In sales we all want access to the decision makers who are being protected by the gatekeepers.
The first way to get direct access is getting the names of the decision takers which can be found using:

Internet-Data-Mining for contact names

- Press releases:
In many cases the CEO or marketing manager will be quoted

- LinkedIn:
Using the internal search function on company
Googling the company name and LinkedIn in one search will give you names. By adding the function you can narrow down to the person required.

- Internet data bases:
Searching on Google or Bing using the company name and an Internet data bases like Jigsaw, Spoke or Zoominfo as search terms.

- Twitter:
Using Twitter search can reveal the Twitter account of the decision maker of a company allowing to send him a direct message using Twitter.

Once the name of the decision maker found you can:
- Call him directly by stipulating his name to the telephone operator
- Send him an email by constructing his email address to the company format. You can find the format by just searching on the company domain name on Google or Bing.

Joining social groups

By joining target market groups or of your industry you are able to participate in discussions or to start a discussion that is related to your business or solutions:
Such groups exist on
- LinkedIn
- Facebook
- Ecademy
- Small Business Forum
- UK Business Forums
- Startups.co.uk

Once you get into a discussion you can:
- Generate interest in yourself or the solutions of your company the other participants.
- Engage into a discussion with one of the people posting on the discussion board

If all fails and no interest is generated directly for your company then you can send the discussion participants a private message related to their answer or opinion they have posted in the discussion.
In many cases these people will not be the decision maker but the influencer as this are the kind of people tending to participate on these discussion groups.
Once you have convinced the influencer the decision maker is within your reach.

Do you know any additional method to bypass the gatekeeper ?

The boring life of all
Most people just go to work to make money. They have hardly any happiness, sensation or emotion during their jobs.
Almost the same stuff every day. Jobs might be have some challenges but nothing really exciting – not to say boring.

The exciting life of the salesman
A salesman however has plenty of sensation and emotion during the lead generation and sales process.
He experiences the rejection fear of cold calling.
He has the challenge to find the next lead.
He needs to decide of the lead is qualified or not as each lead becomes an investment.
He know he can be out of the race to close the deal any time.
He feels the pressure of the sales target and his commission.
He has the anxiety for the ever higher sales quota at the beginning of each year
He can play poker with his customers when negotiating prices.
He gets stressed as he aims for getting the deal done by all means.
He can show no sign of emotion while he is totally emotional inside.
He obtains a glorious feeling when closes a deal.
He is filled with happiness by being the winner.
He even can think he is the Master of the Universe.
He might even feel invincible if he closes too many deals in a row.
He can become down quickly if he misses the next deal.
He can even become depressed if he closes no deals over a longer time-span.

As a bonus he even gets a reward as valuation for the effort and success: his commission.

The life of a salesman is full of emotional and exciting moments and events.
Not boring at all.
Instead of having a quiet life, the salesman is a lucky bastard as his life will be filled with many emotions giving more character to his life.

Why did  you become a salesman and gave character to your life ?

Why didn’t you become a salesman and missed all the emotion (and being bored) ?

Change is business

There is nothing like sustainable business as the only thing which sustains in business is change.

Decades ago business could be sustainable as change was slow. Still every now and then there was a world war and a crisis which changed life and business definitely.
Nowadays change comes even more faster making a sustainable business doubtful.
Change is the driver of all business.

Continuously adjust your business to the business

It is not the sustainability but the differentiators and the capability to change the business model, the offerings, the marketing and the packaging that make a business continue in the long run. In order to keep on going you need to have a distinctive benefit or value for your customers. As customer demand changes your offering needs to change too: continuous adjustments to your products and services.

The sales disadvantage is an advantage

In Sales you are even more exposed to change as you need to adapt your story, benefits and advantages to the ever changing demands of your potential customers.

Telling the same story over a long time span is no longer possible. The salesman is the first in line to feel the changes which gives him the advantage to jump ship on time before it is too late.

How well is your business dealing with changing business?

Always connected: including social digital distractions

Two decades ago salesmen had only a telephone, a fax, letters / mail and a newspaper that could distract them from their work and which they actually used for their work.

Nowadays they need to read their professional emails, their personal emails, their Facebook, their Twitter, their LinkedIn, their texting (sms), chat IM (Instant Messaging), take phone calls on both the land line and their mobile phone, read the news on the Internet and blogs, see the all important YouTube video of last weekend and eventually read the mail or a newspaper.
Most of them are the social digital distractions: not related to your work.

