Web Marketing - Did you start in the right place?

I spend a lot of time in meetings discussing web strategies, Web 2.0, Social Networking, all the latest jargon used to help drive business. The one component that is always missing in these discussions is WHY? The discussion goes around web optimization, Adword, impressions, eyeballs, clicks, and landing pages, but it’s hard to nail someone down to exactly what they want to happen. The short answer is always “I want more business” they haven’t really thought through how their web marketing program was going to actually get them more business. They see it as a “Field of Dreams”, build it and they will come. The reality is that successful web marketing is a symbiotic relationship between marketing, web technology and sales.

Just like no two companies have the same mission and goal, no two companies have the same web strategy. No two companies want the same results from the initial actions taken by potential clients. Even within the same industry and region of the country, each company will have its own unique sales proposition, sales methodology, and sales qualification criteria. The problem is that many companies go to technical resources to build their web marketing strategy without thinking through what exactly they want to happen once they have attracted a person of interest. They’re not even prospects at this point; they may not be good suspects for that matter.

Here is the process I would recommend.

1. Have a thorough understanding of your entire market strategy and exactly how Web Marketing plays in it.

2. Determine the profile of the prospects you want attracted to your site. Remember it is not the number of people who visit your site that counts; it’s the number of people who visit your site and buy something.

3. Determine how much of the sales process do you want to accomplish before you turn it over to your people. At this point I would work out a rough schematic of the process so that I understood how I expected it to work.

4. Now you need to put yourself in the minds of your prospects. Don’t think about what you would use. Thinks about the words they would use. Remember not everyone is good on a keyboard. There are ways to use word combinations.

Let’s say at this point we have found the way to get them to see our little web banner. That’s the summary part they see in the search engine results. Banner Ads are across the top, Adword banners are down the right side and organic search banners are on the left. You have very little real estate to make a point.

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5. What do you have to say that will make them click on your URL? This is extremely important. It’s a sales and marketing discussion, not a technology discussion.

6. Once they click on the URL associated with your banner, which may not be your home page, what do you want to happen? They are going to hit your landing page. The right landing page is critical. Testing many versions is extremely helpful.

Everything starts with the right strategy. If you have thought through that process, here are two extremely good companies to talk with about how to implement it. They are a couple of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firms that understand that it is what happens after they get to your site that is more important than getting them there.

Prominent Placement

Avenue a Razorfish

Generating a lot of traffic with no new business is a waste of time and money.

Faithful Leadership

I personally know Rob Parker, CEO of Kiwanis and Crawford Loritts, pastor, author, and speaker. Both men are men of exceptional integrity. Crawford provided this transcript of the interview that was published in the February 2008 edition of Kiwanis Magazine ( http://classic.kiwanis.org/magazine/february08.asp ). It can downloaded in its entirety from my business website: http://www.focalpointatlanta.com/Articles/Faithful%20leadership%20020108.pdf

Crawford makes an enormous observation when defining leadership. I truly believe that leadership is about passion and vision. Vision with passion is almost unstoppable. Passion is not the cheerleader on the sidelines; it’s the look in the eye of the quarterback in the huddle. The cheerleaders get the spectators motivated (that’s why their backs are to the field of play); the quarterback gets the players to believe that they can win.

Crawford takes it one step further when he talks about assignment. So many businesses fail to achieve their potential because management cannot let go long enough to reach out their hand for help.

Rob Parker (RP): At Kiwanis, we have been talking about how important it is for leaders to be able to communicate a clear and compelling vision. Would you agree with that, and what are your thoughts on the importance of vision?

Crawford Loritts (CL): Vision is everything. There’s no such thing as leadership apart from assignment. Leadership is not a position. Leadership is a verb. If there’s no movement, there’s no leadership. If there’s no task, there’s no leadership. If there’s no assignment, there’s no leadership. By its very nature, leadership is not a corner office with a big desk and nameplate. That is not leadership. Leadership is always about going somewhere. This is where vision comes in. The vision, that’s the target. It is what you see. It’s what gets you up in the morning. It is what makes you pound the table and weep. And if a leader doesn’t feel that, if it’s not worth a sacrifice, then it’s not worth trying to communicate. You have got to be absorbed with the vision. There’s so much that’s nonverbal about leadership. A leader communicates passion with body language and presence, and with their eyes and with all their nonverbal communication … that’s what helps make vision compelling.

