GEEWIZ NEWS – MARCH

For many of us another 90 day quarter comes to an end at the end of this month, and hopefully if you tried some of the ideas we mentioned in last month’s newsletter you’ll have had a good review of your business and have created some strategic strategies for increasing your marketing effort and/or your sales effectiveness.  Here are some ideas for increasing your business during the next 90 days.

Referrals – All of us know we should be getting referrals and many of us get word of mouth referrals that come through their business door really without any effort.  However, referrals are your cost-effective way of both gaining new clients, customers and also increasing the relationships with existing clients who will happily give you a referral if they are asked or prompted.

There is only one way to get a referral and that is ASK.  However you need to prompt the client as to the type of referral that best suits your business, eg, business associate – in the same kind of business as you, a supplier to your business, a distribution company, a business-to-business service client, etc, as your client when prompted will very quickly think of a category of customer and a customer’s name, but when unprompted and just asked ‘Do you have any referrals you could give us?’ – invariably the answer will be no.

Once you have got the referral act on it fast, preferably within 24 hours make contact with the referral and introduce yourself and make reference to the client who has given you the referral.

Referral Rewards - A very good idea is to reward the people who give you referrals with a thank you.  Most common these days is a double thank you.  That is a small gift for the introduction and the name and then a larger gift basket or thank you gift when you actually commenced some business and written up your first order.  This generally means that the client who gave you the referral knows that you have not only acted on their referral but also it got some business so his friend or business associate will be real happy with his recommendation.

Task Idea: Identify 12 clients that you could ask for referrals – one a week over the next 12 weeks for building your relationships.

Web-marketing – Many companies confuse web-marketing with web-design – the two are both entirely separate.  Web-design is the creation of a very attractive web-site with all of the customer interactivity, customer information sources, referrals, and perhaps even a method for examining your products and placing orders.  BUT GOOD CREATIVE IS NO GOOD UNLESS IT IS SEEN BY SOMEBODY.

Web-Marketing is the process whereby a skilled person ensures that your website is marketed to the search engines in such a manner that the search engines will keep a record of the address and when requested by somebody on the web for information about your category of products or services show you, as an ideal web-site logo and take a look at.

Many clients, I have found, that have wonderful creative web-sites do not have active marketing plans in place to have their web-site shown to the search engines. 

Here’s a tip for NZ Companies – go into www.search.nz or www.access.nz which are two very popular NZ search engines that are used by major overseas search engines such as Yahoo and AltaVista and plug in one of your products or your company products or services and see for yourself how you rate!  If you don’t come up in the top 5 or 10 there is something wrong with the way your site is being marketed to the search engines.

If you are paying a simple hosing fee of perhaps $30.00 per month to have your web-site hosted on a server it will not be being marketed – all it will be doing is like being parked in a car garage waiting for people to come into the parking building to see if there are cars inside, this is not marketing your web-site!!

Typical monthly marketing fees seem to range from $80.00 through to $150.00 per month whereby your web-site is actively marketed using all the different techniques to the top 500 search engines out of approximately 1500 search engines and many more access bases which review sites on the web. 

A dangerous precedent has now been set by Yahoo which is now starting to ask for fees to examine web-sites that have been presented to it for inclusion on Yahoo.

Yahoo has indicated that only those web-sites which pay a fee will be considered for inclusion on their search engine, the payment of the fee does not guarantee you’ll be placed in Yahoo – this is dependent on the human interface examining your web-site and deciding whether it is suitable for inclusion in their range.  This could be the tip of the iceberg once major search engines start charging people to have their web-sites looked at and displayed or advertised for a time period, eg a month, the whole cost of marketing on the web will be totally different.  Have a talk to your host server about the activities they can offer you, both long and short term, for marketing your web-site to attract more customers. 

One marketing organisation I can recommend is www.webmark.co.nz   who do a very good job looking after my own web-site and many clients I have recommended to them and they will be happy to give you an indication of their range of services.

A very good newsletter with lots of practical tips for doing your own web-site marketing is Busweb gazette, which you can subscribe to on: www.busweb2000.com.  Some tips from the latest Busweb gazette focus on speed of loading of your web-site, special text sentences at the top of your home page, special discounts or special offers that appear very fast, the addition of quick links when people are in your site if they want to go to other areas of your site or other sites that are associated with you, the benefits of pop-ups, and would you believe it, the benefits of seasonal weather patterns appearing on your home page, eg snow falling, bright sunshine, etc. The writer, Jim Daniels, who is one of the most practical people I’ve found for web-marketing hints.

Sales Tips – I recently presented a highly-rated seminar on sales remuneration programme tips and for the benefit of those who were unable to attend the seminar – here’s some great ideas for remuneration that motivate your sales team.

The first thing to recognise in remuneration is that you have to identify the balance between service requirements, such as building and retaining customer relationships and sorting through quality control problems, etc, without necessarily getting an order and direct sales activity.

If your sales role is heavily service-oriented then your remuneration programme will have to be salary-based with a very small incentive.  If your programme is heavily sales-oriented where the sales person can influence the getting of their budget by their own efforts then you can have very high incentive or at-risk rewards.

Typically, in the NZ environment, because the banking system does not like commission only sales people, you will very rarely find successful commission only remuneration programmes.  This is different in Australia and the United States where the banking financial mortgage lenders will quite happily accept your previous 12 month’s commission statements as a firm example of your earnings.

Over the last few years more and more sales people have accepted that it is in their advantage to have rewards based on their own selling skills, particularly if there are achieving budget or exceeding budget.

