Web Analytics and Google Adwords

Jonathan Calver, Managing Director, StrategyMix

So, what can Web Analytics do for you?

I will assume that you have a web site.

But I will not assume any of the following:

• That you can tell me how many unique individuals have visited your web site in the last hour
• That your marketing system will send an email alert to the appropriate sales executive if a well qualified prospect visits a high value web page, such as a pricing page
• That identified visitors can automatically be inserted into an multi-channel lead development campaign, combining both emails and telemarketing
• That you can calculate the ROI of your Google Adwords and Social Media campaigns based on “Lead Value”
• That you can tell me which pages on your web site I have visited and when

Why is Web Analytics becoming increasingly important?

Because the Internet and particularly the rise of search engines, such as Google, has changed the balance of power between Buyers and Sellers.

Buyers no longer need to contact your sales team to educate themselves on your products and services. Increasingly they start their research via Google, Portals, Blogs, etc. And then, once they have identified the main suppliers, they will visit your website where they expect to find some useful information.

In a study conducted by Marketing Sherpa

“80% of Purchasers believed that they found their vendors rather than that it was the vendors who found them”

Outbound marketing is also set to decline as response rates from email marketing fall further. This has already happened in the UK and USA where anti-spam legislation is relatively weak and the consequent email abuse has led to a reduction in overall response rates.

The Implications for Marketing

As a result, inbound marketing as a source of high quality leads is set to increase relative to outbound marketing. Web Analytics is used to track inbound marketing response and take appropriate actions in real-time, which is why it is set to play an increasingly vital role in your overall sales and marketing process.

The key implication for marketing is that this represents a “game change”. It is no longer about mass marketing to prospects, such as via bulk email blasting, but it is more about how you respond to the visitors who come to your website.

How Web Analytics works with StrategyMix

Essentially the process is quite simple.

We give you a small piece of javascript code, which you include in each web page that you would like to track. When someone visits your website the code will place a cookie on their computer. Each time that person visits one of your nominated web pages, the javascript code contacts one of our web servers to record the visit in your database.

What if they have cookies disabled?

If a person has cookies disabled then the process doesn’t work. However, we find that very few people actually disable their cookies.

How do we make cookies identifiable?

Once a cookie has been planted, you can track a unique visitor as they surf your web site.

So, you can say that Cookie Number 647 visited Page A, Page B and Page C. This type of information, however, is not very “useful” other than for the purpose of website analytics in that you may be able to deduce that a significant proportion of visitors who go to Page A, then go to Page B.

Maybe you can use this information to improve the design of your website, but it is not very exciting for your average sales person.

However, if your web visitor were to complete a registration form, perhaps to download one of your white papers, then suddenly Cookie Number 647 can be associated with the person who submitted the registration, maybe John Robertson, IT Director of Mega Bank. From this point we cannot only track John Robertson when he next visits our web site, BUT we can also “back fill” his previous visitor history based on our records for Cookie Number 647.

Helping Sales Interpret Digital Body Language

Tracking identified web visitors, like John Robertson, can provide Sales with useful insights.

To help illustrate this point let’s consider the following activity record which shows how Mary Jones, our Sales Person, has been attempting to contact John Robertson

Date / Time             Activity

Jan 20 11:32           Mary Jones calls John Robertson and leaves a message

Jan 23 09:23           Mary Jones leaves another message for John

Jan 28 12:15           Mary Jones speaks to John’s secretary and again leaves a message

What do you think will happen next? If Mary is a typical salesperson, then she may conclude that John is “not interested” and that she is “wasting” her time and should give up.

However, if we overlay John’s web visitor history then a more complete picture of his behaviour and buying intentions emerges. The Activity Record might look like this:

Date / Time             Activity

Jan 11 09:05           Cookie 647 visits our home page

Jan 19 09:34           Cookie 647 visits our product page

Jan 19 09:36          Cookie 647 visits our white paper section and downloads a white paper. Cookie 647 is associated with John Robertson. The system routes this lead to Sales.