RP: Do you believe people are born leaders, or is leadership something that can be learned?

CL: I think we all need to be concerned about developing our ability to lead in relationship to the responsibilities we have. However, I do think there are unique positions that require more than just skill. It requires a sense of innate ability that either you have it or you don’t. Let me give you an illustration. You can teach kids with average hand-eye coordination to be a fairly decent baseball player. But there comes a time where no amount of time in a batting cage is going to help a kid bat any better. There are certain things you cannot coach and cannot teach, like when to swing. And I think that’s true at certain levels of proficiencies and skills. There are some people, no matter how many seminars you send them to, no matter how much training you give them, how many books they read, there is a certain innate sixth sense a leader has to have that makes all that stuff natural; that you can’t teach. Some of it is natural and some of it is learned.

I’m interested in what you think. Read the whole article. It’s well worth the effort. It might make a difference in the way you lead……

The Dynamics of a Recession

The old saying is; “A Recession is when your neighbor is out of work and a Depression is when you are.” Keep in mind that during a recession over 95% of the employable working population is still gainfully employed. They may modify their spending, which has a trickle down affect, but they don’t stop spending. Here is an indicator; the Consumer Electronics Association trade group forecast industry revenue would grow 6.1 percent over 2007 to $171 billion -- despite rising energy costs, a slumping housing market and the subprime lending meltdown. Television displays are to make up the largest portion of projected sales at 16 percent. Shipments of TVs will grow 13 percent to more than $29 billion, the trade group forecast. Does this sound like a serious recession or is the old saying still true?

The International Monetary Fund projected in December that the U.S. economy would grow only 1.9 percent in 2008, its slowest rate in six years. So what’s up with this? The electronic entertainment industry is going to grow three times the U.S. economy and we’re in a recession. Economic downturns are like the weather. Forecasting a 40% chance of rain in your city doesn’t mean you’ll see rain. It follows Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. We can predict with almost 100% certainty that there will be a downturn in the overall economy, but we cannot predict with certainty what the impact will be on any one industry, business or person. It’s just too granular and elastic.

The amazing thing is that each person, business and industry can take steps to mitigate the impact. The larger the group involved the harder it is to coordinate the effort required to be successful at making this adjustment. Individuals can react very quickly to change their habit. Businesses, with strong leadership, need more lead time to turn the ship because of the mass. Industries require way too much inter-competitive cooperation to be successful. Some business will use the downturn in the economy to sabotage competitors within their same industry making it even harder for the industry to adjust. The point is that each has a decision to make concerning the degree and length of the impact of an economic downturn.

So what are you doing? Are you going to be buffeted by the winds of change, or take the helm and use this wind to go faster? Now is the time to rethink strategies. In an economic downturn the focus must be, more than ever before, on hard dollar benefit to the buyer. Can you make money or save money by using my product? Discretionary spending will dramatically decrease, not go away, but decrease. At the individual level people will put money in things that they can get the money back out of if needed. Can I reduce the heating bill; can I increase the value of my home? Businesses will spend money to reduce the overall cost of operations. Can they automate an operation saving the need to hire additional people? A note here, very seldom will a company intentional set out to downsize their workforce. Downsizing, right sizing and outplacement are almost always the result of a lack of cash flow. It’s a by-product of events, not the objective. Your strategy should be to leverage existing people to do more.

If you use a reseller channel, what incentives are you providing your partners to help their customer buy more from them? Most suppliers provide incentives (typically through discounts) to the partner hoping for a trickle down affect to their customers. Be a little more obvious and intentional. An example might be to provide a payment plan for the end-user through the reseller. The interest on the money won’t be more than the original discount and the ultimate buyer see a direct benefit.

Get away from the victim mentality. Take control of your destiny. Put in place intentional strategies to protect yourself over the next few months. The more you can encourage the market to buy your offerings, the shorter the “recession” will be. It’s good for all of us.

