The close is the least important step. It is not because it is the last step in the conquering quest of your customer that it is the most important.
As you have been working to the close since the first introduction or contact all steps are important.

The sales process
Before you close you need to start with:
- Understanding the needs
- Qualifying the lead

Throughout the entire sales process you need to:
- Prove of being knowledgeable
- Find the need or demand
- Qualify as a vendor
- Estimate their budget
- Learn about their time frame
- Propose the best suiting solution
- Give the price quote adjusted to their needs an budget
- Get their trust
- Build a relationship
- Convince them of having confidence in your company

The closing
The close is just the last step, of course before the shipping or delivery and getting paid.
Probably getting paid is the most important step as without a payment any deal is a big loss.

Lead management
If all other steps are well planned and are managed and followed-up the closing of the deal becomes a higher likelihood and receives a higher probability.
Once the deal is signed the tension and nervousness decreases instantly.
This is why we find the closing the most important step as our emotion changes after wards.

As a salesman your goal is not the closing, it is earning money for the company.

The telephone contact problem
We all have had this situation:
You found a name to contact on the Internet in a Press Release or on one of the contact sites: LinkedIn, Jigsaw, Spoke, Zoominfo, Ecademy, Viadeo, Xing.
Or somebody recommended you to contact a certain person.

However you haven’t got his direct number and the secretary or receptionist keeps you away from talking to him.
Sending emails will be too easily perceived like spam. So you need to talk with him on the telephone.

Finding the telephone number
1. Start with the company telephone number.
2. Increase the last 2 digits “630-627-4210″ to “630-627-4216″
3. When the phone gets picked up you ask who you are speaking to.
    It is very likely this will not be your wanted contact.
    Still ask if your contact is around.
4. Then apologize for having dialed the wrong number or having written down the wrong number of your contact
5. Clearly mention the name of your contact with the department again.
6. Ask if the person can connect you with the contact.
7. Chances are the person will connect you with the contact.

If your first try fails, then try a second time with a different number. Just make sure you keep track of the numbers dialed.

The contact surprise
Be careful to listen and try to understand the name of the person who picks up the phone as you can have accidentally dialed the correct number. It is quite a surprise when the person you were looking for is all of a sudden on your phone as you need to start your pitch instantly.

How often do you call people you don’t know ?

We all know that a sales job is not the most motivating seen the number of deceptions:
- Missing to close deals because thousand reasons
- Not getting enough leads
- Short and thin pipe line
- Half empty funnel
- Successful colleagues
- Management pressure to close deals
- Social pressure to be successful
- Bad investments made with hard earned money

Hence staying motivated in Sales is a challenge.
In order to be motivated think about these methods:

1. Think positive – have a positive attitude
When you notice your negative thoughts turn them around or replace them with positive ideas and thoughts.

2. Speak positively
Stop saying negative things about business, competitors, government, regulations or other people.
Just don’t do this as it will only pull you further down.

3. State your goal in pubic
Tell your goal you really want to achieve to a few people or mention it on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
It will give you a bit of extra social and personal pressure but you will get support and accountability from the others

4. Daily journal
Keep track of your activities on a daily basis: what exactly have you done and achieved today ? how much time have you wasted on nothing productive ?
Normally you should see a progress towards your goals as you will start to eliminate the wasted time.

5. Competition
Most salesmen need competition to get going or to stay in the lead. It drives them.
- If you have no competition around then look beyond your social environment.
- If your peers are Masters of the Universe then focus on people comparable with yourself.

6. Perplexed deception
Don’t get demotivated by the apparent success of others.
Sometimes it is only an appearance made by the others.
People do pretend to be successful but they are not.
You aren’t doing so badly in reality: investigate out their success and convince yourself of your success.

7. Spare-time
Use your spare-time like weekends and a few hours in the evening to do something completely different. Preferably a physical activity.

