Business Articles Blog

I like calling direct mail “lumpy” mail. Some of my staff groan when I call it that. They prefer to call it “3D Mail”. But, you see, to me, the whole point of direct mailers are that they are, well, lumpy.

So what am I talking about here?

When using direct mail of any sort more than 50% of the battle is just getting the recipient to open it up, right? As a society, we get so much junk mail. And most of that mail is tossed before ever being opened. And even legitimate mail might accidentally look like junk mail. This deluge of mail might be why many marketers have a bad taste in their mouth regarding direct mail.

This perspective is well deserved, in my opinion, because I think most direct mail (that is, 3D Mail) is done incorrectly. I think the two most important things for a direct mail piece are 1) Getting it opened, and 2) Having the right message (presented the right way to the right audience).

In order to get opened or noticed I have found that it helps to be different and creative. That’s why lumpy mail tends to have higher open rates. If you get a package or a letter that is lumpy, because something is in it, you tend to A) have it put at the top of your mail pile (because it *is* lumpy), and B) open it because you are curious. It has a higher profile than the other mail and that is why lumpy mailers are more successful.

I also think that it pays to be creative in what you send. Even outrageous. Let’s face it there is a lot of noise (in terms of marketing) going on all around us so you have to cut through it by being a little outrageous.

Yes, one thing to keep in mind is that lumpy mail is more costly per unit, but when you compare your success rate (making sales because it got opened and read) it can turn out to be pretty cheap, from that perspective.

There are plenty of ways to do these types of mailers if you are a little creative. And I challenge you to just try it. Thank about your business, what you want the recipient to know about your business, about your mission statement, about your staff, about your products, any of these. Just as you envision a logo that “captures” the essence of your business, envision a marketing idea tucked in a “lumpy” piece of mail, an idea that might be right at the edge of your thought, right now. Got an idea? I urge you to try it.

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

My niece just graduated from a top flight parochial school and has been accepted into Wesleyan college. I am very proud of her but I also felt compelled to give her some experiential words of wisdom. I told her that although her college education will be of great benefit to her, it is her mental attitude and behavioral characteristics that are going to make her a true winner in whatever she does. That is my opinion.

How did I get there? Well, you are likely familiar with the concept of “Fight vs. Flight”.

Because I am a serious student of success, I study people who have achieved things I also want to achieve. I study what characteristics helped them get there. Then I apply or adapt that to my own behavior.

I have been doing this for a long time. Fortunately (or unfortunately, not sure which) I did not complete college. So, not having a degree, I was forced to rely on my Street Smarts. (hence the name of my company).

I sometimes liken myself to the description that character Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) articulated in the movie *Wall Street* when he was describing the kind of person he liked to hire: “Give me the guys who are poor, smart (at least I hope so), hungry”.

I had to be creative and think of new ways to compete against people who were better educated than me. I had to, as my mentor says, “face the lion and decide to eat or be eaten” - Fight or Flight. It means that when you are faced with a competitive situation or are having a tough time, as you might in sales or business, you have the choice to be the prey or be the predator.

I have learned after several failures and successes in companies I’ve owned that in order to be wealthy or a success in business (especially if you are the entrepreneur owner) that you have to be a predator. This is not a good prospect for those of us who prefer to be nice; however, it is this predatory, instinctive nature that sets apart the truly successful; the folks who outlast all the rest. It is also the thing that sets us apart from others who are better educated. You see, it really doesn’t matter how intelligent or better educated other people are; in my experience (not always but enough) there is a down side to their intelligence; they think too much before they act. They weigh their options too carefully.

Most importantly, they can imagine defeat. If you are going to be a success as a marketer, sales person, a VAR owner or entrepreneur, then you have to ask yourself, do I imagine defeat? Will you eat or be eaten? Will you fight or take flight?

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

There is a copywriting concept called “Entering the conversation going on in your customer’s mind.” This is both a simple and complex technique to use and understand but when you do master this important skill, it is extremely effective in building your relationship with your customer.

Basically, there are two ways to approach this

* focus on what problems, issues, and concerns your customers are facing currently (what conversations are they having?)

* use things going on around them that aren’t business related such as the political elections, sports, etc. to pierce through the advertising and marketing noise going on around them.

