Sharon J Hall

History is said to repeat itself, and sales history is no different. Whether it’s the dress code, the compensation plan, or the frequency of sales team meetings, chances are you have heard someone in the sales team say; “we’ve done that before.” Let’s take a look at the different ways organizations tried to become effective at selling over the pst 100 or so years. Why? Because chance are, you’re organization has all or some of these forces at play. All of them need to be used to help your sales team succeed.

1890-1920: The Era of Sales Science

The sales frontier….In this era, pioneering companies focused on defining the expectations of sales people and their sales managers. They realized that salespeople needed to build trusting relationships and also be experts in their product. More importantly, organizations focused on defining sales systems, methods, and approaches that would work.

In this era people began to understand and write about what professional selling entailed.

More importantly, individuals sought to proactively teach new salespeople about the profession. Most of the learning was informal, with a focus on teaching individuals how to sell through examples and through coaching. Pioneering sales managers found that isolating the transaction as a specific moment in time allowed them train new salespeople and fellow managers on what happened, why it happened, and how to avoid any missteps in the future.

Because sales managers were often seasoned salespeople, they were able to relay stories and effective strategies for engaging customers. Topics such as “how to approach a customer” and “how to give a handshake” became part of many sales training programs.

Some questions to consider…. Are you in a frontier sales organization?
- Does your sales organization change the sales compensation plan frequently?
- Does your sales training seem to focus solely on making salespeople product/solution experts?
- Does your formal sales training program last a few days and are sales managers expected to coach and teach in the field?
- Does the organization focus on facilitating one transaction at a time?

1920-1945: The Era of Sales Process

The roaring 20′s of selling….This era saw a shift occur within sales and sales training practices. Up until this era, the focus had been on helping salespeople identify and close one transaction at a time. Sales teams quickly realized that the approaches grounded in the previous era began to create some challenges. Teams were having trouble scaling their efforts to reach more people. Facilitating more transactions in a more methodological manner became the focus. Team members and trainers developed methods to train new sales representatives on repeatable sales processes. The sales process become the foundation for effectively facilitating more transactions.

It was during this Era that many of the terms we use today were coined such as; canvassing, territory, quota, sales team, and sales process. Up until this time, most salespeople learned on the job, through self-directed methods of trial and error or by watching others. Sales managers began using printed tools such as books to teach their sales teams. Training was designed to help salespeople understand the product features and benefits, how to make an effective presentation, and how to close strong. Entire approaches to selling began to focus on the importance of flashy sales presentations and the art of overcoming objections. The importance of a positive mental attitude became a cornerstone of many training classes.

Are you in a roaring 20′s sales organization?
- Nobody can train salespeople better than the sales manager!
- Are motivational talks given to salespeople repeatedly?
- Is 75% (or more) of sales training content really product training?
- Do sales managers believe all failures stem from a poor attitude or lack of motivation?

- Does your organization have the capacity for multiple transactions at a time?
- Is your sales team focused on being “flashy”?

1945-1985: The Era of the Sales Relationship

Is your sales team stuck in the “All about me Era”? …. In this era, immediately following World War II, individual luxuries exploded as consumers began to demand more and more comfort in their lives. The age of the advertiser and marketer had arrived with the creation of mass communications (such as television) and the explosion of print media. During this time, sales training emphasized pre-closing activity and landing new business deals. Training audio tapes began taking hold, printed newsletters were more prevalent, and more magazines supported the needs of salesperson development. The goal of sales training focused on helping salespeople gain the attention of the prospective buyer, building the prospect’s interest, and turning that interest into desire to take action through a personal relationship. Many salespeople were taught about the hierarchy of buyer motivation. As a result, training included different types of customer relationships and their unique needs (i.e., buyer types, decision makers, “gate keepers”, coaches, etc.). Sales training included closing techniques, scripted responses to buyer objections, and understanding buyer body language. Emerging technologies such as the portable phone and the fax machine were also trained, helping salespeople become more accessible to clients. As a result, clients had faster access to salespeople who were often the first person they would call with any questions or concerns.

