Category: Sales & Marketing

Infographic contributed by Keith Tully of Real Business Rescue

Are you starting a new restaurant? Do you want it to grow faster with online marketing?

The number of people who are connected to the Internet is growing at an exponential rate. Many restaurant owners are looking at it, and they are trying to latch onto the trend.

There are many ways to market your restaurant online. In this guide, we will only look at practical ideas that a fairly new restaurant can do to bring patrons to its doorsteps.

Here’s the thing about branding and marketing: most of the time we think that it has to be as big and bold and loud as possible. We want one tiny branding message to reach and be acted on by the entire world. It’s the mentality that makes car dealership owners shout and wear crazy costumes during their commercials.

Covert marketing is sly and smooth and, when done properly, the recipient of the marketing effort doesn’t know that you’ve been trying to sell them. They are convinced that their impulse to check out your site, buy your product or talk to their friends about you is their very own idea. It is the best kind of marketing possible because it relies on real people to say genuine things. One person says one good thing about you to two friends. Those two friends tell two friends, etc. You’ve heard the analogy before. So how do you do it? How do you get in there without being obvious and potentially alienating the recipient?

Be a Human First

One of the first rules of marketing and networking is to realize that networking and marketing opportunities are everywhere. A chance meeting in line at the coffee shop, if played right, could lead to your next business connection! If you look at every person you come across as a potential sale, though, you’re going to alienate more people than you attract.

Try to relate to each person you meet as a human being. Don’t mention your business. Instead, say “it was really nice talking to you. Can I give you my card?” If the person says yes, give him or her your card. Or, you can be more direct and ask what the person does for a living. It is one of the laws of polite society that questions about occupation must be reciprocated. When they ask what you do, tell that person and hand over a card. Then let the conversation move along naturally.

Always Put Your Best Face Forward

Do you remember when we talked about the importance of always using and giving away high quality stationery supplies? This is true out in the world, too. Actually using high quality products in natural every day settings makes people curious about you. Leaving notes on company stationery, signing credit card slips with good pens, etc: it projects a subtle air of success.

There is no reason to use a generic cheap pen when you have branded high quality merchandise that doubles as a marketing ploy at your disposal.

Using the above example, with the exchange of business cards “in the wild,” it is important that you not hand over a hand printed card or something that is poorly designed. Your business card is your first impression and since business card printing has gotten much more affordable, even bootstrapping startup entrepreneurs can hand over beautiful cards.

Trust us: ink jet printed business cards stops working once you leave your college campus. Go pro or go home.

Finally: Let it Go

So many branding messages and marketing attempts have a distinct air of desperation about them. Desperation kills sales. Instead, focus on the connection and if a sale happens as a result, great! If not, there are other opportunities out there. This works on you when you shop somewhere, right? Being descended upon by employees makes you want to run right back out of the store. But a shop employee who greets you warmly and then leaves you alone (but is happy to answer questions when you approach them) makes you want to buy twice as much, right?  And, if you’re focused on the person and not the opportunity, you won’t have any trouble putting your blatant selling techniques away.

This all probably feels counter intuitive to what you’ve already learned. Trust us; taking a relaxed approach and letting your materials do the work for you will go further and farther than any “hey, look at me!” approach you can think up.

The hottest addition to the sales world right now is something called ‘Inside Sales’ or ‘Sales 2.0’, a process of selling that involves the sales team to never leave their desk and go through the entire sales cycle behind the phone, computer and other tech. Sounds perfect, right?

The inevitable shift to Inside Selling has been welcomed by many businesses out there – the costs are minimal, the tools out there create little friction and the customer is respective of the remote sales process. I’m certainly in favour of the whole ‘revolution’ but it comes with a number of issues and headaches that inevitably have driven companies back to the old process of selling or hurt them in the long run.

What I’ve decided to do is create an incredibly simple list that pin-points the problem areas of Inside Sales and gives you a way to overcome the hurdle or if  you happen to have a different way you’ve overcome the problem then drop a comment, I’d love to hear it!

Firstly – setting one of these fully functioning Inside Sales teams isn’t easy, it’s actually a lot of trial and error to find out what works and what doesn’t or more specifically what processes create the least amount of friction when your sales team is dealing with a customer. This very simple mishap is usually the reason why the Inside Sales focused business fails, the management is in fact setting up the team for failure.

1. No Leadership or Training

Straight away we’re looking failure square in the eyes because the management team has decided that the Inside Sales team can do it on their own and really don’t need much training. It’s all online and we all certainly know how to use the internet these days, sure but the entire process needs to be looked into and understood by both the management team and sales team.

