Category Archives: Articles

Articles

Ten Common Marketing Mistakes

By Orvel Ray Wilson

Assuming You Don’t Have to Market

Coca-Cola is by far the most widely recognized brand name in the world, and one of the world’s largest advertisers, investing tens of millions of dollars annually in marketing. Even if you’ve got a better mousetrap, the world will not beat a path to your door. Every business must market itself constantly, aggressively, or fail.

Assuming You Need Big Money to Market

Jay Conrad Levinson, in his best-selling book Guerrilla Marketing Attack*, lists 100 marketing weapons, and 50 of them cost you nothing. Even the smallest one-person business should cultivate good relations with the press. Read Jeffery Lant’s book, The Unabashed Self Promoter’s Guide, to learn how to write dollars worth press releases and articles that will generate thousand of dollars worth of free publicity.

Improper Targeting

Try to say something to somebody or you will be saying nothing to everybody. “Narrow cast” your marketing message to a specific group who want, need, or have to buy your products. Advertise to remind rather that to impress. Repetition is key; mail postcards weekly for a month instead of a single multi-page brochure blitz. Enclose a business card with everything.

Confusing Image and Identity

Guerrillas strive to communicate their identity, not their image. Image implies something contrived or counterfeit. Your identity is who you really are. Customers recognize and appreciate the truth. Put your picture on your business card and your address on your stationary. How else will they know where to send the check?

Undervaluing the Product

Hungry retailers routinely sell their work for a fraction of the fair market value. Be competitive, even aggressive, but don’t give products or services away. Customers will not place a value on your work unless you do.

Incomplete Customer Feedback

Follow up every order after several days to make sure the customer is still satisfied. Ask everyone, “How are we doing?” and “How could we improve?” Take every suggestion seriously. If you really listen to your customers, and do what they tell you to, you can’t fail.

No Specific Marketing Goals

Define exactly the outcome you want your marketing to produce É to inform, to educate, to entertain, or to persuade? Every dollar spent on marketing is an investment, so expect a specific rate of return. Be clear about your goals and track your response rates in registrations per hundred calls, or sales per thousand brochures.

Insufficient Information

The belief that people don’t read long copy is a common marketing myth. Readership falls off dramatically after the first 50 words, but long copy sells to readers interested enough to finish. Put the “5 W’s” up front (who, what, when, where, why), then use enough ink to tell your whole story so your customers can make an informed decision.

Failure to Develop Vendor Relationships

Don’t always go with the lowest quote. Get to know a printer, designer, or agency that understands your needs and will compete for your long-term business. For example, ask them to price the printing of your newsletter on a monthly-for-a-year basis.

Switching Too Soon

Easily the most costly, and certainly the most common mistake, is changing the theme, format, or media used in your marketing campaign. This one is so important that it should be listed as number one. Just about the time you’re sick to death of your marketing, your prospects are just beginning to recognize who you are. Instead of updating your advertising, spend the money repeating your message, again and again and again and again.

Orvel Ray Wilson is an author and speaker on sales, marketing and management, and co-author of Guerrilla Selling: Unconventional Weapons and Tactics for Making the Sale. For a free copy of The Guerrilla Selling Newsletter, call 303-637-1461.

*guerrilla marketer (n) 1: one who deploys irregular marketing weapons that are effective, inexpensive, and productive. 2: one who uses time, energy and imagination, instead of brute marketing force to gain an advantage.

[From Connection Magazine, March 1994]

Articles

Buying and Selling Telephone Answering Services

By Thomas G. O’Roark

I find buying and selling Telephone Answering Services (TAS) to be an interesting subject. There are over four thousand TAS in the United States, and most are small, closely-held, family owned and operated businesses. The value of a TAS is almost entirely intangible. Assigning value to an intangible asset is always tricky. In this case, the customer list is the intangible asset which, in my opinion, represents most of the value in a TAS. Buying a TAS is particularly viable because seller financing is usually available as part of the terms, and because significant changes are taking place in the TAS industry which have stimulated buying and selling activity.

