[Question] How to increase my sales leads with marketing

[Cpt Chaos]

Hi guys,

I need some help please.

I've gotten my business up and running to a steady level over the past year and I've seen alot of potential clients requesting quotations, information etc, but alot of them don't return. Now whether its pricing or just personal preference I don't know.

But I honestly feel that the business itself can do way better. At the moment we are busy redeveloping certain parts of our website to give it a more professional look and feel as well as making it user friendly.

In the past I have gone out doing cold calling by actually visiting the clients premises and talking to the person who would make the final call, from this I found we'd get about a 1/20 response to some of them being interested. However with our Facebook Page and the interaction with users we've grown and we're looking at roughly 4 - 6 clients per week requesting a quote and ultimately completing the deal.

We've also tried B2B email marketing by introducing the business to the senior management but in the 300 - 500 emails that have gone out we'd get feedback from about one of them.

Any sugguestions on how I can increase sales leads are welcome as I know and trust that my "ship" still has a lot of water that it can sail on.

Thanking you all in advanced

[adrianh]

You may be running into the fact that you are trying to do something in an already over saturated market.

What makes your services different to the services offered by the next guy? Why would I use your company? Why would I read your mail? Why would I give you a gap? These are the questions you need to figure answers for.

When my PC breaks down I sure ain't going to remember that you sent me a mail 6 months ago, I need to reach out and grab your number (reach for the internet, for my pen or for whatever is at hand) Lots of us still reach for the yellow pages, what do you reach for when you need help? - are you advertising there? are you making it easy for yourself to find yourself dhould you be in a situation where you need your own services. Think dude, think about what you do yourselves when faced with problems, where do you look for help when your car breaks down, your PC blows up etc...

[Dave A]

I've gotten my business up and running to a steady level over the past year and I've seen alot of potential clients requesting quotations, information etc, but alot of them don't return. Now whether its pricing or just personal preference I don't know.

It might be an idea to look at your follow-up procedures. If your follow-up is right, you'll know what's happening.

Knowing your closing rate is useful. Knowing why you're closing and not closing is gold.

[waynmeyer]

It seems that you have the know how on
What makes your business successful. The fact remains that 90% should be done out the office. Getting leads ect. As you say you already doing cold sales. However as pointed out above that if the marker is saturated then you might feel the demand is less intense.

Depending on the nature of your business I would focus on SEO and obviously coupled with great service. You should see a steady increase. The old saying that " the one that shouts the loudest gets the most attention"

Your SEO is probably what needs working on. What's really great is that SA has really bad websites and bad SEO integration so it's pretty easy to sit at the top of google. Once you at the top
Of google you get loads of requests.

Again depending on the nature of your business the search queries might be low. So google wouldn't help much. Check google analytics and see what's the incoming searches, check google ad words tool and see what people are searching related to your business.

Failing that then using coupons sites are seeming to generate nice foot traffic to businesses. Just be cautions as to which sites you join. In general coupon sites can work for most businesses that allow that functionality.

You spoke about a Facebook page earlier. Maybe ask your developer to create you a Facebook app for your page that people can complete the action/process you require to make sales. Facebook apps seems to bring in decent traffic due to people trusting Facebook and due to people being so socially active it's easier to get then to view your app. This way you also get more vitality from your posts.

I would go as far as joining google ad words. Make sure your developer or SEO artist is setting up your keywords and display options. Try take advantage of googles new HTML ads. This way you can have 4 ads in on ad. Making it really powerful using call to action buttons.

Another area people miss is adding their company on google maps. People search like that alot I find. Hope that was a bit of help on the right direction from an online perspective.

[Cpt Chaos]

Thanks guys, you've all given me quite a few valid points to look at. Yes the site itself requires some work on the SEO front and we've appointed a company to take care of that for us. The idea of using facebook apps might be one of the things I haven't thought about and will definately give that a go.

Let me do some more research on what you all said and I'll let you know how it went.

[emersonkelly]

Hi guys,

I need some help please.

I've gotten my business up and running to a steady level over the past year and I've seen alot of potential clients requesting quotations, information etc, but alot of them don't return. Now whether its pricing or just personal preference I don't know.

But I honestly feel that the business itself can do way better. At the moment we are busy redeveloping certain parts of our website to give it a more professional look and feel as well as making it user friendly.