Jan 20 11:32           Mary Jones calls John Robertson and leaves a message

Jan 23 09:23           Mary Jones leaves another message for John

Jan 23 11.10           John Robertson visits our case study page

Jan 24 10:15           Mary Jones speaks to John’s secretary and again leaves a message

Jan 24 11.10           John Robertson visits our pricing page

Jan 24 11.11           Mary receives an alert and decides to call John…..

Given this additional information, the picture for Mary now looks completely different. And as a consequence, we would expect Mary to continue following up this Lead.

Web Analytics and Sales Alerts

Within StrategyMix we have the concept of Smart Responses. A Smart Response is a series of actions that can be automatically triggered in response to a particular event, such as when John Robertson visits our pricing page, as he did on Jan 24.

One of the 7 Smart Responses that we can take is to send an email to alert Mary in real time that John is visiting our pricing page right NOW !

Mary can then call John straight away. Do you think she’ll get through this time? The answer, based on our experience is “Yes”. Furthermore, the conversation is likely to be of high quality because John is focused on our pricing right now and because Mary can orientate the discussion to what is of interest to John, ie: pricing.

Other Smart Responses:

In addition to sending our sales person an email alert we could also:

1.      Send an email alert to a nominated user (perhaps a marketing manager)

2.      Convert their lead status (perhaps to Shown Interest)

3.      Add a list code to the prospect (so we can easily select them into reports or campaigns)

4.      Send the prospect an email on a related topic

5.      Insert the prospect into a telesales campaign

6.      Insert the prospect into a multi-channel lead development campaign

Referrers – how to make them useful

A Referrer is the page that a user visited immediately before they came to your web site.

Referrers can be tracked and are useful because they tell us how people found our web site. This in turn will help us to optimize our SEO and online marketing investments.

You definitely want to keep an eye on your top referrers, as shown below:

The original referrer can also be linked to an identified visitor, so in our John Robertson example we can now reveal that his referrer on Jan 11^th was Google.

We also have the full URL address of the referrer, which might have been:

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=it+sales+sydney&meta=&aq=f&oq=

From this Referrer URL, we can deduce the search words that John used to find our web site, in this case: IT Sales Sydney

Calculating the ROI on Google Adwords

To find out how Google recommends that you calculate the ROI for Google Adwords, you can watch their two-part instructional You Tube video, which you will find by entering the following search words into Google: “Google Conversion ROI Video”.

Or you can read the following synopsis.

Keywords          Page Impressions               Click Rate                       Clicks                                      Cost / Click

ABC                    100                                          10%                                  10                                             $1.20

Total Cost         No of Conversions              Profit / Conversion      Conversion Value               ROI

$12                     2                                               $20                                   $40                                          333%                

The table above explains that you’ve generated 100 page impressions, your click through rate is 10% and you’ve had 10 clicks at an average cost of $1.20 per click, which means your total expenditure was $12.

Of the 10 clicks, 2 have “converted”, which means that these 2 individuals completed a registration form on your web site. You have assigned a nominal value to each conversion of $20, which means that your total return is $40 and your ROI is 333% (($40/$12)*100).

And so, based on the above calculation you should obviously increase your Adwords expenditure with Google !!

But wait, how do you know that the two conversions were worth $20 each?

At this point, a system like StrategyMix has an advantage over Google, because it has access to additional information which Google doesn’t.  It knows the Lead Status of the two conversions.

Let’s assume that one of the conversions was John Robertson and that his lead status is now “May Purchase” and that the other conversion was a student that we have automatically qualified out.

So, we are left with just one conversion, that of John Robertson. What is the value of this conversion?

To answer this question accurately, it would be useful to know:

• Our conversion ratio from “May Purchase” to “Customer”.
• Our average sales price
• Our average profit margin
• Our gross profit margin before marketing and sales costs

Let’s assume that our conversion ratio is 10%, our average sale price is $10,000, our profit margin is 20% and our gross profit margin before marketing and sales costs is 30%.