Decision Process Management

Many deals are lost because the sales organization was either unaware of the true decision process or overconfident of their value in this process. Often sales people get trapped in the notion that the decision process is more or less linear. There is a hierarchy of groups or individuals, which ultimately report to single person with total authority over the decision. This is very seldom true. There is a person who has been given the responsibility to sign the contract. That person may have tremendous leeway in making the ultimate decision. But most of the time the one given the responsibility to sign the contract does not feel they have the total authority to sign it. Most of the time responsibility and authority are two totally different processes.

To get to the bottom of this complex transaction, one must first understand the nature of the business problem. As an example, the IT manager who is trying to buy a new processor has been given the specifications, budget and responsibility to acquire the needed resources. But he or she does not own the business process that is driving the need. The value the IT manager puts on the purchase is driven by competition and budget. The value to the functional manager responsible for the business problem is something entirely different.

A big part of decision process management is the ability to understand the needs and responsibilities of everyone involved in solving the business problem. The IT manager is involved in a formal process with defined rules designed to be impersonal to the organization. This process is several steps removed from the functional business needs assessment because the business understands that the IT manager does not need to fully understand the ultimate reason for acquiring the data processing equipment.

The informal decision process is soft and pliable and is based on factors which change from deal to deal. The informal process is very self-motivated. Informal decision makers have “skin” in the game. They generally have a target return on investment that they must deliver. He or she generally has the ability to make decisions for solutions that are outside the box of traditional thinking.

How many times has the IT manager either dismissed a creative solution as not within specifications or “bumped the idea upstairs for review.” The decision of your sales team to engage any set of players in the decision process is an important step in getting the deal. Don’t make the decision process more complex than it needs to be. But understand there can be other forces involved, and make an effort to determine exactly where they stand. Make every effort to know the entire process so that you can make an informed decision as to how to proceed, keeping in mind the true influencer might be a mentor who is not directly involved in either the business process or the formal decision process.

There are three fundamental levels of resistance when it comes to making decisions. The first level is the logical process of understanding the need. When you see a person’s eyes glaze over, eyebrows furrow, or head tip slightly to one side or the other, he is sending you an unspoken message: “I don’t get what you’re saying.” That’s your cue to slow down and touch base with the person before he or she gets so confused or lost in the morass of your idea that he or she loses interest altogether. After all, if he or she doesn’t get your idea, there’s no chance they’ll support it. The consultative approach to selling will help overcome this.

The second level is s based in the emotion of actually implementing change. Concern that something about your idea will make the other person look bad or lose status in the eyes of others, worry that your idea will cost the person his job or endanger his financial security, Nervousness that your idea will cause the person to fail, perhaps as a result of—and in the wake of—your success. Much of what we have discussed here should help to understand the personal risk involved with moving forward.

The last level is the lack of a trusted relationship. Focus on conversation, not presentation. Ask questions to find out what’s going on in the other person’s mind and why he or she opposes the idea. Find ways to connect with others. Paraphrase their concerns to show that you’re listening, embrace suggestions that piggy-back on your idea, and make it clear that there’s room—and opportunity—for others to join you as you move forward to implement the idea.

Take time upfront to understand this thoroughly. It will improve your chances of success and streamline the sales process.

Guard Against a Potential Recession

I’m not an alarmist by nature so don’t take this as an ominous prediction, it’s not. I wanted to take a minute just to remind everyone of what may appear to be obvious. There is a lot of talk about a potential recession. The old adage is that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job and a depression is when you lose yours. Now I don’t expect either in the near future but prudence says that we should “expect the best but prepare for the worst” So let’s talk about preparing for the worst.

Have you started contingency planning for a slowdown in the economy? Do you understand what that might mean specifically for your company? If you were in the real estate or construction industry you already know. Start taking action to mitigate the potential damage.

Here are some ideas…

Look at your pricing policies to determine if there is a way of assuring future revenue from sales made now. There may be a way of accelerating the recognition of that revenue later if you need it. Remember if you have to discount a deal, always try to discount the one-time products or services over the recurring. If you sell professional service as part of your offering, try to discount those aspects that will only happen once as opposed to your overall billing rate. A discount to your billing rate may last forever.

Take a good look at your pipeline for prospects that might not have the ability to pay in a downturn. The decision concerning what to do is an individual issue. Protect yourself from incurring expenses that you may not be able to collect on down the road.

