really consumables or not really durable products, like consulting, production materials, production facility or office equipment.
Goods and services that the department manager can’t decide on alone, however these are not interesting or not significant enough for the CEO or COO or CFO.
Thus you probably need to address the middle manager first.

Cold calling vs size of company

In large international companies, you are likely to call the appropriate middle manager.
The smaller the company is, the more the CEO (founder) is involved in day-to-day decisions. Thus the more interest he will show for the “Short term” goods and services.
Especially in the case of the CEO being the founder, they are very interested in every purchase that is going to be made. In many cases these founders still consider spending the money of the company like spending their own money. Thus they want every dime well spend or invested.

Cold calling vs industry

Depending on the margins and the profits a company can make in a certain industry, the CEO will be more or less price conscious.

If the margins are high, there is little competition. The focus is not on keeping gross margin costs or operation expenses low, but on closing more deals or optimizing the use of the available capacity (people or machines). There will be little interest from the CEO as he has other problems to decide upon than spending. Thus you call the middle manager or COO.

If the margins are narrow the company is in a very competing market, thus production and manufacturing costs and expenses need to be under control. The CEO might want to get involved in every larger purchase as the purchase order might even carry his signature. Thus you better call as without his decision nothing will be decided, even if the company is significant in size.

Thus all depends on what type, size and market of company you are addressing.
So who do you call? (Not Ghostbusters)

Distributing a Press Release

We have released a press release on “Cold Calling on Warm Companies – Taking Away the Rejection Fear of Cold Calling” and distributed it using several free press release website services.
The goal is to appeal to a broad audience as cold calling is widely used in many businesses. However the main hope is that a journalist or a blogger picks up the content and distributes the story further beyond our reach.

We used our three languages: English, French and German to distribute the press release with different free services (See list below), each language demanding between two-and-a-half and three hours of time even as we had already registered as user. This is due to the fact that each of these free press release websites have different requirements and different layouts.

Several times the Press release reached Google Alerts.
The question is: was it actually read by people?

Twitter – Micro Pitch

In order to reach real people and not computers, and as our previous press releases didn’t get any traction or media attention, we decided to use Twitter Micro Pitching.
To pitch the press release twittering a to selection of about 20 journalists on Twitter, spread over two accounts in order not to get brand marked as a spammer.

We clearly were stating at the beginning of the Twitpitch it concerns a PR.
Included was a Bit.ly http://bit.ly/RMUP link in order to track the clicks.
If we post a link to one of our blog posts we get between 20 and 60 clicks according to Bit.Ly.
This time within two hours we achieved over 250 clicks.
Thus the Twitter community seems to be interested in a “Cold call” related subject.

Free Press Release List

English:
www.prlog.org
www.free-press-release.com
www.pr.com
www.theopenpress.com
www.przoom.com
www.1888pressrelease.com
www.freepressreleases.co.uk
i-newswire.com
www.pr-inside.com
www.live-pr.com
www.clickpress.com
www.pressmethod.com
www.24-7pressrelease.com
www.prfree.com
www.businessportal24.com
mediapitch.ning.com
pitchengine.com
www.betanews.com/submit
www.npr.org/about/pitch/story.html
www.free-press-release-center.info
www.freshnews.com/index.shtml
www.pressbox.co.uk
www.openpr.com
ecommwire.com
www.prcompass.com
prurgent.com
pressabout.com
www.pressreleasepoint.com
www.media-press-release.com
www.newswiretoday.com
www.bizeurope.com/pressrelease.htm

French:
www.presse-fr.com
www.pme-multimedia.com
www.generalite.com
www.generalite.com
www.mediaslibres.com
www.BusinessPortal24.com
www.big-presse.com
www.buzzibuzz.com/fr
www.categorynet.com
www.communiques-de-presse.fr
www.news-eco.com
presse.himselfprod.com/referencement-naturel.html
www.sitepresse.com
www.webactusnet.com
www.nuouz.com
www.pro-liens.com

German
www.openpr.de
www.news4press.com
www.businessportal24.com/de
www.presseecho.de/meldung_veroeffentlichen.php
pressemitteilung.ws
www.presseanzeiger.de/insert-news.php
www.prcenter.de
www.pressemeldung.org
www.presse-kostenlos.de
www.youpress.de
www.offenes-presseportal.de
www.deutsche-nachrichten-agentur.de
www.online-artikel.de
www.firmenpresse.de
www.news4press.com
www.portalderwirtschaft.de
www.pressbot.net
www.presse-kostenlos.de
www.news-eintrag.de

It takes time to distribute using free press release web services.
Still wondering how effective this method is.
Will using Twitter have more effect?