In this scenario, we can allocate $1000 on marketing costs for each sale ((30% – 20%) * $10,000)) or $100 for each lead that has reached a status of “May Purchase”, because our conversion ratio from “May Purchase” to “Customer” is 10%.

So, on this basis, we can assign $100 to this lead value and our ROI is in fact, 833% (($100/$12)* 100).

However, if used correctly, email is an intimate and extremely effective means of building trust and respect between yourself and your potential clients.

And the most effective way to do this is to focus on building your credibility with the recipient. This whitepaper will describe this strategy.

Building Credibility

Lets start by thinking how you last made your last significant purchasing decision. Obviously cost was a major part of the decision-making process, but a significant part of the justification would also have been to do with the credibility of the supplier and the product.

I will borrow a process that the Business Networking Institute (BNI) use to classify the different stages in a business relationship…

1.   Visibility

2.   Credibility

3.   Profitability

Obviously you can’t move from visibility to profitability without first proving your credibility. So lets take it through the stages…

1. Visibility refers to getting your name out there and being recognised! This first step is like handing over a business card or advertising in a newspaper. At this stage there is no relationship being built and there is no tangible evidence of your abilities.

2. You then achieve Credibility by proving your…

• Extensive technical knowledge.
• Ability to deliver on-time and on-budget.
• Track-record at generating a good return on investment.

In other words, you can prove that you know what you are talking about, and that you can ‘walk the talk’!

3. Once your credibility has been attained the relationship develops into a partnership and your customer now feels confident enough to refer you to their connections. It’s called the Profitability stage because you now have an advocate promoting your services for you!

So it should be agreed that we should aim move to the Credibility stage as soon as we can, as this is where the buying happens!

The ‘Smash & Grab’ Emailer

The majority of E-mailers, ie the companies sending out emails, never even try to get past the Visibility stage. They typically send out a boastful and aggressive message and expect sales orders in return.

Now if your product is an inexpensive consumer service, like a session at a beauty parlor, then this may work. But try selling a valuable product or service in this manner, and it will end badly and most likely damage your reputation.

And as a result of this aggression the recipients are quite rightly aggressive in return, which leads the E-mailers to believe, for the wrong reason, that you can’t use email too many times because it makes people angry, or worse still that emailing simply doesn’t work!

The Credible Solution

The solution is profoundly simple, move on to the Credibility stage and the vast majority of recipients will appreciate your email, in fact they may even look forward to the next one!

If you share your specialist knowledge for free with your potential customers then they will naturally have a higher opinion of you. It doesn’t matter whether you are helping them run their businesses more effectively or simply suggesting ways to get more out of life, it will be you who will receive the credit for this knowledge!

And by sharing this knowledge you will demonstrate that you really know your business, and you will thereby prove your Credibility.

So when you next email your potential customers, offer them a ‘whitepaper’ or a ‘10-top-tips’ or an ‘article’ or a ‘webcast’ or a ‘seminar’ on a subject that you know will benefit them. Do take the time to produce it yourself, because there is zero credibility in stealing someone else’s work.

A whitepaper need only be 2-3 pages long and should be informative enough for the reader to implement some fresh ideas straight-away. Here some examples of some whitepapers…

As soon as you start to share knowledge with your prospects, your emails will be much more readily received and most often eagerly awaited. This is important because it means that you can now send out your knowledge-sharing emails every month regardless of whether it’s Ramadan, Summer, or New Year.

So from now on, no more selling, just knowledge sharing. No more spamming, just credibility and relationship building. And the greater your Credibility the more likely your potential customers are to do business with you.

The Next Step

You can implement all of the above strategy as soon as you have written your first whitepaper!

