Business Consultants

Archive for September, 2009

When you first meet with IT sales prospects, you’ll want to get them talking about their top 3 problems. You may learn that the problems your prospects have aren’t ones you or your network of partners or subcontractors can help with. In this case, you are barking up the wrong tree and should move on. But it’s very important to get your prospects talking if you want IT sales.

Ask about Their Preferences

Get them to talk about what they like and dislike about how they’ve gotten IT support in the past. This can also give you a tremendous number of clues as to what they’re looking for.

You also need to figure out at this first meeting if they have an emergency that has to be addressed in the next 24, 48 hours, 72 hours, or are they looking more for an IT audit, site survey, or technology assessment with IT sales.

Every once in a while they’ll throw you a curve ball and prospects will want something totally different. It won’t be an emergency and they won’t really need a tech assessment, but most of the time, those are what they need.

Bring Your Clients to the Next Step

If you want to move from free to fee, if you want to move from sitting there and playing brain-picking-101 in the IT sales call to them writing a check to your company or signing on a credit card authorization for IT sales, then it’s really important that you find out.

Make sure that you have something ready to offer them, that you have proposals that easily take care of their needs. Even better is to bring the blank forms with you so you’re ready to have them sign on the dotted line for IT sales.

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The 1980′s business culture in the USA and internationally put a considerable emphasis on personal reward on the basis that highly motivated individuals could transform organisations and societies. The extreme example in film was Gordon Gekko in Wall Street stating that greed was good. The 90′s, however, have seen companies traumatised and bankrupted by the inappropriate use of remuneration as a motivator. Yet major corporate successes have been built on reward based remuneration systems. Phones4U recently and Allied Dunbar in the financial services market is an earlier example.

The notorious Barings Bank had individual traders on bonuses in the millions yet in the long term these motivated individuals were not fulfilling the company’s objectives. Moreover even when an individual’s reward system is based on entirely appropriate performance indicators, resulting in the organisation’s success and he or she is rewarded, there may still be problems arising from the large differential between salaries of senior people and those of middle management. A payment system that depresses or demotivates 10 people for every one it motivates may not be the best for the organisation.

Wise organisations are therefore trying to reward and motivate all staff so that staff act energetically to further the corporation’s interests both short and long term and feel they have been treated fairly. However there must be properly in place the link between the items on which they are being rewarded and the actions they are able to take to influence the desired outcome.

A wise organisation accepts that:

• It is reasonable for the individual manager to act in his or her own interests.
• Managers work for people not organisations and want to please the superiors closest to them, or failing that, their peer group.
• Managers want to achieve and will be attracted to those tasks at which they know they can succeed, usually favouring the short term at the expense of the long term.

The clear implication is that an organisation should lay some groundwork before relying on a remuneration structure to change performance and behaviour. In other words the management and organisation system must be in balance with the remuneration system.

There are 5 major pre-conditions to the installation of an effective reward structure.

1. Measurement: “If you don’t measure it you won’t get it”. There are various measurement systems of which Balanced Scorecard, which sets multiple objectives and is used by Tesco, is perhaps the best known.

2. Monitoring: If the performance measures are not monitored properly or only monitored in a review at the year end, it can give the manager signals that they don’t really matter or, worse still, that failure is acceptable providing all the managers fail together.

3. Control of the tools for the job: The organisation must ensure that the individual is not over dependent on factors outside his control to achieve the performance measures set out (this is the ‘how’ part of the equation).

4. Consistency: Ensuring that short term organisational factors don’t over-influence managers or drive them from their real objective. The organisation must also ensure that its own design (be it bureaucratic or loose) is appropriate to what is being asked of managers.

5. Reward and strategy in line: An organisation’s achieving a clear strategy is not an event that will take place in the future; it is a journey. A remuneration system can be put into an organisation even when it has a relatively muddled strategy providing that organisational and management disputes are resolved by reference to strategy and the “balanced score card”. Only then will there be pressure on the organisation to refine its strategy, structure and remuneration systems.

