Making the right offer, and making it easy for people to respond
Monica Parham
Vice President, Marketing
Often we get so excited about attractive graphic design on direct mail, e-mail, and advertising, that we forget about the call to action. I love eye-catching postcards and creative ads as much as any marketing director, but I’ve learned to keep the offer front and center. Certainly, professional, interesting graphics will catch the reader’s eye, and that’s important! But even more enticing is your offer.
When preparing creative for a direct marketing initiative, consider that your suspect or prospect has needs, challenges, budgetary constraints, goals, and stakeholders to please. He or she cannot always take advantage of an offer just because it’s interesting or aesthetically pleasing. You won’t find many impulse B-to-B buyers in this economy!
Make sure your promotional copy answers the following questions:
- Why should the reader take the time to consider your services?
- What is unique about your company or offerings?
- What will the reader get for taking a few minutes out of their busy day to read and respond to your direct marketing?
- Is your offer easy to understand?
- Do you ask the reader to take some sort of action, and is that action streamlined and simple?
Calls to action may include visiting a website to download a free white paper or article; registering to attend a special event or webinar; making an appointment for a free or reduced-price consultation; registering for a free trial or demo. If you send traditional mail, make it simple to respond online, obvious who to call, or easy to send in a postage-paid response card. If you send e-mail, give them a link that goes directly to a response page, not your home page where they will have to hunt around to find a way to respond to your offer.
If you fail to include a call to action, you are wasting time and money. You present prospects with an idea or offer that may be interesting, but you need to give them an incentive to engage with you, tell them how, and make it quick and easy to take the next step.
Michael Faul
President
Normally I don’t like to answer questions with questions, but that has changed on the issue of your marketing budget. In the last 8 weeks we were asked no less than 14 times what percentage of sales equates to a good marketing budget. That question will, from this point forward, get an explanation as opposed to a specific answer. The answer depends on you and your:
1. Annual revenue objective
2. Three year growth objectives
3. Average revenue per project / sale
4. Number of new clients needed
5. Revenue backlog from preexisting clients
6. Marketing philosophy and other objectives,
7. And, much more
Because of this we believe the right response is I don’t know, what is your marketing plan? If you don’t have a plan, then start there. Build a marketing plan and then a marketing budget that supports your plan. No matter how hard you press we will not provide you a general metric.
Will budgeting to plan focused on a future objective cost more? Most certainly! But, until you approach the market differently don’t expect a different result. You need to invest first before realizing a return on that investment. You won’t move off the plateau until you start planning and investing according to your future objectives as opposed to your past performance.
Monica Parham
VP, Marketing
We’re nearing the end of the year, which means companies are thinking about their sales, marketing, and business plans for next year. Many of our clients are asking how to determine what to spend on their marketing. Everyone is looking for us to provide them with a hard number or specific percentage, and I keep telling everyone “It depends.”
On what, you ask? Here are some questions to help you get to your answer.
- Are you trying to grow your business or remain flat next year?
- What percentage of this year’s budget did you invest in marketing and what were the results?
Did revenue increase, decrease, or stay the same?
Did you increase the number of relationships and prospects in your pipeline?
- At what rate do you convert relationships to prospects and prospects to clients? How does that rate compare to previous years? If you invested in marketing and your conversion rate increased, then you are seeing results! If you invested in marketing and your conversion rate decreased, then you need to reconsider whether you are targeting the right people with the right message.
- What is your typical sales cycle? I worked for an organization in which the sales cycle was 12 to 18 months. It took a long time and a lot of patience to see results from marketing investments. By the same token, we found ourselves in a serious revenue shortfall situation 18 months after cost-cutting slashed the marketing budget in half, and it took over two years to restabilize. Ultimately, cutting marketing overhead did not help to control costs, but cost us revenue we could not restore and added marketing expenses when we tried to rush campaigns and programs to market in attempts to make up for the loss.
- Has the cost of doing business increased? While The Fed has managed to control inflation with interest rate cuts, the escalating cost of energy is having a serious impact on day-to-day operations. It is costing you more to keep the lights on, put paper in the printer, and maintain health insurance for your employees. It’s also costing your vendors more, and they are going to pass those costs on to you. In effect, maintaining a flat marketing budget amounts to a budget cut: you can do less and reach fewer people with the same amount of money, which could put your company’s income at risk.