You will need to implement an online strategy that will deliver the ‘whitepaper’ and measure and qualify the people who request the ‘whitepaper’. This technology is available today.

Indeed this form of strategy will naturally support and enhance your existing sales and marketing activities and will generate a constant stream of self-qualified prospects, which in turn will lead to a constant stream of fresh revenue.

Feedback

Please feel free to pass on any feedback or ask any questions regarding this whitepaper by calling the author on +971-4-3911654, or emailing him at mark@dotbizmarketing.biz

In the ‘online world’ there are a lot of ‘blind spots’. Prospects and clients walk undetected through these blind spots everyday, which means that we are missing out on sales opportunities and customer intelligence.

Feedback is critical to a sales persons performance. If they can’t read a persons body language in a meeting they have no idea if the prospect is receptive or closed to their sales proposal.

It’s the same if we can’t ‘see’ people on our websites or ‘see’ them reading our social media blog or ‘see’ them downloading our brochures. So in simple terms we are quite blind in the online world.

First lets describe the problem, and then lets see if we can forecast a solution in 2011.

Your website
When a prospect visits your website they are anonymous. They wander around the site looking at particular pages, some of which would give you important clues as to what they are looking to buy and how likely they are to buy from you.

An example: If a prospect looks at a technical spec on your website and then the price list, you would know that they are seriously appraising your products. But in the online world you only know ‘how many’ and not ‘who’ looked at these pages.

Your emails
Emailing is an area where you have a lot more visibility of what’s going on. A good emailing system will tell you how many emails were delivered, opened and failed.

But what is really important is that if a recipient clicks on an email link to your website, the emailing system will tell you that they visited that page, which is excellent.

But which pages they viewed after that moment is again hidden in the blind spot. And it’s the behaviour after the initial click that is so important because it reveals the viewers buying motivation.

Your social media
If you post an update on your Linkedin or Facebook or Twitter you are entering another blind spot because you can’t see how many people looked at the update, let alone which client or prospect read it.

Summarizing The Online Problem
Let’s put it this way, if your car had this number of blind spots it would be banned from the roads.

Nowadays we all put a lot of effort and budget into generating online activity, promoting our websites, sending out emails, blogging on Link-Twit-Face. And apart from the very welcome customer initiated replies we are totally blind as to who is reading our blogs and reading our webpages.

And if you think about the business you generated over the last year, ask yourself how much of it was “walk in” business. In our experience this would be a very small percentage. This means that you have to be very ‘pro-active’ to get business, and at present the online world is very ‘re-active’, meaning, you have to rely on the potential customer to take the first step.

So lets look ahead to the future.

The Future Of Online Prospecting – The Theory
The theory of the future is that you can see when people read your emails, when they click on the links, which pages they look at in your website and even which social media blogs and updates they read.

I will describe a typical scenario if this became reality.

• You send out 300 emails, your email control panel tells you that by the end of the day 120 people had looked at your email and you can see of listing of who they are.

• The next day, you go through the list of 40 names who downloaded the brochure and the 10 who downloaded the order form. You decide to call them all and get a warm reception from most of them when you speak with them. You set up 4 meetings and send further information to the remainder.

• You go through the registration control panel and identify 7 who didn’t download the brochure. You call them, and find out that they had problems with slow internet access, so you email a zipped version to them and set up 2 more meetings.

• You use the web analytics control panel to track their visits to your website and see that 3 people had spent a lot of time looking your web site and you call them up. They tell you that they are glad you called because they were going to call you, so you arrange a meeting with each one.

• You check your social media analytics control panel and see that 50 people clicked on your latest blog, 3 of them via Twitter, 42 via LinkedIn and 5 via Facebook. But the best bit was that 7 of them had also opened your email, so you add them to your Linkedin connections.

So a combination of reacting to the prospects activities and reading their ‘online digital body language’ results in 9 meetings that may well have been lost in the online blind spot.

