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How to Qualify and Close Every Sale Effectively

A lot of people often ask me how I can call myself a CEO with a small corporation. The answer is quite simple. A CEO is a Chief Experience Officer. A person that always has their door open and likely follows a system similar to G.U.E.S.S.T. Over the years I've had the opportunity to be trained by some of the top sales people in Canada and it's taught me a lot. Using the G.U.E.S.S.T system has given me endless opportunities and I hope it does for you too.

Greet

every customer and person with equal genuine enthusiasm. Most business to an extent is based on an emotional impulse. Would you buy from someone you didn't like? You are a brand after all. Just look at how well Steve Jobs was able to communicate and embrace every day people's needs in his brief but powerful presentations. In networking and engaging your potential audience through various mediums you are with any luck building rapport. In fact, just by going out to introduce myself and asking clients relevant questions I quickly became one of the top 5 sales people for a very large corporation inside a month. Three great books that helped me with this are, "Never Eat Alone," by Keith Ferrazzi, "Delivering Happiness" by "Tony Hsieh and "How to Win Friends and Influence People," by Dale Carnegie. If you haven't read these books you really should as I found them transforming. I've been told Toast Masters is amazing for business but I've not yet gone so I can't say from personal experience. If you're answering the phone make sure you say your name last. A study found that most people remember the last word you said. So if you answer the phone ending a sentence with speaking you've just become Mr/Mrs Speaking. Are you engaging people through the internet and greeting everyone that comes in?

Understand

your clients needs. The who, what, why, where, and how the product service offering will be used. If you know the potential customers needs you'll never have to sell to them. You're just giving them what they want. Two ears, one mouth is often said for a reason. If you're not listening to your customer through various mediums such as the internet you're missing out on huge opportunities. Are you properly qualifying your sales by asking the right questions?

Educate

your guests with brief, comprehensive values that tie into their needs. Plant seeds by answering their needs with questions how your product service offering applies to them with the who, why, when, where and how the offering will be used. For example, "Jennifer, you mentioned you're looking for more sales cost effectively. Have you ever tried internet marketing which has the strongest ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and on average results in $6 in store for every dollar spent online? Most people are doing their research about product service offerings online prior to purchase." You'll notice in the example I addressed the person by name which means they're not just another person through the door. If a customer agrees three times that's usually enough. Always look a customer in the eye if it's in person, and speak with enthusiasm regardless of where it is. I remember speaking to a sales person from a Fortune 500 company on the phone about the acquisition of some hardware for a client over the phone. It quickly became very apparent that he was cocky and slouching back in his chair which made him someone we didn't wish to buy from. If you're on the phone sit up and speak with enthusiasm as people notice. If you're speaking to someone in person make sure you're nodding as you speak as people will tend to find themselves doing the same in agreement. Make sure you believe in the product service offering because if you don't the client will either know it or it will be returned. Over 70% of communication is body language so make sure you're projecting that confidence. I never sell anything I don't personally stand behind or like. Know your product knowledge thoroughly but don't confuse them with too many technical terms. Never give the customer more than a few choices as this will confuse them. Are you educating your customers with things relevant to their needs?

Satisfy

that the clients needs are met by asking questions.

Sell

is an old term, but close the sale by giving the customer what they basically asked for when you qualified them with questions pertinent to their needs.

Thank

every customer and be thankful for their business as it's well known that it's easier to sell to existing customers than it is to new ones.

The R's of Internet Marketing

A good marketer sees the value in people and companies that the companies often can't see themselves. The R's of internet marketing are gathered from my 11 years of experience doing what I love. If you apply the following you should become very successful in marketing your business. For example, if you were a client of Making 8 Inc in 2011 with an integrated internet marketing service plan then your business over doubled in size.

