The salesman acting like businessman

The reverse marketer on a trade show looks like a businessman, talks like a businessman and acts like a businessman. In reality he’s a salesman looking for prospects.

He walks up and down the aisle chatting up exhibitors. He poses questions at almost every booth as if he is interested in everything. However he is not as his only goal is selling, not buying.

The skills of the reverse marketer

His skills are:
- To ask relevant questions relating the products of the exhibitor
- To manage getting a management level executive engaged into the conversation
- To turn the conversation into a sales pitch for the products or services he represents
- To obtain valuable contacts for progressing his sales cycle once back in the office

The challenges of the reverse marketer

His challenges are huge as he:
- Only has one shot at each company with a booth
- Needs to come up with very specific questions that requires the involvement of upper management to answer
- Has to generate enough interest in a very short amount of time
- Has to pick or present the solution matching the needs of the company
- Has to make the timely proposition during his sales pitch
- Must obtain a contact in order to continue his sales cycle after the trade show
- Has a limited amount of time for each booth due to the high number of companies on the trade show floor

The reverse salesman is a top notch salesman.

Have you been a reverse marketer on a trade show?
Do you have any reverse marketing tips?

Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
Travel the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something

This is an extract of the lyrics of “Sweet Dreams” from The Eurythmics.

However business travel is not like sweet dreams at all.

Scheduling

You need to make, schedule and get your appointments confirmed.
The more people in the meetings the harder. Moreover your time is running out as departure is approaching every day.
It is a challenge to get your meetings planned and not to waste too much time between meetings.

Bookings

Then comes the hassle of planning your travel itinerary and book your hotels using the Internet.
The hotels have to be near the meeting locations, be affordable and the need of WiFi – preferably free WiFi.

Getting there locally

The next step is finding out where the locations of the meetings are and how to get there.
Getting to the meeting used to be relatively simple as most office buildings where in the city center: just take a taxi in order to get there.

a) Commuting: Now businesses are spread all over a city and its’ suburbs hence a travel becomes commuting in a city and its’ suburbs.

b) Public transport: As traffic jams in large cities are more common than exceptional, a journey with a cab has become a hazardous expedition for arriving on time. Hence the use of public transport is the obvious choice for getting on time to meetings;

c) Knowing around However using public transport requires even more planning for each itinerary and knowing around in big cities.

Packing

Finally before going on the business trip you need to pack your luggage with all the clothing, documents and portable. Making the choice between traveling light with only hand luggage or travel heavy with a suitcase.

Business travel

Then you can go to travel the world and seven seas to hardly see anything as you move from meeting to meeting, with in between airports, airplanes, public transport, the occasional taxi, reception halls, lobbies and hotel rooms.
In the end business travel is not so sweet.
Keep your head up, movin’ on
Movin’ on!

Send later

In most email clients it is possible to send an email on a later time:
- Outlook: go to “Options” – “Message options” – then use “Do not deliver before”
- Thunderbird: Add-on Send Later 3 will allow you to specify when to send
- Eudora: use the Queue feature
- Apple mail: apparently not possible
- GMail: requires installing Boomerang for GMail

Convenience

Sending emails later is very convenient for not forgetting to send emails to suspects, leads, prospects and customers after a first email.
You typically send a first email after an event in order to follow-up:
- During and after a free trial (which we use it for)
- After a first encounter
- After a meeting
- After a purchase
When the first email misses its’ goal, no impact or no response, then on one or more scheduled times different emails will be send. Of course if the first email gets the communication started, you can easily delete the further planned emails.

This sending later feature can also be used for sending emails to your suppliers or business consultants in order to find out progress or status of project or product.

Scheduling emails upfront

Typically you have one or more standard follow-up emails on a certain event.
If you have to keep track of when to send the different emails to different people it is almost certain this will fail as you will forget or it will require a large amount of overhead to your work as you need to keep track of what has been send and still needs to be send.
Instead you can prepare the series of emails in one go to the same person.

Send emails later power

The power of sending emails later are:
- You can schedule one or a series of emails in order to keep the contact or relation going.
- You will not forget to send
- You increase your efficiency as you don’t have to look-up the email address and name for each email of the series
- Your addressee will get the idea that you are organized, focused on your business and care about them
- You can have a pounding marketing message for your suspects, leads or even customers
- You can re-think what you have written before the email is send which reduces the risk of emailing emotional or angry missives that you may later regret.

Why aren’t you using send emails later for your business ? Or are you already using it ?

When we think of branding, we consider this a generic for all companies. However there are at least four types of awareness:
- The solution market awareness
- The brand awareness
- The market leader branding
- The vendor specific awareness

Solution awareness

If people aren’t aware of a certain solution type then they will not be searching for this type of solutions. Even if they find your solution to their problem, due to the unknown it is likely they will not proceed for further investigation or inquiring for further information as this type of solution is just too new or too disruptive for them. You will need very compelling arguments and benefits in order to get them as lead.

