Tag Archives: Automated marketing

Consultant Marketing The Ladder

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Gail asked me, “Do you remember how you used to start that speech sitting on top a step ladder?”

“Sure”, I said, “Every business owner has a place they want to get to. For some it is a simple thing but for others it is a full-blown Technicolor dream of a castle way up there in the air…

Do you have the ladder you need to get you there?”

“Do you still do that speech?”

“Not for years,” I said. “If I were to do it today I would shift the focus from CRM to Automated marketing, what you’ve heard me call Automagic Marketing”

What tool do you need to build you business?

If you had to reach the ceiling or get up on your roof or rescue a kitten from a tree you would get a ladder, right?

In business in today’s world that ladder is a mystifying array of ways to connect to potential customers. There’s the traditional advertising and PR stuff that has been changed forever by the internet.

But, some things never change.

  • You will always have to introduce yourself
  • You will always have to get people to listen to you
  • You will always have to tell them what you do
  • You will always have to ask them for their business
  • You will always have to get to trust to keep their business.

Automagic

Automated Marketing software is how to get to the top rung of your ladder these days. It won’t take the place of branding and networking and generating referrals but it can help do all that with clarity and consistency building the relationships that turn contacts to contracts.

It is proven and infinitely practical. And now there are integrated systems anyone familiar with a computer can learn to use to build automated marketing campaigns that capture leads and nurture them into sales. You no longer have to kludge together 5 or 6 different pieces of software as you did when I first started working with this concept.

Everyone that wants to get to their castle way up there in the air needs a ladder and an Automated Marketing system can be a key to their success.

Time and Money

All marketing is a matter of time and money. If you intend to sell beyond your local area and provide services or products you need to have a presence on line. The time you put into your business will quickly move from planning and structuring to selling because if you don’t sell you have no revenue and you will go out of business.

An Automagic Marketing system can save you huge amounts of time in selling on line. The flip side of that is that it can have a steep learning curve and that takes time.

One of the top all-in-one online programs (Kartra) will cost you around $200 a month to get these capabilities:

  • Up to 12500 leads in a sophisticated CRM that keeps track of all your interactions with those leads and allows you to maintain multiple lists.
  • 3 Custom Domains which allows you to Brand 3 different websites and other pages in the system.
  • Unlimited e-mails. Send as many al you like to your lists. Whenever you like.
  • Unlimited Pages. All your website pages. Landing pages. Thank you pages. Form Pages.
  • Unlimited videos. Video is fast becoming the way to reach out to people and now you can use as many as you like.
  • Unlimited products. You can sell as many products as you can invent or purchase whether the product is real world or digital.
  • Unlimited Membership sites so you can set up online organizations that are only for registrants and either paid or free.
  • Unlimited Quizzes and Surveys to continually get to know your customers better.
  • Unlimited Team Members which becomes important as you stretch your entrepreneurial muscles. This allows you to keep developing products and services but have staff handle the tasks of automating your business.

You can use as much or as little of that capability as you like but once started you will quickly take your on line marketing up a notch.

See how it works. We will be surveying consultants, coaches entrepreneurs and independent professionals later this year for the 18th annual Consultant Marketing survey. You can get a copy of this year’s report and sign up for the upcoming survey. Just click here.

And so it goes.

Jerry Fletcher is a sought-after International Speaker, a beBee ambassador, founder and CEO of Z-axis Marketing, Inc. See Jerry’s speaker demo reel.

His consulting practice, founded in 1990, is known for on and off-line Trust-based Consultant Marketing advice that builds businesses, brands and lives of joy.

Credibility to Cash TM is his latest way to share experiences so you can take your business up a notch…or two.

Consulting: https://www.JerryFletcher.com
Speaking:  https://www.NetworkingNinja.com

Peeling the Onion of CRM

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Why I chimed in.

In the Q&A portion of a webinar I was attending the other night someone asked the folks assembled what CRM they used.

I could tell by the answers that there were several different understandings of Contact Relationship Management.

I’ve spoken on the subject on three continents and what I heard caused me to chime in.

