Showing posts with label Cold Calling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cold Calling. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Improve Your CRM Program - Anosales


Data enrichment process from ANOSALES follows 4 distinct process. Our data enrichment process can instantly build new contacts to your database and help you to retain customers through multi-channel marketing.

4 phases of business data enhancement

1. We receive file from you.

2. We scan your database to ascertain missing or undeliverable contact information. Then we perform data normalization, data cleansing process as per the requirement of the client.

3. We match your file against our master-database. This process appends new information to your marketing database .

4. We deliver enhanced file back to you with updated demographics and business firmographic details.

Data Sources:

We acquire data from our partners and our in-house data resource centre collates data from yellow pages, business white page directories, annual reports, business journals, periodicals, onine research, NCOA, and other credible sources. Before we append data, we ensure that each contact is tele-verified.

Business details appended:

  • SIC Code
  • Revenues
  • Number of Employees
  • Company Name
  • Company Address
  • Location, Zip Code
  • Alternate Key Contacts
  • Fax #
  • Fortune 1000
  • Public Company Indicator

Our data compilation is very comprehensive and complete. Our trained data assistants verify each records before adding it to your business. Our continuous data monitoring and monthly data cleansing maintain data fresh and valuable for marketing.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

When Testing Doesn't Work by - David Baker


There are probably thousands of articles on the Web about how to test marketing campaigns effectively. You have a hypothesis, you have test variables, you have test segments, and you have some view of statistical probabilities associated with the outcome. That's a perfect world. Let's first assume you actually have the time to build a proper test and the resources to create the many versions -- and you can actually deliver on the test program and keep the program sterile. What do you do when the tests don't tell you what you want to hear?

A consumer marketer I know with a really large database decided to test the cadence of their email programs. They developed several test cells: a high frequency cell, a low frequency cell, a control group that was exposed to the same cadence they've run for a year, and then a hold-out group. Seemed like a pretty straightforward test. The group with the highest revenue would lead to some conclusions on how often they should send promotional email. Well, what they found was that the hold-out group actually performed better in terms of revenue than any of the other test cells. At first glance, you'd think, our email program stinks and all this work we put in is wasted energy. We can generate these sales without email.

This test somewhat backfired on the CRM team; now they had to now justify what they do day in and day out. But they realized that the frequency of communications wasn't an indicator of their program's success. The problem was at the root of their program: early lifestage messaging. They had a very progressive offer strategy for new customers and people who signed up for their product/service, and they were effectively numbing their audience to their email promotions. It wasn't that they had declining revenue for their retention audience, but email was not as effective at driving conversion under their own terms, and increasing offers didn't increase sales at the same rate as the increased offer value.

What do you do in a circumstance like this? Would the senior team actually believe this new hypothesis and be able to deal with the subsequent costs of ripping apart the company's s early-stage promotional strategies? Could they migrate away from "crack marketing," where you're so addicted to doing the same things that you are afraid to make wholesale changes?

The challenge with a scenario like this is, the CRM team didn't think about all the possible outcomes and dynamics that might influence the results -- and they weren't ready to react to the results.

Another story involves a company that decided to test the effects of direct mail and email through different scenarios: email only, direct mail only, and a combination of the two. Seems like a fruitful exercise. If you can prove that email has a better influence as a standalone channel, you have a winner from a cost savings perspective. If you show the combination of email and direct mail have an influence on increased revenue value, you can potentially leverage this to be very timely in your launch and communications. But what if every scenario pays off? What happens if revenue is down all around? What happens if you find that a large portion of your loyal customers are no longer buying through the email channel, but your paid search numbers have increased dramatically?

Testing is a funny exercise. It's hard to contemplate all the potential outcomes, and it takes a lot of energy to put together good tests. Is the trade-off to do it poorly and risk outcomes that you can't justify? That is almost worse than not testing at all.

I won't belabor the point. The only time tests don't work is when you aren't prepared to react, haven't thought about all the potential outcomes, or take no action at all on the results.


Reverse Email Adress By - MyFreeEmailSearch.com


Find Someone's Email Address


Reaching out to someone you have not spoken with in a long time might be easier if you use email. There are many reasons why people lose touch. The reasons why people drift often dictate how they reconnect in the future if they reconnect at all. Those that have simply slipped away because life got busy may not mind picking up the phone to call someone with whom they have not spoken in a while. However, when you have lost touch due to argument or other circumstances, it might be hard to call. When that happens, email may be a better choice, at least at first.

