Airline fares fluctuate

Airline ticket prices fluctuate like a diabolo – seemingly without any system or reason behind it.
According to this article from the Wall Street Journal the fares cycle during the week.

Buy your airline ticker on Tuesday as prices creep up during the week as seats get sold. Over the weekend the fares aren’t actively managed as managers are out (on their cheap flight?) and the automatic fare system rules.
When the managers return on Monday they will issue the new prices late Monday evening or Tuesday morning. Apparently the best time to buy is 3 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday.

Departure and return day

Your departure day has even more influence than the moment of buying.
The cheapest departure days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday.

As holiday travelers want to get back from a weekend trip on Sunday, latest on Monday, whereas business travelers will need to leave on Sunday to have the meetings starting on Monday or those who don’t want to fly in their weekend leave on Monday.

For long weekenders the weekend rush starts on Thursday and tops on Friday, whereas businessmen want to get home for the weekend on Thursday, latest Friday.

Stay-over-weekend

In some cases staying over the weekend can result in lower fares probably to have customers on the Monday morning flying back while avoiding the busy Friday afternoon rush back home before the weekend.
Question is: what to do during the weekend without family or acquaintances?

Last minute or late bookings

Last minute promotions a hard to use for the traveling businessman as he has appointments and other schedules to meet.
Late bookings up to 2 weeks before departure can save you money.
This depends very much on the airline or low cost carrier as they have different optimizing heuristics in their system.

Obsolete air miles

Due to the complexities and the imposed hidden rules air miles have always been difficult to use. You can save hundred thousands of air miles and then find out you can’t use them on a specific flight at a specific moment due to a reason beyond your imagination.

With the availability of the low cost carriers (US) and the discount airlines (EUR) the air miles have become completely obsolete.

Book on Tuesday – fly on Tuesday or Wednesday

As a rule of thumb:
- Plan your meetings on Tuesdays or Wednesdays: letting you fly in and fly out at the lower fares.
- Start looking for airfares on Tuesday morning in order to book on Tuesday afternoon latest.

Be smart and have happy cheaper bookings!

1. Size of the market:
The size of the market is clearly a differentiator as in B2C the number of potential customers is ranging from hundred thousands to millions, whereas in B2B a company can survive on just a few customers to a few hundred customers.

2. Dollar value:
In B2C the dollar value of the customer is in most cases significantly lower than in B2B.

3. Sales process:
B2B has a complex sales process supported by several employees, whereas in B2C the salesman can be replaced by an online ordering system.

4. Cost of sales:
In B2B the cost of a sale is much higher than in B2C.

5. Sale value:
The value of a sale in B2B is much higher than in B2C

6. Churn:
In B2C the churn is high compared to the relatively low number of customers that change supplier in B2B.

7. Repeat and standing orders:
In B2C nearly every sale includes a decision.
In B2B repeat and standing orders are common but the first purchase order can take ages.

8. Decision makers:
In B2C the decision maker is in most cases limited to one person – exceptionally 2 or 3 members of a family get involved, whereas in B2B you will hardly find a sole decision maker.

9. Statistic approaches:
Thanks to the large numbers in B2C generic patterns or trends can be defined using statistical approaches. In B2B the customers are numbered and no statistics can be applied.

10. Data quality:
In B2C most people don’t change their status often (married or divorced) or locations (house).
In B2B people do change job (rather often) as they get promoted or change company.
Thus the information from business cards or data bases can become obsolete quickly.

11. Lead generation:
Lead generation and nurturing is typically for B2B, whereas in B2C marketing campaigns are for direct sale.

12. Contracts:
In B2C people just buy and hardly negotiate.
In B2B nearly every sale requires signing of a contract or at least a purchase order after a long pricing negotiation.

13. Social media marketing:
Social media marketing is probably feasible for most B2C products and services as the number of people is high and many can feel engaged.
In B2B social media marketing is likely to be no effective at all.

14. Website
In both market the website plays an important role. Still the approach will be different.
In B2C techniques for presenting relevant content on the website will be used for instant influence and buying stimulus, whereas in B2B it is important to identify the visitor by company and to have lead intelligence systems in place to send relevant personalized content by email for nurturing.

Both B2C and B2B markets require different approaches for marketing and sales: other tools and methods. Letting sales methods and marketing systems cross over from B2C to B2B or vice-versa is likely not to be successful.

Content marketing has become all the hype as it only requires your creativity and writing skills to receive traffic on your website delivered by the search engines.
Apparently low cost for a maximum return of leads!

Content marketing faces three issues:
- You don’t know what content will draw in traffic
- You don’t know the content plans of your competitors
- You don’t now what content will most convert traffic into leads or customers
making it like gambling with dices.