As to financing the purchase of a TAS, in my experience, most bankers will not loan money against an intangible asset. The TAS customer list is a recurring revenue base of service bureau subscribers, representing a cash flow stream not unlike an annuity. A future stream of recurring cash flows can be discounted to a net present value, similar to the way that bankers discount loan payments or the way that bonds are valued. Within the financial community, most lenders like to have solid collateral for a loan, such as real estate. They tend to completely ignore the value of intangibles, relying only on the “tangible net worth” a business. Therefore, seller financing is an essential part of any sale or purchase of a TAS.

The first step in buying or selling any business is strategic planning. An individual owner of a TAS should focus on internal factors such as retirement planning, developing exit strategies for becoming liquid, and actually realizing their hard won capital from the business. Often the business represents decades of “sweat equity.” The customers are also friends and neighbors who often have been loyal subscribers since the inception of the business. Providing uninterrupted, high-quality service is of utmost concern. Management succession and training are critical.

Can the Owner/Operator replicate him or herself? Can he or she afford to?

Not every individual owner has an heir who is interested in or capable of running a TAS. As they say, you can lead them to water, but you can’t make them take over the business.

Also, forecasting profitability and cash flow projections are vital to both buyer and seller. It’s often the case that a small TAS can support one family quite nicely, but not two. So both Mom and Jr. can’t both be drawing a full management salary.

How does Mom get her retirement nest egg out of the business, but still pass on the business to Jr.?

Alternatively, how does Mom retire, but continue to own the business, if she has to replace her owner’s draw with a manager’s salary?

Similarly, if an absentee owner/investor buys a TAS, the new owner must pass on all or part of the owner’s compensation to the manager and also service the acquisition debt, which leaves little or no draw for the new owner.

This cash flow dilemma is often the motivation for selling to a competitor who can consolidate two offices into one, or can divide management time between both offices, thereby freeing up enough cash flow to service the acquisition debt. Consolidating offices eliminates duplication in office rent, supervision, night shift operators, etc., and helps leverage existing over heads for support staff, billing, collections, equipment capacity, telephone trunkage, etc. In my experience, a large, reputable competitor is usually the best choice when selecting a buyer.

Selection of a buyer is without a doubt the single most important decision to be made after an owner decides to sell. Unless the price is all cash, consider critical success factors in selecting a buyer.

  • Is the buyer qualified to operate a TAS?
  • Will the customers stay on service after the sale or will there be excessive account loss?
  • Can the new owner make a profit operating the service as-is where-is? Could you?
  • Or, will he/she have to move it or upgrade the equipment?
  • Will the new owner be able to make their debt payments to the seller?
  • Is the new owner dependent upon the cash flows from the business being acquired to service the debt?
  • Or does the new owner have other cash flows from other sources that will enable them to pay for the business?

We all know how quickly a service business can decline, and trying to repossess an answering service is not very practical. Sellers need absolute assurance that they’ll be paid irrespective of what happens to the business after the sale.

Conversely, the prudent buyer wants to be guaranteed of receiving full value for the purchase price, and will normally require the seller to warranty the accounts for some period of time after the closing of the sale. The buyer and seller typically compromise on a mutual sharing of the business risk involved in transferring the accounts to the new owner, with some well defined criteria for qualifying the accounts. Qualification might typically involve an account remaining on service for some period of time following the sale and becoming a paying customer of the new owner.

I suggest both buyers and sellers look closely at the competition. The easiest place to find TAS is in the yellow pages. Shop them.

  • What are their capabilities?
  • How do they price their services?
  • What about new entrants into the market?

Most TAS experience occasional (albeit temporary) loss of customers (usually high volume users) to “flat rate” competitors offering unlimited usage, so consider the pricing trends in the local market, and whether usage is billed per call, per message or per minute. Consider the difference, for example, between day service (only answering between eight am and six pm, Monday through Friday) and full-blown 24- hours a day, 365-days a year, type service. What do most customers demand from an answering service in today’s market?