If you know someone's email address, you can just shoot of a message and wait to see if they respond. This can be hard because an email address may not be something that someone uses any longer. You won't know if they are ignoring you, or if you sent something to the wrong person. Someone who does not know you may not bother to reply to tell you that you have the wrong person.

Take an old email address to what would be called a reverse email address lookup. There you can enter the email address to see if you can find a name to go with it. That can better tell you if you have the right one or the right person. You can also see if you can search by name through a forward search. You put in the name to see if a matching email address comes up so that you can reach someone that way.

Once you have the right email, the only thing you can do is email them to see if they respond. If you left on good terms, they may respond as soon as they get something from you. Just remember some do not check email each day so it may take them a bit to get your message. If you left on bad terms, they may not wish to respond. It is better to know that through email than by calling and having them hang up on you.

If you have to know if someone has gotten your email address, try to use an email service that has a return receipt. This is something that works just like registered mail through the post office. When they open the email, you will get an email confirming that it was opened. You may not be able to do this with your email, but if you can, it helps to know if you felt it was important that your message was received.

Reverse Email Address Lookup


The Difference Between Reverse Email Lookup and a Regular Email Search

Email address information can be found in quite a few different ways. Emails came about and quickly took the place of some paper and even phone communications as more and more people got email service. You can reach people quickly and effectively though an email service. In fact, if you want to talk to someone on the other side of the world, you can know your email is going to get to them within a matter of seconds. When you need any type of information on addresses, you should know where to look.

You have to know someone's email address if you want to send them an e-mail. This is when you want to know more about a forward email search. Though there are going to be times when you exchange e-mail addresses with someone in person, you may want to reach someone that you have met but did not ask for an address. There are a few simple ways that you can go about a forward email search lookup.

One way to do a forward e-mail search is to ask those that you know if they know the email address for the person in question. If you gave met someone that your friends know, they may have the address to give you. It can be that simple. People are more likely to give you an e-mail address rather than a cell phone number. You can also see if you can find a email directory online. There you can enter someone's name to see if an e-mail address pops up. It's very simple.

However, what do you do when you have an email from someone, but you have never seen the e-mail address before? That is when you have to turn things around to do a reverse email directory search or lookup. This is when you would take an email address to various online sources to see if you can get a name to go with it.

Some of the best places to do reverse email lookup would be to find some directories that offer forward search to see if you can do a reverse search there. You could see if you get anything if you enter the e-mail address into a search engine, or see what comes up when you look at sites that were built to help you find people. They probably have a good reverse email lookup right there that you can try.


Read More on - http://www.myfreeemailsearch.com


Saturday, August 29, 2009

Email Appends: A Powerful Tool for Email Marketing


Email Appends: A Powerful Tool for Email Marketing

Are you interested in expanding your business' potential by entering the exciting world of email marketing? Email marketing allows your business to reach both current and potential customers via email, which is certainly more effective than old-fashioned "snail mail" marketing tactics.

The Benefits of Email Marketing vs. Snail Mail Marketing

Traditional business owners may wonder why it is necessary to obtain email lists through email appends. Email marketing - despite what you may have heard about "spam" - is always preferential to "snail mail" marketing.

Email marketing is cheaper, since you don't have to pay for printed and mailed materials. Thankfully, you don't have to worry about expensive marketing materials being immediately thrown into the garbage can without being read. In addition, email marketing is far more eco-friendly.

The Legalities of Email Appends

If you haven't yet established a long list of customer email addresses, you can still enter the email marketing game. Through a system called email appends, you can hire a third party company to perform an email search for your customers by using their current mailing address and personal information. These email lists are extremely useful in reaching your customers directly.

If you already have your customers' personal information, it is legal to utilize email appends to develop your email lists. By relying on email appends, a business can immediately begin the process of email marketing, instead of wasting precious marketing time manually compiling a new email list.

Advantages to Email Appends

Using email appends has a wealth of advantages over just sending paper materials to the individuals on your list of customers. While it may seem like a waste of money to obtain email lists for customers whose physical mailing addresses you already possess, you will end up saving much more money than you would having your next round of direct mailers printed.

Disadvantages to Email Appends

Some people may consider these email marketing tactics to be spam, even if they did at one point provide your company with their address and personal information. However, even if a customer immediately deletes an email from your company, it is still preferential to that same customer immediately throwing away a piece of traditional mail; none of your advertising money has really been wasted in the aforementioned scenario.

