Category: Sales & Marketing

To unearth the age-old secrets of sales and marketing, I journeyed 2,600 miles to Cabo San Lucas on the extreme southern tip of Baja California Sur.

Actually, it was just a vacation.

But during what was a carefree trip spent mostly on the beach and in margarita bars, I inadvertently received a Mexican marketing lesson and crystal-clear insight into what it really takes to be successful in selling services and promoting products.

The unexpected lesson came at me from two different angles – from above and below. One angle was luxurious, affluent and exclusive; the other was “street selling,” marketing in a very traditional and primitive form.

Let’s start with the luxurious angle. We had the good fortune of staying in our friends’ opulent condo, a lavishly appointed place with an interior design worthy of an architectural magazine. As the guest of a resident, I was offered the “opportunity” to sit in an information session organized by the management company. Of course, the session was actually intended to sell me my own piece of real estate paradise (or at least a one-week share of it).

Normal vacationers run like hell when offered such an “opportunity.” Not me. I love real estate and am fascinated with marketing, so I couldn’t pass up the chance to learn. The free breakfast buffet and piña coladas were just icing on the cake.

Wow, the real estate agent was so effective – she was charismatic, well informed, a great conversationalist with such strong interpersonal skills. The meeting was private, not some presentation in an auditorium. The pitch was soft-sell, much more focused on relationship-building than high-pressure closings. We talked for two hours. Most of the time was spent discussing the local area. We talked about politics, culture and a great deal of Mexican history. She asked questions – lots of them. A good salesperson gets to know her prospects inside and out. She knew what information she wanted from me, and she got it.

In a clear attempt to play to my ego, she said, “The advantage of a time share is that you pre-pay your vacation. That means a man of your stature is essentially forced to set aside time in your busy schedule to relax and be with your family. That will make your wife happy and give your kids memories for a lifetime.”

Now, she obviously acted as if I was a much bigger deal than I really am, but what a great angle! She found what I valued and focused on how her product could satisfy that value.

Then there’s the other side of sales and marketing in Cabo.

As is common in Mexican tourist towns, street hawkers are omnipresent. They sell everything from traditional souvenir items to whale-watching excursions to staged photos of you downing a shot of tequila on the beach while sporting an oversized sombrero.

There’s so much selling, you get kind of sick of it, which can lead to flippant brush-offs and irritated responses of “No gracias!”

While walking to lunch one day with my wife and our friend, a street vendor approached me and displayed a handful of silver bracelets.

“Hey man, you need one of these for your pretty lady,” he said.

“Her? She doesn’t even like me anymore,” I responded playfully.

“Maybe this bracelet would help,” he said.

“It’s hopeless; nothing will help. She doesn’t want anything to do with me,” I insisted.

A pause and a smile… “Get one for your next wife!”

His humor and creativity stood out among the sea of street vendors all saying the same thing. What’s more impressive, however, is that he was trying to find something I valued. Had I been telling the truth, it may have been a successful pitch!

How interesting – the methods of selling I experienced on my Mexican vacation were very different, yet the lessons were the same: it all comes down to value! Whether you are selling exclusive real estate or future garage-sale items from a pushcart, you are successful when you find the buyer’s value points.

The successful marketer and the savvy salesperson know that people buy what they value and only what they value. It is the salesperson’s job to find out just what that value is. Value is determined by the prospective client, never by the seller or marketer.

How do you find what your prospective clients value? It’s simple. Start by building rapport and then ask the right questions.

The street hawker with the bracelets built rapport through humor and creativity. Because it was such a brief encounter, he didn’t have the luxury of asking me a lot of questions, but give him credit for trying to find my value point as quickly as possible.

The condo salesperson gave a textbook performance. She built rapport with me and asked the right questions. She now knows what I value. She didn’t make the sale, but I suspect I will hear from her periodically. When the day comes that I can justify such a frivolous expense, I do have her contact information.

You never know…. I just might call her someday.

About the Author:

Jeff Beals is an award-winning author, who helps professionals do more business and have a greater impact on the world through effective sales, marketing and personal branding techniques. As a professional speaker, he delivers energetic and humorous keynote speeches and workshops to audiences worldwide. You can learn more and follow his “Business Motivation Blog” at JeffBeals.com.

Table tent cards, despite the presence of other promotional tactics, are still a great and innovative manner of promoting for your business, particularly if it is a tinier business establishment. They have evolved a lot during the past decades. In addition, these print services have gotten a lot wiser than before and keep coming up with new, creative ideas for successful business promotion. To further improve your knowledge about these things, below are some of the facts that you can always keep in mind. All you have to do is to read on and understand.

1. These table tent cards have gotten so well known.

In fact, that the above stated services have increased in number over the past few years. These trade prints more often than not make it so easy for most of you to display your business to all clients without even forcing these things to all of those people.

2. Most of you get to select what type of color scheme or color them you want to use.

This truly depends on what your business, your business logo and all other details, which more often than not puts you and your business in the best position to decide on it. Most of you can even select to have either sides of these prints colored, or just the visible part. The former, of course, costs more than the latter.

3. Great and vivid colors are, for sure a great manner for promoting your business using these trade prints.

That is not to say that black and white themed alternatives are not effectual. These days, table tent printing services more often than not offer wisely planned black and white tents that can draw clients interest and attention by virtue of them being different from other prints. How good these can be differs from services to service though.