There are very significant TAS Industry trends which affect the value of a TAS business, such as the contracting TAS market. Every analysis of the TAS industry that I have seen indicates a shrinking market for traditional TAS services. Alternative technologies such as cellular, voice mail, alpha-numeric paging, etc., have severely impacted demand for traditional answering services. The industry is undergoing a rapid consolidation with fewer and fewer competitors, and larger remaining call centers. The level of buying and selling activity within the TAS Industry is good, with fair availability of willing buyers and willing sellers. In order to maintain their revenue levels, TAS owners who do not wish to sell are forced to buy their competitors and/or diversify into new and different value-added types of services. Diversification often demands expensive investment in automated equipment with capabilities that are more flexible, more complicated, and more fully featured than even most automated TAS systems can traditionally provide.

As TAS change their focus away from traditional messaging services and toward other service niches, their appetite for acquiring the customer bases of their competitors may naturally wane. The margins and the prices charged to customers of traditional, take-a-name-and-number type messaging services, are not particularly attractive in light of other niche services that yield higher revenues per minute and that have the potential for exponential growth. Scarce capacity will naturally be allocated to the higher ticket, more profitable service niches.

Timing is everything in life, and TAS owners should carefully consider if and when they might be in a selling mode.

In a declining industry such as telephone answering services, the durability of existing cash flows is in question, which results in lowering of values for the businesses. It may well be that traditional TAS businesses will never again be worth as much as they are right now. Outside investors are typically not attracted to declining industries. The number of competitors keeps steadily dwindling and those that remain have larger shares of a smaller market. Most TAS systems have definite upper limits for capacity in terms of numbers of ports and/or numbers of operators. Competitors may be aggressively buying accounts today, but may satisfy their demand. Once a competitor has maximized the utilization of his/her TAS system, then a second system would be required before any new accounts could be added, the cost of which may be prohibitive. Experts disagree over the optimal size for a call center, but consolidation has definite limits.

The larger a call center becomes, the fewer competitors there are who could consolidate it into another office. Industry consolidation tends to have a self dampening aspect to it that gradually slows the pace of the process.

There are new and emerging customer needs and market driven demands for innovation as well as upgrading of the service. Even if retirement is not a factor to a TAS owner, replacement or upgrading of plant and equipment requires careful cash flow planning. Consider the investment required for technology, service enhancements, productivity tools, opportunities to reduce costs, obsolescence of old equipment. TAS veterans well remember the advent of answering machines and the resulting reduction in the size of the TAS market, and the transition from hardwired secretarial lines, cordboards and concentrators to DID’s and call forwarding. Today’s customers are demanding their TAS offer fax, paging, fully integrated voicemail, modem access, remote printing, order-taking, credit card verification, scripting, label printing, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR).

  • How comfortable are you with new technology?
  • Do you understand computerization, data base management, networking, data file manipulation and transfer?
  • Most importantly, how will you finance the new hardware and software?
  • It isn’t cheap, and it won’t always work as well as or easily as advertised. After it’s installed, how will you maintain it, and at what ongoing cost?

New buyers should consider the skills and commitment required by a 24-hour per day, 365-day per year business, that never closes for holidays, Sundays, blizzards, storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, riots, or anything else. In fact, the more disastrous the local situation, the more customers need you, with zero fault tolerance. Also, any failure to answer the phones can have significant consequential damages to a customers business, as in the case of doctors or other emergency service providers. It can be oppressive. One reason I consistently hear for selling is a yearning for freedom to travel and to enjoy the well deserved fruits of hard earned success.

The labor intensity of answering service is sometimes overlooked by new entrants into the industry. Recruiting, training, supervising skills are essential. I am occasionally contacted by a bleary-eyed seller who is motivated to sell sooner rather that later due to recent turnover in key people. If a new buyer is not from a labor intensive background, then managing a call center could be quite a challenge. It’s the nature of a service business that even your lowest paid employee will interact with your most valuable customers. There is a demand for a uniform, consistent level of service that requires constant monitoring, observation, training and retraining. These service businesses cannot stand to be neglected at all. It’s amazing how quickly an answering service can decline due to poor service.

Finally, before buying or selling, one must consider such external factors as recession, inflation, global economy, U.S. economy, and most importantly for a local service bureau, the local economy. It’s hard to collect when your customers are going out of business, or when your competition is desperate for new business. Also, there are issues of inflation, new governmental regulations which add cost, and office lease escalation clauses to consider and plan for. Be sensitive to labor force changes and to legal and regulatory issues .