Do you work in an “all about me” sales organization?

- Training is conducted on the types of buyer behavior sales teams encounter.
- Salespeople are expected to serve customers after the sale but very little training is provided in that area.
- Training is heavily focused on overcoming objections and “canned” responses to buyer concerns.

- The organization seems to be focused more on salesperson activity, then on sales team learning
- The sales team is isolated from marketing and the learning organization.

1985-2005: The Era of Sales Technology

Is your sales team from the “dot-com” sales era?… During this era, the internet boom was coupled with the wide-spread use of computer technology in client organizations. Because sales processes were well understood and consumer behavior become well known, organizations turned to technology to help speed up salesperson reaction times to market trends, keep them abreast of important industry news, and develop a more solid understanding of their clients. Customer Relationship Management and Sales Force Automation tools became widely. The newly available information enabled the entire transaction experience became more widely understood by marketing, selling, and servicing departments.

Within sales training, more emphasis was placed on service after the sale as well as bundled products into more encompassing solutions. Companies began teaching salespeople about consultative selling and how to valuate solutions. Salespeople were taught to become more problem solvers and required to think more like a CEO who understands the entire ramification of a purchase decision. Due to the complexity in the market, training focused on vertical expertise and project management skills. Sales managers began to hire for skills rather than training existing salespeople. Training programs began to focus on new-hire programs as sales talent become harder to find. Centralized training and annual events became more difficult due to dispersed teams.

Do you work with a dot-com sales organization?

- The paradigm seems to be “hire for the right skill and personality traits” as opposed to training existing salespeople.
- New hire training focuses on CRM training, product training, and administrative skills. Selling skills training is almost non-existent.
- Salespeople are responsible for the own professional development and skills attainment.
- Sales managers spend more time troubleshooting deals, filling out paperwork, and working company issues than coaching salespeople.

In its simplest form, the term online marketing refers to using the power of Internet advertising to generate a response from your audience. Also known as Internet marketing or web marketing, online marketing is used by companies selling goods and services directly to consumers as well as those who operate on a business-to-business model. Online marketing or internet marketing is a relatively new, but rapidly expanding and fundamentally important aspect of strategic implementation. Indeed in many organizations, it may be regarded as a functional aspect of marketing strategy and certainly of the business model.

Online marketing processes include not only e-marketing and sales, but supply chain and channel management, manufacturing and inventory control, financial operations and employee’s workflow procedures across an entire organization.

Online marketing or e-marketing is always confused with e-commerce. Any business marketing using online media is known as e-marketing, while on the other spectrum, if there is financial transaction involved with the electronic process using internet technologies, it is e-commerce.

Online marketing, in any case of the exact method a company chooses to use, offers several benefits. It’s convenient, affordable, and provides the opportunity for companies to track results as a campaign progresses. In addition, Internet marketing allows even the smallest of companies to compete in a global marketplace. Online marketing is often related to public relations, customer service, sales, and information management. However, it is important to remember that these fields can be considered separate specialties as well.

In online marketing certain area of interest are include:

Associate marketing:

In associate marketing, a business recruits associates to promote the company’s products or services. The associates receive a commission or other similar rewards for every sale, visitor, subscriber, or customer they bring to the company.

Search engine marketing:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion are search engine marketing techniques that companies can use to increase their visibility in the search engine page results from Google and its competitors.

Viral marketing:

Viral marketing is a technique is which companies encourage customers to pass along information about their products or services.

A very simple recommendation: qualify first and count second. People generally worry little about the cost per sales leads that marketing generates. What they look at is how many of those leads become viable sale opportunities.

Focusing on the cost of sales leads is an unrealistic measure because you do not know how likely the information you receive about your customers is to be turned into actual sales.

