E-Zine 2/10
Feb 2010 E-Zine
Boy was I blown away when I saw that over 1,200 people downloaded the complimentary preview teleclass mp3 call for the Speakers Summit http://ping.fm/thJw8 Get Booked at Colleges with Brent Scarpo, Jack Barnard and myself last week. It’s a hot topic and Brent and Jack gave us great content. We learned what topics are hot in the high school and college market. This was just the tip of the iceberg. Brent promises to share more with us on how to get paid gigs in the college market and who to call on.
Are you investing in your speaking/marketing career? You can transform your speaking as training does make difference The Speakers Summit10 The theme is Position, Prospect, Prospect- The Road Ahead is our annual event and here are some of the topics our experts will be sharing with the audience so that you can bring your message to the heart and mind of the audience. BTW: No hard sell, we are content driven and reasonably priced.
- Discover your niche that suits your passion and skills
- Create content that meets the needs of your audience.
- Leverage Social Networking skills to grow your business
- Get Paid to speak at High Schools & Colleges
- Make an extra $250,000 to $1,000,000 a year with high impact coaching programs
- Repurpose, produce and distribute content that can be shared and extends the voice of your brand, product and company
- Prospecting for speaking engagements: Systematize the booking process
- Bypass Gatekeepers and Voicemail & Reach Your Prospect Directly
- Explore why video is one of the best forms of viral marketing
- From Passion to Profits
- Think and Grow Rich
Expert Presenters: Jack Barnard, Brent Scarpo, Greg S. Reid, Sabrina Gibson, Joel Bauer, Adam Urbanski, Ursula Mentjes, Susan Levin, Barbara Niven, Nancy Solari, Michael Macfarlane, Mark Mikelat, Deborah Deras, Keith Ivey.
Read the program/register. Save $100 sign up by Feb 26.
Today I am sharing to articles with you one from Ursuala Mentjes, Why Didn’t I Get That Sale? Ursula will be speaking at the Summit PROSPECTING FOR SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS, Master the Art of Speaking and Selling with Intention.
Let me know how I can assist you. Give me a call for a comp session.
Susan Levin, Speaker Services, 310-822-4922 PT
PS Feb 8 – Comp preview teleclass for Speakers Summit discussion: Online Video Strategies Register here
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New Speakers for Feb 2010
Anastasios Nestoras, Ph.D.
Sports medicine expert presents The Training Revolution, a streamlined, cutting-edge system that takes the drudgery and guesswork out of fitness and brings back the fun.
Fitness, Health, Healthy Lifestyle
Barbara Flood
Business Executive Life Coach shows how to hear and accept life’s call to embark on your personal hero or heroine’s journey, tap your greatest strengths, and find balance between personal humility and professional will.
Baby Boomers, Business Spirituality, Inspirational, Motivational
Wade “Biskit” Hatch
Motivational Wrangler shows how to break free from the herd mentality and head down the freedom trail to the life you deserve.
Change, Motivational, Time Management, Work/Life Balance
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Speakers Community Teleclass
Teleclasses are free for Speakers’ Community Members. Not a member? Join Now to access the calls with my special FREE 2- month Speakers’ Community trial. Past members can re-join at regular monthly rate
Feb 11 Media Interviews that Gets You Gigs, Clients with Gayl Murphy
What if you go on TV and you don’t know what to do?
Can you “tell it to sell it?” If you can’t tell your story (who you are and what you do) to one person in 10 seconds or less, how can you tell it to a million?
Did you know that business networking is exactly the same as being on the “Today” show?
What if the Rachel Ray Show called you today, for a last minute replacement slot on the show for tomorrow, would you be prepared?
Can you pitch your business to anyone, any place, anytime or anywhere, regardless of whether or not they fit the profile of your typical target consumer? If not, why not?
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Introducing Seed Nurturing post from Modern B2B Marketing
One thing you’ll notice about most lead nurturing campaigns is the fact that they usually take place after prospects land on your site and enter your database. However, what happens when qualified prospects visit your site or social media sites anonymously where you don’t necessarily have their names or e-mails?
This is where seed nurturing comes into play. Seed nurturing is the process of building relationships with qualified prospects before you have their contact information.
It comes down to is this: prospects are educating themselves long before you actually identify them by landing on your corporate Web site as anonymous visitors, and researching your products and services through third-party resources, word-of-mouth recommendations, and social media sites. Just because you can’t identify these individuals doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified prospects — and because of this, you must nurture them just as you would the known contacts in your database.
If you succeed at this, you will stay top of mind with your prospects as they educate themselves and move through the early stages of their buying process. As a result, they will come to you when they are ready to engage with a sales rep, and you will create a steady flow of highly qualified inbound leads. If you ignore the requirement to build relationships with these very early stage prospects, you’re yielding this opportunity to more agile competitors who will scoop these savvy prospects out from under you.
Seed nurturing best practices
Personalize interactions with anonymous visitors
When prospects visit your website anonymously, you can and should still take advantage of the visit to deepen the relationship with them with relevant and personalized content. You may not know their name and email address, but you certainly can know a great deal about their interests and behaviors. First time visitors can see different offers than repeat visitors. Visitors that use specific search terms can see different promotions that generic visitors. Visitors who visit specific pages and show specific interests can see even more specialized content and offers. Using these techniques, you can design “drip marketing” campaigns that help buyers educate themselves before they ever share their contact information with you. For more on this, see the on-demand webinar Supercharge your Demand Generation with Personalization (an oldie but a goodie).
Make valuable content freely available on your site and over social media.