2011 Is The Future Of Online Prospecting – The Reality
The reality is that with today’s technology you can see when people read your emails, you can see when they click on the links, you can see which pages they look at in your website and even which social media blogs and updates they read.

In business terms this means that you are only focusing your sales resources on the Prospects who are ‘sales ready’, and you are not bothering those that are ‘just looking’. This will lower your cost of sales and increase the return on your online investment.

You will no longer miss out on those ‘hidden’ online opportunities, and in today’s business climate, this is a crucial fresh source of revenue.

Today it’s all about being smarter with your resources and using technology to do the heavy work. I would say that being able to read your prospects online digital body language in 2011 is a prime example of that.

“We tried it once and it was a failure” is the epitaph of many email campaigns. The reason for the failure is right there, as clear as a bell. They only tried it ONCE!

So there wasn’t any long-term expectation of success in the first place, there wasn’t any phased mailing schedule that could be measured in a realistic manner, but the main failing was that they simply gave up.

So lets describe the component parts of a successful emailing strategy so that you can replicate its success for yourself.

Tip #1 Plan For Success

A one-time mail blast is doomed to failure. You must plan a long-term strategy that will engage your prospects in a continuous conversation over the months ahead. One mailing per month is an ideal interval because you don’t want to overwhelm your prospect with information, yet you want to keep them involved.

You need to decide on the overall theme of the mailing plan…

1. Choose the products that have the highest number of unique selling points (USP) and generate the highest return on investment (ROI) for the buyer.

2. Detail all the reasons why your customers bought these products and what problems these products solved for the customer.

3. Request case studies and commendations from your customers.

Now you will be able to write to your prospects with a range of stories and reasons that will truly motivate them to buy from you.

Now the hard bit, sorry! You need to determine the typical annual revenue ($AnnualRevenue) that a new customer will generate in their first year for your selected product range. Then estimate the prospect to customer conversion rate (Conversion%). If you are clueless on what percentage to expect, start with a 1% conversion rate and see how that works out. Now to forecast your return on your investment (ROI%) for this strategy calculate as follows…

#Prospects x Conversion% = #Customers

#Customers x $AnnualRevenue =$GrossRevenue

$Gross Revenue – $CostOfSales = $GrossProfit

$Gross Revenue ÷ $CostOfSales x 100 = ROI%

Now you have something to measure against, and you can adjust the expectations to match reality as you go along.

Tip #2 Enhance Other Marketing Activities

If you can afford it, email should be just part of the marketing mix. Use email to support and enhance your Social Media campaigns, as well as your ‘offline’ media campaigns such as press advertising and PR. And you can also use the ‘offline’ media to support and add weight to your online activities.

Tip #3 Only Target Those Who Are Most Likely To Buy From You

With regards to target data selection, there are two myths that need to be debunked. The first is that you have to email 1,000,000’s of contacts to be successful. The other myth is that you should be highly selective and target only a few 100 people using incredibly complicated selection criteria. Ridiculous!

The real world solution is to profile your ideal customers and to find as many prospects as you can that match that profile. The reasoning being that your best customers earn the highest revenue and give you the least hassle, so why not get more customers just like that?

Tip #4 Use Gentle Repetition

This is the secret key to successful email marketing. You may never have thought of it like this before but here is why gentle repetition works…

1. Emailing is a respectful one-2-one relationship building exercise that builds trust between the parties.

2. You have the opportunity to put forward different reasons for buying your solution each time you email them.

3. Each time you contact the prospect you actually increase the chances of them showing an interest in your offering.

In the right hands, emailing is a sophisticated sales medium.

Tip #5 Get It Read

First you have to get the email through to the recipient!

Spam filters pretend that you got the email ID wrong but they are lying! Just avoid scoring spam points with words like ‘free’ and ‘offer’. The annoying thing is that the nature of my business means that every email I write is littered with spam words like “email” and “guarantee”!  Anyway try and avoid and these 200+ spam words too… http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/spamfilter_phrases.htm

You can also have your email ‘scored’ for spam attributes at Lyris… http://www.lyris.com/resources/index/

The next thing is to keep the size of the email under 40K, so don’t attach files and images. Also make sure there is a physical address and an opt-out link in the email.

