Monthly Archives: January 2010

Failure as Key to Success in Sales & Marketing

By John Aberle | Sales Training , Visualization

My baby granddaughter reminded me of an important point

This past week, I watched a video of our youngest granddaughter that Ian posted on Facebook. He captured her as she made her first efforts to stand. What a treat! She was so proud of herself and excited as she wobbled trying to learn balance. She had a good grip on the pole she’d used to pull herself up. She’d let go with only one hand just pleased as could be. Naturally, daddy heaped praise on her too.

All success in life starts with failures

I often think about the parallel in sales and marketing to infants learning to stand, walk and talk. It fascinates me that infants are risk takers. Survival demands it. When we learn to stand and then to walk, we spend more time falling than we do standing or walking. The exciting thing is that everyone praises these early efforts. The same goes for learning to talk. Have you ever strove to understand a toddler’s gibberish? They try so hard to communicate. They’re so sincere and committed. Yet the process normally takes months, even years to become clear enough that people can understand anything more than the most basic images.

Yet somewhere along the line we forget that all life’s activity takes failure to succeed at new skills. This is true especially true in sales and marketing. Continue reading

What Sales Line Will You Buy into Related to the U.S. Census?

By John Aberle | fraud , Sales and Marketing

The creativity of scammers never ceases to amaze me. You would think that applying it to selling legitimate products and services would net them comfortable livings without the risk of jail. But I suspect that part of the thrill for scammers is to prove how clever they are and that they can get away with it. Using heart-centered, soft sell sales and marketing would just be too tame for them.

I’m writing this blog post because a friend of mine, Tom Lenzo, a business & technology consultant in Pasadena California, recently sent me an email he received from the FBI about the census and possible scammers taking advantage of another opportunity to misrepresent themselves so as to get your money.

Here is the gist of the FBI reminder plus tips from the Better Business Bureau:

Preparation for the 2010 Census is well underway nationwide. April 1, 2010 is “Census Day” however there is lots of preparation and marketing that needs to be done between now and then to ensure that EVERYONE IS COUNTED. This is the first in a series of messages that we will send to remind you to do your part to ensure your household, and your community, is counted. Check out www.census.gov for schedules, timelines, partnership and more. Remember, the 2010 Census form will be the shortest in history with just 10 questions.

Regarding the Census, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) recommends the following:Continue reading

The Way to Win a Customer's Repeat Business

By John Aberle | customer service , Sales and Marketing , Soft Sell

One would think that the way to win a customer's repeat business is intuitively obvious. For instance, at the January 8, 2008 Pasadena Art of Small Business Survival workshop, Glenn Rowe broke the audience into five groups to discuss customer satisfaction. 

Business owners and managers often seem to forget what it's like to be a customer

The fascinating thing to me was that everyone seemed to agree on what makes up good customer service as well as what bad service looks and feels like. Excellent customer service is intuitively obvious to virtually everyone – when they are customers. Often, though, business owners and managers seem to forget everything they know when they are now responsible for profits and efficiency.

Use heart-centered, soft sell approach to resolve problems with customers

The wonderful thing about heart-centered, soft sell sales and marketing is that they naturally focus on what needs to be done to give customers exceptional service. Your attention simply needs to be on what your customer really wants and needs. When it comes to bad service, faulty products or missed delivery dates, the customer first wants someone to care. You show this by listening, asking questions to understand, and doing something to repair the situation.

This example shows how important it is to follow up with an upset customer

In a Yelp.com review of Slater’s 50/50, David L. revealed how Scott Slater handled an earlier negative review he gave Slater’s 50/50. When he read David L’s December 20, 2009 review, Slater took responsibility to discuss the problem. As a result, on December 26th, this same customer wrote another review, this time giving Slater’s four stars (out of five possible) and retracting his last one, all because “Mr. Scott Slater himself messaged me with my concerns and addressed them accordingly.  With that alone made me want to come back and try their food again.  Which I did.. a few days ago.”

