Year: 2022

Marketing Automation Solutions For Business Needs And Revenue Generation

Marketing automation solutions improve influence and engagement with customers and prospects. It reduces mundane and repetitive tasks enabling the marketing department to focus on marketing strategy. Automation directly impacts the quality of sales by delivery attractive messages consists of offers. The data that is fed needs to be cleansed and standardized continually. Today’s marketing automation solutions provide data management as part of the service.

Benefits associated with Marketing Automation Solutions:

More and better qualified leads – Using technology marketing solutions will lead to more and better qualified leads. Qualified leads are the customers who show interest in your product and show willingness to buy that product in a specified period of time. Automation helps track such qualified leads

Increased efficiency of Sales representatives – Working smarter rather than harder is the key in today’s fast paced business world. In order to remain competitive the sales representatives have to be trained on the latest tools. That’s where marketing automation solutions step in. Automation helps increased efficiency and productivity amongst sales

Better coordination between Sales and Marketing – Marketing automation solutions help align Sales and Marketing processes. Communication between Sales and Marketing is very important and automation tools help to smooth this process. Lead nurturing and qualifying is made easy for the Sales through automation

Content Delivery Automation – Marketing automation makes it easy to send instant and well drafted messages. These delivery messages can include links to whitepaper or eBooks which encourages the customer to download them and read the content. Automation can also help to track website visits and visitor reviews. These can be further used to canvass your product

Better ROI- Marketing automation assists organizations to nurture leads that create more opportunities and provide valuable insight into marketing campaigns. The automation process narrows down better marketing campaigns thus producing a better return on marketing programs investments.

Lead Scoring- based on customer behavior, lead-scoring helps marketing personnel to assign a value to leads. Based on geographical location and digital behavior, marketing automation solutions design a lead scoring model which gives information on leads and their activities

Web analytics- Web analytics allows you to view pages your prospect has visited, email communication and the files downloaded. With the help of this information leads can be nurtured and the ones that get qualified can be further worked on to create customers

In short to recap the above, Marketing automation synchronizes leads and performs automation tasks like sending emails, formulating campaigns based on customer behavior, scores and nurtures leads and provides correct metric information by generating reports based on updated data. Marketing Automation is the process of automatically managing the targeting, timing, and content of your outbound marketing content in response to customer’s actions and online behaviors.

Conclusion

By automating your marketing processes you achieve greater customer satisfaction and retention, better accountability in your organization and reduced costs. It enables the clients to leverage the benefits of the internet and social media for generating …

The Secret to Marketing Wealth Happiness

Happiness is found in simple, momentary spaces of time. It can be as simple as observing a robin pluck a worm from the dew covered ground or as exquisite as the first bite of a strawberry covered piece of cheesecake. Happiness is what we all seek no matter what our pursuit. A relationship, a business deal, an academic achievement, we all seek after these things because we view them as intermediaries of our happiness. What if we slowed down long enough to ponder whether in fact these things would truly bring us what we were seeking. Oftentimes they don’t. I am not saying we don’t need these things for some measure of our sustenance-both physical and emotional but oftentimes we end up severely disappointed and even less happy than when we first sought out these things.

I think it important that before one pursues these things one evaluates what happiness truly is. All too often happiness is found inside and all around us. A melodic song heard on the radio or while sampling songs on iTunes. The smell of a bright Spring day. The rustling of leaves on a brisk Fall day. The question becomes what is the practical manifestation of this type of perspective on happiness? What day-to-day experiences will we have with this outlook? How will it change our habits and our fortunes? Will we become rich if we simply have this outlook all of a sudden? Maybe so maybe not. This begs the greater question, what does it mean to be rich? Is rich having ten million dollars in the bank but perpetually worrying over we will be able to keep it? Is rich having great relationships that both financially and psychologically sustain us? I don’t claim to have the answer but am on a journey to find out for myself.