In closing, it is my opinion, that the TAS industry is undergoing important changes. As the industry declines, rapid consolidation is occurring resulting in fewer, larger call centers. Owner/operators are diversifying into new value-added services and are transitioning away from traditional message taking. Therefore, the availability of willing buyers and sellers is presently good, but timing is critical, and capacity is limited. Strategic planning by owner/operators is very important to determine when and if they might become a buyer or a seller, and what their strategy will be with regards to diversification into new service niches.

[From Connection Magazine, March 1994]

Articles

Ten Characteristics of Great Sales People

By Orvel Ray Wilson

It’s a jungle out there. You are not paranoid; they really are out to get you. Doing business in the highly competitive environment of the 90’s requires the boldness and ingenuity of a veteran commercial mercenary.

Today’s winners in business are the renegades, the rebels who break all the rules, who use information and surprise to gain a tactical advantage. There are ten characteristics that set the sales people apart. Study them. Sell by them.

1. Investment

The average business in America invests only 3% of gross sales in marketing. The “Great Sales Person” averages 10%.

Great Sales People believe that the difference between winning and loosing, more often than not, is a very slim margin. So they invest heavily in technology, in people, and in themselves. They are constantly expanding their horizons, constantly training, and constantly on the lookout for anything that will give them a slight advantage.

2. Consistent

Poor selling done consistently will be more effective than great selling done sporadically. In the mind of your customers, consistency is interpreted as credibility, longevity and success. Great Sales People earn this confidence by communicating their identity, not their image. They are very resistant to changing their name, their logo, their color scheme. Be consistent and you will out sell the better armed, better equipped, better organized corporate regulars.

3. Confident

Great Sales People believe in their products, their services, and their people. They count on others in the organization to deliver on every promise, every time, and then some. If you can’t feel that kind of confidence, you’re working for the wrong outfit. When something goes wrong, take personal responsibility for making it right, right away.

4. Patient

A hunter will sit in the trees for days waiting for a clear shot. Less than 4% of sales are made on the first call, over 80% are made after the eighth call. Great Sales People are always on the lookout for the next need cycle and strive to be there when the need arises. So stick with it. Keep mailing out your brochure.

5. Assortment

The old days of Henry Ford, when “you can have it any color you want, as long as it’s black” are long gone. Great Sales People offer a wide variety of goods and services, and adapt their offerings, their terms, even their delivery schedules to meet the customers’ needs. Look for the new, the unusual, the unique, and add it to your offering. Ask customers what they’d like to see. The more flexible you can be, the better. The more options you offer, the more people you can serve, and the more successful your company will be.

6. Subsequent

Great Sales People are in this for the long haul, and getting the order is only the first step. Great Sales People spend 10% of their resources educating the universe, promoting the business to the community at large. They spend 30% of their time marketing to prospective customers. But they spend a whopping 60% of their time, energy and money marketing to people who have already bought. Why? It costs five times as much to sell a new customer as it does to make the same sale to an existing customer. Great Sales People sell and re-sell and re-sell the benefits of their offering.

7. Measurement

Any behavior that is rewarded will tend to be repeated, so Great Sales People reward every customer and client for the opportunity to serve them. It’s the thirteenth doughnut in the baker’s dozen; it’s doing everything you promised, everything the customer expected, and more. And because expectations are constantly changing, Great Sales People are always asking “how are we doing?” and “how can we improve.” Survey your customers. Get out in the field and talk to them. If you do exactly what they tell you, you cannot fail.

8. Convenient

Great Sales People are both receptive and responsive. They know that they have to be “user friendly.” That means easy to reach, east to talk to, and easy to do business with. They return their calls. They give out their numbers at home, at the office, in the car. They keep phones staffed at night and on weekends, even if only by an answering service. They are in touch. Be available. Lend a near to your customers when they have a suggestion, a question, or a problem. And do everything immediately.

9. Excitement

Great Sales People are enthusiastic, and militantly optimistic. They have a good word for everyone, and never complain about the weather, the economy, or the people they work for. Their passion spreads like a wildfire. People love to do business with people who love their business. Spread good news and cheer about your people and your industry to everyone you meet. Start a one-sales person revolution to turn your corner of the economy around. Launch a success conspiracy. Enthusiasm is contagious.

