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Thread: How to increase my sales leads with marketing

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    Full Member Cpt Chaos's Avatar
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    Question How to increase my sales leads with marketing

    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

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    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...

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    Site Caretaker Dave A's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cpt Chaos View Post
    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.

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    New Member waynmeyer's Avatar
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    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.

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    Full Member Cpt Chaos's Avatar
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    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.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cpt Chaos View Post
    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.

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    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.

  8. Thank given for this post:

    Cpt Chaos (16-Dec-12), Dave A (16-Dec-12)

  9. #8
    Full Member Cpt Chaos's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by emersonkelly View Post
    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
    For all your I.T. Support in Cape Town contact Dynamic Support.

    "You must be the change you want to see in the world. ~ Mahatma Gandhi"

  10. #9
    Gold Member Mark Atkinson's Avatar
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    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).



    ----

    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.

  11. Thank given for this post:

    Blurock (16-Dec-12), Dave A (17-Dec-12)

  12. #10
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    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.

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