These sort of rewards can include a commission on sales, a share of the profit percentage of sales made, nominated $ value figures for achieving certain tasks such as gaining new customers, selling selected products or services, achieving a desired range of calls or prospects, in fact any target you care to nominate.  Other incentives include rewards every 90 days (3 monthly) for achieving the 90 day budget – such things as a weekend away, a holiday destination travel, generally these are for the sales person and their partner, with a total $ value limit as to the all-up costs.  Other incentives include cash bonuses, specific gift items, and even instant reward points which can be redeemed for merchandise.

Here are some structures you may like to consider and review with your own organisation –

Distribution company selling products to other businesses. 

Base salary 50% of earnings. 

Incentive commission based on all sales for the month. 

New customer acquisition bonus $ cash amount.

90 day bonus trips or weekends away to holiday destinations.

Sales person of the month - hard cash budget achievement award in two stages.  50% if the sales person got their budget and the other 50% if the total company team got their budget.

Service supply company selling specialist services to business and retail customers.

Base salary 70% of package.

New customer % of profit on opening orders purchases.

Commission on sales once 95% of budget has been achieved.

Annual sales person of the year overseas trip for two.

Motor vehicle allowance rather than provision of a motor car.

Selling promotional giveaway products to businesses and corporates.

Low salary base 15% of total package.

Commission % on all sales made.

No minimum monthly budget.

Car and cellphone.

Monthly dinner for 2 for the best performing rep’s result.

Media sales rep selling to direct media buyers.

Retainer advance equal to 20% of expected remuneration package.

High incentive commission paid on media sales result over 50% of budget being achieved (if you don’t achieve 50% you don’t get paid the commission and your salary advance is all you get for the month which has to be paid back once you next have a good month.

Monthly entertainment allowance for entertaining clients, relative to budget for the 90 day quarter.

Task Activity – Review your service versus sales needs and then review the remuneration package you pay your sales reps to see whether you can motivate by fine-tuning and tweaking your total package to make it more attractive to gain efficiency in work.

Two top sales closes:

[1] Having introduced your client to the benefits of your products or services use this question -“When would you like to start enjoying the benefits?”

[2] The power of silence – after you have asked the question when would you like to start enjoying the benefits – don’t talk – just stay silent holding your pen over the paper waiting for your customer to make commitment.  The longest you’ll ever probably wait is 2-3 minutes, however, I’ve had the experience where I waited 45 minutes but I got a really high value order at the end of it.

Client Success Stories  

A recent seminar attendee at a seminar went out late afternoon at the completion of the seminar to make a client visit – used one of the techniques and was so rapt phoned me on my 0800 number to tell me how pleased they were that one of the techniques they learnt earlier that day that had succeeded in helping them close the sale. 

A professional services company that recently had suffered a down-turn in sales, put together a plan to have all of their customers called/visited on according to ABC categories on a set call-cycle over a period of 90 days plus added in all the prospects that they had on their data and a generation basis and programmed their sales reps to concentrate on customer calls, and quality evaluation of prospects.  The net result was a dramatic increase in the number of quotations and opportunities to secure work, reps concentrating on quality time with customers, and an improvement in the budget results.

Another client introducing software training services spent 3 hours recently practising their 30 minute corporate presentation using PowerPoint and other visual aids presentation to the board of their client company result a resounding congratulations and commitment to proceed with purchasing the software and the training package. 

An importer selling to a major retail chain who decided to fully-track all orders that were delivered to the retail chain, monitor the merchandising, and then present an evaluation report at the completion of 90 days to the main buyers of the retail chain had an 80% range extension increase as a result of the homework and success that had been planned.

A security monitoring and alarm company found that by offering a “free security evaluation check” as part of a introduction to the company’s services that their closure rate on sign-ups for security protection, alarm monitoring and even alarm sales went up a staggering 300%.  It proves that something free helps to provide the benefit awareness that you can use to close a sale.

A Wellington-based tourist attraction found after instituting a referral rewards programme, certificates of completion to their tourist participants, a photograph of the activity, that repeat bookings and referrals have gone up 25% and best of all the marketing cost to new customer acquisition has fallen over 30%.

On the Geewiz web-site: www.geewiz.co.nz., you will find two new changes.

The first is under the pop-up click button on Chamber of Commerce workshops is a list of all of the workshops and seminars I have for the year 2001 running at various Chambers of Commerce throughout NZ. 

Geewiz seminars will feature seminars that are at various locations on sales and marketing topics and you can book your participation for yourself or your team member directly on the internet via a safe credit card facility and what’s better – save on the seminar price by booking directly on the internet.  You receive confirmation by e-mail of the seminar as well as your participation being a real skill developer. 

If you’ve ever wondered who’s been on seminars have a look at the photos page which shows regular private company seminars and also Chamber of Commerce workshops and, who knows, you may even see yourself!

Did you know that on my web-site it’s free to post a job vacancy for a sales marketing or customer service role, or if you are looking for a job it’s free to post basic details about your skills and backgrounds and have a contact directly e-mail you or we can arrange confidentiality to have anyone interested e-mail myself who will then pass it on to you.  A number of clients have found that they have been able to fill their sales vacancies and also a number of top flight sales people have been able to get new roles.  If I can help all you have to do is e-mail to me the details.

In my general marketing activities, having worked with many clients on their marketing plans during January, putting together those vital sales and expense budgets in February, I am now working with many clients creating the implementation of those marketing plans broken down into 90 day quarterly targets and achievement goals.

Enjoy yourselves, and I hope you have some success overcoming those opportunities in your sales and marketing.      Richard P Gee