Relevancy

is all about knowing your clients needs, goals, and effectively answering their questions. I use the G.U.E.S.S.T formula to understand client needs on a personal basis and incorporate it into marketing plans. If you know you're relevant to clients and search engines then hard sales a methodology of the past will not be necessary. The law of reciprocity will show that just in educating clients that meet their needs you'll more than likely get business and continue to be ahead of where the puck is headed by knowing intent. After all, you're just giving them what they asked for by answering their wants and needs. Market directed campaigns and strategies should always be implemented. Being able to define, segment and define realistic goals/KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) will surely lead to an increase in conversions. Are your marketing campaigns segmented and clearly defined with goals inside a realistic timeline?

Research

is thoroughly investigating clients service offering, products and needs to apply into your marketing plan. In thoroughly knowing a company's offerings and their target market you can define value One of the things I've learned over the years is that in asking the right questions you'll almost always grow by leaps and bounds. I've been fortunate enough to study and crowd source with some of the top internet marketers in a world to pass on that data to our clients resulting in growth for everyone. What kind of research have you done to integrate into your marketing plan? Do you know what your goals are?

Reconnaissance

is learning the activities, standings, resources, and position of competition. Once you have this you can review your research, define your value added proposition and ultimately surpass your competition by applying the actionable data. Follow in the foot steps of giants and it will only take small steps to set your own path. Study the master, become the master. Do you know what your competition is doing or how they stand out? I certainly know what my clients competition is doing. After all, business is measured in seconds.

Reach

is utilizing various mediums such as social media, SEO, and SEM to engage clients and potential customers. In becoming part of the conversation about the product offerings your company provides you're given the opportunity to solve their problems and everyone benefits. A good CEO always has their door opener, and is always sharing information. Are you engaging your targeted portion of the 2.5 billion searches a day made from the Google network alone?

Review

is following the kaizen philosophy of continuous learning and improvement by analyzing the data such as web analytics marketing science. Are you asking the right questions by segmenting your campaigns? Are you monitoring your results? Do you know what keywords and search queries your clients are looking for to find your business? Do you know what keywords most commonly result in a sale? What are people most commonly looking for on your site? These are all answers and internet marketer can clearly define.

Respond

is the ability to understand, educate, and overcome objections by using the valuable actionable data provided from your marketing science to integrate into your strategies. Successful companies are able to act fast and respond to the data they're given from internet markets to maximize engagement, ROI and ROAS. Does your company have decision makers that are able to quickly able to respond to the market? Are you able to adapt to the changes of the 350-400 changes a year Google makes to its algorithm and over 200 ranking signals? An SEO professional certainly can and does on a daily basis.

ROAS

Return On Ad Spend is defining your marketing efforts returns after the cost of spend. A good marketer is always able to measure this metric, and show the value if they're any good. Do you know what your returns are after your marketing ad spend?

ROI

Return On Investment is ultimately talking the language of any business professional and demonstrating that what you're doing is increasing their bottom line. A good marketer will be able to define ROI with marketing reports outlining segmented KPI's (Key Performance Indicators), outcomes, and returns. Is your marketing focused and converting into ROI? What are you doing to continuously grow your ROI/ROAS? A professional internet marketer should be able to tell you this.

How SEO Builds Successful Companies

If you're an entrepreneur or marketer chances are you keep hearing about this SEO (Search Engine Optimization) buzz word that keeps flying around. You know you need this internet marketing called SEO but you're not really sure why. The reality is that every business whether they sell products online or not needs SEO. It's not enough to just post content in a traditional print style anymore as Google's put out an algorithm that devalues pages that aren't relevant to searchers on the internet. What this means is that even if you're fortunate enough to be found in one of the trillion plus known sites crawled by Google chances are if you're not writing your content for both engaged users and search engines you're not going to be too successful online. The reason for this is Google uses click data to determine relevance and search query rankings. When a user immediately leaves (bounces) due to irrelevant information the page is devalued in search rankings. This is a large part of why traditional writers don't perform well on search engines. While there's over 200 constantly changing ranking signals there's definitely a right and wrong way to brand your company online and it's with SEO. Good branding means being first, selling your company well, and a website does this 24 hours a day 365 days a year even while you sleep.