In the meantime I use a system for making money that gives me the time to ponder such deep thoughts while making money and getting to do the things that I enjoy. Using the proximity partner marketing system and a few key prospecting tools that combine the best of online marketing and offline marketing techniques, I can get as many free leads and as much business as I want. Most people would love the luxury of time to ponder the deep thoughts of life but because they are “time poor” cannot. In this age of automated marketing tools, there is no reason why this has to be.

No matter what type of business you are in: consulting, network marketing, real estate or financial consulting, you need leads to sustain your business. Some simple strategic steps will allow you to figure out the best marketing system or combination of systems for your particular business. Important questions to answer as you begin your strategic plan are:

How many leads does it take to convert into a sale?

How long does it take to convert a lead into a sale?

Are my price …

Article Marketing and Blog Networks

Many internet marketers try their hand at article marketing. Most simply to distribute their articles to the main article directories, but why stop there? If you submit your articles to private blog networks, the results in terms of search engine rankings can be impressive.

What I do is utilise the combined ranking power of bother article directory listings and blog network posts. To begin with, I submit my newly written articles to the main directories, and then once they are live on those sites, I go ahead and post them to the network of blogs I am a member of. Dependant on the popularity of my chosen niche, my articles are posted to as many 250 or more member blogs, all of which are relevant to the niche! The links from these blogs consistently push my pages up to the top of the search engines. As a result, my web pages consistently reach page one of the main search engines for even some competitive keyword phrases.

The other beauty of the blog network that I am a member of is that it comes with built in article spinning functionality. This means that unique versions of my articles are published to the member blogs giving me opportunity to rank for several keyword phrases from the one base article! And because the links point to my web pages from unique content on relevant individual blogs, they carry more ranking juice.

If you want a source of automated one way linking from genuine web sites, you really should consider using a blog network. There are several networks to select from. The one I use is the largest I know of on the web, with over 15,000 member blogs available to post to. Because of the number of blogs, it is more difficult for the search engines to pick up a linking pattern. Combining traditional article marketing with posting to a blog network has brought me lots of top rankings and traffic in the last twelve months, more than I could have dreamt of before.

If you have multiple web sites or blogs that you’d like to have better rankings for, you really should take a look at the blog networks that are around and give one a go. Writing articles and using them to get you traffic and rankings is a proven strategy that works over and over again. It might not be the sexiest strategy around, but it is proven to deliver results with consistency!…

Automating Your Email-Marketing Campaigns

Often, new email marketers want to save cash, and thus opt for managing their email marketing campaigns by hand without the use of software. Now, although in the beginning this is possible, what inevitably happens is that their list grows. First to 100, then 300, then 1000 and before they have time to realize the mess they’ve gotten themselves in to, they’re unable to keep up with standard list management. In order to keep this from happening, it is important to automate many of the repetitive email marketing tasks from the very beginning with good email campaign software.

Email Marketing Software

Ultimately, what new marketers should really do is invest in email campaign software that helps automate the more repetitive tasks. Things like managing un-subscriptions, performance analysis, email design and email scheduling are just a few of the benefits of good email marketing software. Generally, prices range from $10/month all the way to a couple thousand if your list is very big, but chances are that you will be in the $10/month range for quite a while as you begin to grow your list. There are multiple software programs available and a simple Google search will bring up a handful of good ones, but ultimately the point of email marketing software is to help you focus on two things, and they are performance testing and writing great content.

Performance Testing

One of the most important tasks of any email marketer is performance testing. This involves segmenting your list and then simply trying various calls to action, designs, button placement and so-on. After making a few changes and sending a fresh newsletter, record the results and then make changes again. Over time you will notice that a certain combination of text, calls to action and layout consistently perform the best. This is one way professional email marketers get such good results, it’s because they test! Now, it’s not very easy to test your emails on your own, especially as your email list grows, but great email marketing software will help automate this aspect by literally tracking exactly which subscribers open and respond to your emails. This, in my opinion, is one of the greatest benefits of email marketing software.