8. Alcohol / drugs
Don’t drink or use drugs it will only will make you feel older and uglier afterward.
Happiness based on alcohol or drugs is only for a short amount of time.

9. Enjoy
Enjoy the power of your youth even if you are sixty: be glad you still can enjoy and live these challenges. Many people haven’t got the chance to keep going as you do.
Life has still so many more challenges and discoveries for you.

10. No worry
Why worry about the future as you can encounter the next lead in a few seconds or this day.
Worrying won’t help. Don’t worry be happy.
Take decisions to change your future.

11. Don’t look back
Only the future counts as you can’t change the past.

12. Make plans
Making plans is positive thinking for the future.

The journey of life is important

It is not the goal it is the journey of life that is important.
Closing the big sales deal, your retirement or wealth is not the goal.
The journey to achieve these goals is the most important.
The meaning of life.

If you are feeling down – read this post again

Filling the funnel

You can spend large amounts of money to fill the funnel.
You can have all kinds of marketing initiatives to overload your funnel.
However if your funnel is very leaky the waste is enormous.

Hence it is better to fill the funnel:
- Only with quality leads
- Adequately to the means you have in place to keep your funnel from leaking by nurturing your leads.

Thus:
- Make sure you obtain quality leads by trying to attract only really interested parties
- Filtering out the fake leads as soon as possible in the lead generating process
- Then limit yourself to the number of leads you can adequately manage and nurture
Nurturing is much more efficient than all the expensive marketing efforts for finding suspects that still need to become leads.

Moving leads through the funnel

The goal is to move the leads through the funnel: that costs energy, time and money. Leads that get stuck in the funnel will eventually leave (leak out) the funnel.
The goal of having a lead in the funnel is to guide it through nurturing to become a customer. Not to leave it sitting in the funnel until the lead disappears.

All the additional leads are pure waste of time, effort and money for both your organization and the potential customer as you will send them emails, post letters, invite them for a event, call them, try to set-up a meeting or trying to engage in a conversation.

Keeping a lead in the funnel costs money too but is much less expensive than filling the funnel with another lead that you might not be able to keep in your funnel.

Funnel efficiency

Avoid crappiness of your funnel in order to have a higher Return On Investment (ROI) of your costs and expenses for lead generation and moving the leads through the funnel.
In order to know if your marketing and sales operations are functioning efficiently you need to measure the different parameters involved with the funnel for efficiency:
- Number of suspects
- Number of leads qualified
- Number nurturing messages per month or per lead
- Ratio of qualified leads / customers
- Ratio of qualified leads / leads leaving the funnel
- Average time elapsed between entering the funnel and leaving the funnel as customer

Conclusion: lead quality over quantity

Just filling the funnel with any lead has no benefit but to look good during the first sales meeting.
In the long run the only solution is to fill the funnel with quality leads which you can adequately nurture and move these to become customers which is much more efficient as nurturing costs less than finding new interested parties (suspects) that still need to become leads.

What do you do most: fill the funnel or nurture the funnel ?
How efficient is your funnel ?

Sales managers can make many mistakes in their position getting averse reactions from their sales team which will demotivate which will result in a decrease of sales instead.