Finally, the subject line will make a big difference to the response rates so keep it honest and make it personally beneficial for the recipient. For example if you are emailing a car rental companies use “How car rental companies are benefiting from our services…”

Tip #6 Keep It Simple

The plan is to get to the point right away, tell them…

• Why you are writing

• Why they will benefit from the solutions you are offering

• Where they can find out more

• How they can reach you

Above all, avoid heavy HTML emails, just stick to stylized text and use the minimum number of images. Keep the paragraphs short and conversational. Nobody wants a heavy sales pitch; you are just getting to know each other so keep it friendly!

Tip #7 Encourage Feedback

Provide a download of something educational, such as a whitepaper. Encourage the recipient to download the whitepaper and in return ask them to fill in a survey which tells you how they feel about your products and when they are looking to buy.

Ask them to view your website, connect to you at LinkedIn, join your Facebook and follow your Tweets. Nowadays you can track all these activities and log them in your marketing database. So encourage them to click click click!

Tip #8 Measure and Adjust

Track every single mouse click. This is possible with today’s technology.

We can track their email reads, their whitepaper deliveries, their registrations, their profile answers, their website click-thros and which pages they viewed, which of your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter broadcasts they were interested in, even which GoogleAdWords they clicked thro on. All this will tell you how interested each prospect is in buying from you.

Now re-calculate the formulas in Tip #1 with the actual figures and see how successful you were. Except you will work out the conversion rate as follows…

#Customers ÷ #Prospects x 100 = Conversion%

There will be areas for improvement, there always are. So when you are talking to your prospects ask them what inspired them to contact you and what they didn’t like about your offer and emails. And if more than a couple of people mention the same thing, act upon it.

Repeat…

Re-read Tip #4 and repeat Tips #5 thro #8 … ad infinitum …

…ends

Today everything is about your return on investment (ROI). How much revenue do you generate from your expenditure. For a long time, marketing expenditure, especially advertising expenditure, was immeasurable. For example, nobody could determine which customers had bought insurance policies, vehicles, exhibition stands, PC’s, as a direct result of a string of posters on Sheikh Zayed Road.

Online marketing has changed all that. If you send out 2,000 emails you will know precisely how much business is generated as a direct result of that mailing. And this can be extrapolated for each campaign and strategy. Nowadays you can even predict which organisations are most likely to become customers before the mailer is even sent out!

But first, we must recognise that that the buyer is in charge of the buying process. It is no longer the ‘sales cycle’ but the ‘buying cycle’ that controls the deal. So the seller must know where the prospect stands in the buying cycle and synchronise their approach accordingly. But if the seller doesn’t get their synchronization right they’ll never get the deal.

So what are the financial reasons for implementing an automated online prospecting strategy? Please read on…

#1: Effectively Matching Your Prospect’s Buyers Cycle

To get synchronized with your prospects you need to be in close contact and get detailed feedback on where they are in their buying cycle. Previously, to achieve this you needed your sales people to repeatedly get in front of each prospect, even though the prospect had no intention of buying at that moment.

Obviously, this was a waste of resources and could be perceived as aggressive selling tactics by the prospect. So the justification is that automated online prospecting now allows you to cost-efficiently and passively synchronise with your prospect’s buying cycle without overloading your sales resources.

#2: Cost Efficient Budget Usage

Marketing budgets are getting tighter, so you have to accomplish a lot more with less. Because automated online prospecting uses online technology, really, it is less dependent on expensive manpower. Also, it doesn’t require any advertising spend, which makes it a comparatively inexpensive way of generating new prospects.