Content

The other important benefit of email marketing software is that it lets you focus on content. Now, there are many different theories on what makes great content for an email marketing newsletter, but generally, it’s important to consider your audience first. I notice that many new email marketers focus their newsletters too much on their own business, which of course is important to you but boring for most everyone else. Because of this, it’s important to consider your audience and make your material unique and interesting. Simply including a poll, a few links to beneficial “how-to” articles or even interviewing someone in the field and providing a download to the audio file in the email will do wonders for your conversion rates and subscriber retention. Remember, nobody …

Discover How To Automate Your Marketing For Ultimate Leverage And Freedom

If you own a business you have probably contemplated how to automate your marketing for ultimate leverage and freedom. Many people go into business to do something they love to do. But then reality comes along.

In order to continue doing what they love and make enough money to stay open, they need to make money. Making money requires customers. Gaining customers requires sales and marketing. These become full-time jobs and soon there is not enough time left to do what they love doing. But they cannot just close down in many instances. Money has been invested and must be recovered. And so these owners feel trapped.

Perhaps this has happened to you and you are looking for a way out of this trap. Maybe you have not yet experienced this and are looking to avoid this situation. If so, then automating your marketing may be just what you are looking for.

This process takes most, if not all, of the work out of finding potential customers. Through various methods, both online and offline, people find out about the goods and services you offer. They respond, putting their name into an automated system. They are then given information in stages by the system until they are screened out or until they buy.

You, as the owner of the business, supply the information for the system. After all, who knows the business better than you do? This information is then organized and inserted into the proper sequence.

With diligent study, you can learn these steps and do them by yourself. But, if you are like many people, and you would rather not go through this effort, you can outsource. Many companies exist that focus solely on setting up such marketing processes.

Once the system is fully implemented, it attracts prospective buyers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It never sleeps, nor goes on vacation. All for a price far less than you would pay one worker to help a few hours a day. Once it is up and running, you can almost forget about it. The system will need updated information from time to time, like if you add new products or services.

However, once the system is functioning, you no longer need to go find customers yourself. The automated process does it for you. You are then free to concentrate on doing what you went in business to do.

So, if you are tired of chasing after business, then you may be ready for this step. You may wish to learn more about how to automate your marketing for ultimate leverage and freedom. Make sure that you do your homework to find the best solution for your circumstances.…

Smart Marketing Strategies For Small Business – Part 5 – How to Develop Your Marketing Message

Smart marketing strategies are simply not an option for the small business owner. Today’s economic conditions are generating fierce competition for the same dollars spent on products and services. There is a trend toward social media marketing and many small business owners are not prepared. The challenges are many, and there has never been a better time to get down to business and discover how to be the smartest marketer in your field. It will payoff in spades, as they say!

In previous articles, we discussed understanding your major goals, understanding your target market, and understanding your customer. We even talked about determining your niche correctly and narrowly. Now, let’s talk about your actual marketing message.

It’s Called an “Elevator Speech”

I went to a marketing conference in Las Vegas earlier this year and we got together in small groups for about an hour to figure out our “elevator speech.” It was time well spent, and it wasn’t as easy as you might think. The idea is to be prepared to answer the question, “What do you do?” if you get into an elevator with someone and they ask the question, and you just have enough time to go up or down a few floors and answer the question. In other words, it has to be short and snappy, and get the point across. I’ve actually developed two of these “elevator speeches” – one is very short – about 10 seconds long, and the other is about twice as long – no more than 30 seconds.

When you work on this, do it with someone who knows what you do, and will be honest with you. Also, pick the brightest and most creative person you can to partner with you on this. You want someone who’s good with words. Have a notebook handy and write it down. You’ll end up scratching out a few of them, but keep at it and soon you’ll have it down. Then memorize it and test it on some people. You may even want to revise it after some use and testing.

Note: You’ll want to refine this short marketing message into your bio on Twitter.

Your Complete Marketing Message

This is the information that you will include in all your marketing materials – business cards, flyers, post cards, Facebook Business Pages. Remember, this marketing message needs to accomplish two things: 1) It will tell what you do, and 2) It will give information to persuade people to become your customer or client.