Uncertainty: What content for traffic: text, headers and keywords

You can not predict what will generate most traffic on your website as it is a combination of text, headers and keywords
You can only know what content brings the most traffic by testing. In order to test you need to produce content on different matters, items, issues and keywords that all relate to your business or solutions.
The challenge is to find these subjects and to tag them with the best suiting keywords for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which is also a gamble.
You will never know the optimum for content, but you will learn over time what scores the best.

Uncertainty: Content competition

On the Internet you are competing for clicks and attention. So all your competitors, bloggers and industry publications are your content competitors in a constant competition to get the click on the link and the attention on the website.
Due to the search algorithms applied by Google and Bing apparent similar content will score differently in SERP (Search Engine Result Page). You can’t predict what will be successful.

Uncertainty: Which content is best for conversions

Pages that receive most traffic aren’t necessarily the pages that convert the most.
So again testing is required as of all your content some will convert very well and some not.
You will notice that certain content, page layout or approach to present content will convert more than other pages. You can exploit this to create even more content about these well converting matters or subjects using the same page layout and approach.

So you are gambling with three dices:
- Text, headers and keywords for traffic
- The competitors targeting the same audience
- The conversion effectiveness of the content, page layout or approach
Indicating your luck is very low.

Gamble more to win more

Just like in gambling: the more you gamble (content) the more chance you have to win.
Create, write and publish more content to hit the jackpot one day.

And in content marketing your bet isn’t completely lost as it still will generate some leads.
Once you have published all the different variations of content, it is likely you keep all this content published as even lower scoring web pages will get visitors and eventually convert to leads.

Good luck with the content marketing gamble !

Conference booth disadvantages

On most conferences companies can have a booth in the area where coffee breaks are organized at a high price. As a salesman you have booth duty and passively you have to hope someone shows interest.
On the booth you are a salesman and not part of the community.

Attendee opportunities

By just attending the conference a minimum amount of money is spend but you have no visibility.
There are several advantages by attending:
- You are part of the crowd – not immediately identified as a salesman
- You can move around freely like a hunter looking for your prey
- When leaving the conference room for the coffee break use the subject of the last speaker for starting a conversation
- Any possible contact or event can be exploited

The very short sales pitch

You need to make your sales pitches face to face during the coffee breaks, the lunches and the dinners.

Hope for a walking dinner as this gives more opportunities to communicate with people: sitting at a lunch or dinner table is wasting your time. During a walking dinner take small portions in order to be able to move around: you are not there to eat but to make contacts.

These sales pitches are is a tricky thing to do as there are several constraints:
- Time limitation of the break: the clock is ticking away your sales time
- Finding a group of people: look at their name tags and company names for:
    a)  non-target companies
    b)  avoiding other salesmen
    c) avoiding the conference organizers as you didn’t pay enough
- Finding a suiting subject for a conversation
- Jumping into a conversation which you need to steer onto a subject related to your product
- Having a short 25 second pitch relevant to the previous conversation
- Making the sales pitch entertaining and to the point
- Organize to have your business card ready to exchange
Don’t waste time as the number of breaks during a conference are limited.

Goal: the business cards

Once the sales pitch done, you need to present your business cards to all of the people in the conversation group. In most cases people will give their business card just because of courtesy.
If they don’t have any questions then excuse and disappear. If they have questions make sure you can answer them briefly or else promise to contact again: a reason for getting their business card.
Your goal is not to sell but to paint the concept and collect business cards.

These short performances you can effectively do about 3 to 4 times during each break collecting about 9 to 14 business cards. Totaling 37 to 64 business cards over 2 days of conference attending, which is to my experience many times more than having a booth on a conference at a many times lesser cost.
Just hope there are not too many vendors on the conference which will decrease your effectiveness and opportunities significantly.

Conclusion for attending

If your product, solution or service is suited or you can find a method to describe the advantages or benefits in a very short pitch this is way cheaper than having a booth.

In order to perform as a conversational salesman amongst the attendees, you need to be good in conversations and at the same time entertaining.

Make sure the company website is viewable from a mobile device as more people than you would expect will look-up your website during the next speaker as a website brings credibility and they will remember you longer.

Are you a booth salesman or conference hunting salesman?

Unpredictability of SERP

Whatever the specialists say or pretend SEO is a gamble with an uncertain outcome.
Even with many years of experience there is no certain outcome or result for SEO efforts.

