Fresh Ideas for Innovative Marketing

For many entrepreneurs, summertime brings slower sales and less hectic activity. What better time than right now to explore fresh marketing ideas for growing your business? Rather than slide into the busy fourth quarter with the same old marketing bag of tricks, you can get a jump on your competitors by embracing new tactics for increasing leads and sales.

Sales Ideas

* Start every day with two cold calls.
* Read newspapers, business journals, and trade publications for new business openings, personnel appointments, and promotion announcements made by companies. Send your business literature to appropriate individuals and firms.
* Give your sales literature to your lawyer, accountant, printer, banker, temp agency, office supply salesperson, advertising agency, etc. (Expand your sales force for free!)
* Put your fax number on order forms for easy submission.
* Set up a fax-on-demand or e-mail system to easily distribute responses to company or product inquiries.
* Follow up on your direct mailings, email messages, and broadcast faxes with a friendly telephone call.
* Try using the broadcast fax or email delivery methods instead of direct mail. (Broadcast fax and email allows you to send the same message to many locations at once.)
* Use broadcast faxes or email messages to notify your customers of product service updates.
* Extend your hours of operation.
* Reduce response/turnaround time. Make reordering easy – use reminders. Provide preaddressed envelopes.
* Display product and service samples at your office.
* Remind clients of the products and services you provide that they aren’t currently buying.
* Call and/or send mail to former clients to try and reactivate them.
* Take sales orders over the Internet.

Business Marketing Strategies, Marketing Tools, Marketing Tips

Welcome to Marketing Survival Kit, an eclectic source of small business marketing articles, marketing tips, marketing strategies, and some of the best marketing tools available. We feature a variety of traditional and online business marketing tools, business marketing articles, and business marketing software that can help you effectively promote and grow your business.

Among the business marketing tools and business marketing software we feature on Marketing Survival Kit are sales letter templates, proposal writing software, public relations planning software, and the Small Business Marketing Bible, an informative business marketing manual that reveals dozens of powerful small business marketing techniques and tools that can help you generate more sales, more sales leads, and more sales referrals.

Sales Funnel Analysis

Bottlenecks and blockages can be avoided by analysing your sales funnel at regular intervals.

You will then spot the slow movers, and perhaps even those passing down too quickly. If they are moving slowly you can lubricate them before they get stuck. If they are too fast, then perhaps they are missing some qualifying stages without you noticing so check up on their sales records and analyse their progress.

And so it goes on, until as many prospects as possible fall out the bottom as fully-fledged customers. You can specify as many levels in your funnel as you want, but each must have a set of rules that qualify entrants to move on. These should be fixed rules and not up to sales personnel making concessions.

Along with the rules to move down from each level in the funnel, you are advised to have remedial action procedures in place, so once a bottleneck occurs, everybody knows the correct way to free it. These remedial are the lubrication I have referred to, and should be customer friendly and simple to implement.

If applied correctly, a sales funnel is an excellent and professional way to keep tabs on how prospects are faring on their route to becoming established customers. It can identify weaknesses in your sales structure and procedures. If you throw every prospect into your funnel, then you can get a good analysis of the effectiveness of your company in converting them to customers, and also identify the weakness in your sales procedures.

Bottlenecks and Qualification

At various levels in your sales funnel you will come across bottlenecks that prevent the smooth flow of prospects down it. In order to move from one stage or level to another, you should have rules that the prospect will have to follow. If they fail to follow these rules then they cannot move farther down and too many at any level can cause a bottleneck. That gives you a clue as to problems in your sales procedure.

You have three ways of clearing a bottleneck. Either find out why they are not meeting the rule, and take action to ensure that they do, or eject them. The third is to change the rule. But when do you do which? That is one of the fundamentals of sales funnels, because if you always clear bottlenecks through ejections, you will always end up with fewer passing down it than if you had tried some lubrication.

You must clear the blockages.

What do you do with a blockage in a sink? Plunge it, stick a rod down it or pour some chemicals in it; in other words take positive action.

Some of the methods you can use to clear blockages are: contact the prospect and ask what the problem is; pay them a visit; invite them to your premises to see your quality control systems; offer a free sample if they haven’t yet had one; and anything else relevant. Oh, and perhaps fire the salesperson that constantly allows blockages to build up in their sales funnel!

What is a Sales Funnel?

Basically, a sales funnel is a hypothetical funnel into which you pour all of your prospects.

As they fall down the funnel they become increasingly more qualified, until those that fall out the bottom are customers that have purchased and become paying customers. If you have only one product, then they will be ejected when they have purchased that. If you have back-end products, their first purchase will be just another level in the funnel. Get the picture?

So, how can you use it practically?

The first concept is to determine who your prospects are. This concept applies whether your business is online or offline; a small business or a large corporation; a franchise or privately owned. So who are your prospects?