Business Growth Development Consultant

Drip campaigns; lead nurturing, multi-channel and multi-touch marketing automation

There is nothing more time consuming and off putting than either getting too close too quickly or spending time following up on leads with prospects that are just not ready to buy yet.

Spending time with current or potential customers that are in no position to make a decision is not a great use of your company’s valuable selling assets. Instead they should be focusing their time on leads which are ready to start looking seriously at what you are offering and don’t require “converting” because they are already aligned with your model as shown by your marketing and their continued interest, so it’s just a question of details.

Right now either businesses are spending a ton of marketing desperately trying to generate leads any which way they can or they’ve stopped marketing all together.

Either way its not going to be good for your business, but there are ways to get your message to market that are low cost and performance based and that is the only place where you should be spending time and money right now.

Pay-Per-Click / Pay-Per-Lead – Only serve adverts in areas that you can compete and satisfy (especially if you’re a local business) and use the Google optimizer to pay only for conversions (lead that take action) not just leads.

Michael Gerber speaks on building business systems that are the true vehicles of unleashing growth and why getting your sales and marketing systems right are essential to being able to grow beyond what appear to be the limiting boundaries and resources of your business.

Philip Kotler speaks about the evolving importance of marketing and how its moved from being just a process or department inside a business to an encompassing glue that binds many of the traditional and disparate parts of a business internally to its chosen audiences, partners and markets.

As an engineer I understood and valued the amazing power of building proof and using evidence to formulate a basis of your decisions and actions. Yet for years I allowed myself to be dictated a set of sales and marketing belief’s in business which were for the most part a bunch of mumbo jumbo nonsense.

When I finally sat down and actually researched and proved to myself what worked and what did not, things started to change.

Right from the get go I’ve been a supporter of a hung parliament for this present time and especially a Tory and Lib Dem coalition.  In fact I changed my vote strategically to purposely balance votes on the Conservative and Lib Dem side and hopped that others would follow.

I feel there could not have been a better time than now for a hung parliament to give us the much needed focus on those important debates that will be the deciding factors in navigating our way out of this mess.

If you are considering running a marketing campaign and you may also be changing your telephone number, moving address or updating any other information around the same time, then please think carefully before you do or you may be incurring a lot of unnecessary cost and customer confusion.

I’ve now had two customers and suppliers over the last month that have had a ton of marketing material printed up, only to find out that the telephone number they thought they had purchased was allocated elsewhere.

Some days you just can’t help hitting the roof and blowing off a bit of steam, whether it’s a bad day at work or problems at home, there’s always something that gets you worked up, but most of the time it doesn’t push you over the edge.  You grab a drink, watch a film, cuddle up to a loved one or chat with a friend and put the world to rights, finally waking up the following day with a clearer head.

I’m not a religious devote myself but I do see lessons and teachings in everything that we can all learn something from.

Easter celebrations are the modern day equivalents of a Pagan festival.

While most people both religious and non-religious celebrate the coming of spring, it is the religious folk that celebrate Jesus’s resurrection during a feast which comes at the end of Lent, a period of fasting and patience.

The general symbolic story of the death of the son (sun) on a cross (the constellation of the southern cross) and his rebirth, overcoming the powers of darkness, is a story that echoes from the ancient world where there are plenty of parallels to be drawn and rival resurrected saviours.

Lead Generation By Cold Calling Is A Big Fat Lie

For years bosses and trainers have lied to sales people and themselves about cold calling.

They regale stories of smashing down doors and dialling for dollars and how its an act of bravery that only warriors and hunters engage in, who hack their way through the jungle of barriers to get to the budget treasure which is buried deep in the customers company tomb and guarded by the evil spirit known as the decision maker.

When I first went self employed a lot of things went wrong and for all sort of reasons, most of which were mistakes I’d made.

They’re painful and costly experiences but I learned far more from them than I had done at any other point in my working life.

You can’t avoid the mistakes, so make them as they will make you more effective.

This evening I stumbled across what I could only describe as a bombshell for the so called “professional marketing” world.

You see there are just far too many businesses trying to out do one another using overly creative marketing produced by these vary same companies and all they end up with is more confusion and empty pockets.

If these so called “marketing professional” were any good at what they did they would be able to use their own marketing skills to win new business right ? WRONG!

Where Growth Comes From

Growth occurs where you have a very simple equation that describes the coming together of demand and supply.  The greater the demand and the weaker the supply the faster the business growth develops, similar to the simple equation to calculate force which Newton describes in his second law, Force = Mass x Acceleration or F=ma.

There are however other factors that will impact the trajectory of growth in your business which come from shifts in the market that alter what is now deemed in demand and ultimately where supply comes from.

No matter how good your sales and marketing is, it will become ineffective in the long run if your products and services are a pile of tut.

Even Sir Alan Sugar, who’s been labelled himself for producing some questionable products said (and rather well) during one of the apprentice shows:

“I sent you out on a mission to France, to sell quality British products. I gave you a list of organic farmers, people who use tender love and care to create something special, that they take a pride in. And I wanted you to take that product and say “This is what us British produce, this is not mass-produced tut…” and what you do, is you go and buy a breeze block-load of bloody cheddar cheese!”

Well, I’m not going to say much here except that today I received a piece of outbound marketing from none other than…..GOOGLE.  Yes one of the worlds biggest online inbound marketing forces and they are sending me an outbound marketing piece to promote Adsense.

Why are they doing this ? Well, not everybody is online, nor are they online all of the time and good outbound marketing still works well if done properly and it helps to create a true closed loop environment.