1. Not giving the sales team the credit for the success but pretend it is due to your greatness
2. Finding all possible reasons why your salesman didn’t close the sale again
3. Beating up (verbally) the whole sales team while only one or two people are not performing
4. Managing the other departments like product development or marketing
5. Not accepting ideas from others
6. Focusing more on the immediate results than on cooperation: results will decline in the long run
7. Let your team carry your worries. Instead give the sales team trust even if you know the company has a problem.
8. Stating a negative comment at the end of personal meetings with a salesman
9. Making assumptions and jumping to conclusions before you heard everybody involved
10. Push the sales targets too high that they aren’t realistic anymore. When not reachable then why would any salesman undertake the effort of reaching the targets
11. Calling upon customers directly without informing and letting the salesman participate in the conversation
12. Only the numbers in your spreadsheets count. There is more in sales than numbers and spreadsheets as selling involves people
13. Talk more than listening. You don’t know all about the customers, leads and markets. Your salesmen are the nearest.
14. Use the CRM as a tool manage, to annoy and to demotivate your salesmen. The CRM will become a point of failure
15. Talking about the past when you were still in sales and being outstanding. Times have changed and you are getting old.
16. Telling your sales team they are stupid and don’t understand business
17. Always blame the failures to the sales team, but take the credit for the successes
18. Only manage when business is going fine but hide, avoid decisions and delegate responsibilities when business is slow
19. Only listen to the members of the team that always agree with you. The truth and value is probably with those who have their own opinion.
20. Show your bad moods during the entire week, getting friendly Friday afternoon
21. Stating that in the good old days things were better, giving the impression not being adapted to the new times
22. Change compensation plans during the year. Preferably just before a salesman is to achieve his targets
23. Integrity is not part of your thinking and acting. Then be prepared for the worst
24. Expecting the sales team will exactly perform tasks you told them to do as it is the only way to do
25. Promising everything but never ever make them happen
26. Dating a member of the sales team. The gossip will kill you
27. Stating not having time for a member to talk thus making it clear the person is not important. Make sure you set an appointment to meet
28. During a personal face-to-face meeting with a team member taking all the calls and answering SMS (texting)
29. Hiring a good looking team member and giving all possible attention and compliments
30. Create two or more groups in your sales team by giving them different benefits
31. Spreading gossip about team members or members of other teams
32. Getting drunk in the presence of a customer
33. Acting strangely or rude during a meeting with a customer as the salesman will feel uncomfortable and will regret to have set-up the meeting
34. Micro-manage everything for every member of the sales team. The best will leave the company
35. Impose cold calling on purchased industry lists
36. Over staff trade shows on too big boots and discuss all expenses of salesmen
37. Arrive at your meetings late keeping your sales team waiting
38. Order detailed reports about everything every salesman undertakes. Salesmen have to bring in sales. Reports don’t bring sales
39. You are the Master of the Universe and the sales team are your salves
40. Insist that salesmen have 4 meetings a day and inside sales makes 40 cold calls a day. The value is not in the quantity but quality
41. Going to play golf while your sales team is working and never bring in deals from these important gatherings.
42. You are their boss not their leader. You will get better results being their leader
43. You are invincible whereas salesmen are suckers
44. Being feared makes you feel better. The team will not support you
45. The Peter Principle doesn’t apply to you, whereas in reality you are just a salesman that got lucky

Any more things sales managers shouldn’t do but actually do ?

Salesmen and Marketers gather various experiences of hotels in different places in the world due to their travel.
Hotels can be good but the best have not always the highest rated by the number of stars granted.
There is a discrepancy between the needs and the standards for the qualification.
Even 4 or 5 star hotels can be less convenient for the road warrior as some missing features and services can be really annoying.

1. Wifi – Internet connection

The best is when Wifi is free (or Ethernet cable is present to plug into the portable PC for free).
The worst is when there is no Wifi or Internet connection! Then just hope McDonalds is nearby.

When Wifi is not free then the fees to be paid upfront are rather high compared to the room price and often a 24 hours charge nears the cost of a monthly residential Internet access.
The limited number of options (15min or 24 hours) are not making the choice easier for the guest staying in the hotel.
Again many occasions a visit to McDonalds is a much better deal (which is also a better deal than Starbucks).

Even when Wifi is announced for free then you better check upfront what exactly they are offering: ‘Can I connect my own laptop?’ ‘How many access points do you have?’ ‘Is your Wifi actually installed or to be installed real soon now?’

2. Power plugs

Countries have different power plugs.
An voyagers carry many battery powered devices.
If you are lucky there is a simple universal plug in the bathroom (for the electric razor/hairdryer) where you can plug in your power plugs in order to charge your laptop, mobile phone, iPod, …
More and more this universal power plug is being replaced by a wall mounted hairdryer which kills this solution.