Here are some thoughts about what to include in your complete marketing message:

Define your prospect’s problem

Give proof that this problem is urgent enough it should be solved immediately

Tell why you have the perfect answer to the problem

Give benefits your clients will receive

Provide testimonials

Explain pricing and payment options

Always include an unconditional guarantee (decide on a time line – 30, 60, …

4 Steps For Building a Small Business

Setting up a productive and successful small business is very difficult endeavor. It’s actually dependent on numerous external variables, such as competitors, timing and demand from customers, that you’ve got hardly any control over at first. If every one of these external variables are to your advantage, developing a good business strategy may lead to having a profitable small business. Listed below are 5 steps to take into account when you are setting up your small business from the ground-up:

1. Decide on your small business. What exactly are you selling?

Tricky question, for sure. For instance, Nike is within the sportswear business, but the fact is any time you purchase a set of Nike sneakers along with a t-shirt in the shopping mall you are purchasing much more than sportswear – you are purchasing a perception, a sensation. You’re purchasing the Nike brand. Don’t forget, there is much more to a product than, well, the product. Your brand name is the thing that sets your product apart from your competition.

2. Choose your market. Who will be your targeted customer?

This step is not hard as the first, although it is just as important. Who will be your customer? What do you know about that particular person? Knowing your customer is usually a way to success. What exactly are they are doing? The place do they really hang around? Precisely what do they watch on tv? These are just some of the questions which you must be able to answer regarding your customer. Figuring out the answers to these questions can answer a great deal of your concerns in terms of creating an advertising and marketing approach. This power to comprehend your consumer’s need could only be a consequence of knowing them just like your neighbors.

3. Develop your advertising and marketing approach. How would you speak with these persons?

It is a final comprehension of your brand and your customer. As said before in number 2, comprehension of your customer can answer a great deal of questions with regards to your advertising and marketing approach: Where must you advertise? What’s the style of your respective brand? What sort of pricing is affordable for this market? So that you can interact with your customer, a.k.a. sell your merchandise directly to them, you must understand exactly where your ads are going to be seen, how to talk to them, and exactly how much they should be able to spend, among the other things. Seriously, this step ought to have been combined with previous simply because who your market is determines your advertising and marketing approach completely.

4. Find similar circumstances. Seek the advice of people who have done it.

There are numerous training books published by experts who have previously began their very own small business and also have succeeded in them.

Keep in mind, setting up a profitable small business isn’t just about the money. Nearly as important is your brand as …

The Power of Multimedia Vignettes

So, how do you harness the power of your organization and put it in the hands of your salespeople? How do you cut through all the internet clutter, the barrage of messages and information, so your business stands out from your competition? The answer comes from using the internet in a different way from everyone else.

Enter the world of multimedia vignettes – small nuggets of knowledge – points of view – insights – presented to your customers in dynamic and efficient ways. Knowledge driven by PowerPoint builds, e-mails, audio or even video footage taken from a device as simple as a Flip camera.

Imagine being able to take your latest survey data and translate the raw information into a high-quality vignette, including screen shots and a voice-over, that your sales force would be happy to use. Imagine being able to send this vignette out, like breaking news, a couple of hours after receiving your data.

Vignettes can be the crucial difference in demand generation. A recent survey of one company’s sales people showed a 71% improvement in response rate when an e-mail was sent with a link to a vignette. Potential customers watched the vignettes instead of just ignoring an e-mail or sales call. The customer responded to the sales person because of the value generated by the message vignette. So a short, tight, simple vignette with the promise of an exciting interaction can dramatically enhance the response to your sales program.

The vignette allows your sales staff to cut through the clutter, bringing power to their approach for all aspects of the sale, including call preparation, appointment setting and post-meeting follow up.