Based on these 5 pre conditions, there is a checklist of 10 factors that the effective remuneration and reward structure must achieve:

1. Support the business strategy
2. Encourage the desired behaviour
3. Reward relevant performance
4. Be fair
5. Be substantial
6. Be tax efficient
7. Be timely (The reward must take place close to the achievement)
8. Incorporate non financial rewards (Recognition can be as important as cash)
9. Be firm (A bonus lost through missing target should not be recoverable whereas a salary increase should only be delayed until target is reached)
10. Be crystal clear

Before revealing the secrets of the trades, here are myths and fallacies that need to be cleared before one indulges into building an opt-in list. These marketing misconceptions could pose so much of an obstacle towards your profitting well from your business.

Not a lot of people use email

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods nowadays simply because virtually almost all people use email. Check on those email fields or blanks required to be filled up on various forms needed in processing different transactions. A person without an email address is tantamount to a person without an online home, which is one big shameful truth for this generation.

Email marketing campaigns can offend a lot of people

The not-so secret way to surmount this dilemma is through permission-based advertising. There’s no harm in trying after asking for permission.

It’s stupid to send email to all the people

The key to this predicament is to have a very discerning eye on who to email and who to not email. Better look for some metrics on how to know which group of people would give you high ROI or return on investment.

The Real Deal with Building Opt-in List

After clearing the fog regarding email marketing myths, here’s how one can benefit from employing the power of email marketing campaigns – building an opt-in list.

However, building an opt-in list is not a piece of cake particularly for the uninitiated. Here is a roundown of tips on how to succeed in this kind of marketing endeavor.

1. Strategic Collection of Data

Know which information from your audiences will help you in lowering expenses and/or make sales flourish. Devise a tactic to make people voluntarily provide you with the information necessary to create higher conversion.

Overload of data is not good. Ask only for opt-in, with their full name and email addresses. Make sure that the profiles that you gather are updated to aid in improving the relevance, timeliness and satisfaction from each deal you make.

2. Good Implementation

Old adage says it all – ‘action speaks louder than words’. This easily translates to the difficulty one has to undergo during the execution of his or her email marketing efforts. It’s a good thing that various methods, often low-cost, abound to hasten and facilitate the building up of one’s opt-in database.

Tracking your email marketing results can pose great hardship, too. Technology and relevant sources should be employed in making this aspect of your marketing a lot manageable. Your high traffic groups of opt-ins with the greatest result should be taken noted of.

The following are the most widely used methods to leverage channels without overspending:

1. Make use of websites.

It is an excellent tool for data collation and providing you with relevant info regarding your email offers. Use forms that solicit your visitor’s email address and consent.

2. Make use of print ads, brochures, TV, radio and direct mail.

These are the more popular ways of marketing aiming to lead traffic to one’s site. You may want to ask for signups for email services. Make your website more visible through these media. Offering free electronic newsletters and or rewards program can do well in making it easy to win the nod of your audiences, too.

3. Maximize your sales force.

Customer service associates can help a lot in making you benefit more from your email correspondence. Sales people with proper education on how to aid you in this endeavor can very well contribute to higher ROI. Techniques like offering account updates and special programs through email can easily land you those lists of valuable visitors.

4. Don’t make your point of sale pointless.

Forms for signup located at cash registers and other high-traffic and highly visible spots can be very excellent venues for your business to collect email addresses. Notification of upcoming sales through their email addresses and names can coax them to supply you with the information you need.

5. Conferences or trade shows can work, too.

Giveaway offers or entries on sweepstakes are great for opt-in to volunteer their contact details.

These tactics should be applied with adequate caution and should focus on earning the trust of your opt-in list instead of simply collating data for your sole own benefit. Always make sure that the forms that you will use and other methods that you will employ will not necessitate too much fuss to subscribe. This is for people to not be annoyed during the process of data supplication.

With that bunch of information, who can ever go wrong with the feat of building an opt-in list?

John Vinters

http://www.easydailycash.com/?id=newventure