Don’t start projects that fall into the “nice to have” category both internally and externally. An updated document viewer my make your product more attractive in the long run, but if it isn’t going to pay for itself in the short run consider putting it off until you’re sure the economy is in your favor.

People are your most important asset. If you gain a reputation of jettisoning employees it will be hard to replace them with quality people later on. Make this your last alternative. If the downturn is short lived, the severance pay, plus new hire cost, will eat all your potential savings.

This is a really good time to have conversations with your best customers. Start putting together a contingency plan with them. It will pay overwhelming dividends down the road. It might be a time to accelerate projects while the money is available. It’s also the best time to put together a great business case on why your project should be a priority during the downturn. Proactive thinking beat reactive thinking any day.

Bottom line is; don’t let it happen to you. You have an opportunity to do something about it now. Don’t get so caught up in the day-to-day that you leave yourself exposed. If it doesn’t happen, you will have left yourself in a better position for what will happen.

Absolutely Accelerate Revenue Recognition

Every businessperson wants to grow their company. Growth can be defined in many ways; revenue, profit, market share, asset value, strong team that lets you take more time off, increased happiness and contentment. Not every businessperson wants more money. Interestingly enough, virtually everything that we do want is somehow tied to money. It’s because we live in a capitalistic society. Increased peace of mind comes from the ability to rise above the day-to-day issues of walking this earth. Much of that contentment can come from inner strength to face everyday challenges with less stress. I would say that we could in almost (key word almost) every case tie back the ability to use money to acquire tools that can help solve problems as an underlying attribute to contentment. Of course the other part is the ability to be content with less. Very few companies are content with less, so let’s talk about the other side….

If profit is a derivative of revenue and I need profit to invest in solutions then “If I could sell more today would I?” I think we would all say “yes”. Then if we want more revenue in our companies today, why don’t we just do it? It’s because it’s not that easy. Growing incremental new revenue is difficult at best, near impossible at worst. I know businesspeople who believe “If I haven’t done it yet, it’s because it can’t be done.” It’s not that they think they are overwhelmingly smart in general. It’s just that they believe that no one understands their particular business better then themselves. They don’t know what they don’t know (The ugly description is: unconscious incompetent).

Let me suggest an approach that should help virtually any businessperson find a way to generate not only more top line revenue, but bottom line profit. It is a systemic approach to looking at revenue. Systemic means “affecting the body as a whole”. There are several components that must work together. These components reside throughout your organization, not just sales and marketing. Here are some of them with a brief description of their impact on revenue:

Product Development: It all starts with deciding what is the best product or service to take to market? This doesn’t mean that you have to actually develop the product or service yourself, but someone must. You might just resell it for them. The key issue is “What business problem does it solve for my prospective customer?” Does the value of the solution cost more than the problem? It is a “must have” or a “like to have”? Does it dilute my earnings or enhance them? Is the market big enough to support the investment, initial and ongoing?

Accounting: Accounting? Yes one of the biggest overlooked elements in a good revenue engine. Are there KPI’s (Key Results Indicators) in place to tell you what products make money and which ones don’t or which clients make you money and which ones dilute your earnings? Do your credit and collections policies support or detract from your ability to attract quality prospects? Does your pricing methodology support your prospects ability to pay (capital outlay verses expense outlay, lump sum verse payments)? Do you have a discount policy and corresponding methodologies? Does the salaries, commission and incentive plans support the goals of the corporation (remember that this doesn’t just apply to sales)?

Marketing: On the surface this seems obvious, but there are deeper concerns. Every businessperson knows that marketing is important. Does your marketing department (person) work with accounting to determine the right product mix and customer profile? Does their lead generation programs target these products and prospects? Do they have metrics in place to measure the ROI on each program they run? Is information that is gathered through the marketing process feed back into accounting, product development and sales to improve their involvement? Is marketing not only targeting new products or new customers, it is trying to increase the average value of a sales by promoting ancillary or corollary products (product bundling)?

Sales: This is the assembly line of revenue and income. In a well oiled revenue engine; sales simply works through a process with predicable results; easier said than done. There needs to be a sales methodology that accelerates prospects through the pipeline. Each step in the process should be easier for the prospect. Every wasted effort needs to be removed. Think of it as an assembly line. You should be driving down the cost of manufacturing. Look at the risk associated with the potential gain. Don’t have such a laborious proposal approval process or credit approval process that it drives way business. This is especially true if you haven’t really experience a financial loss due to business polices. Get accounting involved to determine the true downside of speeding up the system. Be prudent, but not paranoid.