10. Commitment

The Great Sales Person is enlisted in a larger mission that just closing the deal and getting the order. They are deadly serious about adding value and serving the community. When a customer complains, the Great Sales Person tracks down the cause and corrects it, whatever it takes. They have no time for excuses and apologies, and they never argue with results. They treat every customer as if the survival of their business depended on it, because it does.

Get committed to your marketing effort, and if you’re more comfortable hosting receptions or maintaining membership rolls, assign someone to be your full-time designated sales person.

It’s time we launched a revolution in American business. You have no choice. To survive in today’s brutal economic environment, you must become a Great Sales Person.

Orvel Ray Wilson is an author and speaker on sales, marketing and management, and co-author of Guerrilla Selling: Unconventional Weapons and Tactics for Making the Sale. For a free copy of The Guerilla Selling Newsletter, call toll-free 800-247-9145.

[From Connection Magazine, January 1994]

Articles

T1 – Bypassing Monthly Expenses

By Roger Koenig

Telecommunications transmission in North America is now almost entirely digital. Every time you make a call across the country, or across the city, your voice is being converted to digital numbers. Only in the “last mile” (the telephone office closest to your caller) is the digital speech coding converted back to an analog electrical voltage to drive a telephone. The standard means of digital transmission and connection that makes this possible is called T1 or Digital Signal 1 (DS-1). It has become the basic building block of the telephone network and the fiber optic transmission lines that link it.

T1 transmission came out of Bell Labs approximately 30 years ago. For the last dozen years, T1 transmission has been available for business telecommunications users to create private networks, linking sites with voice, data, and video communications. A T1 line appears to the user as a plastic box on the wall. You plug into it at each end with a wide modular plug. Equipment called multiplexers or channel banks convert the T1 digital line into 24 or 48 individual telephone lines or high-speed data channels.

The Universal Communications Pipe: Technically, T1 is a method of sending digital “1” and “0” pulses on two pairs of copper wire at a high speed. The standard speed, or “bit rate,” is 1.544 megabits per second, enough pulses to support 24 or 48 simultaneous telephone conversations in each direction.

You can think of T1 transmission as a digital “pipe.” You put “1” and “0” bits of information in at one end, and the information comes out at the other end exactly as you put it in – whether the other end is in the next town or across the country. As a point-to-point leased line service, a T1 has no connection to the telephone company switch. There are no per-minute charges for calls over the T1, only a fixed monthly charge of leasing the “pipe.” What you transmit on a T1 leased line is up to you – DID lines, remote dial-out lines, data, talk paths, or remote operator connections. The telephone company neither knows nor cares what type of information is being carried in the T1 communications pipe.

Messaging services are profitably using T1 lines that have monthly leases anywhere between $400 and $4,000 per month depending on distance between sites and the number of accounts handled. Lines are typically leased from the local telephone company for consolidations within your Local Access Transport Area (LATA), and from a long distance company (AT&T, MCI, Sprint) for consolidations between LATA’s. There are also 600 independent fiber optic transmission companies in the U.S. that specialize in leasing T1 circuits within specific cities or geographical areas of the country.

Digital Is Cheaper: Messaging services, like the rest of the telecommunications industry, are going digital. The motivation is a matter of saving money while providing a better quality of service to customers. Two pairs of copper wire using digital T1 transmission are cheaper, easier to maintain, and sound better than using 24 pairs of copper wire to do the same job with analog techniques. The monetary savings telephone companies, or “carriers,” enjoy by using T1 is being passed on to customers. Rates for analog private line services, including Foreign Exchange (FX) lines, have been going up while rates for digital private line services (T1) have been going down. In some areas, you can lease a full T1 line – capable of connecting 48 DID, concentrator, or call-out lines – for the same monthly expense as four analog FX lines. Telephone answering, paging, and voice mail services are using T1 leased lines for mergers, consolidations, market expansions, and to reduce monthly FX charges.