Affordability is one of the many benefits of the vignette. Costly, time-consuming production methods are a thing of the past. And quality doesn’t have to suffer because the vignette is less expensive than the old multimedia production methods. You only have to look at YouTube to experience the kind of slick, eye-catching messages that people around the globe produce quickly and inexpensively.

The vignette is perfect for simplifying a complex idea or making an abstract idea easier to understand. When you factor in convenience and the power of information technology, the stellar importance of the vignette comes shining through.

In today’s world, outstanding, relevant messages must be delivered rapidly to your customer. Businesses don’t have the luxury of waiting three months to create and deliver content. The multimedia vignette gives your message ultimate flexibility and on-demand precision. Marketing automation, a sales tool that tracks data and allows your marketers to hold meaningful “conversations” with your customers, can help you manage your entire sales process, including vignette creation.…

B2B Marketing – White Papers and Marketing Automation

Online marketing offers B2B marketers the opportunity to reach millions of potential clients around the globe, but the early phases of your online efforts can feel a bit lonely.

Working online will often make you feel like you’re standing in the middle of an empty field yelling about your amazing service. Everything you say is both true and potentially compelling, but no one is around to hear, and more importantly, act on what you’re saying.

B2B marketers often feel this way upon the completion of a great new white paper. They’ve developed clear and helpful content and their deliverable is expertly designed, and the executives are excited about the potential results.

So what now? Obviously, online is the only realistic distribution method for white papers and other thought leadership pieces, but simply offering the paper on your website fails to leverage the capabilities of online marketing.

The value of marketing automation

In the online space, user attention spans are incredibly short. Even if someone goes through the trouble of providing the necessary information to download your content, it’s probable that you’ll never hear from them again. Marketing automation, however, allows your company to maintain top-of-mind awareness among these lukewarm leads while allowing your sales organization to focus on following-up only on the hot leads.

So, for example, let’s say you require a bit of contain information in exchange for your new paper or report. When the contact downloads the paper, their information is sent to the marketing automation platform. The best systems will then score the lead based on the data the entered. If the lead’s profile is rated highly, the lead’s info is passed to sales; anyone who falls below the preset benchmark is sent into a nurturing, or drip, campaign.

The nurturing campaign then sends the lead information from your company weekly or a few times a month. This content usually consists of other white papers, case studies, reports, and other helpful and interesting information. Ideally, your content both helps them do their job better while positioning your company as a thought leader in your space.

This scenario is a very high-level view of how white papers and marketing automation work together. Without a strong white paper distribution strategy, however, your b2b marketing plan will fail to leverage the invsetment you’ve already made in creating your white paper.…

Cleaning Business Dilemma – Subcontractors Or Employees?

As a small business owner of a cleaning company, one of the challenges you faces on how to run a cleaning business is the cost-effectiveness of your decisions. Since the house cleaning business is a business that involves the selling of services rather than products, it is quite difficult to decide as to whether you should hire employees or simply work with subcontractors.

Employees

Having employees and personnel in your company does have its own benefits too. For one, you can have some people that you can rely on, especially on how to run a cleaning business – during the times when you are not around. Plus, these are people whom you have trained, thus can do the job as you expect it to be done. The only thing about having employees is that aside from paying them their salaries, which by the way, must not be below the minimum wage set by the government, you also have to provide them with their other employee benefits such as sick leave, vacation leave with pay, and other allowances. In other words, aside from their salaries, you are obliged to provide them with their employee compensations as required

by the government.

However, if you are a good employer, most of your employees will definitely stay with you and you will have skilled and experienced staff in your company, which is a plus point on your cleaning business’ marketing. So basically, it’s a give and take situation – you pay them, provide them their compensations, and in return, you get reliable, skilled, and experienced staff that can make your company.

Subcontractors

Subcontractors are independent contractors that you hire only for a certain job. They are not employed by you. So you simply pay them their fee, and that’s about it. However, having subcontractors means having the same company to work for you, but the people they send are not the same. The only focus is to get the job that you hired them for, done. If you are just starting out, you can hire subcontractors to help you accommodate your cleaning jobs. However, when you are fully operational with a steady pool of clients, you might be better off with employees – it is financially more practical too.

