Improving cold calling results

Posted on May 16, 2013 by admin

By Rhonda Campbell

successful cold callingA salesperson can earn more than $80,000 a year, especially a sales person who introduces prospective customers to scientific and technical products. Another perk a salesperson enjoys is the opportunity to travel. However, considering the nerve necessary to succeed at selling, these and other perks still aren’t enough to entice some people to enter the career field. A good reason for this has to do with cold calling.

Sure; it can be intimidating to pick up the telephone and call one stranger after another, highlighting product features, asking them about their greatest wants or negotiating with them, hoping to get them to invest more of their time in you as you schedule a follow-up call or in-person meeting with them. But, fears must be pushed aside.


Point is, without cold calling, bottom lines don’t elevate. Whether you’re thinking about using cold calling to stimulate sales, stop losses or boost exposure for a new product or service, you could benefit from cold calling. To improve your cold calling results:

  • Create a list or database that includes contact names, telephone numbers, email addresses and two to three prominent interests contacts have.
  • Outline key points you’re going to cover with respondents before you pick up the telephone.
  • Stop taking ‘no’ personally. There could be a range of reasons why you hear ‘no’. For starters, people who turn down your offers may simply not be interested in the types of products or services you’re selling. You also might have caught a person at an inconvenient time (i.e. they just stepped out of the shower, their food is burning on the stove).
  • Find a mentor, someone who has five or more years of experience cold calling successfully.
  • Work to build rewarding relationships with people you cold call, offering them tips, free advice, three or more ways to contact you, etc.
  • Set a date and time to connect with the person within the next two to three days, providing them with more details about your products and services, including how using the products and services would improve or enhance their lives. If contacts prefer not to be telephoned, ask them if you can follow-up via an email, or again with an in-person meeting.
  • Highlight benefits specifically related to your products and services.
  • Stay honest, even if answering a question reveals risks associated with products or services you’re cold calling to sell.
  • Be straightforward.
  • Ask thought provoking questions, ones that help you unearth a person’s deepest desires, wishes and dreams.
  • Point out how products and services you’re cold calling to sell could help people fulfill their deepest desires, wishes and dreams.

After taking each of these and other steps, it’s important to keep in touch with respondents, again establishing a rewarding relationship with them. Listening, informing and educating, versus selling, are constant actions you should take during the entire cold calling process. The payoff could be huge.

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Who should take the blame for business failure?

Posted on May 16, 2013 by admin

Businesses fail; it’s that simple. No one wants to see a business fold. However, there are times when no amount of money, time, work or focus will keep a business from going under. Of course, as the recent recession showed, other factors like economic downturns, regulatory policies and market shifts impact a business’ ability to generate sales and succeed.

small business cartoon

Sit in a boardroom with members of a senior management team and you might find that you’re starting to be looked at as the cause for a company’s failure. It seems to come with the executive turf, the need to blame someone for lack of sales, poor management decisions, high employee turnover . . . you name it.

About the only way to steer clear of these muddy waters is to keep detailed records of business discussions, meeting notes and directions you were given from senior staff. If you don’t keep clear records, you could find yourself in a very uncomfortable she said/he said debate, not what you want.


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Getting larger profits by incorporating YouTube into your marketing strategies

Posted on May 11, 2013 by admin

By Rhonda Campbell

youtube videos marketing

Training seminars, clips from concerts, book readings and taped athletic competitions are just some of the types of videos uploaded and viewed at YouTube. This all happens for a very good reason. For starters, each month more than 800 million people visit YouTube, all in all this volume of traffic could potentially equate into an incredibly ripe harvest for you. YouTube also reports that “72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.” If you’ve never considered implementing YouTube promotion strategies to market your small business, perhaps it’s time you did.

More about how YouTube could improve your marketing successes

Founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, three guys who once worked for PayPal, YouTube has about 10 million channels. Channels are generally created by individual users. One way you could increase the number of YouTube views your videos receive is to give your channel a catchy name, something that grabs and holds people’s attention. You can also upload YouTube videos under existing channels. Just make sure you select a channel that won’t bury your videos.

A good way to find out which channels might be best suited for your small business videos is to spend a day or two searching for channels that publish videos that are similar to the content you plan on putting on YouTube. For example, if you’re an insurance agent, you might consider linking your videos to banking, medical or age-related (i.e. AARP) channels. Also, check out channels that have a large subscription base. In a nutshell, do a little empirical study and learning. Make note of your findings.


In other words, don’t just start uploading YouTube videos. Do your homework. Get a good grasp for what’s trending in your industry. This process might take you several days or a week or longer. At the end of your study, you should know what balance of comedy/humor, stats, interviews with industry leaders, news commentary and tips/advice will best grow your YouTube business channel.

Here are some other actions you could take to promote your business using YouTube videos:

  • Provide newsworthy or trending content in your videos.
  • Add content visitors could only find if they visited your YouTube channel (i.e. clips from a conference your business sponsors).
  • Feature  your YouTube channel in newsletters, press releases, direct mailings, your website, etc.
  • Create YouTube badges using YouTubeAPIs. Add these badges to your websites and blogs.
  • Make it easy for YouTube visitors to embed and share your videos. Add feature videos you make about your business to your website, blogs and digital newsletters.
  • Build themes around your videos, so people looking for certain types of videos can easily find you.
  • Register to have your best videos included in YouTube promoted videos
  • Add your YouTube videos/channel to search engines.
  • Include the right keywords/phrases in your video titles and descriptions.
  • Ask your friends, employees and supporters to share your videos with people in their circles.
  • Publish links to your YouTube videos/channel at social media networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter).

