Posted by Brian Reed on June 24th, 2011 ~
0 Comments What I’ve learned the last 10 years of working with entrepreneurial small businesses is that this savvy group of marketers cares about three things: getting more customers, increasing sales and saving time.
Small businesses tend to focus most, if not all, of their marketing and sales resources on closing hot leads — which means the not-ready-to-buy-yet leads end up getting thrown out with yesterday’s garbage.
This “get more customers ” mentality, combined with a lack of time and resources, hurts small businesses and often causes some serious inefficiency in the marketing and sales funnel.
Are you suffering from this problem in your small business? There are five signs your marketing and sales funnel is leaking leads and losing customers.
1. You don’t use a lead magnet or Web form. You spend money and time driving traffic to your website, but then you bury your opt-in form. Or worse, you don’t offer a compelling lead magnet (e-book, webinar, demo, etc.) that people can opt in for at all. If you don’t have their contact information, you can’t follow up, and your conversions will be lower.
2. You don’t segment your prospect and customer list. I suggest you segment your contact list three ways: by lead source, by demographics and behaviors (links they clicked on in an email, webinars they attended, etc.) and by selected interests (what information they’ve opted to receive).
3. You don’t have a lead nurturing system in place. Without a system in place for nurturing and qualifying cold leads, your sales team waste hours on the phone educating prospects about the benefits your product or service provides. It helps to have an automated follow-up system in place so no lead gets lost in the cracks.
4. You batch and blast. Your lack of time forces you to send the same message at the same time to your entire contact list. While your prospects and customers may share similarities, this one-size-fits-all approach will train them to ignore you or opt out of your messages all together. Track what actions they’ve taken, what information they’ve opted in to receive and their buying history. Then send only relevant, highly targeted messages that you know they will want to receive. This strategy will result in better open rates, higher click-through rates and more lead-to-sale conversions.
5. Any nurturing ends after the sale. Once you get the customer, you get too busy to keep them happy, to upsell additional products or to ask for referrals. Automated follow-up can help satisfied customers remember to send their friends your way. Also be strategic about the products you upsell. If you have a system in place for tracking customer behavior, you can easily market your upsells to their needs. I know one small business that sends a pre-recorded voicemail automatically to new customers, thanking them for their recent purchase. That same business sends cookies when customers spend a certain amount of money (this is done automatically when the sale is processed). It’s about wowing your new customers so they don’t leave you for the competition.
Don’t fret if you find your marketing and sales funnel has some serious leaks. Just about every small business will experience and overcome these growing pains. In today’s world of technology, there are many marketing and sales tools available to help small businesses attract, nurture and convert leads.
Posted by Sara Lopez on June 24th, 2011 ~
0 Comments Two weeks ago, the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company threw itself into the rancorous partisan debate over the 2010 health care overhaul by publishing research that appeared to predict that many employers would dump their health insurance plans when the new law fully took effect in 2014. The new law offers subsidies to help low-income people purchase health insurance from state-run exchanges, and it also penalizes companies with more than 50 employees when they fail to offer those employees affordable coverage. As McKinsey notes, paying the penalty will cost less than providing the insurance, so companies could profit by socializing that cost.
Nonetheless, the finding was surprising, and controversial, because, as The Agenda reported in April 2010 (and also in 2009), most economists say they believe that a mix of market pressures, a tax incentive and the penalty will deter all but a relative handful of employers from casting off their health insurance plans. The Obama administration slammed McKinsey’s apparent prediction, and Senate Democrats demanded that the consultants release the proprietary methodology behind it. F
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Tags: Health, Health Insurance
Posted by Sara Lopez on June 24th, 2011 ~
0 Comments General stores and convenience stores got their names exactly because of the way they served their neighborhoods and communities. General products and goods at convenient locations, in case you ran out of milk or wanted to indulge your sweet tooth. Unfortunately, rogue website operators have mimicked this idea, brought it to the web, and started hawking counterfeit goods. Criminals have created rogue websites, such as , which serve as a virtual bazaar of counterfeit products. Not quite the same as the local, neighborhood convenience store.
This website sold knockoffs of numerous products, but perhaps the most striking counterfeit product sold on this website was cigarettes. WebVIPShopping.com didn’t mind making money off kids of any age, so it didn’t require age verification at checkout. And it shipped those cigarettes into the U.S. in ways that were almost certainly illegal. Further, the site did not charge for state excise taxes after completing a purchase, depriving our state and local governments of revenue to which they were legally entitled. Con
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Posted by Sara Lopez on June 24th, 2011 ~
0 Comments What’s the secret to success in entrepreneurship? Passion? Persistence? Doing what you like? Maybe it’s having a great business plan? I’ve written here that empathy might be the most important. But that’s a generalization too. What do you think?
Here’s the problem with that: there are no general rules. Scratch under the surface of entrepreneurship and you’ll find lots of people willing to put forth one characteristic or another. You can find examples for anything.
The people who strike off on their own are by definition people who split off from the group to do something different. So they don’t come in flocks, Generalizations don’t apply. I know people who fell in love with technology, a market, doing something they like to do, or even one or two who set out from the beginning with the specific goal of making millions of dollars. And I know people who started their own business mainly to be independent, set their own hours. I know people who did it just to prove that they were right when they said it could be done.
What reminded me of this was Susan Solivic’s What is Your Motivation? on Up and Run
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Posted by Nathan Torres on June 24th, 2011 ~
0 Comments More and more discussion of the proposed Department of Financial Regulation is focusing on the overlap of regulatory authority with the Attorney General’s office, rather than any cost-savings impact it might have on future budgets. I found this article by Jacob Gershman from the Wall Street Journal, Cuomo Reaches for Power, interesting in that it puts this proposed agency into a larger context about the role of the Executive in NY. There isn’t anything new on the DFR here, but I think it is always a good exercise to see any new development in a larger context, in this case, a possible reallocation of power between the Executive and Legislative branches of government.
Tags: Financial Regulation, Regulation
Posted by Brian Reed on June 23rd, 2011 ~
0 Comments Part 3 of a three-part review series: Book Reviewer Vacations With Kindle and Karma
In my last review, I was sharing my experiences with the Kindle while on vacation reading The Diamond Cutter, a heady business book by Geshe Michael Roach and Lama Christy McNally about Michael’s application of the Buddhist teachings he learned as he grew Andin International, a diamond company in New York City.
After finishing The Diamond Cutter, the Kindle promptly asked me if I wanted to read any other books by the same author. So I decided to try Karmic Management: What Goes Around Comes Around in Your Business and Your Life, also by Geshe Michael Roach and Lama Christy McNally.
As tedious as I thought The Diamond Cutter was at times, the practical business problems and solutions in the book really made me want to read more. I l
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Tags: Book Review, Review
Posted by Brian Reed on June 23rd, 2011 ~
0 Comments — Austin-area certified public accountant Donna Wesling was named chairman of the 28,000-member Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants.
She is a former resident of Corpus Christi and graduated Summa Cum Laude from Texas A&M University and began her accounting career at CPA firms in Bryan and Austin.
Tags: Chairman, Corpus Christi