The only real way anyone can do this is through the process of training and learning from an individual with experience, if the company doesn’t offer this to the Inside team then they’ve got to just go through the motions and learn from their mistakes. Mistakes are great for learning but in small amounts, without leadership or training these mistakes tend to grow and build up leading to a disfunctional sales team that sit there looking at their screen blankly.

It’s relatively simple to get over this hurdle.

Get someone on the team that’s had experience of Inside Sales and ask them to provide the needed training or if you want it done in a crash course style of training outsource the training initially and build on it internally afterwards. Don’t leave the training out of the equation, it is needed as the process is vastly different to a traditional sales role.

2. Lack of Structure

Inside Sales teams still need to have the same style of structure as a traditional sales team does. So that means that:

• There needs to be departments or separation within the team that controls and holds certain parts of the sales cycle (lead generation, closers etc)
• The team needs to know when leads get handed off, when deals get signed off etc
• Who’s in charge of account management?
• What is the sales process?

The list isn’t huge here but the basics are highlighted however with every company the needs of the team can vary so use your expertise and knowledge to answer any queries and questions yourself.

Once the structure is clearly defined the Inside Sales team will know what they’re doing with little guess work being needed.

3. Sales Cycles Are Longer

Inside sales people spend the entire day behind the desk pounding out calls and getting endless rejection. This comes with the territory but everyone needs a quick and easy win sometimes to refresh their ego and boost morale.

So if you happen to be selling products at £1000 a pop it might be worth considering creating a product or offering something of less value to initially get the customer on board and ultimately give your sales team an easy morale booster.

4. Inside Vs Outside Sales Battles

Lets face it, most sales people are incredibly competitive with an ego to match which means that in a lot of cases there will be an initial lack of respect from the outside sales team towards the inside sales team. Sounds childish but understandably the outside sales team will question the work ethic and everything else of the inside sales team.

Minor things like handing off tepid leads, cancel appointments that are well qualified or ask the inside sales team to do general admin tasks. Consider it the ‘apprenticeship’ phase but in the end a well run team needs to have no in-fighting at all.

This is where the importance of structure comes into play – define everything clearly and early, both the inside and outside sales teams need to understand what a hot lead is, when to hand it over and so on.

5. Marketing Is Disconnected

Sales & Marketing are considered to be the same thing in many cases so it’s hard to understand why there always seems to be such a disconnect between the two when put into practice. Inside selling involves the process of using social media to promote and generate leads, it also involves various other online marketing ideas.

In order to create effective marketing campaigns the sales team should be speaking with everyone, not just the marketing/inside sales team. They are at the front of the business, promoting it and learning from the people they contact. These are details that need to be shared which also brings me to the lack of co-working on marketing campaigns. When an inside sales team works on social media marketing, the outside sales team should be paying attention to what is being said and how it’s being said.

To get over this issue ensure that the sales (inside and outside) and marketing teams have meetings and consistently communicate with each other. Initially it’ll be hard but in the long run they’ll see the results too, eliminating and fear or doubts.

6. Unrealistic Goals

Management teams seem to assume that an inside sales team, because of its work style, can achieve more and ultimately should have higher/harder goals. It might be true that they can achieve more that a field sales person BUT that doesn’t mean they should be forced to work in a different manner.

Inside sales is still about generating hot leads, arranging meetings for the field sales people and ultimately moving the sales cycle along – all of these take time and patience. Setting goals that are impossible to reach without the sales team comprising their ethics and your company’s name is always a road leading to failure.

Set specific goals for each member of the team, ensure everyone is happy with them and create a desire to achieve these goals. Again setting up products and offers that the sales team can get quick wins and morale boosters will also take the team further.

7. Having a New Message

Sometimes a product will end up having a complete overhaul with the messaging which (back to the disconnect between marketing and sales teams) somehow always ends up confusing the sales teams and this includes both the inside and outside teams too.

If you happen to change the messaging of a product ensure that every single department and team understands what it is that has changed and where the positioning and messaging is now focused.

8. Endless Apps & Tools

To grow alongside the demand and growth of inside selling there has been an increase in inside sales focused or compatible apps and tools created. Which is great as we get to try out various new shiny tools and apps learning what works well and what doesn’t but the time spent trying out these things is where inside sales teams get hurt the most.

Look to minimise or at least centralise the entire list of tools everyone uses and ensure everyone has the correct training and understanding of it. In most cases people fail to adopt this new tech because they simply don’t understand it or don’t want to understand it as it tends to waste time going through a trial and error process.