On the other hand, hiring subcontractors to accommodate the extra services that you offer is also a good idea, since these services are not asked for often. Plus, your subcontractors can also be one of your cleaning business’ marketing tools – they can tell their other clients about you too.

It’s your house cleaning business and you call the shots. Just see what is practical and cost-effective for you and go for it.…

Article Marketing Automation – Effective Marketing Over the Net

Perhaps the most tedious and time consuming phase of doing an article marketing is putting your article in adequate sites to have the highest percentage of publicity. Writing articles for marketing consume a lot of time when you reach the point where you are striving to get published in as many sites as possible but it is less expensive and simple to do.

This kind of marketing automation through writing articles can help you at this point. It is a group of sovereign websites and weblogs that are establish to issue articles for other members of Article Marketing Automation group.

The huge advantage of this is with the big size of the ever increasing group you will be having a bigger number of websites and weblogs that will have links back to your sites.

Automation in writing articles intended for marketing saves you time and money and because a lot of marketers are attracted to it and that is why it is getting bigger everyday. It is able to get you on page number one of any search engine in just about 20 days. Aside from issuing your articles extensively, you can also get related content for your personal websites and weblogs.

Following the process is without fuss. You write an article or have somebody write it for you and then you forward it to the Article Marketing Automation group and you are done. It is that easy. After that, your article will be issued and circulated to related websites handing you publicity, links, and traffic.

There is also a training offered by Article Marketing Automation on how to use the group and maximize the publicity that you get. They will teach you how to have a higher rank over the span of 2 to 3 months. They want you to flourish because the existence of this group depends on the success of its members. The more triumph you come upon, so as the other members of the group.

Article marketing is no doubt one of the most popular means of marketing on the internet today. It is a possible way to get yourself that freedom to do whatever you want to do other than work. And Article Marketing Automation will be your tool in achieving a successful article marketing campaign in less time and money spent.…

Marketing Automation of Your Articles For Business

If you are marketing products or services, you need to let others know what you are doing. Marketing Automation of articles builds your business.

Writing relevant informative articles related to your products and services is essential to building your business reputation and credibility. Creating a successful business means using great tactics to gain exposure. You need to let others know what you are doing through article creation and use tools for Marketing Automation of your business on line. The informative pieces you create about your business go a long way to branding you as credible and reputable.

It is very important to produce content of importance in relation to your business and also you need to have quality products and services. Quality important information in your article content is a bonus to your business to maintain customer interest. If the content is strong in relation to what they are looking for, your business can flourish. Potential customers won’t even look at your product or service unless they feel they can trust you.

Every business needs quality software applications for production and distribution of articles and website creation. Good use of these can make Marketing Automation a routine that can be accomplished where limited time and budget are required. Hiring or outsourcing website creation and content on a continuing basis to develop and grow a business can be very expensive. This especially will not work in the micro niche businesses that produce a small monthly return, but with Marketing Automation, acquisition of quality software applications can help a person with limited time and resources produce multiple micro niche businesses which can reach 7 figures annually.

In summary write the hot reports. Chock it full of information your target market enjoys. Find and acquire the quality software you will need to create your websites, get your website business and articles to page one in search engines. Without some form of Marketing Automation software, you will be hanging out for weeks trying to get one small micro niche business up and earning money.

There is more free information on acquiring free software applications and purchasing needed Marketing Automation Software here.…

Set Your Marketing Business Apart With Video

Marketing firms are responsible for helping businesses get the exposure they need for their business to thrive and grow. Therefore, anyone interested in setting up their own marketing business needs to be outgoing, have lots of contacts, and have skills for evaluating business marketing needs. And since there are many marketing firms out there, you have to be able to set yourself apart from the crowd. One way to do that is with expert video marketing on the web.

