Manufacturing Revenues

Building your business is a process. Strategize, plan, execute, measure, and reload. Generating revenues is the same.

Sales consultants like to talk about the funnel. A bushel of leads enters the funnel. The leads are winnowed after qualification and prosecution until only a few exit the funnel as actual sales.

But the focus on a funnel is short-sighted. Let’s say you’re the guy in charge of sales. Your goal is 10 sales this quarter. You’re damn good and know that you can close 20% of qualified leads. Marketing generates 50 leads. So you’re set, right? No. That’s a separate funnel. If 20% of gross leads are qualified, you can only expect 10 qualified leads and to close 20% of that, or 2 sales. Marketing actually needs to generate 250 leads for you to make quota. Uh-oh!

Tactical funnels don’t exist in isolation. There are a series of operational marketing and sales funnels that encompass and qualify markets, prospects, leads, and accounts. Indeed there is one huge funnel that stretches from mass markets of tens of millions of business or consumers customers to the individual customers that trickle out the other end.

When you build a manufacturing plant, you don’t just engineer one machine. You design the entire layout, including machines and production line, from raw materials to finished product.

It’s the same in marketing and sales. You can’t focus on an individual step.  It’s the entire process that counts.  When you design and engineer that process, your revenues will become predictable and manageable.

This approach to manufactured revenues is taught by services such as Tribe Blue’s  Revenue Typhoon and supported by demand generation systems like WeMeUs, which provides a single platform for marketing, lead generation, and sales tracking.

Sharpen your lead generation

Ready to take your lead generation to the next step?  Shrink the sales funnel from contact to close.  Dissect your lead gen process to determine how you can make it more timely, direct, and personal.

Few businesses have the in-house resources of an interactive agency.  But this example below is filled with techniques that you can use on your own.  Relationship marketing services like WeMeUs Contact Management & Lead Generation  automate leads and personalize emails to power referrals and shrink the sales funnel.

“As an interactive digital agency, we do much of our marketing through referrals, so one of the things we do is present at various conferences. I presented a session on e-mail marketing and word-of-mouth at a MarketingSherpa e-mail summit in Miami in March, and used ExactTarget’s text capture and triggered e-mail integration. I invited the audience to use their cell phones to text me to request a copy of my slide deck. More than 60% of the 120 people present took me up on the offer, and they received an immediate text confirmation in return that an e-mail would soon follow. The triggered e-mail went out thanking them for attending the session, and 78% responded to that to receive the PDF of my deck. The e-mail integration closed the gap, providing the next step with a pallet of choices that advanced the sales process. I went from a bunch of people in the audience just looking at me to having 78% self-identify as reasonably qualified sales prospects.”

—DAN HEIMBROCK, president-CEO, HyperDrive Interactive

Email is top marketing program for small businesses

Small businesses continue to push their marketing online.  Email is the top program.  According to a survey by Vistaprint and Hawk Partners, 26% of business already use email marketing with another 10% planning to do so the next year, for a total of 36%.

Social media is rising quickly and will jump into second place next year. Businesses continue to leave offline media. Yellow page ads, postcards and catalogs, and print media are all categories where the number of past and no longer current users outnumber the few who are going to try it.

What about you?  WeMeUs uniquely personalizes email to generate leads for relationship marketers.

Relationships matter

All web visitors are not alike.  If you can appeal to their individual needs, interests, and actions, you can better interact and sell them.  One way to segment users is by where they come from. The following chart holds no surprises. The stronger the relationship or referral, the more likely someone will buy, try, register, or contact you. An existing contact or customer is 6 times more likely to act than a random visitor and 3.5 times more likely than a  visitor from paid advertising.

WeMeUs helps you maintain relationships with logs and reminders for active contacts, Keep in Touch features for other contacts, and the Email Assistant for sending ongoing customized and personalized news and updates to customers and prospects.

Web conversion by source
Direct URL or bookmark	7.38%
From another site or email	6.58%
AVERAGE	3.6%
Paid search*	2.03%
Organic search	1.26%
Study by Engine Ready of 26 web retailers over 12 months

Case study: Personalizing emails boosts response

Marketing Sherpa published a case study on Expedia CruiseShipCenters, Personalized Emails, Website for Sales Agents Boost Response: 5 Strategies to Lift CTR 23% .  Compared to traditional generic messages, personal emails resulted in a 5.5% higher open rate and a 23% higher clickthrough rate.