Seems life has become much harder for businessmen and salesmen to focus on their real job which is doing business or selling and getting sales done.

This not only happens at the office but throughout the whole day as salesmen can be distracted from their real job as the mobile Internet gets them connected in all possible places with their smartphone, their netbook or iPad.

Instead of listening to people during short encounters in the office building or even during meetings, we all are checking our mobile devices for new information, replying to text messages or answering telephone calls on our mobiles. Most of them are  unlikely to have any relationship with our sales job as they are social digital distractions.

Wasting our time by being connected

Maybe with all these communication abilities and being on-line and available all of the time the real selling and getting deals closed is moving to a lower level of importance as our social private life continuous throughout our workday with the social digital distractions.

The information and messages related to our social life and spare-time are much more fun and interesting than the information and messages related to our (sales) jobs. This why we are distracted so easily and frequently throughout the work day which gets us paid in the first place and enables all the pleasures in life.

We need to start making a distinction between the real need of being connected for our sales job and all of the social distractions of being connected as we waste large amounts of time throughout everyday – even during our spare time we waste a lot of time being connected. Although it are small amounts of time that increment becoming several hours everyday of nothing productive.

The winners will limit their social digital distractions

A decade ago we believed those who would have the best communication means would be the ultimate winners.

Now as we all can be continuously connected, it seems more like those who can distantiate themselves from all the social digital distractions and use the communication means intelligently are likely to be the winners.

In sales the real winners are always the survivors.
The digital social distraction will quickly separate the winners from the losers (wasters) as those who are bringing in most sales are those who will be getting the most commissions.

The morale is: limit yourself from the social digital distractions in order to do business, generate and find leads, nurture your leads and close deals.
It will allow you keeping your social life and level as it needs money.

How good are you with sticking to your business, using the communication means professionally and avoiding the social digital distractions.

When things become mainstream
When methods and things become mainstream it is often time to leave them behind and look for new methods and approaches.
When all including large corporations start using it for their purpose, chances are the smaller players stand no chance to stand out.

Social media marketing has become Big Brother
Seems like social media marketing is becoming mainstream as the hype is over and large corporations have adopted it in their marketing strategy.
Companies have a Facebook page, Twitter accounts, post video’s on Youtube, use Slideshare or Scribd for presentations and they even have a blog which they get posted on ‘news’ sites.

Brands are using social media monitoring tools and web services for monitoring buzz about their brands and their competitors.
The big companies move in overwhelming the small players.
Blogs have become team work instead of a solo undertaking.

At the same time the participation and engagement of people has decrease as:
- Less comments are posted on blogs
- Less bookmarking happens

The originality and the spirit are gone of the early days.
Social has become Big Brother.

Time to move on as you’ve done it all
Probably it’s time to move on for the small and medium sized enterprises.
The question is where too ? What’s next ?
There is augmented reality together with location-based social networking website but no clue how to use these in marketing our web services.

You’ve done it all but now you need a new vehicle for your marketing.

You’ve done it all, you’ve broken every code
And pulled the Rebel to the floor
You spoilt the game, no matter what you say
…
There’s nothing left, all gone and run away
Maybe you’ll tarry for a while
It’s just a test, a game for us to play
Win or lose, it’s hard to smile
Resist, resist, it’s from yourself you have to hide
(Cockney Rebel – ‘Make Me Smile’ Lyrics)

What’s next ? Make me smile !

Mass email marketing
Mass email marketing can get you visitors which can become suspects, to be turned into leads through nurturing and eventually become sales.
At the same time your mass email marketing has been received by many others and have been considered as spam. These people can swear never to do any business with you – ever.

The problem is for every customer you win from mass (spamming) email, you could loose 3 or more potential customers forever.

This is something you cannot measure, not prove but in any case the negative effect is long lasting.

So instead of having a few quick wins with email marketing, you can be destroying your future business all by yourself.

The end of email marketing
This will lead to the end of mass email marketing in B2B as you only see the ever decreasing success rate of your email marketing campaigns but not the missed opportunities.
Stop eating your future babies.

Will you think twice the next time before you hit the button to send out your mass email marketing campaign ?

Being in the business of identification of website visitors by company we daily visit many of websites before granting a 30-day free trial.
As the pricing of our web services is in relation to the number of monthly visitors we like to give advice to our customers in order to increase their visits (so we can charge more later on).