Hence having a widely recognized market leader or two market leaders is a big plus for even the medium or smaller players in this market as they do create the awareness with the larger public. The audience will be listening to market leaders as they are recognized.
As a smaller player: just hope you can lift on the awareness generated by the market leaders by offering the alternative to the large players.

If there are no widely recognized leaders in your niche market, you have an uphill battle, a problem difficult to solve as people don’t know this type of solutions and have no well-know reference brand they take for granted.

Brand awareness

This is the typical case as your brand needs to stand out in a crowded market of well-known solution type.
Brand awareness is utmost important in order to differentiate from the rest of the crowd.
Whatever can set your brand apart, stand out and create awareness will have a positive effect on your lead generation and eventually on your sales.
Your challenge is to differentiate fro the market leaders and stand out from the rest of the competitors.

Market leader branding

being a market leader can be beneficial as people do think instantly of your brand when looking or selecting a solution, but still you need to have a positive brand image.
One of the problems of being a market leader is that smaller customers might think they are too small to be considered or to really taken care of as they are just small fish. Your marketing branding has to make sure you also care and respect the smaller customers.

Additionally market leaders have more overhead, longer decision lines, slower moving, more administration, less personal and perhaps even less innovative. All due to the size and the levels of management involved in a bigger business, which leads to less focus on clients or being less flexible. The brand image of a dynamic innovative company needs to be displayed.
Being a market leader is a challenge too, as all smaller companies will search for flaws and gaps in the offering in order to fill and to differentiate themselves.

The vendor specific awareness

If you are a reseller or even a distributor, the awareness of the supplier brand is utmost important and beneficial for your company. However your vendor / reseller name needs to get connected with the big brand. People need to think about your company when they think of the big brand for local supplies.
Your challenge is to get your reseller or distributor name connected with the big brand.

What kind of branding applies to your company ?

Many website just miss what they are intended for.
Often a first time visitor will not know what the company is selling or proposing.

Did you really looked at your website since its’ last update ?

Relevant content

The content of your website needs to be relevant to the visitors that are looking for solutions to solve their problem or improve their business that you can provide.

Still your website has several goals:
- To explain the solutions you provide to certain problems
- To present the solutions and products
- To define the business you are into: developer, manufacturer, reseller, agent, service provider
- To generate leads
- To inform customers

And has to address three different target groups:
- Potential customers
- Customers
- Ex-customers

Capturing attention

However the most important is that when people are looking for a solution and have found your website, they read a part of the landing page and decide to continue visiting other pages of your website as it has triggered their attention.
Thus in less than 10 seconds (maybe even 5) they need to see or read what they have been looking for or make the link between your proposition and their researched problem. That last case is when they were looking for solving a problem with a solution they had in mind but you offer a alternative method of solving their problem. Maybe this is a bit too much for a first visit, so you need to make sure they remember you: hence the need for something that has an impact on them and stays with them during their further search on the Internet.

For customers and ex-customers the website needs to inform about new developments or new products in order to trigger their attention, which can be one step to far for potential customers who are just getting introduced to the solutions and products of your company.

Lead generation beyond call to action

Once the website has caught the attention of potential customers and convinced them to spend their valuable time on your website the next step is to convert the visitor into a lead.

Even if you have implemented call to action buttons according to the rules, by:
- View the products
- White paper downloads
- Free trial
- Call today
- Signup for information
- Contact us
It still is tricky to achieve as most visitors want to stay incognito instead of contacting you by email, call of fill out an online form. And even if they download a white paper they will mainly use an email address from a free provider.
As the visitor will not contact you, it is up to you to contact those visitors that have shown sufficient interest. You need to re-target your visiting companies with the suiting message based upon the pages they visited and the search terms used with the advantage that this will be timely due their current interest.

How good is your website at these requirements?

Content is king ?

Long have we believed content is king.
But it isn’t.

One of the problems facing content marketing is to come up with interesting and different content which is a real challenge. There aren’t so much possibilities to have interesting content that draws in the masses or the target market. Much chance your content marketing is failing.

Entertaining content

However the most successful people in publishing or blogging aren’t so much into exposing unique and different content, but they are good in presenting the content in a very entertaining format or form. In most cases they are not innovative or disruptive as this would be too challenging for most content consumers or for most of their audience, but they have the skills to write, edit, draw or create content which is entertaining.

Not entertaining innovative or disruptive content:
One can find innovative or disruptive content in PhD theses but hardly anyone will ever read it as it is about the mere or hard facts without any form of entertainment.

Plain entertaining content
At the other side is the content of the gossip magazines that seem to be very entertaining as most people read them frequently, although there is nothing new, disruptive, innovative or special about it.

Content isn’t king but the entertaining presentation is. Hence marketers will have to be entertainers or will entertainers become marketers again – like P.T. Barnum?

Is your content entertaining ?

When real estate prices started to rise, blogging emerged from the underground of geeks.
When the valuation of real estate was at its’ highest, the interest for blogging was the highest too. This was probably due to the fact many were becoming rich thanks to the ever increasing housing prices. People seemed to have time to read blogs on the Internet (instead of working hard) as it was the new thing.