Confusion is natural

Not long ago and not so far away business people kept track of their contacts with a rolodex. More sophisticated operations had card files on clients that could be accessed by the sales staff. A friend that was in the jewelry trade told me how they used color coding of the cards to visually differentiate the gentlemen’s purchases for wives and “lady friends.”

Direct marketing operations used master files to have data on purchases, recency and frequency.

Even back then the difficulty was in the multiplicity of processes in use. It is the same today. With the advent of the computer, accounting programs were drafted into use to keep files. Today, it is not uncommon for businesses to keep their customer records in Excel.

Software for salespeople

The granddaddy of software built specifically for the purpose of managing all the contact data a salesperson or a company could muster is ACT!. Initially it was a flat file rather than a relational database and offered limited capability for sending letters. (The internet and e-mail were in the future!)

Over time the product came to offer 15 special fields to enter data that was not “standard.” It became more and more robust and is still in use in a relational database form today.

The man that introduced ACT! is responsible for the top selling CRM product in the world today, Sales Force.com a cloud-based product.

Contacts vs Prospects vs Customers

Products originally built to track customers or clients started to get used to follow the actions of prospects who were people that had been contacted and established as a “sales lead.” Of course, none of this could work without input from each of the salespeople. Therein is a huge problem. Sales folks don’t like doing that detailed kind of data entry. So I developed a 3 step mantra that they could apply after each sales call:

  1. Note what happened in the prospect or client file
  2. Decide your next action
  3. Put a follow up date on that action and when it comes up just do it.

(Incidentally you can use this process in a paper-based CRM, any software CRM and it works in Outlook as well.)

It worked when sales managers encouraged it and let the rest of the sales force know about the results.

I start where the software stops

That’s when I honed my expertise in the CRM arena. It was difficult enough to get salespeople to use the systems let alone purchase lists of suspects, do the mailings and phone calls necessary to assure that it was really a lead worth pursuing and then maintain the contact over time. I showed companies how to go beyond CRM software to what I termed Automagic Marketing kluging automated e-mailings, data capture and timely automated sales follow-up as well as prospect qualification.

E-mail became a universal cure but if you didn’t automate it the costs were too much to bear. Solutions like Constant Contact appeared on the scene providing the ability to use graphic e-mail rather than text alone. Organizations started using these products for Newsletters and on-line magazines. Mail Chimp is a good option these days. These programs operate from lists loaded into them, require proof that the folks on the lists opted in and have no CRM capabilities. For that you need to connect them to your CRM system.

Autoresponders The first were part of e-mail transfer agents. They created bounce messages such as “your e-mail could not be delivered because…” Today’s autoresponders can handle if-then branching sequences as well as time delayed responses and even action-based triggering. Responses can be automatically entered into your CRM system with the right hookup. The best available at the moment in my view is Active Campaign. Visit their web site to see how this sophisticated kind of product works. (Note that Active Campaign is introducing a CRM linked to their Autoresponder capability.)

E-commerce solutions

The first “complete solution” software that became a market dominator was Infusionsoft. It included a store, upsells, downsells purchase tracking and the ability to accept payment (with a link). More importantly it was a fully functioning CRM with individual and bulk, text or graphic e-mail capability, autoresponder with linkage to telephone as well as snail mail. Today there are a host of systems available. Here are some to consider if you intend to sell from your website:

  • Infusionsoft
  • Click Funnels
  • Kartra
  • Ontraport
  • Builderall
  • Active Campaign (with a store integration)

Pricing for these ranges from under $20 to $300/month

Before you leap be sure of what your real objectives are.

Need help with that? E-mail me.

Jerry Fletcher is a sought-after International Speaker, a beBee ambassador, founder and Grand Poobah of www.BrandBrainTrust.com 

His consulting practice, founded in 1990, is known for Trust-based Brand development, Positioning and business development for independent professionals on and off-line.

Consulting: www.JerryFletcher.com
Speaking: www.NetworkingNinja.com
DIY Training: www.ingomu.com