Transparent Consolidations: Let’s talk about a typical T1 installation between messaging service locations such as Akron and Cleveland. The overall goal is to transport all of the service lines from the Akron Office to the Cleveland Office. Existing DID, call-out, and concentrator lines in Akron are connected to appropriate cards in Channel Bank 1. The channel bank converts or “multiplexes” all of the 24 analog line signals into a single high-speed digital signal – the T1. At the Cleveland end of the T1 line, Channel Bank 2 converts the T1 signal back into 24 analog lines. The lines are then connected to the Cleveland Switch exactly like local DID, call-out, and concentrator lines. All customer accounts from Akron are transported to Cleveland combining the two services into one larger service.

To the messaging service customers, the consolidation of Akron into Cleveland is transparent. Connecting (or “cutting-over”) the Akron lines to the T1 Channel Bank is typically done late at night. Customer answering, voice mail, and paging accounts are immediately handled in Cleveland after the “cut.” All current Akron customer account information and messages are entered in Cleveland before the cut. Due to the T1 digital technology, there is no loss in speech quality by transporting the Akron lines to Cleveland.

Most significantly for the messaging service, there are no per-minute toll costs for DID or call-outs from Akron to Cleveland. All communications traffic goes over the messaging service’s private T1 network. The economics of T1 lines has paid-off for consolidating messaging businesses from 10 to 300 miles apart.

The Sum is Less than the Halves: Every business has costs considered “fixed,” such as rent, office equipment, insurance, accounting, and overhead management. Other expenses are “variable,” depending on the volume of customer accounts handled, such as operations staff payrolls.

The major motivation for messaging service to consolidate or merge with T1 lines is to cut expenses both fixed and variable. For fixed expenses, operating one office is obviously cheaper than the overhead associated with two offices. One switch, voice mail system, and paging terminal costs less than two. Not everyone realizes, however, that variable expenses are lower for larger messaging services than smaller ones.

The statistics of telephone call traffic dictate that the bigger you are, the more efficiently you use operators, equipment, and trunks. This is due to the averaging effect of telephone traffic coming from large groups of callers. In a large group, each operator or voice mail port can handle more calls on average. Callers have a lower probability of waiting on hold or getting a busy tone. Airlines, credit card companies, and insurance companies learned this a long time ago. Reducing payroll and overhead costs is the reason that customer service operators for these high-volume companies are typically at one large site in the country.

[From Connection Magazine, January 1994]

Articles

A Novice’s Guide to Marketing & Sales

By John E. Hudson

Marketing has long been a fancy of mine. The reason I find marketing so interesting is that it deals with the way people develop and react to different concepts. It also provides insight into the process a particular individual uses to develop the rationale for the decision they just reached. The key to a good market program is to focus on, and exploit this human trait. Creating a plan to suggest consumer acceptance before the targeted prospect develops the sense of need is a great skill.

While this may sound like a subliminal message, it really isn’t. Today’s technical name is pro-active marketing. You can really call it what you want. The bottom line is to create a market need using your strengths in order to capture a position of leadership. After you have done it, you tell the world about it and they stand in line to give you money.

Sounds great doesn’t it? You know the market really needs what you have to offer. Are you ready to start tomorrow? Why not?

These are the key attitudes necessary to create an aggressive marketing campaign that will increase your sales volume and profit dollars. A common mistake of business is the belief that price management allows you to maintain a level of business that is necessary for long term success. To develop long term business success you must provide value to a select group of individuals who truly believe you are the only source for what they seek.

There are several items critical to the development of a successful, aggressive marketing plan: Market Leadership, Risk Management and Selling Tactics. Without these essential skills it is difficult to control the business environment because you don’t have a complete picture of how outside influences affect the market.

Market Leadership: If you are not willing to define the industry accepted criteria for a specific product or service offering, your competition will. The prospect will always have an opinion of what they want to buy and how much they are willing to pay. They will also have an opinion on the perceived value of your goods and services to their business or to them personally.

Selling Message #1, Perception. Create an industry need only you can fulfill!

To lead the market it is necessary to teach it about the benefits of purchasing goods and services from you. The consumers are influenced by what they read, see and hear. Rarely do you find an independent thinker. People want things that make them successful. So, your objective is well defined. Create a message that is believable and is verifiable by references in the market segment.