In the past I have gone out doing cold calling by actually visiting the clients premises and talking to the person who would make the final call, from this I found we'd get about a 1/20 response to some of them being interested. However with our Facebook Page and the interaction with users we've grown and we're looking at roughly 4 - 6 clients per week requesting a quote and ultimately completing the deal.

We've also tried B2B email marketing by introducing the business to the senior management but in the 300 - 500 emails that have gone out we'd get feedback from about one of them.

Any sugguestions on how I can increase sales leads are welcome as I know and trust that my "ship" still has a lot of water that it can sail on.

Thanking you all in advanced

Have you tried marketing with Pinterest and twitter?? These sites also increases sales.

[ians]

Spending many hours on the internet, a few things i have learnt , if i wanted to expand my operation to beyond what i can already handle at this point in time, this is what i would do.

Be a nice guy, but true
be honest,
offer information on topics which you are familiar with, not only industry specific,
let people into your office or factory and show them what you are all about, the people who work for you and what services you have to offer,
the more you share the more people will learn to trust you, customer who trust you will always come back,
whatever you do, never run down other companies in the same industry or anyone for that matter,
make sure you backup what you say,
it will take 100s of good customers to get your name out there and only one unhappy one to destroy it, the internet is a powerful media,
keep people up to date with the latest technology available in your market, and makes sure you keep up,
join social networks and forums even if it is your hobby, people will learn to trust you and spread the word, the most powerful advertising media.

My biggest problem at present is not finding customers, its trying to find good staff who dont have TB or aids and who are prepared to do things right. I just cant do everything.

By the way play nicely with the other kids on the forums and people will want to get to know you better which will in turn expand your operation.

[Cpt Chaos]

Have you tried marketing with Pinterest and twitter?? These sites also increases sales.

I've never used pinterest so will give it a definite go and I'm trying to get the twitter side of things more active as we currently concentrate mainly on our Facebook presence

[Mark Atkinson]

Alright, Cpt Chaos, I'm going to be very frank with you here. This critique may or may not gel with your emotional ties to your business, but take it as you please. I believe that if you take my advice seriously, you will see your website's performance improve.

I've seen your website and am a fan of your Facebook page (joined up from Carbonite) - I make it a habit to keep tabs on what's happening in my clients' industries and I follow many of their competitors, including you.

Now, if I had to pinpoint your failures to 5 main areas, it would be the following:

1. This is probably the most important of all - your website doesn't look trustworthy. I'm not quite sure why you chose Drupal for an online store, but since I'm talking frankly here, it's left a lot to be desired. The site looks more like a site built 5-10 years ago than one built in 2012. You are missing key credibility factors - You've got testimonials, which are great, but anybody can create fictitious testimonials. At a glance, I can't find information regarding shipping, refunds, warranties, etc. I don't see any trusted brands/names with whom I can associate Dynamic Support. I would not buy from a site whom I wouldn't trust to deliver on the goods and the after sales service.

You would be far better off creating a site using either Wordpress & WooCommerce, or Joomla and Virtuemart, which are both easier to use and more SEO-friendly. You can pick up a much cleaner template for one of those systems which would aid your site's aesthetic appeal.

If memory serves me correctly, you offered website design as a service at one stage. This rubbed me up the wrong way, because when I looked at your site and saw stock photography that was distorted (wrong proportions), a website that was broken in 2 out of the 3 major browsers, and a footer with the text reduced to 5px high that reads "Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer" - the feeling I got is that this shouldn't be a business offering website design.

2. Your prices. Truth is, people tend to buy on price on the Internet and your prices tend to be 20% - 30% higher than the bulk of your competitors. From experience, when selling hardware/software people will look for bargains first. It's only when the prices are comparable that people start to judge you on other factors, whether it's delivery times, credibility factors, warranty periods, etc.

3. You are operating in a saturated industry. It is very, very difficult to succeed with an online store selling what you are selling. To succeed in a saturated industry, you need to be offering something that your competitors aren't. Whether it's a 3 month instant, no questions asked money-back guarantee, or whether it's a year worth of free consultation with every new PC, or whether you'll deliver every order for free, you need to do something differently.