#3: Efficient Use Of Resources

Human resources are thinner on the ground these days; again you have to do more with less. As mentioned above, automated online prospecting will reduce your dependence on manpower, for example the reduced cold calling and prospect visits will free up your sales team so that they can focus their time and resources on the ‘sales-ready’ prospects.

#4: Higher Customer Conversion Rates

Being able to precisely measure the quality of your prospects, will lead to more accurate forecasting and a continuous stream of higher value prospects.

To start this process think of the best client you currently have. This is the customer who is always interested in your latest offerings, they always pay on time, they praise and thank you when you do good work, they only give you hassle if you under-perform, and they even recommend you to other people. In other words; your ideal customer.

Automated online prospecting enables you to identify how prospects match up to your ‘ideal customer profile’, and by doing that you will convert a higher percentage of prospects into customers, and you get an infinitely more accurate appraisal of a prospect’s potential value to your organisation.

#5: Reduced Cost Of Sales

Sum up the cost savings identified above and they will be significant. In essence, by only using your skilled sales people where and when they will be most effective, you can reduce costs and increase effectiveness.

If you can afford it we unwaveringly recommend that you use an ‘all-media’ approach to your sales and marketing strategy. But if you were to make a one-on-one comparison you would find that online marketing is less expensive to employ than telesales and cold calling, and more measurable than PR or advertising.

In summary: Automated online prospecting enables you to cost-effectively focus on your sales-ready prospects. The results are reduced cost of sales and increased return on your sales investment.

A: They don’t have enough clients!

Why? Because they don’t have an automated long-term process to attract fresh prospects and convert them into customers. Is this the same for you? The big difference between today and two years ago is that the prospects are no longer lining up at your door to do business with you. So now you have to go looking for them.

The consequences of not acquiring new customers are at best, falling revenues, at worst, closure. Amazingly, some business owners haven’t figured this out yet! The game-plan is very simple. You set up an automated online prospecting program that generates a constant stream of interested and qualified prospects. It takes a bit of planning, but once it’s running you let the smart technology do all the work for you!

I remember my initial skepticism when I was first introduced to this concept, because it was tough to believe that something so simple could be effective. But it really works, and of course the best ideas are always the most simple.

Here are the three main elements that make up a smart online prospecting strategy…

1. You “Give to Get”! If you can help someone, they will help you.

The reality is that if you freely share your experience and skills with the people you want to do business with they will be much more willing to trust you and share their requirements with you. And as you will see in the next element, feedback is critical.

2. Continually qualify and profile your prospects.

You must synchronize your ŒSales Cycle with their ŒBuying Cycle. Otherwise you will be asking for the business when they haven’t even selected you as a potential supplier! To do this you will need to find out how they compare to your preferred customer profile, and what they are expecting from you. Only when you know this can you correctly execute your sales strategy to match or exceed their expectations.

3. Keep in constant contact with your prospects.

The old saying is… if you are not talking with your prospects, your competitors will be!

This was so true when I was selling Unisys software in the 80′s, because if I wasn’t Œliving  in my prospect’s office 24/7 the IBM salesman would be polishing his desk for him! But nowadays you can use online technologies to subtly keep your brands and products in front of your prospects, so that they are always thinking of you. By the way, I strongly advise against polishing a prospect’s desk, it gives the wrong impression. The results… Now what will happen if you can automate the above processes is that you will start to produce predictable results. This means that you can actually control the number of new customers being added each month. And, you can do all this without creating extra work for yourself. Now, that has to be a good thing!

Mark Mogridge – © bizmarketing 2010 – www.dotbizmarketing.biz

If you have never experienced the extraordinary power of OnlineMarketing before, here is an everyday statistic that may shock you …

At 11 am on the 27th of September 2010 Acumen Advertising LLC used BizMarketing’s SmartestOnline strategy to email the UAE PowerPurchaser database.

By 3pm on the same day they had booked 28 fresh appointments with some of the UAE’S leading organisations.