To establish relationships with prospective customers, you’re going to have to let people see you or your team members. You’re going to have to help people to feel as if they are getting to know you, can trust you. For these reasons, if you create your own small business YouTube videos, make sure you record yourself or staff in well lit areas. Eliminate background noise. Look into the camera and speak naturally. Let your personality shine to engage viewers. Be authentic.

Creating YouTube marketing videos

Should you want to include screenshots of computer pages in your YouTube videos, there are tools like Jango and Snipping Tool that you could use for free to capture the screenshots. All you have to do is capture the screenshot you want, save it to your computer then upload it onto documents you plan on including in your videos. Movie makers are other tools you can use to create YouTube videos. Additionally, if you have a digital camera, even a small handheld digital camera that fits in your pocket, you can start recording yourself, outdoor scenes, etc. to use in your small business YouTube videos.

After you upload your small business videos, get busy marketing and promoting them. Share your videos with your followers at social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Post links to your videos at your small business blog and at your official small business website.

Encourage your staff to do the same. Also encourage your staff to leave comments about your YouTube videos at your small business channel. These steps could help improve your YouTube views. To keep your small business channel subscribers coming back, searching for new videos you upload, try to record and upload one or more new videos a week or a month.

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Blog content that’s driving customer sales

Posted on May 7, 2013 by admin

By Rhonda Campbell

blog content that increases customer salesTrue. Blog content can increase your small business’ search engine ranking, pulling in hundreds and thousands of visitors who might not otherwise learn about your business. The right blog content could also turn visitors into paying customers. The rewards can be great; but the content has to be developed and used in the right way.

Start to develop blog content that drives customer sales
Highlight freebies that you’re giving away to people who read all the to the end of your blog article. Do this at the start of the article. To build your marketing database, add a form that requires readers to provide their name and email address, to the bottom of articles attached to giveaways.

As a tip, freebies alone won’t draw in repeat readers. You have to show readers how to do something, entertain, inspire or motivate people who visit your blog. For example, you could offer your insights on a current trending news piece (this could work especially well if you’re considered as an expert in the field the news piece focuses on).


You could also add unique motivational or inspirational quotes to your blog. Add a new quote every day and you could see a spike in the numbers of repeat visitors to your blog fairly quickly. If you decide to add “how to” pieces to your blog, think about including images that illustrate the steps you’re directing readers to take, as little compliments “how to” blog content like clear illustrations.

Feature interviews with industry leaders, announcements about popular upcoming events and humorous articles or comedy pieces that are related to the field your small business operates in are other types of blog content that could attract large numbers of potential customers. It’s important to note that these and other steps take time and commitment. In fact, some blog owners who have gone on to earn hundreds or thousands of dollars a month off their blog sites have said that it wasn’t until the second or third year after starting a blog that they began to earn a profit.

Some of these blog content writing pros also have several blogs that they market and promote. They also start niche blog sites. For example, they might only write free blog content about jazz artists, history and songs or interior design. It can be a good decision as niche blog content writing can make it easier for online ad firms like Google Adsense to know which ads work best on certain blog sites. This, in turn, can increase the amount of money blog owners receive from their blogs.

As with other business endeavors and marketing strategies, to earn significant profits off blog content writing, it’s important to be flexible. For instance, some blog articles might prove grab readers’ attention, while other blog posts seem to be merely an exercise in writing. By using tools like Google Keywords, you could find phrases and words to include in your blog content, phrases and keywords that millions of people conduct online searches with.

Generating customer sales via blog sites that rank high in search engines
Other steps you could take while promoting a blog include adding social media share buttons to each blog posts. By making RSS blog feeds available to readers, you could gain subscribers, readers who will be alerted when you publish new articles at your blog.

Slide shows are also becoming more popular at some websites. I’m not a fan of slide shows because they generally take awhile to load. I also prefer to read articles on a single page. However, it might be worth it to test drive two or more slide shows at blog sites you own to see how readers react to the slides.

Ways to measure the success of your blog content include running Google Analytics and monitoring how many visitors enter your website through your blog. Also, measure the numbers of people who click onto your order page after having read a blog posts. If you add a comments section to your blog posts, you can also engage readers more deeply, encouraging them to feel that they are a key part of your blog’s success. As a tip, if you do add a comments section to your blog, set up spam blockers as more than a few people only visit blogs to add spam links.

One last tip I want to leave with you regarding blog content involves page ads. These are great tools to use to grab reader interest. For example, you can publish a clickable image (one that leads readers to an order page) of one of your popular products on your blog’s sidebar, gaining more interest for the product.

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Does no marketing really equal no customers?

Posted on May 4, 2013 by admin

Marketing has certainly earned its place in the business world. In fact, depending on who you talk with, it might appear as if, without marketing, customers and entrepreneurs wouldn’t connect at all, that they would never find each other. But, is that true?

small business marketingIf you built a shop or website, wouldn’t a few customers find your without you having to pay for advertising or without you having to market the shop or website? Common sense tells me that they would. However, to attract enough customers so you can pay rent, you’ve got to get folks talking.


Think you can pull that off on your own? You know what?  I think you can!  The rub is whether or not you really have the time (oh, time) to market and develop your products or services, not mention finding the time to enrich relationships you have with existing customers.

If your a solo-preneur, you’re doing it all. You’re finding a way.  (One day, I hope solo-preneurs receive the spotlight they deserve!!)

However, as your business continues to grow (and especially if it really takes off!), time may become somewhat of a rare commodity. Keep your eyes open to working with experienced marketers. They just might help you get over some tough sales slumps. They also might help take your business to new, lofty levels.

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