Generalizing will not do it. Marketing people may tend to pay more attention to the amount of leads they are sending. But if this department has no idea what kind of information constitutes a good Lead for the sales department, we are going nowhere fast. This is why your company has to struggle to constantly reduce the gap between the marketing and the sales department.

When accepting leads into the pipeline, think about the quality that you need in order to reach your goals.

You can do this better when your marketing department has trained people, and when the process is designed appropriately. The quality of the leads has a great influence on your sales and therefore in your return of investments.

When you focus only on cost effectiveness, you may actually be sacrificing quality along the process. However this approach is uncommon, but it is important to be aware that the number of high quality leads is often low.

The key questions to ask are:

Is the information contained in these sales leads useful for the sales department?

Will these leads turn into loyal customers?

The pressure put on the marketing department drives them to take less time and effort into carefully qualifying the sales leads.

Unqualified leads that are sent to the sales departments end up costing a company more than they can really quantify. If there is not some sort of filtering process behind them, sales leads will cost your company money and time. This is why the cost effective model is inappropriate for this kinds of processes.

You will be damaging the reputation of your marketing department if you allow them to share unqualified sales leads.

As a business owner using a variety of marketing tool is the key to your overall success of generating traffic to your website and therefore your business. There are lots of pay per click providers to choose and Google Adwords is one of the biggest pay per click site, however there are also a number of great other tools. So your business has many different options. Here we are help you to decide whether the PPC campaign is suitable for your business. Here we have provided the strengths and weaknesses of this PPC advertising campaign. But it has a number of strengths compared to other marketing strategies including,

Cost-effective:
PPC advertising requires only very little investment and time to set up, and this advertising campaign is very useful for any size of businesses. Since the cost of PPC advertising is controlled, there are so many companies are prepared to bid, in some places PPC is very cost-effective, although as competition increases, it will become less so.

Measurable:
Conversion rates for the PPC advertising process can be measured if some tracking code is added to a site, so that you are able to calculate the cost per sale and conversion rate that pay-per-click is giving you.

This makes an effective PPC campaign very easy to measurable compared to other forms of advertising. You can also monitor click-through rates to measure the effectiveness of your advertising messages.

Targeted:
As with all forms of online marketing strategies, the main benefit of PPC advertising is that it is targeted at people who are already looking for your products or services, meaning they are likely to be interested in your offering.

Immediate:
You can set up this process immediately with Google AdWords and within the space of a few days on Yahoo! Search Marketing. All the pay-per-click tools let you to control your budget and bid levels online, so that you can easily alter your activity and spend in line with business objectives such as market penetration, sales promotions and catering for seasonal variations. However this advertising process can also be a highly complex arena, which can present a number of business issues.

Intensive management required:
Bidding against competitors, testing strategies and budget monitoring all are require significant management skills and time in order to yield the efficient results.

Not all clicks are equal:

Make sure that the people who click on your advertisements are likely to generate a lead or sale is critical to the success of a pay-per-click campaign, and there are a number of pitfalls to watch out for. Bidding on the most general keywords by an advertiser in a specialist sector of a market may well lead to a high level of click-through cost from unlikely customers.

Targeting the right user in your ad text is also important and it often pays to be specific in what you are offering. Once a user clicks through to your site, it must provide them with a relevant information actually what they are seeking, providing a specific landing page and improving the user’s journey to a lead or sale on your actual site can be of great help in this process.

Sustainability:
Many other methods of marketing strategies let you to achieve sustainable results without investing huge amount of money. Pay-per-click is similar to traditional advertising in that as soon as you stop investing in it, you will lose the benefits immediately.

Overall pay per click marketing for small business owners is a great strategy that allows business an instant hit to their website page. With all marketing you do you need to ensure that the return you are getting is worth the investment.