What this all boils down to is that if you don't control your brand online with SEO someone else will be in the front of the crowd talking about your brand, product, or service offering . If you're not on the front page in the top search rankings for search queries you might as well be a guy at the back of a concert without a mic expecting to be heard. While many major brands don't sell products online they do sell their brands and this is often worth millions if not billions of dollars to them in store. If you're always at the back of people's mind then you're the company people are most likely to go to first. It doesn't matter whether you sell jeans with a popular brand label or you sell buildings the presence you have first makes you the expert. In fact, a study shows that for every dollar spent online six is spent in store. With Canada being the highest number of users online per capita in the world chances are you want your company to have a strong SEO campaign to put your brand in front of the crowd.

If you don't have SEO just think of the BP and Toyota in the last year. Two entirely different scenarios and two entirely different results. BP's message was dominated by the media but with Toyota they managed to dominate their PR especially using SEO / Social Media Marketing to respond to an engaged audience looking for answers. Business is changing and chances are if people hear something about a company the first place they look is online. If they find your information first for popular queries the law of reciprocity shows that they're more likely to work with you in the future. Consider most clothing brands. While most people don't buy all their clothes online the value from powerful branding and presence selling the sizzle makes them more desirable. Without SEO you're a pamphlet to the wind and nobody is going to see your message.

If you want to market yourself properly online you need a:

Royal Wedding Will & Kate Marketing

Royal Wedding William Kate

The Royal Wedding is suggested to be one of the most watched events ever. My Google search reports suggests that the 'Royal Wedding' with Will and Kate is searched 450,000 times a month, and wedding venues 1,500,000 times a month. So you might be asking yourself how often is my business being searched? Chances are unless you're a well known brand people are searching for general terms like wedding venue (1.5MM searches a month), wedding ideas (1MM searches a month) and other general keywords relevant to that particular industry.

Having an search marketing company is pretty important. We're able to determine things like the Royal Wedding is most popular in order:

  1. United Kingdom
  2. Ireland
  3. New Zealand
  4. Australia
  5. Canada
  6. United States
  7. Germany

We're even able to determine where a market is the hottest like for example the most popular subregions of Canada for the William Kate Royal Wedding:

  1. Alberta, Canada
  2. Ontario, Canada
  3. Nova Scotia, Canada
  4. Newfoundland, Canada
  5. New Brunswick, Canada
  6. Manitoba, Canada
  7. Saskatchewan, Canada
  8. British Columbia, Canada
  9. Quebec, Canada

The Royal Wedding is most popular in the following cities:

  1. Poplar, United Kingdom
  2. Brentford, United Kingdom
  3. Thames Ditton, United Kingdom
  4. Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
  5. Edinburgh, United Kingdom
  6. Manchester, United Kingdom
  7. Birmingham, United Kingdom
  8. London, United Kingdom
  9. Herndon, VA, USA
  10. Toronto, Canada

We can even tell you which cities the William Kate Royal Wedding is most popular in Canada:

  1. Brampton, Canada
  2. Burlington, Canada
  3. Barrie, Canada
  4. Scarborough, Canada
  5. St John, Canada
  6. Toronto, Canada
  7. Windsor, Canada
  8. Burnaby, Canada
  9. Kingston, Canada
  10. Kitchener, Canada
  11. Having a good SEO company allows you to determine the seasonality of searches for example the royal wedding has had exponential search growth since Q4 of 2010 starting November 17th. You can not only tell the seasonality but where in the world things are most popular. However, it doesn't stop there. Most professional SEO's are trained to examine the web analytics of a site to tell exactly what searches a person used to find your site, what browser they're using, how long they stayed on site, what they were interested in, where they're from, and even what browser they're using. If I'm able to tell you all this about the William Kate Royal Wedding just imagine what I can do for your business with one of our marketing plans full of market research, web statistics, and reverse engineering on your competitors?

    Want to get this kind of information about your business and competitors? Call 1-888-832-4023 for a FREE consultation and get started today

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