This is due to several reasons of uncertainty:
- What content your competitors are publishing
- What content bloggers are publishing on the same matters
- How effective keywords will be in the future: people change interest and attitudes
- What people will click on in searches
- What people are looking for
- Event beyond your business, market or industry which can promote certain content
- Of change in: business, market, industry and world business
- Getting links – getting high scoring links

Of course the more time and effort is put into selecting the best matching keywords to your target group, the more internal links your create and the more external links your website obtains the better you will score.
However the predictability of high Search Engine Result Page (SERP) for a page is very low due to all the other content, influences and changes.
Moreover the results change over time as a new page can be presented at first high in search results, but when hardly anybody clicks on the link or a high bounce rate is registered, then the search engines will devalue your search engine result due to apparently less interesting or less relevant content.

SEO is not a science but a gamble

You can have the best SEO implemented and still score mediocre: not reaching the first page on a search due to all the parameters beyond your control.

Search engine results are a very unpredictable as there are too many parameters and events influencing your results.
As SEO is not a science but a gamble then in order to win is to play many games.
In order to play many games in content marketing, the sole solution is to create as much content about your products and solutions in as many possible variations as possible in order to have a higher chance to score high in searches.
- Fight the unpredictability massively.
- Create at least one page on each possible topic related to your business
- Apply the best SEO on each page

How is your website scoring in the search engine searches ?

A checklist for your business in order to get a better view of your approach to potential customers:

1. Increase revenues
Will your service increase revenues?
- Increase in revenue is what CxO’s interest the most
If possible sell on revenue increase.

2. Cost cutting
Is your service cutting expenses for the target audience?
- Cost cutting is second to increase in revenue.
If not on revenue then sell on cost cutting.

3. Differentiator
Is your service or product filling a compelling need not well addressed by competitors?
- With a differentiator you have an interesting message and no need to sell on price.
If you have a differentiator, even a minimal one, you need to explain and sell it.

4. Market leading
Is your service or product market leading or lagging?
- Leading creates interest whereas lagging requires discounts.
If your are a leading the market you need to stay ahead as changing over to a laggard will not be appreciated.

5. Target audience
Are you targeting the right audience in a company?
- Knowing who benefits the most of your solution or who has the budget to pay for your solution helps you to find your audience.
If you know the target audience focus on them and don’t waste time with others.

6. Recurring revenue
Is your service recurring revenue or one time only?
- With recurring revenue you build up a portfolio of contracts that secures your future
If you don’t have recurring revenue then try to sell a minor part as recurring – like maintenance.

7. Sales cycle length
What is the length of your sales cycle?
- The shorter the sales cycle the easier to loose your customer to a competitor for the next deal
- The longer your sales cycle the harder it is when you miss a deal at the end.
If you have a short sales cycle you have to have many deals in your sales funnel.
If you have a long sales cycle only a few deals will be in your sales funnel.

8. Selling on Fear
Is fear the driving force for selling your service or products?
- Comparing the calculated or estimated expense of the risk with the cost of your service or product
If people can’t calculated the cost involved with the risk then you need to calculate it for them.

9. Selling on Compliance
Are regulations or compliance the reasons for your business?
- Regulations and compliance are not a business need.
If you can bring added value for the company besides compliance then you can charge more than the minimum price of your competitors.

10. Benefits or features
Are you selling on tangible or intangible benefits or functions and features?
- Functions and features are accountable, benefits are less accountable.
If you sell on functions and features be aware that the nerds and the influencers of the company will know competitors with even more functions and features.

11. Sales pitch
Can you have your sales pitch in 140 characters or 30 seconds?
- Short sales pitches are likely easier understood as people keep attention.
If your sales pitch is longer than most people their attention span you will have a hard time selling.

12. CxO versus Mid-management
Can mid-management decide to purchase your service or product?
- Limiting decisions to mid-management has all it’s advantages – not only shorter sales cycles.
If CxO’s need to get involved due to the high budget your sales cycle becomes more complex, longer and prone to other non-business influences and intangible benefits.

Whatever business-to-business you are in you will encounter most of these challenges, opportunities and hurdles.

What’s your business in B2B?

The marketers of Social Media Marketing have created many new words as it was a new media and environment and probably in order to stimulate the hype.