For any business owner or entrepreneur, a part of investment has to be allotted to one aspect of business – advertising, that is. Without advertising one’s product or service is like watching a pot that never boils, because it has never lit in the first place. One has to be known by its prospected clients before a business can truly be considered successful and thriving. Because of such importance, various alternatives in marketing strategies are being explored nowadays. One of the most effective of which is Mobile Ads.

In today’s technology, the requirements of mobile advertising are just laid out in advertisers’ grasp, only to be strategically utilized. The gadgets, like laptops, mobile phones, handheld devices are ready for data connection and are currently being used by mobile users. The networks or wireless service providers offers various services, both voice and data connection purposes.

Media and entertainment geniuses have to be taken advantage in building brand awareness through photos, wall papers and ringtones, which are easily and widely transferred from one person to another, creating a viral marketing effect. The consumer basic practices and standards can now be easily profiled using the internet networking sites, like Facebook, Tweeter, Multiply and Friendster. All of which combined can actually provide more than enough ideas for entrepreneurs to sell what they have in store for their consumers.

Mobile Ads guarantees satisfaction for both consumers and sellers with these advantages at hand:

Real-time Service

Transfer of message from one advertiser to its target recipients can happen in just few seconds. Aggressive for the sellers’ point of view, but not as pushy and invading on the part of the consumers.

Reliability beyond distance

Thanks to digital transmission, the guaranty that the mobile user can receive the message is high, no matter how far the recipient is, as long as he or she is connected in a wireless network, of course.

Mobility

As evident from the strategy’s name, anywhere and anytime, the consumer can receive the ads in his or her very own hands.

Cost-Effective

Per SMS message charge (which may range in cents depending on the network operator’s charge) is much lower compared to voice calls or data connectivity charge when accessing the internet. As volume increases, the prices drops as well.

Efficiency

Since it is easier to respond via text, the consumers can take action faster.

Personalization

As mentioned a while ago, the social networking sites nowadays expose the kinds of trend which are hot for specific types of consumers. Creating a pattern designed for these profiles can actually make greater impact and better impression of a brand. This shall make a client feel more special and exclusive, keeping a closer and fruitful business relationship.

The more marketing strategy, the merrier!

Mobile Marketing is not competing with other forms of advertising. In fact, it can work well in parallel with media, TV, press and radio advertising. Mutual benefits are enjoyed.

The Virus Effect

One can hardly forward a call unless being referred to. And email isnot as easy to access and resend compared to an SMS ad. But this does not mean spamming every prospected buyer. Through mobile ads, one message can go a long way in different networks of people, leaving a mark in every phone it hops into.

So you have a great product that you think will sell really well? Great! Now, how do you alert the public to your product? The internet is a great way to both advertise and sell a product. Internet marketing may seem confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will find that it is a powerful and effective tool. The first and most important step to selling your product on the internet is to get a website. You can pay someone to design one for you, or you can try to design it yourself. The website can include pictures of the product, a description about what it does or how it’s made, and contact information for you in case potential customers have any questions. Make sure to also set up an e-mail address devoted exclusively to your new internet marketing venture. This will be a great way to keep your work and personal e-mails separate. You may even be able to set your site up so that you can take orders through the site.

It is a good idea to have someone who is knowledgeable about website design either helps you, or makes the site for you. If you ask around, many friends may be able to help or to at least recommend people that can help. This is generally relatively inexpensive.

Once your site is up and running, it is time to let people know about your great new product. It is a good idea to contact owners of other websites and blogs that have a large number of visitors and cater to your target demographic. Just send them an e-mail letting them know who you are and what you’re selling and encourage them to check it out. If those in charge of these already established websites or blogs like your product, they may choose to feature it on their site. If this happens, you get free advertising. Most of the time, websites generate revenue through ads, so if you have some money you might want to consider buying ad space on websites that serve your target demographic. If your product is solid and people like it, this ad space should eventually pay for itself in the form of increased sales. Selling and marketing products on the internet can be a fun, rewarding, and financially lucrative experience. Most importantly, remember to enjoy yourself. Good luck.