I operate in the web design industry & online marketing industry, which is more saturated than most. We started off as general web and graphic designers. We were run-of-the-mill designers, just like everybody else. So what did we do? We stopped offering our services to everybody and worked on a solution tailored to small businesses only. We became the people to go to if you've got a small business and needed a website, branding or needed to market yourself online. We have packages to suit and make sure that we have the best response times and best customer service in Durban - and trust me, it works.

Our client sells cellphones on the internet. Lots of other websites sell cellphones, but he sells them with monthly airtime packages and runs specials at cheaper prices than anywhere in South Africa. Not all of his products are cheaper, but he's creating a name for himself in SA. Every product that he sells using penetration pricing tactics gets the digital consumer market in SA talking - from MyBroadband to Carbonite to SAGamer, people are talking about his business. They wouldn't be talking about him if his products/specials/service weren't something to talk about. As a result of them talking, he sells a bunch of other products, which are the ones that bring him in the money. He differentiated himself from his competitors and he is seeing success as a result.

I suggest you do the same.

4. You mentioned you were paying somebody to do SEO. If they've been working for longer than a month, I suggest you fire them. Even your home page has zero optimisation work done on it. No H1 headings, no meta description, not much of anything really. Your title tags are non-descriptive and vague and many of your internal links have no descriptive value. (e.g. dynamicsupport.co.za/node/242)

Please, please don't fall into the trap of paying somebody to "build hundreds/thousands of links" through various means. That's just not how SEO works anymore.

5. Conversion. I see you're running a Google Analytics script. Have you set up e-commerce tracking? If not, you should. Selling to a South African online buyer's market, you should be aiming for a 1% conversion rate (visitors to completed sales) which is pretty much standard across the board. For most of our clients who are sitting on 1%, we aim for 2-3%, but that requires almost full-time work on conversion rate optimisation, which not many small business clients can afford.

Your figures may be distorted because you probably aren't getting much natural search traffic just yet, but it'd make for some interesting reading.

Make sure you use your Google's in-page Analytics, so you can see where people are clicking and determine why.

If you do not know what your visitors are doing and why they are doing it, then you will never know how to make them do more of what you want (buy from you) and less of what you don't want (leave).

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If you work on the things I've mentioned above, I'm pretty darn sure the next time we talk you'll be doing a lot better, at which stage we can discuss how you can do even better. I do hope my being frank hasn't offended you, but I'd rather call it how I see it than dress things up and not have you see any success as a result.

P.S. It's often not a good idea to over-diversify your services. Specialise, become an expert in one thing first. Doing one thing well is often better than under-performing on several things.

Obviously the above is all my professional opinion. Some may disagree or have different advice. At the end of the day, it's your business and you are the one who needs to sift through the information and make the right changes.

P.P.S Don't worry about Pinterest and the like until you are doing the rest well. Facebook, your website and maybe Twitter is all you really need for now.

[adrianh]

You know Mark, there is one aspect of marketing that you touched on indirectly yet powerfully, namely; knowing your trade. The thing is, when we go to see a doctor and we ask for his opinion we assess his knowledge (rightfully or not; through the things that he says) - does he use lots of jargon and try to sell us the latest technology, does he waffle, what sort of picture does he paint, balanced, rosy etc. You mostly don't have the oppertunity to speak to his other patients...so how do you judge whether he will be able to do that knee replacement properly...you listen to what he says and hopefully your perceptions are balanced enough to make a reasonable assessment of his skills.

Ok, so what did I see in what you wrote: It is clear that YOU know YOUR trade. I don't have to see a website that you are involved with to be able to make a fair assessment that I could put my trust in you, why, because you cut to the chase and call it as you see it.

I am really trying to make two points through this posting:
1. Frankly, I don't really care whether a company has a website or not, what I do care about is being able to get knowledge / experience based clear, concise and honest answers to my questions and solutions to my problems. Once I establish that I can trust the person / company then its easy for them to get all my business.
2. One day soon when my wallet has put on a bit of weight then I'll commission you to sort out my websites.

[Cpt Chaos]

1. This is probably the most important of all - your website doesn't look trustworthy. I'm not quite sure why you chose Drupal for an online store, but since I'm talking frankly here, it's left a lot to be desired. The site looks more like a site built 5-10 years ago than one built in 2012. You are missing key credibility factors - You've got testimonials, which are great, but anybody can create fictitious testimonials. At a glance, I can't find information regarding shipping, refunds, warranties, etc. I don't see any trusted brands/names with whom I can associate Dynamic Support. I would not buy from a site whom I wouldn't trust to deliver on the goods and the after sales service.