Risk Management: Aggressive campaigns must be measurable. The primary goal is to take control of the market. Other elements that must be influence dare, the content of services offered, the proper price structure, and the acceptable standards for conducting business. These are the goals. To be successful you must have criteria for measuring your success at reaching these goals. Risk management consists of many elements. Each of these issues deals specifically with the elements that affect your potential for success. Also, each has an associated out-of-pocket expense. This makes it mandatory to manage the effectiveness of the program.

Selling Message #2, Value. By tailoring our products to the requirements of their market, we have helped our customers succeed.

I believe the two most critical issues in a pro-active marketing campaign are the “time line for success,” and the “barriers to entry.” Many business planners deal with these issues separately. In my opinion, it is mandatory that these two issues be dealt with as a set. This is especially true in a small business that has limited resources in time and money.

The “time line for success” provides a schedule of events that must occur during the campaign. You manage the campaign with a series of milestones. Each milestone has a set of goals associated with it. The milestones will change with each new campaign. As you approach the milestones at the end of the schedule, you should have specific goals for capture rate and customer acceptance.

If you are meeting your goals on the time line you set, you are on the road to success. As soon as you sense that you are having trouble meeting the goals, reevaluate both the goals and the timing for success. You may find that the market is not what you expected, or your goals are too ambitious. Apply the rule of “time versus money.” Will the project create the income I want in a time frame that is acceptable to me and by business? If the answer is no, or maybe, you should consider abandoning the project. If you do closeout the project, you need to know why it did not succeed. Some parts were successful, some were not. It is equally important to know why elements of any project succeed or fail.

Selling Message #3, Need. The market needs your services because you told them they did!

Entry barriers have a major effect on the time line. The level of market awareness by the consumer, as well as the number and quality of your perceived competitors, can severely impact the timing required to succeed. In either case these are two items that you must understand and factor into your campaign before you commit to spend your business development dollars.

Other issues affecting your decision to enter are; market segment knowledge, your time commitments to other projects, personal and business resources, and the cost of technology to serve the market. The bottom line in risk management should not be viewed as a negative. It is good business to know your strengths and limitations. This kind of knowledge allows you to optimize your personal and business resources. Any time you decide to take an aggressive position you should be well prepared to win.

Selling Tactics: Creating an aggressive marketing plan without an aggressive selling plan is like practicing all your life to hit a home run and then never getting up to bat. If your intent is to attack the market you need to:

  1. Develop the language of the industry
  2. Solve the problem
  3. Manage the selling cycle
  4. Steam roll the competition

These four items are dealt with in sets. Language development and solving problems go hand-in hand. In order to successfully sell in a market segment you must develop their vocabulary and understand how and when to apply it. We have all seen it É someone tries to sell us something and they have no concept of how it’s used, or why we would use it. If that applies to us, why wouldn’t it apply to our prospect? To make the sale, allow the prospect to be the hero. We win because we allowed them to provide solutions to the individuals they are responsible to.

Selling Message #4, Ask for the Order. At some point in the selling cycle you must stop selling and ask for a commitment from the buyer.

Managing the selling cycle and steam rolling the competition are keys to sales success. The only way to steam roll the competition is understand and manage the selling cycle. This means that you, or a sales manager, must take an active roll in preparing the sales staff to be well trained in creating the approach to closing the sale.

The requirements for closing a sale are part of the risk management portion of a marketing plan. To complete a sale for anything certain needs have to be met. The other portion of the sales cycle is managing the flow of the sale. By managing the flow it makes it difficult for competition to invade the prospect.

Selling Message #5, Winning. To win both the seller and the buyer must believe that their objectives are being met.

Remember, the company that defines the buyers needs, presents products to fill those needs, and controls the selling cycle will always win in the long run.

Conclusion

Some industry critics believe that aggressively attacking a specific business segment is risky and leaves a bad image if it is done improperly. To some degree they are correct. The business that is not prepared to actively solve the buyer’s needs will fail and negatively influence the prospect on the value of goods offered to them by another company. The message is be prepared to win. Fill the needs of the prospect at the point of sale.

John Hudson is a Product Director for Comverse Technology, Inc.

[From Connection Magazine, January 1994]