- Which marketing activities will go into your plan this year? You may save marketing dollars by cutting back on aspects of your campaigns, but at what cost to your results, conversion rates, and overall revenue? Marketers all over the world have proven that you need to reach people six to eight times through multiple communication channels before they will take an action. When you skimp on a channel or an outreach tactic, you will miss individuals who need your services, but do not even know you exist because they overlooked your direct mail campaign, or couldn’t find your website when they searched by keywords you never optimized on your website.
- What are your competitors doing? If you have successful competitors who you never see actively competing against you for projects and contracts, they are playing in deals where you don’t even have a seat at the table. This means they are reaching leads not on your radar. Their marketing budget most likely outweighs yours and you are losing customers to the competition!
Perhaps instead of asking “How much should I spend on marketing next year?” ask yourself “What drives my budget?” Do you want to make budgetary decisions based on a percentage of sales, a rule of thumb, what you did in the past, or your marketing plan? I recommend you develop a plan that will achieve your desired results and align your costs to the plan.
Michael Faul
President
It’s war! Xsellerate declares war on the sales funnel. Perhaps that sounds silly: we think not. The sales funnel may have helped many businesses in the day, but now we need a new model for community marketing in the new millennium. Someone has to offer the challenge, stand up to convention, and say the emperor has no clothes. If that means war, then the gauntlet is thrown.
If you have a 20% close rate, then 80% of your sales leads do not flow through to the bottom of your sales funnel. Where did they go? Your funnel has holes, lot’s of them.
Through sales qualification, leads get evaluated according to their sales potential . Qualified leads move forward toward the throat of the funnel. Disqualified leads spill out of the funnel through the holes in your funnel.
According to research conducted by Forrester, Gartner, and the Sales Lead Management Association, up to 80% of disqualified leads never hear from the selling company again. Now consider that 80% of spilled leads make a buying decision in the 18 months following their disqualification. That means about 64% of the pipeline makes a buying decision without considering your solution.
Granted, the funnel as a metaphor doesn’t directly cause this. But, it reinforces a way of thinking that says we will sell to fewer than we start with. The funnel gets you thinking in terms of “in” and “out”. It discourages you from thinking about degrees of readiness.
Most people start shopping before they become ready to buy. If the sales and marketing model doesn’t accommodate this reality, you run the risk of forming the perception that most leads are “tire kickers,” “time wasters”, unqualified. As a result they get disqualified out of your marketing and sales process.
Instead of the sales funnel, we need a model that has no easy exit. In the new model, qualification should have one job: to properly position people according to the type of relationship they want with your business. We need a model in which people find it easy to move in and become reluctant to leave. This same model should simplify the process of planning and executing your marketing program, and doesn’t promote a feud between sales and marketing.
Enter the bull’s eye and community marketing. You will see the bull’s eye appearing everywhere on our site. It provides a straight forward way of managing the entire community across both the marketing and sales function. Outside the bull’s eye lives suspects, people you think might want to hear what you have to say. Inside the outer boundary of the bull’s eye resides people with whom you have a relationship.
Marketing converts suspects into relationships, and then grows those relationships until they become prospects. Sales works with prospects through the buying process until they become new clients. Rings inside the bull’s eye represent various stages of relationship development. You can learn more about these at:
http://www.xselleratesolutions.com/resources.php.
Each ring of the bull’s eye sits inside the prior indicating that the people inherit the characteristics and programs available to stages represented by the out rings of the bull’s eye.
In future articles we want to explore in greater detail the bull’s eye model. We will break down each ring of the bull’s eye; define the behaviors people in your community exhibit as members of each stage. We will show you a great way to qualify your leads according to their behaviors, and a way to manage leads that virtually eliminates spillage and lost future opportunity. You will leave less money on the table, boost your revenue, and grow.
Do you get all that from using a different drawing? No, all of that comes from thinking differently about the people who belong to the community around your business.
Yes, we think we have a better approach. And we do want to make it available to you. If someone wants to defend the sales funnel of yesteryear, by all means drop us a note.