Email — simply tougher to get through to your customers. A lot of it gets automatically forwarded by your customer to their cell phones. Some customers set up the filtering on their phones so that newsletters, emails with images, emails with links get rejected. Hard bounced from the phone network. Did the recipient view in computer preview pane? Or are they getting so much in their inboxes that almost nothing gets opened.
The key in our experience is relevance and value … ... Read More
By Dale Wolf
We all want fatter pipelines and our group has determine that one way to do this is to get more successful with the initial prospect contact. We want to talk our way into more deals.
We can all imagine the scene on the other end of the phone. The prospect accidentally takes the phone call instead of dumping us into voicemail. It’s not that they are rude, but just that the people we want to talk to are rather popular with all vendors. They get 25 ... Read More
By Dale Wolf
The best-in-class sales professionals understand the importance of account strategy and of staying the course. This takes vision. You have to see it first and feel it second. Some sales reps see things as they are and ask why. The best see things that never were and asked why not.
While you are researching your top 100 sales prospects, begin optimizing a disciplined process that you will follow day after day. Sales people who fail typically have no process: “I just make ... Read More
By Dale Wolf
Too many sales people rely on purchased lists for their cold calling initiatives. We know of no better way to freeze your career with cold calls into the wrong people at the wrong companies.
A list or even your own Roladex is only a starting point. 98% of marketing promotions fail because they get delivered to the wrong people and miss the right people. There is an old adage in the direct marketing business: Ten things are important for success; the first seven are list, ... Read More
By Dale Wolf
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows you to deliver online content to prospective or current customers from an RSS newsreader, chosen by and setup by customers who want to be alerted when new content relevant to their needs is published. The reader acts like a personal online magazine that contains just content that the subscriber wants to view.
Blogs and many news Web sites have made RSS a widely recognized acronym. But now RSS offers B2B marketers a new and highly effective medium for communicating with customers extending the customer experience.
eMail continues to be the mainstay medium for most marketerscontinue because it is relatively inexpensive to deliver. Spam has, however, turned off a lot of email opt-in subscribers. Search marketing is ... Read More
By Dale Wolf
Lead Nurturing and Customer Experience go hand-in-hand. Nurturing implies that you stay in contact with prospects across a longitudinal time frame. Done properly, this should increase the customer experience. I say "properly" because nurturing programs should initiate outbound communications that deliver value to the prospect at each stage of the buying cycle. During most of this cycle, the prospect is most likely not even in an active buying situation … the time is not right. We need to recognize where the prospect is and what they need at any given time and then provide an offer that is meaningful, relevant, useful. Such nurturing improves the experience.
A situation came up at our company just this week. A prospect we talked with almost a ... Read More