3. Dim lights

Some hotel rooms are so poorly lit that the screen of my portable has to make the keys on my keyboard visible. Don’t try to read printouts or handwritten notes in these rooms that have been designed to be 21st century caves.

4. Desk space

Although the bed, couch or comfortable chair can have royal sizes, it seems the designers are always saving money on the desk space with a narrow work space. This makes it difficult to work with your portable and the necessary documents.
After 1 hour of typing without a hand rest in a cramped position to near of the screen of the portable your get tired too early too soon.

5. Master light switch

When you are going to sleep you will find out you need to switch out all the lights one by one as there is no master light switch near your bed.
A master light switch is so convenient.

6. TV set

We all know how TV sets work since the early days of our lives.
Then why are we guided by a complex system proposing all the paid channels and options we never use (Internet-TV) when we just want to see the free channels before falling asleep?
In most cases it requires pressing multiple buttons to get out of this guided system.

Why can’t the TV set have a USB connection so we can view movies on our USB stick we take with us.

7. Alarm clocks

As these require programming without a manual and can be quite complex to set.
Moreover as a trial run consumes time, I prefer to use my mobile phone (if I still have enough battery left over).

8. Shower taps

When the operation of the shower requires a master degree in shower-taps due to the automatic temperature controller and one lever handle then taking a shower becomes an enterprise.
Should I turn left or right to get hotter water or has the warm water not yet arrived from the boiler at my tap ?
What was wrong with the separate hot and cold water taps ?

9. The airco

Having an airco (A/C) in the room can be a requirement for many guests and can be convenient on hot days.
Still having the option to turn it completely off is a major plus:
- for the cold air
- for the noise
And if possible having the ability to open a window instead – even if it is just 5cm or 2inches.

10. Mini bar

Why can’t the price list of the mini bar be displayed clearly upfront on the door of the fridge ?
Or having an electronic cash register using electronic tags reporting exactly what each beverage will cost ?
This is the reason I never use the minibar.

11. Thin walls

I don’t want to follow a TV show or a movie of the next room at 2 o’clock in the morning.
No thanks I have meetings tomorrow.

12. Running pipes

I don’t need to know when the upstairs neighbor has flushed his toilet or empties his bath.

13. Parking fees

Free parking is great and convenient as there is no hassle with the payment and payment cards.
Paying for a parking space kills the stay in the hotel and increases the bill unexpectedly.
When free is not available and when possible I prefer to park outside on the street.

14. Breakfast not included

The price for breakfast can be so exaggerated that getting your breakfast in a coffee shop outside is a much better deal.
Why trying to steal from your customers ?

15. Phone charges

You probably are not able to get correct phone charges until the bill is presented to you when checking out. In most cases, it’s cheaper to just use your cell phone, even when abroad.
And if you have free Wifi you can Skype !

16. Sneaky charges

When checking out you are informed there is an additional VAT, residential tax or Resort fee is to be paid.
This spoils your stay definitely!

Conclusion
Hotels can really make you feel like their guest but they have many opportunities to get it wrong.

When you make your next reservation use the filters (Refine your search) on Booking.com.

How are your hotel experiences ?

Email marketing

Email marketing has been embraced by most companies due to the apparent low cost and far reach for their lead generation.

However building email marketing lists yourself is a slow process due to the little number of people signing-up or opt-in for your newsletter or getting contacts on trade shows.
It will take ages before your list becomes significantly long enough to be useful.
Additionally the maintenance of these lists become costly due to people changing functions and companies which all need to be verified frequently (email bounces).

Purchased email marketing lists

Hence buying an email marketing list seems easy and obvious.
However:
- On average lists available are about 70% accurate, the best are up to 85%
- As lists are generic they are not customized for your specific business
- You certainly have your industry contact list of people who are also in the bought lists: overlap
- Most lists are based upon the function titles not on the real responsibilities in a company
- When using these lists then what’s the difference between you and a spammer ?