When the real estate prices started to decline people turned to shorter information: Twitter. As if they hadn’t the time anymore to read long blogs.

By now the situation has turned really ugly with many people ‘underwater’ (at least 11mio), probably resulting in people not even have the time to read a blog or to follow someone on Twitter as they need to work for a living.
Hence the decline of blogging ? Or has the new just wore off ?

Has blogging had its’ time? For sure real estate prices won’t grow anymore like they did before.

How about you and reading blogs ?

Interruption Marketing is dying

Marketing is getting into a slump as:
- People click less on online ads
- People are less influenced by print ads
- Trade shows are in decline
- Press releases aren’t read any more
- Industry magazine have an ever smaller distribution
- People attend conferences in order to sell
- Email marketing has obtained declining response rates
- Cold calling using call-operators isn’t effective at all

Throughout the day people are bombarded with marketing messages, which have an ever lowering impact on the buying decisions. The more marketing messages the less interest they get, the lesser they influence.

Content Marketing: the Marketing 911

Moreover people aren’t waiting for the right or suiting marketing campaign to pass along. instead people search themselves on the Internet to find answers and solutions to solve their problems, issues, grow their revenue, reduce their costs or eliminate risks.
Moreover they not just use the Internet at the beginning of any purchase process, but throughout the entire purchase and decision cycle the Internet and websites are being consulted.
In order to address these requirement, only Content Marketing can solve this and rescue Marketing like 911.
By using Content Marketing, Marketing publishes and distributes your solutions and methods on problems and issues on the Internet in the hope they get found, read and effectively influences the purchase decision in a near future.

Marketing mentality shift

Creating the content is only one aspect requiring to be comprehensive and of high quality. The main problem is the mentality shift in the Marketing department and management as Content Marketing is not about selling but informing, helping and educating the potential customer. Besides being informative and useful the content also needs to be entertaining as else the audience won’t listen and loose attention quickly. They won’t take the effort of reading through the entire article or information bucket.
So instead of imposing messages upon the potential customers, Marketing has to think as an entertainer in order to get potential customers reading or consuming the content and take it for granted.

Of course one issue remains with Content Marketing: when people of companies consume your content, you are not aware who is actually reading your content. All your effort for Content marketing can be wasted if no-one poses you a question or sends his contact details to you. In order to overcome this, solutions exist.

Is your company ready for Content Marketing with a mentality shift of Marketing ?

The opposites:
- Branding is only effective over a long time frame (years)
- The CEO wants ROI in just a few quarters

Branding benefits

Branding gives the potential customer a preconceived notion of what the company and its’ products represents. A brand of a company is the physical, rational and emotional connections one makes with a company.
Once a recognized brand name established, it will create a trust level which takes away some of the perceived risk while buying products or services. In the end branding will generate more leads, increase the number of RFI’s received and eventually more sales.
The problem is that branding takes a long time to build.

The CEO ROI

On the other hand the CEO has other challenges: he needs to make profit each quarter or at least make ends meet. In a public traded company this pressure will be even greater.
As such the CEO wants ROI (Return On Investment) in 2 or maximum 3 quarters. Anything longer than a year with no predictive and easy to measure results is a danger for him as he might not be around anymore at the time the branding becomes effective. That would be investing for his successor.

Short marketing actions with predictable and measurable outcome like email marketing or advertising will get the approval of the CEO, whereas long term investments like branding and even the company website will not get approval easily.

Persuasion into Branding

If your company has no habit of investing money into branding, it will be difficult to start with branding as the return on investment can only be expected over a very long time: years not quarters. Most the planning horizon of most CEO’s is in quarters instead of years.

Convincing the CEO to invest in branding will require:
- Industry benchmarks
- Showing how the company and its’ products are currently being perceived
- Address intangible benefits that pleases his ego by portraying he will be reminded for the vision he had when investing in branding.

Is your CEO willing to invest on branding ?

Brand name and domain name

Investing time for finding or creating a good brand name is obvious as changing it afterwards is expensive and will cost business.
It has always been a challenge as the brand name has to meet all kinds of constraints (including the interpretation in foreign languages).
It is logic to use this brand name also for your company or product website for brand management, as it will help generating more leads and thus business due to the fact people are more likely to find your website.

Brand naming help

In order to find or create a new brand name that still expresses a product group or a feature you can use online tools like Symnym which at the same time will verify if these names are still available as domain names.
Always be careful when using domain name verification web services, while they might just order the domain name before you can.

Scarcity of Domain names

It is still important to get the .com for your brand and if possible the .net, .biz, .org too – and also the domain name with the extension of your home country.

After the Dot.Com era brand naming has become an even more bigger challenge due to lack of availability of a domain name for your brand name as many .com names have been taken by all kinds of opportunists or no longer existing companies or products.
Hence the availability of good brand names are have become limited.

If the domain name has been taken, you probably can negotiate a price for it. However as your brand name is not yet established it is better to look for another brand name instead.

Never forget to check upon the availability of a Twitter account.