Promoting your marketing firm on a local basis still requires making contacts in person. Make it part of your everyday business plan to contact people you know to let them know what you are doing, because networking is the key to success. And even if you specialize in video marketing online, you’ll need offline tools like business cards and brochures for your business.

Because web video has become such an amazingly important force in internet marketing, it is a great place to specialize these days. Believe it or not, video accounts for around 60% of all web traffic, so you can see how solid video marketing can have a huge impact on your potential clients or even your own website.

YouTube consistently ranks in the top five most visited websites in the United States with over 2 billion views a day, and right now getting video to the top of local search results is fairly easy, making video marketing software and video distribution software critical to your success in local business marketing. In other words, now is a great time to position yourself as a leader in local video marketing.

Being able to shoot, edit, and distribute videos to multiple video sharing sites and social media sites is a real plus for local businesses. But you may have to make a case for web video as a promotional tool for small local businesses, who may not see the web as being that relevant to them. Understanding local business needs and offering them more value for their marketing dollar is what will build your client base.

Video is a terrific tool for showing off the benefits that local businesses offer. For example, while your local lawn mower dealer wants to sell mowers, your video productions should show the benefits of owning those mowers in the form of a lush, green lawn in front of a beautiful house. Everybody knows what a mower looks like, but they may need to be reminded of the benefits of owning a certain mower.

To become a success with a video marketing business, you’ll also have to be well-versed in the art and science of search engine optimization, or SEO. This is a matter of building or modifying websites and their content (including video) so that they rank as highly as possible in search engine searches for relevant keywords. With the big search engines now honing their local search features, this is another great place to get in ahead of …

Thought Leadership Interview – Jill Konrath on Closing the Gap Between Marketing and Sales

Jill Konrath wrote the first section of The Quintessential Marketing Automation Guidebook where she wrote a letter from Sales telling Marketing exactly what was needed to help drive revenue. If only companies were that brave. Her letter stirred up reactions from our readers, so I caught up with Jill to ask her to share a few more insights about how to bring marketing and sales closer together.

CD: What does marketing need to do to get salespeople to use the content they provide?

JK: Write good content. Most of what marketing produces today sucks. It’s self-serving tripe that highlights the company’s fabulous products, unique methodologies and state-of-the-art technologies. When sellers use this type of content, it trivializes them with customers. They’re seen as product-pushing peddlers who add little value to the sales process.

Educate the sales force. After an eternity of only getting crap from marketing, salespeople don’t have a clue how to use good content. They need to know how to follow up effectively on leads with content during the sales process.

Make it simple. Salespeople don’t have a lot of time. If it’s scattered across the website, it won’t be used. If it’s not intuitive, it won’t be used. Make it as much a no-brainer as possible.

CD: In SNAP Selling, you talk about the prospect’s three decisions. What are they and how do they related to content?

JK: Basically prospects make three primary decisions when it comes to dealing with salespeople. Their 1st Decision is to “allow access” to them. Sellers may only want a small amount of their time, but today’s crazy-busy buyers are stingy with it. At this stage, salespeople could use content related to the value other firms have used from using the company’s offering. This supports their reason for getting together and increases their chances of setting up a meeting.

The prospect’s 2nd Decision is to “initiate change” – which is something they are loathe to do with everything else on their calendar. Sellers desperately need good content to help prospects determine if making a change would provide significant value for their organization. This could include case studies, white papers, podcasts, articles, analyst reports and more.

Finally, the prospect’s 3rd Decision is to “select resources.” At this phase, sellers need content that differentiates them from other vendors and supports the company’s strengths. Please notice that I didn’t say brochures. They provide little value except at the very end of the sales process. In my opinion, fancy four-color glossies are a relic of the past – even though salespeople may still be clamoring for them. There are enough sales dinosaurs out there who haven’t yet realized that brochures create significant collateral damage and destroy more opportunities than they gain.

CD: In SNAP Selling, you present a Buyers’ Matrix. How would you suggest using this matrix as a tool to create a more productive relationship between marketing and sales?

JK: Every …