Marketing lists can bring you contacts from potential interested parties but without:
- Knowing if this is the right person to contact: titles are not functions and responsibilities
- Knowing if the demand is there: no demand no interest
- Knowing if it is timely to contact them: too early or too late

The more you use these bought listings the more the people will opt-out or will brand your email address and company as spammer.

The ROI (Return On Investment) will drop significantly and is much higher than estimated at first or accepted by general public.

Website traffic of interested companies

On the other hand your website receives traffic of companies that are interested at this very moment.
This eliminates 2 of the three uncertainties for sending an email to these companies.
The only requirement is knowing the companies visiting your website and lead scoring by the level of interest indicated by:
- The search terms used
- The pages visited
- The number of unique visitors by the company
This is like the Caller-ID for your website.

The main hurdle is getting the contact information of the visiting companies for which Internet data bases and searches can be used as well as your own list of industry contacts.

The goal of any email marketing is not:
- The number of emails send
- The frequency of email marketign campaigns
- The number of bounces
- The number of opens
but the number of actual sales or closed deals

How is your email marketing performing ?

Some websites have massive traffic – some have very little traffic although they haven been doing their best for years.

Sticking to one tactic to attract traffic
The company marketer has stuck with one method (like article marketing) which he has mastered and might have been very successful once, but no longer so due to addressing the same group of people over and over again.

Multiple methods and tactics are needed. Try not to depend on just one source of traffic.

Never depend solely on paid traffic either, there are always fools who don’t know what they’re doing and/or have more money to spend than you do.

Jumping tactics
Jumping from one tactic to another without waiting long enough to measure the effect.
You need to take time to measure in order to get significant results. Less measurements = less accurate results.

Moreover everything takes time on the Internet as people really aren’t waiting for you or your message.

Automated services
There are many services that can bring traffic: they show effects at first use but on the long run their system can decrease in efficiency.
Using too many of these automated web services which will replicate your original content over an over again, will result in a lower SERP (Search Engine Results Page) as your content will seem like duplicated content.

If you trick the search engines somehow, they will catch on sooner or later. And if your tricks don’t survive a manual inspection, you might get reported by your competitors.

Old content
The older your content becomes the less important is is regarded by search engines. Only when you keep getting new inbound links, and people still frequently click on your links in the serps then you’ll keep a good score on search result pages.

Probably inspired by Twitter’s popularity, fresh content is the driving force these days.

Not indexed pages
Most website have only half of their content indexed by the search engines. Unindexed content will not show up in searches and not generate traffic.

For a start create internal links between all of your pages. Not just one link on each page, but multiple links to multiple pages on each page. Make sure you have a well interlinked site. If this doesn’t seem easy, consider if such a multi-column link footer would help. They don’t interfere with your content, and people almost expect them to be there these days.

Next, try to obtain more external links. Preferably of high-authority sites. Easier said than done. According to the search engines, more external links pointing to your site = a more important and interesting site = more pages of your site will get crawled = more of your pages in the serps.

Additionally create a site map page to please the search engines: submit your xml site map to Google (WebMasterTools), Bing and Yahoo .

External links
Internal links are easy to achieve and a first step to increase your ranking. However the real challenge is in external links (backlinks or inbound links): other sites linking to yours.

This is the hard work:
- Having really interesting content, rising above the internet noise
- Persuading the others to link to you. Easier when you have interesting or remarkable content.
- Various tactics, like commenting on blogs. Often hard not to regard this as a form of spamming.
- Participating in linkwheels or buying links: frowned upon.

It’s often said by ‘SEO Experts’ (beware, a lot of these people are the modern variant of snake oil peddlers) that forged links to your site could result in a penalty from the search engines.
We seriously doubt this though. If an external, off-site factor could result in a penalty, surely lots of people would use this to bring penalties to their competitor’s sites.