Obtaining Email Lists without Email Appends

There are other ways to obtain customer email addresses besides utilizing email appends. For example, you can include an email autoresponder on your website, which allows customers to fill out a virtual form. The potential customer then receives an email from your company immediately afterwards.

The world of email marketing offers a wealth of methods for reaching your customers through electronic mail. It is time that your business stops wasting money on paper mailers and finally enters the digital age.


Read More on - http://www.myfreeemailsearch.com

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

How to Double Your Income By Warming Up Those Cold Calls By - By Silvia Quintanilla

Salespeople are under a lot of pressure to win new business. This fact hit home last week when I spoke to a salesperson who uses our research.

She's expected to perform 5 demos every week. In fact, someone from HQ calls her every Monday to find out specifically what she has lined up that week. And just 2 weeks before, her company laid off a slew of under performing salespeople. I have to admit, just speaking to her made me a bit nervous, and I don’t even work there!

But that conversation inspired this article. Hopefully, by using the tips below, we can help your sales team meet their metrics, whether it’s demo appointments, in-person meetings, or opportunities in the pipeline.

Finding a Good Prospect
When we do research for our clients, we’re always looking for a “way in.” In other words, we’re looking for a project or challenge the prospect is facing that matches our clients’ solution set.

Here are some of our favorite ways of finding that information:

Tip #1: Use the Job Postings
Using job postings to find sales opportunities is a true “gem” of an idea. It’s helped us find hundreds of sales opportunities for our clients. The key is to use a site that aggregates job openings from many places (like Career Builder, Monster, Dice, etc).

Jobposting A good one we like is Indeed.com. Once there, go to the Advanced Search function. Next, type in a few keywords that apply to your service/product.

For example, let’s say you offer business intelligence (BI) solutions. Type in that keyword or similar keywords that indicate a company is working on a BI project.

You’ll likely have to sift through a few postings, but it could prove very worthwhile. Once you find a company that's starting a project in this area, you’re chances of engaging your prospect improve significantly.

Tip #2: Regularly Review Vertical / Functional Periodicals
No matter what you sell, there’s probably a monthly eMagazine that matches it. There are online magazines dedicated to IT professionals, HR, Marketing, Finance, Legal, etc., as well as magazines devoted to verticals (e.g., Banking, Healthcare, Retail). There are even online magazines devoted to a specific geographic regions.

Each magazine is packed with stories and news events for that specific area. We recommend reviewing them regularly to find timely prospects.

For example, many of our clients focus on selling to the financial services vertical. Here are the top 3 online magazines we like best for that space:
1. Waters – www.watersonline.com
2. Bank Systems & Technology – www.banktech.com
3. Bank Technology News - www.americanbanker.com/btn.html

There’s an online magazine(s) for nearly every area. If you need help finding one that fits your solution, feel free to send an email at silvia@industrygems.com.

Tip #3: Read the Earnings Transcripts
Earnings If your salespeople are really looking for the six-figure (and potentially seven-figure) sale, have them read the company’s quarterly Earnings Transcripts (if the company is public).

Every quarter, public U.S. companies must present to shareholders and investors. Those meetings are recorded and later transcribed to written word.

At those meetings, the executive management talks about their future strategies, upcoming projects, as well as any issues or challenges they’re trying to resolve. It’s a great way to find out the more “hidden” type of information that’s not being reported in the news.

You can find a company’s earnings transcripts at Seeking Alpha:
http://seekingalpha.com/tag/transcripts

We truly hope the above tips can help your salespeople meet their metrics!



Read More on - http://www.sellingtobigcompanies.blogs.com/

Monday, August 17, 2009

CRM - Social media's impact on web forms and landing pages By Brian Carroll

More marketers are embracing social media and inbound marketing practices for lead generation. That's a good thing.

I’ve written about how you can leverage social media tools like blogs, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to drive interested visitors to your website or landing pages to register for educational content and other assets. It works.

But remember most people coming to your website aren't coming to your website to buy. They are coming to your site for information. People start to question the value of giving up too much info on forms before you've earned their trust.

Have you thought about your web forms? Are you asking for far too much information before you've earned their trust? I wrote about this in my post, Why Most B2B Sites Fail to Convert Sales Leads. I would add that you need to leverage a robust lead qualification process too.

Earlier this week, I came across a relevant post by Chis Koch (@Ckochster) on “how old-school data capture is poisoning marketing and what to do about it.”