4. You are also given the alternative to select from certain standard dimensions for your trade prints.

This will more often than not depend on where you intend to place these things. For example, you can also get 4 ¼ by 4 ¼ prints or even the 6 by 4 ¼ dimensions, since these are considered as the standard ones. Of course, for a tiny additional fee, you can also order custom dimensions or even very large ones to display at events or other suitable places.

5. The type of material used for making these trade prints also matters a lot for effectual business promotions for your business establishment.

The two primary alternatives that you can more often than not find are the uncovered and the gloss. These then most of the time branch out to custom alternatives like the gloss on only the visible side, uncovered on the other, and gloss on either sides. Great business promotional tools also because these things are easy for all clients to carry around with them if they want to. If well planned, most people might also want to keep these prints on display at the comfort of their own home.

Given lots of selection that printers give, there is no way that you cannot find a table tent printing plan or template that will perfectly suits you and your business establishment. With the convenience offered by all of these services, most of you can choose and even plan your own prints for great satisfaction.

It’s true that Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) such as Google’s “Adwords” and Microsoft’s “Bing” can be a remarkably effective, low-cost advertising solution that can almost instantly bring a flood of eager buyers to your website, if done correctly. However, it’s also true that you can take a terrible beating in a very short time if you’re not careful and don’t know what you’re doing.

You see, Adwords™ and Bing™ (the dominant Pay-Per-Click platforms) are promoted as being easy to use. In a sense that’s true. You can sign up for an account and be walked through how to put up a PPC ad in a matter of a few minutes. But, I can’t tell you how many local business clients have come to me mentioning that they have spent thousands of dollars on PPC – and yet they received zero sales for their efforts. They report that money is leaving their pockets – and it’s not being replenished. They have almost given up on Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Here Are 5 Things That Can Go Wrong When You Try to Manage Your Own Pay-Per-Click Advertising Efforts

1. You target the wrong keywords.

Some search terms can get a lot of clicks, but very few sales, because they’re too general, and there’s no buying intent. For example, you have a tire shop specializing in off-road tires, and you bid on “tires.” That term is searched on over 16,000,000 times a month, so even if your ad wasn’t very good, you could get a lot of clicks. But that searcher isn’t your prospect—he’s in the early stages of looking around, and it’s likely that all you’re going to do is pay for a very expensive click and not get a sale.

2. You under-estimate the amount of clicks you can get, and don’t set an appropriate limit on what you want to spend.

Sure, you can set a daily budget for your campaign, but that’s for all the adgroups in the campaign. You could spend your whole budget early in the day on one poorly-chosen search term, and have all your other ads not get shown at all. Or you could mistakenly set your budget at $3,000 (what you wanted to spend for the month) instead of $100, and come back a few days later to find that you spent thousands of dollars. Happens all the time—and the search engines aren’t user-friendly when that happens. They still want to get paid.

3. You have a local business, but you advertise in geographies that can’t possibly bring you any business.

If you advertise your dry-cleaning business located in central Denver in Google’s Denver “metro” area, your ads will be shown throughout northern Colorado, including places 250 miles away. That will get you some completely worthless clicks.

4. You advertise, using broad match, without properly using negative keywords, and pay for a lot of useless clicks.

For example, if you sell guns, and you don’t set “Top Gun” as a negative keyword, you’ll pay for a lot of clicks from people looking for information about the movie, not about guns.

5. You bid on a keyword, and write a good enough ad to get the click, but your landing page isn’t congruent with the ad or the keyword.

For example, you’re a signage and graphics shop, and you bid on the keyword “trade show graphics”, but when people click your ad, you send them to your home page where there are pictures of lighted building signs and vehicle “wraps”. Your visitor doesn’t see what he expected to see, so he hits the “back” button, and he’s gone.

I could write about a hundred similar errors, and probably a lot more than that.

With So Many Things That Can Go Wrong, Should You Continue to Invest in Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

Pay-Per-Click is a fiendishly complex beast, capable of amazing and subtle refinements, and not at all easy to master. One of the most popular PPC manuals is over 300 pages, and that’s just the beginner’s guide. Not only that, PPC changes all the time, so it’s difficult, even for experts, to stay on top of it.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be doing PPC. You very likely should. Done right, expert Pay-per-Click management can improve website results phenomenally. Traffic and sales increases of several hundred per cent are common—at minimal cost, leading to a very large return on investment.

You just shouldn’t do it by yourself, unless you’re willing to devote a LOT of time (and money) to learning it.
Because we’re experts in local search marketing and pay-per-click advertising, we’re able to help our clients avoid mistakes and get the kind of results they want, like:

• One very happy reverse mortgage specialist obtained exclusive, hot leads for less than half what he was paying to buy leads that weren’t nearly as fresh, and weren’t even exclusive.
• A physician, who was using pay-per-click advertising for years, increased his inquiries three-fold, at no increase in cost.

If you’re looking to achieve excellent results from Pay-Per-Click marketing, I urge you to consider investing in a PPC management expert who can handle all your PPC needs – because in the long run, it pays!

About the Author:

Local Search Marketing and Pay-Per Click Management expert Scott Harvey works with business owners who want to improve their website marketing , get better search engine results and capture more clicks. Now, he is offering an 82-page, step-by-step guide to better website performance, covering PPC and many other proven website marketing strategies. Grab his FREE “Make the Phone Ring” eBook now at: http://www.honestwebsitemarketing.com