The Social Marketing Media Crapola Vocabulary explained:

- Social graph:
  Drawing virtual relationships just like a rainbow virtually

- Social media optimization:
  Make organized noise in Social Media

- User generated content:
  Hoping your users generate content as you aren’t able to create content

- Followers:
  Probably your competitors wanting to know what you are up to

- Mash-up:
  Mix some content of others for content marketing when not being capable to create content

- Blogosphere:
  The heaven universe strictly for bloggers where you cannot enter

- Micro-blogging:
  When writing more than 140 characters is a challenge to you

- Meme:
  Only your negative or bad news will spread through the Internet

- Vanity monitoring:
  Problematic Internet message monitoring when social media marketing goes wrong

- Enterprise 2.0:
  In the sixties we had Star Ship Enterprise now we have a virtual enterprise to boldly go …

- CRM 2.0:
  The electronic Rolodexes trying to re-invent themselves

- Social CRM:
  Monitoring and repairing dumb and wrong things about your company on the Internet

- Wiki:
  As long Wikis don’t leak it’s OK for you but if a Wiki leaks then problems

- Crowdsourcing:
  Hoping the crowd will do the job you don’t want to do

- Social search:
  Searching on all of the crapola web services

You have probably learned nothing but maybe you had a laugh

Boring B2b Marketing

In most cases B2B marketing is just boring.
- Nothing exciting
- Anything impressive
- No emotion
- No fun
- Not to be remembered

B2B Marketing describes briefly the problem, the solution and presents the facts and figures and maybe some references or testimonials.
If a potential customer is not completely interested there is little chance he will remember the brand, the product or the benefits.

B2b marketing wants to portray an image of seriousness, reliability and trustworthiness of the products or services and the company which leads to boring marketing.

Personal instead of boring

For most companies it would be too daring to bring excitement and emotion.
Moreover the goal for seriousness and trust could be lost

So instead of boring marketing automation programs that are way too generic, bringing relevant and personalized messages to each of your potential customers would be a great step.
What you could do for client oriented marketing:
- Website that provides relevant information while visiting
- Emails that deal with the problem or need of a specific company
- Re-targeting companies visiting the website with an email message that matches their shown interest
- Cold calls with the appropriate questions and messages

These methods are likely to engage your potential customers of your target market without the immediate need for excitement, emotion or fun.

Entertaining for capturing the audience

If you really want to capture a large part of your target market at once your marketing will need to be entertaining in order to have the audience listening.

Even the serious Microsoft achieved it in B2B:

How boring is your B2B marketing ?
What are you going to do about it ?

Sales people should focus on the revenue. They shouldn’t focus on the bottom line. Focusing on the top line is already enough of a challenge which is really hard to achieve.

The salesman who focuses on the top and bottom line is called a CEO. If you are in sales you are not the CEO: so stick to your business.

Salesmen sell to customers for getting money in return of products or services.
The CEO needs to sell to investors for getting or staying funded.

The CEO sells to VC’s, investors, bankers and shareholders to keep the invested money or to get more money invested in the company for executing the future plans of the company.
It is a different kind of selling all together as it is much broader than just the products or the services of a company. The CEO has to take the entire economy into account.

Just like salesmen are supported by pre-sales and sales engineers, the CEO is supported by his CFO for the details of the numbers. The CEO needs to sell a vision and a strategy in order to explain how to move forward with the company.

Problems can emerge when the CEO starts selling to potential customers as it is likely he will start using his vision and strategy for selling products or services. That might be very interesting but is unlikely to match the current needs, demands and interests of the prospects.
Only in case the customer requires having the vision and the strategy of the CEO explained then the CEO can do his pitch. Such a requirement is, besides a few exceptions, only with existing customers.

It even can get worse: when during the meeting with the potential customer, the CEO feels he is not closing the deal and wants to score. His only option to win the deal is to give a big discount and he has the power to do so.
This is exactly what the salesman didn’t want to happen: selling on price – resulting in a lower commission.

In most cases it is better to keep the CEO away from prospects and customers due to his different pitch to a different audience.

What’s your experience with your CEO selling to customers ?

No scaling business model
If your company has a high similarity between the growth in revenue and the growth in employees, as on these charts shown, then you as salesman have a problem.

The scalability of the company is non-existing.
This can be any kind of business. The more revenue the more manpower.

No scaling commissions
Even if marketing tries hard or harder to generate more qualified leads and sales reps. to close more deals, the result will be an increase in employees while the bottom line will remain steady.

The salesmen in such companies will also experience this scalability problem as their commissions will not scale. The company cannot afford to pay higher commissions to their sales reps. as they need to keep costs under control.
Moreover in most cases the increase of revenue will only come from more salesmen in this type of companies. More people in sales will create additional overhead (managers) resulting even lower profits.

Companies with a scaling businesses can easily pay higher commissions for reaching higher targets as they have the money to spend and more revenue means more profit for the founders, owners or investors.

Your 2 options:
In the case your company has such a scaling problem you have 2 options:
- If you want to make real money in sales you will need to change company
- If you just want to live your life and earn a steady salary then stay with the company
Just be aware that the profit of non-scaling businesses are strongly affected by inflation.

Are you in a scaling business ? Does your commission scales big ?