By showing you care, you win back an upset customer as a loyal fan

Whether you apply a heart-centered, soft sell approach or not to your sales and marketing, the way to win a customers’ repeat business is to ensure an exceptional experience. Surprisingly, just like Scott Slater did with his Slater’s 50/50 customer, you can turn a negative experience into a positive by fixing the problem as best as possible as quickly as possible. Excellent customer service means using empathy and listening closely, asking questions as needed to learn what this negative experience means to them – and how can you make them happier? Finally, take action.

Take time today to say thank you to someone who’s provided you exceptional service.

 

Your blog as the hub of your Internet marketing

By John Aberle | Blogging , Internet Marketing

Although many Internet marketers recommend making your blog the hub of your Internet marketing, I know of no brick and mortar companies that would go that far. Nevertheless, maintaining a blog is one of the most powerful tools you can use to promote your business. After all, a static website merely gives you an address. Now you need to attract visitors. Probably the most popular dream of most businesses with websites is to find themselves on the first page of the generic search for their most important keywords because it costs them nothing.

Frequent updates get you better placement in generic search results

To do that, though, takes effort and understanding how search engines rank websites. One of the primary things search engines want to find is frequent updates. Due to the nature of blogs which typically get new articles posted to them weekly or even daily in some cases, the search engines return more frequently to blogs to check on updates. Additionally, blogs are easy to add to or to fix while websites often take a webmaster to make changes. Besides, once uploaded, most people forget about their websites so the sites never get updated.

Slater’s 50/50 blog is presently just another unchanging page

Continuing to use Slater’s 50/50 to demonstrate a real business, in this article, I’m looking at their blog. As Scott Slater is a very sharp marketer, I’m surprised to find his current blog is simply a place holder which he does with a “Blog” tab on the nav bar (navigation bar). Unfortunately, the blog appears to be ignored. Continue reading

The Hidden Things on Your Websites Search Engines Look for

By John Aberle | Internet Marketing , Website Design

What you don’t see on the website still affects you

Although the first impression is critical when it comes to websites, there’s more to an effective website than meets the eye. For marketing purposes, what you don’t see can have a major impact on the ability of your site to be found by people who want the products and services you provide. It would be like locating your business on a busy highway then erecting a wall between your company and the road so nobody could see it as you drove by.

So what can you do to help your website be found? This critique will focus on Internet marketing. Typically, good graphic designers lack the marketing background to maximize the effectiveness of your site for you.

Obviously there are a lot of Internet marketing activities you can do to have your website found, including pay-per-click advertising and social networking. You can also use traditional marketing, such as mailing postcards and purchasing newspaper inserts. This article focuses instead on the things you can do in your website design to become more attractive to the Internet search engines.

Meta tags and alternate text

Although it takes a programmer or web designer to explain the differences and purposes of meta tags versus alternate text, from a marketing viewpoint, the important thing is that these are areas visible in the source code of your website that the search engine’s software, called spiders because they “crawl” the “web” looking for information they need to catalog the sites on the Internet.

Some of the things which the spiders see that we normally don’t are the following:Continue reading

Slater’s Website Creates that Critical First Impression

By John Aberle | Internet Marketing , website

Do you remember the last time you met someone and took an instant like or dislike to them? Have you ever bought a book because your first impression was so strongly positive? Regardless of what decisions you’ve made based on first impressions, we all do it. In sales and marketing, it’s long been known that we make our first impression on a prospect in the first 20 seconds. If it’s not positive, we may never get to make a second impression.

First impressions are more critical in Internet marketing than they are in business because people can click off your site and onto another almost instantly. In fact, research shows that you have 1/20th of a second to make that first impression. Nobody makes a decision that fast on the content. The first impression your website makes depends all on the appearance, which includes pictures, white space, and graphics. I personally find examples help me understand concepts better so I’m going to analyze Slater’s 50/50’s website to show how this works. With his website, Scott Slater continues to demonstrate a good understanding of marketing. For my purposes, it’s instructive that he misses a few more subtle points, which I’ll mention as we go along. Overall, Slater’s 50/50’s is a good example of what a small business can do to promote itself.

Strong first impression graphically

Their landing page (the page where you first enter the site) comes before you get to their Home page. This is different from most websites. I find it is both positive and negative.Continue reading