That’s just for putting an agent’s name and email address on the message. Imagine how much higher responses rates are when you truly customize the email, such as through WeMeUs where you can insert specific fields like recipient company, where you first met, or shared interests …  use a custom field to record whatever personalization works best   … or even customize each email individually with a personal note as it’s being sent.

CRM boosts sales

CSO Insights conducted a survey to determine the effect, if any, of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) on sales.  The result – CRM matters.

Has the company integrated CRM into sales?	No	Yes
Reps making quota	57%	67%
Deal win rate	47%	57%
Companies reaching revenue target	85%	93%

Using technology to manage and track the sales process works.  It makes reps more effective, leads to more deals, and boosts overall revenues.  That’s fine if you’re a big company and can afford staff and licenses to install and deploy Oracle or salesforce.com.  But what if your company is just you?

WeMeUs is the solution.  We developed WeMeUs as a personal CRM specifically for consultants and small businesses, people just like you.   We uniquely understand how you leverage your network to create referral and repeat business.  WeMeUs integrates contact management, email marketing, lead generation, and sales tracking in a complete end-to-end service.  Try WeMeUs for free today.

Email up while economy down

Only two marketing line items have increased in companies both big and small in this past year of tough economic times.  One is social media.  The other area is far more mundane – email marketing.  While email is not flashy, it IS reliable, tested, and proven to generate results and sales, a safe bet even when budgets are down.

Where are you investing your marketing time?  If a good part of your revenues comes from your contacts and referrals, then you need WeMeUs, which integrates contact management, email marketing, and lead generation for consultants and small businesses. Visit our Email articles page to learn more about the WeMeUs Email Assistant.

New at WeMeUs: Recommendations

We updated WeMeUs with a new release last night.  There’s a LOT of improvements  – details at http://bit.ly/New_at_WeMeUs

One new feature in particular stands out:  recommendations. We now make it even easier for you to recommend WeMeUs to contacts and colleagues that you think would benefit from our services.   The Recommendation button found on each page now pops up Email Assistant and a draft recommendation template in Email Assistant that you can customize and send.

Each of those recommendations will be tracked and you’ll earn incentives for those contacts and colleagues that sign up for their own premium subscriptions.   Send your first recommendation today,  and check it out!

Relationships and Why Silicon Valley is

Great Techcrunch article here on why Silicon Valley continues to be  “…an engine of entrepreneurship and innovation … a unique place of powerful and concurrent overlapping networks..” in the words of Vivek Wadhwa an entrepreneur turned academic,  visiting here to understand it better.   The emphasis on concurrent overlapping networks is mine.   This observation reinforces our belief that the relationships you build as an entrepreneur have a very significant influence on the path and progress of your company.  And for entrepreneurs, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the valley is a multitude of opportunities – open to newcomers – to meet key people, establish relationships and build a influential network.

Turning Contacts into Relationships, Part III

Previous posts, here and here,  talked about making initial contact and identifying something shared – a person, place, passion, experience, etc.  That “shared something” serves to connect you for your initial conversation, and helps them remember you later on.

Once you’ve made that initial contact, followup is your next challenge.  It is the step that is most frequently not completed,  due to lack of tools, process, and time.   But no followup = no return, so take a few minutes to protect the investment of time you’ve already made in networking.   Select a system, set up a process and stick to it.

System considerations first – you’re using some system now to save the information about your contacts even if it’s only keeping it in your head (not recommended, by the way).   Outlook is by far the most frequently used, followed by Gmail, Yahoo and then a plethora of other email, webmail and database – desktop or hosted – alternatives.

It’s no surprise that the first three alternatives mentioned are email and webmail because contact management has been largely subsumed into those systems and their address books.     All three offer users the ability to store limited information on contacts and integrate with a calendar.  Outlook supports more data, but it’s time-consuming to enter and hard to organize.

Factors to consider in selecting a system include accessibility, flexibility, complexity, ease of use,  how much and what kind of data you need, the size of your network and what you want to accomplish with the system.

As a longtime consumer of contact management software, I  migrated from Teamup to Goldmine to ACT, and finally to Outlook.   I found all of them lacking in flexibility, accessibility and – most of all – too complicated and time consuming to use.   That’s when and why WeMeUs came to be.  WeMeUs is designed to organize and track  people, not companies and relationships rather than business processes.    It also has a unique focus on automating and streamlining at multiple points to save users’ time.  Because it is web-based, I can access my data can be accessed anywhere, and I no longer have to worry about Outlook crashing and losing my contact information.

Building your own solution is extreme, I’ll admit!  What software or system are you using, why and how has it helped you?