Don’t think of content as only text on a webpage. Content can be anything: movies, screencasts, audiobooks, tools, games, photo’s, cartoons,…

Domain age
The older the domain the more weight it obtains in any search result.
Apparently old means trustworthy.
Moreover older content is likely to have more links than new content.
If the links don’t increase though, the content is regarded as outdated or stale which might have an averse effect.

Don’t depend on only one source of traffic. Key is having content interesting, remarkable or useful enough to get others to link to you.

When launching a new product or even a new company many hours are spent (wasted?) on finding a good brand name.
The question is: what is a good brand name?
- Should it express the problem it solves?
- Should it relate to the business?
- Can it be an acronym when the name becomes too long?
- Is a “Web 2.0” name taken seriously in B2B?
- Should the name reflect the serious business you manage?

Of course all of the above is true and a reason to think about when generating names. We think the most important function is being remarkable and being retained by the human brain.

Once the name has been chosen then:
- What is the impression of the brand name?
- Does it generate positive or negative feelings?
- Is it remarkable?
- It is memorable?
- Does it generate emotions?
- Isn’t it an insult in another language?
- Is there no doubt about pronunciation?
- Is it still available as a domainname somehow?
Sticking out and generating emotion are the most important.
Just make sure your product or service have the quality or content to back-it up.

Our case: LEADSExplorer/
We started with the idea that it should express the reason or functionality:
- Leads: the service is intended to generate leads
- Explorer: the service should help to explore your leads further in order to convert them into customers
So we pasted both together giving: LeadsExplorer

What we didn’t really consider was the new word created in the middle of the brand name.
In order to mask this problem we put the first word in capitals and the second just with one capital. People still spot it. Maybe even search engines spot it and somehow give us a lower score because of it. SEO experts have told us this is not the case, but how can they be sure?

Maybe it is not good as a B2B brand name.
Maybe it isn’t projecting enough seriousness.
If the number of people searching for ‘leadsexplorer’ is an indication, it is at least memorable.

However in most cases people will spot the word in the middle and are likely to remember it.
People even made fun of it – which is emotion. So maybe good?

Al and Laura Reis said:”A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer”. Well, at least in our case you probably won’t deny that part of our brand name is often on your mind. Unfortunately (or rather luckily?) you won’t associate this with our services.

Would you consider us less serious because we’ve got everyone’s favorite 3 letter word in our name?

In biology parasite means those living organisms that live on food made by other living creatures.
In marketing it are the marketing efforts piggy-backed on the marketing of your competitors.

In this tough economy competition can be brutal. So can you be!
How can you be able to continue to grow in a highly competitive market requiring to spend large amounts for advertising and PR ?
How do you get exposure to your target market on a limited budget ?
Why do competitors get more exposure than you do ?
Why do companies get bloggers to write about them an your products ?
How can you get attention when potential customers tend to overlook or forget about your offerings ?

Fighting an uphill battle is never an economic way of doing business, thus go with the flow:
You could leverage on the exposures your competitors are getting:
1) Use any free social search engine:
- Socialmention
- Whostalkin
- Collecta
to search for your competitors

2) Find blog posts or comments about your competitors

3) Read carefully the blog post and each comment
This is essential: you have to fully understand the blog post and the comments as the comment you have to create needs to be inline and very interesting or thoughtful.
The quality of, the information provided in or the questions posed by your comment needs to overcome the rejection by the owner of the blog by it’s level of interest or value that it brings to the blog post.

Make sure your comment doesn’t sound like a commercial.

4) Post this suiting and matching comment and if possible including an shortened link to a page on your website in the comment.
It is this comment that is your sole change to generate interest.

5) use you name your company email address and the company website.
The best is to have a different link than the shortened url in the comment.

Using this parasite marketing you will generate traffic consisting of interested visitors generated by the efforts of your competitors and your creativity.

Consider it as a game:
Each comment that gets published is a win for your marketing at hardly any cost (except for your time and effort).

What is your experience ?