Five things we frequently encounter:
- The intention of the website
- The url of the pages have no significant meaning
- The keywords are the same for every page throughout the website
- The description being equal for all pages
- The main navigation menu needs to be in text
- The all Flash websites

1. The intention of the website
What do you sell ?
To who do you sell ? What is your market? B2C, B2B ?
If we can’t figure out what you are selling and to who, how will your potential customer know that he might have found a solution to his problem.
People do leave a website in less than 4 seconds if they don’t understand immediately what it is all about.

2. The urls
If your pages have an url like

http://www.company.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=235&Itemid=209

Then you can’t tell which page it is and what the page is all about.
The same is valid for Google, Bing and Yahoo: they don’t understand it neither as it has no meaning.
Each page should have a url that matches the content of the page: especially the keywords or titles used.
Just like this blog post which uses the title of the post.

http://www.LEADSExplorer.com/blog/2010/11/15/the-6-most-frequent-website-design-mistakes

If you can read it then Google can read it and tag it which makes Google happy and friendly.

3. The keywords
Many web designers seem to use the same keywords throughout the website.
However every page should have keywords matching the content of the page. Each page should be considered as a landing page attracting its’ own interested visitors.
Again this will make the interpretation and filing of your page easier for Google.

4. The description
This is similar as the keywords: the description of each page is the same. That doesn’t make the operation of the Google algorithm easier for filing your web pages.
Help Google & Co in order to help yourself.

5. The main navigation menu in text
The main navigation menu should be easily found and in text format in order to let Google read your menu items.
In case your menu consist of images then make sure all the images are named to make them understandable.

6. The all Flash website
Of course you can have Flash on your website as it will animate and make it more lively.
Still it doesn’t mean you have to have an all Flash website which is really bad for getting indexed by search engines and thus getting found by potential customers.

How to ?
A question we often get:
How to see the keywords, description and menu items:
In FireFox: Go to “View” then click on “Page Source”
In Internet Explorer: Go to “View” then click on “Source”

Have fun with this video of a presentation:

How bad is your website ?

Companies are spending large amounts to bring awareness about their products, solutions and services. Some companies go even as far as branding. In order to achieve this awareness the complete arsenal of advertising, online advertising, website, SEO, PR, email marketing, blogging, social media, trade shows, conferences, call centers,… is used.

It cannot cost enough to bring the message.

All these efforts do generate leads and tools are in place to measure and enhance the lead generation.
Companies even hire appointment setting services to get meetings if they can’t achieve this themselves.

However once the the lead captured or even a first meeting has taken place, the lead management is not in place making sales people forget about the lead.

Hence the funnel of leads is:
- Awareness: spending massive amounts of money
- Lead generation: still spending but much less as the major task has been achieved
- Lead management: is still an undeveloped area for most companies

Do you have a lead management system?

“I’m Not Interested”
“We already have a supplier”
“I don’t have the budget”
“I have no time for this”
“We are satisfied with our current suppliers”

These are the statements from the callee after you have given the perfect pitch and used all your options.
Then the million dollar question is:
What are the two things they would like to change from their current suppliers?

This gives you ammunition and opportunities to show how you can offer a difference as they nail down their current problem. Maybe they won’t answer your question but at least you get a last chance to get in by discovering problems that you hadn’t identified previously.

Email marketing is still popular.
In order to feed the marketing machine companies buy email marketing lists as their ability to fill up their email marketing data base is limited.

Drive website traffic
Email marketing lists are not lead generation as they belong to the same camp as SEO, advertising, online advertising, PR, blogging and even social media.
All these marketing methods are for generating interest and awareness with the main goal: to drive traffic to the company website.

Sending emails to people on an email marketing list is like shooting with a machine gun at a herd. It is uncertain these people have any interest in your solution at that very moment. This is even less targeted and having a very low ROI compared to online advertising where your ad is presented to people actively browsing or searching web pages for a certain subject.

Lead generation and qualification
Once the interested person has landed on the website the lead generation and visitor conversion process begins:
- Identification of the company
- Analyzing the level of interest by company for lead qualification and lead scoring.
As only up to 3 percent of all your website visitors will ever contact you or leave contact details in an online form, you need to have a system in place to achieve the identification and level of interest. Otherwise all your previous marketing efforts and investments – including your fancy website – are wasted.

Once you know the visiting companies and have qualified them as leads, only then you should re-target by email in order to keep the awareness of your brand and solution.

Do you buy email marketing lists?