By eliminating the need for registration in order to obtain your whitepapers, eBooks, and other valuable content, you are making the effort to build relationships with people before you have them in your database. You may be thinking to yourself, “If I do this, I’ll be wasting valuable offers on people I’ll never be able to identify.” On the contrary, you will strengthen your readership, and these dedicated yet anonymous leads will likely come to you as inbound leads once their levels of interest are high enough. Moreover, whether you like it or not, in most cases the information is already out there on social sites, so you may as well embrace the trend rather than fight it. David Merman Scott writes more on this topic in Say NO to squeezing your buyers.
Use social media to build a rock-solid reputation that builds credibility and trust with prospects.
One of the biggest obstacles in the B2B purchasing process is the feeling of risk that overcomes B2B buyers, causing them to behave irrationally during the decision-making process. Seed nurturing plays a key role in diminishing this risk by acting as a vehicle for you to build your reputation as a thought leader and gain the trust of early stage prospects. For example, you can use Twitter to inform people of your views on developments in your industry or show your ability to solve specific business pains by becoming an “Expert” on LinkedIn. B2B buyers trust thought leaders who can demonstrate they understand buyer problems and how to solve them. While a reputation of thought leadership will never be as “risk-reducing” as a personal referral, it is a great way to build awareness and increase your chances that the prospect will respond to future demand generation efforts.
Conclusion
While these ideas represent a departure from what you may consider traditional lead generation techniques, they will help you plant the seeds for highly qualified prospects to reach out to you when they are ready, and once this happens, you can rest easy knowing that you’ve nurtured them appropriately and gained their trust as you would through a traditional drip marketing campaign.
How have you incorporating seed nurturing into your marketing mix?
Posted by Jon Miller on January 27, 2010 in Demand Generation , Lead Nurturing , Modern B2B Marketing , Social Media | Introducing Seed Nurturing
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Why Didn’t I Get That Sale? By Ursula Mentjes
Throughout my years as a Sales Coach, one of the questions that my clients will sometimes ask me is, “Why didn’t I get that sale?”
I say, “sometimes” because no one wants to really talk about lost sales. We don’t even like to admit that we didn’t get the sale.
But I want to tell you that sometimes not getting the sale isn’t a bad thing. And, there are things you can do to reduce the amount of sales you don’t get.
The reality is you aren’t going to get every sale. Nor would you want to. It is important to remember, though, that selling begins in your mind.
When I wrote Selling with Intention, my primary goal was to teach Sales Professionals and Entrepreneurs that they had a lot more control over selling then they thought. And that was the key-more than they thought. Selling begins in your mind, and when you “get that” at a deep level, selling can become effortless.
Think back to the last time you didn’t get a sale. How did the interaction begin? How did it end? My guess is that it was one of the reasons I am going to share with you below.
Four Reasons Why You Didn’t Get the Sale:
You didn’t ask.
Let’s face it. Sometimes you can have a phenomenal conversation with your prospect, and it feels like everything is going perfectly until the end of your time together. You can feel the time creeping up on you, the hour is almost over, but you haven’t asked for the sale yet. Fear creeps up, strangling your vocal cords, and before you ask for the sale you find yourself scurrying out to your car, trying to get your key into the ignition as quickly as possible. Looking back you know you could have had the sale, but you didn’t ask.
Next time you are wrapping up a great appointment with a prospect, save time at the end to take a breath and then simply offer at least three solutions for them to choose from. You will probably be surprised to find out that by simply offering choices, you WILL get more sales. I promise!
You didn’t set your intention.
Not setting your intention is a lot like not asking for the sale. I always encourage my clients to set their intention ahead of time and actually visualize the sales process from start to finish. Being intentional about selling is like “assuming the sale”-or expecting that you are going to get it. Notice how you feel when you “expect” something to happen versus just “thinking” or “hoping” you are getting it.
I recommend that you expect the sale only when you are working with your Target Clients. Otherwise you will feel like you are just forcing the situation rather than letting it unfold. Set your intention and expect to get the sale!
You didn’t really want it.
Deep down, at a gut level, you KNOW when a prospect who is sitting in front of you isn’t a Target Prospect. A Target Prospect is a prospect that fits your ideal client profile and needs and or wants (or both) what you are selling. One of the main reasons you set an appointment with a prospect is for you to get to know them and for them to get to know you. During the process of assessing their wants and needs, you will figure out whether or not you really CAN solve their problem or help them with their products or services.
Maybe the last time you didn’t get the sale was because you didn’t really want it. You recognized that for whatever reason, this prospect wasn’t a good fit. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay because you did what was in the best interest of the prospect.
You didn’t build rapport.
People buy from Sales Professionals they LIKE, KNOW and TRUST. It takes a different amount of time to build rapport depending on personality types. My friend, Laura Bruno, of The Referral Institute, teaches a great class called Room Full of Referrals. This class teaches you the different personality types and how to sell to each one. One of the reasons you might not have gotten the sale is because you didn’t take the time to build rapport with your prospect.. You can tell whether or not you have built rapport because they will either seem completely disconnected from what you are talking about, or they will be engaged. Taking time to build rapport can often be the difference between gaining a new client, or shaking your head and walking away wondering what just happened.
Action Item: Think back to the last time you didn’t get the sale. Which reason above most accurately describes it? What could you do differently next time? Can you think of a client that you think might have said yes if you had asked for the sale? Make a commitment to yourself to call that client and set another appointment. And then ask for the sale!
Not getting the sale often makes room for the next “big client” that is trying to get to you. The next time you don’t get a client, and you know it was because they weren’t a fit, just be grateful. I can almost guarantee you that the next one is right around the corner!
Ursula Mentjes, M.S., ACC is the founder of Sales Coach Now, and the author of Selling with Intention and One Great Goal. Ms. Mentjes has helped clients double and triple their sales revenue in as short as two months! If you want to do the same, then visit her web-site at www.salescoachnow.com
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