In his post, Chris dares us to rethink how and if we should gather information from prospects. He writes, “As social media becomes more prevalent in marketing, we’re going to have to rethink how we gather information from prospects.” Check out his post. I agree.

You'll do better by thinking of lead generation as a process of micro-conversions that build an opportunity profile over time, such as requesting an email address, then asking for first and last name, later requesting a phone number, and so on.

I read of one company that trimmed down the registration to include an extremely simple, two-field form. Conversion rate more than tripled with this simplification. At the same time, the company expanded their email follow-up process and was able to increase the total amount of personal data collected over time.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Looking for a little marketing wisdom? BY- Brian's Carroll focused on B2B lead Generation

Well, I’ve got, oh about a hundred suggestions for you all courtesy of MarketingSherpa’s latest Wisdom Report.

Sherpa’s free report is filled with mini-stories from our colleagues in the marketing world who have learned through trial and error. The topics of this year’s report touched on just about every aspect of marketing out there – from tradtional tactics to Web 2.0 and mobile marketing.

According to the editors at Sherpa, there were three main trends represented in this year’s edition:
1. Email - It’s clear from this book that email isn’t dead. In fact, it’s far from it. Sherpa editors noticed that marketers are looking for ways to tweak their email correspondence. Marketers are personalizing messages more than ever, segmenting their lists to create the most focused targets possible, and are testing to the hilt. You could learn a lot from the stories included in the email section.

2. Build Social Networks - Marketers are starting to see the value of building relationships using LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and blogs. There are some interesting “Case Studies” that will hit home for marketers investigating ways to integrate social media marketing into their 2009 plan.

3. Search Engine Optimization - It seems that more and more marketers are focusing on making their websites search-engine friendly. Marketers give advice on everything from making PPC more affordable to concentrating on niche keywords. One marketer shares how 2008 was the turning point that made him realize that after 25 years in the business he had to get with the program.

The Long Forgotten Unique Selling Proposition By Author: Flyn

Flyn has made a most interesting discovery. Most salespeople don’t really know what a unique selling proposition is. In fact, most companies don’t seem to know. This sounds incredible but it appears to be true.

Since the unique selling proposition is a critical aspect of selling not to mention selling on the phone, I though I would share some information on unique selling propositions that will help you sell more.

Before I begin let me recommend a book that I recommend all the time and in my book lists to salespeople. (See the recommended reading section of my free sales resources page.). The book is called “Monopolize Your Marketplace” by Richard Harshaw. In this book, as well as Jay Abraham’s “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got,” you can learn all about unique selling propositions and how to tell a powerful story that will hook prospects.

What is a Unique Selling Proposition?

Before I reveal the secrets of the unique selling proposition let me ask you to write yours down on a piece of paper. Then you can go through the exercise with me as I lay this out.

A unique selling proposition according to Hershaw should make the prospect feel, and I quote from page 21 of his book:

“I would have to be an absolute fool to do business with anyone else but you – regardless of price.”

As you can see a good unique selling proposition has to be pretty darn powerful. Most of the propositions you hear aren’t propositions at all but platitudes.

What’s a platitude? A platitude is something that is stated as if it were important or unique when in fact it is not. Here are some examples.

“We fix your car right the first time.”

Why is this a platitude? Because anyone getting their car fixed would expect this to be the case. No one is going to the guy who says – “We fix it right the second time.” This is a “Well I would hope so” platitude.

And that is the first test of a good unique selling proposition – Would a normal person looking for your product or service simply expect as common what you claim.

Here’s another example of “I would hope so.”

“We give you a free consultation visit.”

This is a common benefit stated in ads for lawyers – but everyone does it so it is expected anyway. It’s a platitude.

Look at your selling proposition, is it a “Well I would hope so?”

The second platitude is “Who else can say that?” If someone else can say what you said, then it’s not and unique selling proposition as it’s not unique.

If you say “Were the best in town.” you very well might be, but any other company could simply make the same claim. If your competition can say with confidence based on their belief what you are saying, it’s not a unique selling proposition.

It’s not about who can do what you do, but about who can say what you say.

A great example of all of this is found by looking in the phone book at say lawyers. In most cases you could switch the names and phone numbers between the ads (as long as you kept with in the specialties) and the claims would be true or at least legitimate. There are very few unique selling propositions in the phone book, most of the ads contain platitudes instead.

Summary

Now that you have a better understanding of what a unique selling proposition really is you can see why having one will likely generate call backs to your messages in your cold calling efforts and get the attention of those you engage on the phone.