I have to agree with you on this. Not only in the sense of taking a hit at my own business but when it comes to the aesthetics I wasn't very happy with myself we've been looking at the entire site as you've mentioned and saying what can we do to change it. Looking at your remarks I can see the issue re valuable information on shipping etc. The whole site has been in redevelopment for some time now and we are hoping to launch the new site early in the new year.

3. You are operating in a saturated industry. It is very, very difficult to succeed with an online store selling what you are selling. To succeed in a saturated industry, you need to be offering something that your competitors aren't. Whether it's a 3 month instant, no questions asked money-back guarantee, or whether it's a year worth of free consultation with every new PC, or whether you'll deliver every order for free, you need to do something differently.

Looking at our business from two sides we've got our Durban based offices where we mainly do retail sales of hardware, software, security sector equipment etc, where as with me in Cape Town we are a service driven entity that provides mainly I.T support in the form of computer support, telephonic and email support and one of our more popular services in Cape Town being cloud based solutions. The online store is an alternative for our clients to make purchases without having to contact us. Now having two branches that focus on different aspects how would you go about marketing the business? Would you suggest looking more at the service driven side of things or going with the retail service where we already as mentioned have a saturated market?

4. You mentioned you were paying somebody to do SEO. If they've been working for longer than a month, I suggest you fire them. Even your home page has zero optimization work done on it. No H1 headings, no meta description, not much of anything really. Your title tags are non-descriptive and vague and many of your internal links have no descriptive value. (e.g. dynamicsupport.co.za/node/242)

We have recently fired the seo company as I have been monitoring them and we could not see any progress even less so on page optimization being done as they have never used their account to login to our site. I am working through Dereks SEO course to do the basic optimization but would like a company specializing in the market to take over that job.

----

If you work on the things I've mentioned above, I'm pretty darn sure the next time we talk you'll be doing a lot better, at which stage we can discuss how you can do even better. I do hope my being frank hasn't offended you, but I'd rather call it how I see it than dress things up and not have you see any success as a result.

Thanks for putting at as you see it Mark, I know you've been there too when you initially started up and you've grown tremendously since then. I'll definitely go through what you and the rest have said before making use of some valuable information.

[ians]

Selling the latest technology is one of the key factors in most companies today, if you are left behind with technology so will your company.

Latest technology doesnt always means new electronic gadgets, in my industry for example, it could be a dustless chasing system, or an LEM lamp which could save you lots of money.

Baffling people with bullshit is one thing, understanding your industry and offering the latest technology you are familiar with, is another. 50 years ago trying to sell people computers would have been quite a challenge, today people only want the latest and up to date systems.

[Blurock]

Now having two branches that focus on different aspects how would you go about marketing the business? Would you suggest looking more at the service driven side of things or going with the retail service where we already as mentioned have a saturated market?

The business of the branches are still related and can be marketed as different divisions of the same business e.g. Sales and Service. Or you can do what Richard Branson is known for: divide the business into two smaller entities. Being an SMME, I do not think the latter option would be feasible at this stage, though.

[Mark Atkinson]

You know Mark, there is one aspect of marketing that you touched on indirectly yet powerfully, namely; knowing your trade. The thing is, when we go to see a doctor and we ask for his opinion we assess his knowledge (rightfully or not; through the things that he says) - does he use lots of jargon and try to sell us the latest technology, does he waffle, what sort of picture does he paint, balanced, rosy etc. You mostly don't have the oppertunity to speak to his other patients...so how do you judge whether he will be able to do that knee replacement properly...you listen to what he says and hopefully your perceptions are balanced enough to make a reasonable assessment of his skills.

Ok, so what did I see in what you wrote: It is clear that YOU know YOUR trade. I don't have to see a website that you are involved with to be able to make a fair assessment that I could put my trust in you, why, because you cut to the chase and call it as you see it.

I am really trying to make two points through this posting:
1. Frankly, I don't really care whether a company has a website or not, what I do care about is being able to get knowledge / experience based clear, concise and honest answers to my questions and solutions to my problems. Once I establish that I can trust the person / company then its easy for them to get all my business.
2. One day soon when my wallet has put on a bit of weight then I'll commission you to sort out my websites.