It’s 10am the next day and the client sends me a BB sms …

“Your a pain in the neck Mark!!!! You’re too good at what you do. The meeting requests are coming in thick and fast this morning – Rebecca just messaged me to say she’s being swamped”

Hahaha! He just sent another mez …

“LOL – what an amazing problem to have. I’m going to make the whole Bizmarketing partnership and integral part of our crdentials presentations to everyone we meet”

Do you want proof? Email our client yourself!

He is a bit busy right now but he says it’s OK to email him on david@acumen-dubai.com

BTW Acumen is VERY good at providing a full agency service. They are not a bunch of “yes” people, they deliver what they promise – boy, that is rare here in Dubai!!!!

Check out their site:  http://www.acumen-dubai.com/

A marketing database will generate revenue, but it’s integrity and accuracy needs to be 90% accurate for the database to be in anyway effective. Simply put, you have to manage a database properly or it won’t perform for you!

The integrity of a database refers to the percentage of the correctly populated (entered) fields, the effectiveness of the search criteria, and the spelling accuracy.

With regards to accuracy; statistics show that around 40% of a database’s UAE contact records will be inaccurate due to the recent exodus! That’s slightly below the required 90% accuracy level.

Thankfully bizmarketing have come up with a data Integrity and re-verification strategy that will keep your data in prime condition, as well as spreading the costs evenly over the year.

In the UAE there are 8,000 key decision makers that decide how the top 2,000 organisations spend their budgets. They are the powerpurchasers in the UAE.

bizmarketing can provide you with direct access to these powerpurchasers, and all you have to do is sign into salesforce.com and you can access them 24/7!

The bizmarketing powerpurchasers database contains the prospects who are most likely to buy from you, if your ideal customers typically …

• Represent or are a regional office of an internationally recognized brand.

• Are a professionally managed organisation.

• Maintain significant budgets for IT, Advertising, Hospitality, Equipment, etc.

• Acquire new technologies and methodologies.

• Invest heavily in the remuneration and performance of their executives.

• Operate structured supplier payment schemes.

bizmarketing will provide you with the executive’s full name, job title, phone number, email address, postal address and company website. This means that you can market your products directly to them in many different ways.

The powerpurchasers database is a proven performer that really generates results. Why? Because it only focuses on the decision makers with the largest budgets in the UAE!

But what really sets this database apart from other UAE databases is its accuracy. The data is re-verified four (4) times a year so the data is accurate every time you use it.

And so that your sales and marketing teams can get the most out of the database from day-one, the powerpurchasers database is pre-loaded the into a salesforce.com Small Business CRM database for you.

SmartestOnline = SmarterOnline + Automated Prospect Qualification …

The SmartestOnline automated prospecting strategy will start generating qualified prospects as soon as you plug it into your marketing campaigns, with the minimum of hassle and cost.

Simply put, the strategy allows you describe your “ideal” customer profile and then it automatically finds and identifies which prospects match that profile! Then when the prospects are “sales-ready” you can convert them into high value customers!

The whole process is conducted online, so you won’t waste your precious resources and budget.

No expensive telesales campaigns to gather the data.

No chasing Prospects who don’t match your client profile.

No pursuing Prospects who are simply not ready to buy.

This really is the SmartestOnline Prospecting strategy available today, because it helps your sales team to be more effective at closing the deals at the right time in the buyer’s cycle.

Added Value…

bizmarketing brings this sophisticated strategy to life by managing the whole process for you; bizmarketing will …

• Acquire and set up the CRM, Emailing, Web Interaction and Marketing Qualification applications.

• Use their experience to help you plan your annual emailing strategy.

• Help you design and write the copy of your monthly email.

• Deliver the monthly emails on your behalf and provide a delivery report.

• Allocate a WebReceptionist to interact with your website visitors.

• Use their experience to help you develop your online qualification strategy.

• Help you design the qualification questionnaires and feedback forms.