Support: I am going to define support as both post sales support and any production process required to deliver the product. It cost more money to get a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. We all know this, yet we act differently. Get feedback from your support function on the ideal customer. You can also get feedback on feature improvements and pricing or credit policies. Once you get this far in the relationship, use it. Constantly gather information on ways to improve the revenue generating process. These are people who have made a decision to do business with you. Make sure you know why.

Executive Management: Always a sticking point in my conversations. There are very good executives that understand revenue generation and are a major assets. I’m sure you are one of them. But I have worked with senior executive that have had a less than stellar opinion of sales and marketing people. When you don’t trust your revenue generation system, you have a problem. Use the system outline above. Understand that sales is not the sales department, it is the entire company. If sales are not where you want them look everywhere, don’t just beat up the sales group. If your career has been laced with having bad sales people call on you, learn to trust and delegate. Your personal bias may be costing your business.

Bottom line: Sell the products with the largest margins to the customer who will pay the most, through a sales methodology that will close the sale the fastest.

Obligatory New Year Resolution

The beginning of every year, we as business people are obliged to set new goals for the upcoming year. I have gone through this process over 30 times in my career. During this time I have noticed one striking trend. Those who believe succeed; those who don’t, don’t. Brian Tracy in his Psychology of Achievement spends a great deal of time helping people reset their subconscious so that they can achieve the success they have always wanted. His story is that you have to concretely believe you can succeed before you can actually do it. There is a lot of data to support that this is fundamental to individual success. What about corporations?

Thirty years of business planning has taught me that it’s very true of corporations as well. If the annual plan is a hope and a prayer, it will not succeed. Many companies have a top down planning approach. Those in the know determine the cash requirements of the corporation to survive and meet expectations for the coming year. They then extrapolate the revenue number taking into account cost of goods and cost of sales. The revenue number is then passed down to the individuals responsible. Sometime, like when I work for British Telecom, the number is inflated as it is passed down to assure each management group is successful. The final number given to each sales person is a result of this process and doesn’t reflect the reality of their market. The people at the top “believe” in their number because it makes sense. The people at the bottom find the number arbitrary at best and will strive to do their best.

A deviation to this strategy is a top-down, bottom-up approach. While the executive management is forecasting from above, the sales force is forecasting from below. They meet in the middle and develop a compromise. Sound better doesn’t it? Heisenberg taught us that this isn’t necessarily so. My experience collaborates this. The people at the top assume the people at the bottom are going to sandbag (low ball) their numbers and the people at the bottom assume that the top is going to inflate the numbers. Everyone knows it’s a negotiation, therefore it’s best to build in some level of compromise. In this case neither party”believes”. Both have had to compromise and assume the other is not being fully honest in the process. This by the way is true.

So, how do you get everyone to believe? The answer is to take a more systemic approach. If you haven’t ever done this it won’t happen for 2008, but it can happen in 2008. The object is to align the entire company toward a single goal. Everything is tied to achieving that goal; from product development, to marketing, to sales, to legal, to accounting, to procurement, to support. Everyone knows their responsibility for achieving that goal and believes they can do their part. No one is part of the “sales prevention” team. The sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole. What’s the systemic approach?

This takes some thinking. It is not intuitively obvious. If you are a glass half empty type of person, you may not see how it will work. Every activity must be tied directly to revenue and carry a specific expense associated with that activity. Some will be profit centers and some will be cost centers. But they are all tied to the final objective. Deciding how this will work within your specific corporation may take a lot of thought. Many departments don’t like this thinking because either they don’t truly understand how their department impacts revenue or they do understand and they would just as soon you don’t. A good place to start is to map out the process, cradle to grave. Apply your vision and mission to the process, you do have one right? Make sure everything aligns, and then start doing the math. Always seek input from those responsible for implementation.

Reprogramming the human subconscious to succeed is a consistent, repetitive process. The same is true of corporations.

The corporation that believes…. Succeeds.