Thanks very much for your kind words, Adrian. It's nice to know that that sort of thing is noticed. What you've said is absolutely true though - it's generally very easy to pick out the person who knows his stuff. As an illustration, I found my financial advisor through MyBroadband. There was a debate regarding retirement annuities and it was blindingly obvious that the guy knew what he was talking about.

Looking at our business from two sides we've got our Durban based offices where we mainly do retail sales of hardware, software, security sector equipment etc, where as with me in Cape Town we are a service driven entity that provides mainly I.T support in the form of computer support, telephonic and email support and one of our more popular services in Cape Town being cloud based solutions. The online store is an alternative for our clients to make purchases without having to contact us. Now having two branches that focus on different aspects how would you go about marketing the business? Would you suggest looking more at the service driven side of things or going with the retail service where we already as mentioned have a saturated market?

You've got to remember that once you're on the Internet it's very difficult to isolate parts of your business. You're selling to SA as a whole now, rather than just Durban or just CT. Do your branches only offer the services/products you mentioned to only those areas? If so, you need to make sure you are stating this very clearly.

If that is the case, what I would look to do - from a website point of view - is optimise the site more for local terms rather than general terms. So "Cloud Storage Solutions in Cape Town" rather than "Cloud Storage Solutions". (This is a very simplistic example) For your Durban offices, it would be something along the lines of "Buy Hardware in Durban". If you have two physical office locations, claim them both in Google's local listings and make sure that you only list the services that are applicable to that branch.

If you can win with the local terms, you can move onto the broader terms eventually.

Either way, I wouldn't discount either branch's offerings. There is just a different way of marketing each one. Hardware sales, for example, are very specific. The product has a certain name, appeals to certain people and costs a certain amount. Service-based offerings are variable in price, much less specific and they also appeal to a wider range of people. You need to make sure that you're optimising your website accordingly for each.

I would make sure I've got landing pages for each of my key services and then I would define goals. The goals for my landing pages detailing services would be to get the visitor to request a free quotation, or maybe sign up for a newsletter.

The goal for retail sales is generally to either drive them through the sales process or to get them to consent to further marketing from you so that they may buy from you in future. (It may even be to get them to like you on Facebook.)

Track your conversion rates for each goal and work constantly on improving them. Just always bear in mind that the sales funnel is usually different for a service-based entity than it is for a retail-based entity.

We have recently fired the seo company as I have been monitoring them and we could not see any progress even less so on page optimization being done as they have never used their account to login to our site. I am working through Dereks SEO course to do the basic optimization but would like a company specializing in the market to take over that job.

That's half of your problem. It's great that you're working through an SEO course to familiarise yourself with the basics - that's something I always encourage my clients to do. I've recently written a blog post which compiles some of the best beginner resources that I've found on the net. If you'd like to give it a read, you can find it here: SEO Beginners - 11 Resources to Take You from Buggerall to Badass

Regarding optimisation - If you email me with your budget and goals I can quote you for an SEO audit and on-site optimisation. I only take on one client per industry, so we won't be able to perform a full online marketing service for you. (This actually depends on your products, but I think it may conflict with a current client's offerings)
I'm also happy to consult if you're in Durbs, or via Skype.

We also deal closely with another online marketing company in Durban who I'm happy to refer you to for online marketing work if you're more comfortable with them. They happen to be very clued up and I even outsource some of my own Adwords work to them when I'm over capacity.

Whoever you work with, be sure to ask for real references who you can actually contact. With SEO, if you're paying next to nothing, you're probably getting next to nothing in return. (As it is with most things in life)

[Cpt Chaos]

Thanks for the remarks Mark,

We service the whole of South Africa. We have a network of companies we outsource our work to. Although we found that our client market here in Cape Town is more of a service driven target market we also do the entire retail side of the business. I believe that if you go into the trade where you deal with hardware breakages etc its always a good idea to have the retail service too.

I must say Mark you do give quite a bit of insight into the things I've been pondering on. Let me work through what you've said and I'll definitely have a read through your SEO resource blog as well. At the moment its the busy time of the year where I don't spend much time in the office. But I will definitely be in touch soon whether it will be this year or the new year I can't say.