Moreover, help yourself and help your customer by identifying the niche market your business targets, the niche market that you service. This will also establish the conversation, since you inherently have a more laser focused marketing message to your customers. Your conversation includes using their language, talking to them about things they care about.

For instance, if your niche is financial services companies in the Chicago area, and perhaps there are some regional challenges that CIO’s are experiencing, you can use that knowledge to tailor your marketing message in a campaign to reflect these challenges.

By focusing on a niche, you can speak your customer’s language and make them feel that you understand them. This can be a serious competitive advantage against those that believe everyone is their customer and whose marketing message is so general that it fails to effect prospective customers in any meaningful way.

The basic idea is to have a message that speaks to them and cuts through all the other stuff going on in their life (noise). For instance, perhaps last year you sent a mailer or had a telemarketing campaign about virtualization and the prospect didn’t respond. Perhaps they were busy with other things going on at the time. You have talked to them once. Now, fast forward to today and you learn that same prospect is researching or implementing a virtualization project because his company is doing less hardware purchasing and trying to do more with what they have. You can converse with them, again.

You want to enter the conversation going on in your customer’s mind, which in the case of the scenario above is “energy efficiency, consolidation, and maintenance, etc.” (Doing more with what they have.)

Believe it or not they will be more receptive to your message/offer if you relate it to something they are already thinking about. Always, the customer focuses on “what can you do for me - how can you help me - what is *in* it for me”. Start the next conversation - tell them!

As always, knowing how to communicate (technique wise) and knowing who, within the organization, to communicate with is always vital to identify.

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

This is the mantra that I here oftentimes from people who prefer to make excuses vs. those who look for solutions. I know I sound a little harsh but that is the reality of it.

To explain further, one of my businesses provides one-on-one and group marketing, business, sales, and personal development coaching to entrepreneurs. You can imagine what a variety of people we deal with - and what interesting types of entrepreneurship is growing out there.

One night after our monthly meeting, a participant came up to me visibly worried about his business and wanted some advice. I started to go over the information we had covered that night during the meeting. However, he kept saying, “that won’t work, blah, blah, blah. No, I can’t do that, blah, blah, blah. See, my business is different, blah, blah, blah.”

His business is different?

We continued talking. He kept on with the same line.

I counseled him that it would be much more advantageous for him to look at what I was advising from a different perspective. I urged him to stop the “no” response to coaching suggestions.

Yes, there it is - his strongest choice was/is to figure out how to apply what I was advising to his business instead of figuring out how it won’t work. It’s the choice to *not* react to business advice or coaching, right away, with “Yes, but”

We went on talking in this (dead end) vein for a while longer and finally I had had enough and bid him a good night (and good luck). Truly, I am very passionate about entrepreneurship and honestly want to help, but when I meet people like that I have little or no sympathy when their business fails.

I see this “not in my business” attitude with IT service firms, as an example. I assert that’s why the marketing in the tech industry seems so similar and undistinguishable. This theme might be why, when someone like me (someone a little different, marketing-wise) comes along, people can tend to want to stay in their comfort zone. They can begin their litany of, “Yes, but.”

So what is the lesson for you?

There is a wealth of information out there. Not just from me but from others. I had referred to the tech industry - but it could be about another industry, or about consumer marketing vs. B2B marketing, any number of areas.

The point is, you can spend all day telling me or yourself how something won’t work. I guarantee you that type of thinking won’t make you any more successful in running your business or making sales or being a better marketer. Figuring out how to apply lessons from other areas of business and life will make you rich or successful in business. I guarantee it. If you keep that solution-oriented attitude you will succeed.

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

As a VAR, I have strong concerns about mandatory vendor “marketing guidelines” we must use in our communications with prospects - and how much they can undercut our effectiveness. It is counterproductive to have anything restrict the relationship - and the sales - to our prospects. I’d like to offer a great illustration referencing the “power of a strong, well written headline” experience my company had.

While I will focus on email and its headline (the first sentence once the email has been opened), this advice applies to any marketing piece, whether a sales letter, landing page, direct mail, etc. A headline is incredibly important. We are trained to read headlines and, standing in the grocery line reviewing magazines, where do your eyes lands first? Of course, on the headlines.

Therefore, as marketers we need to work *with* human nature, not against it. Another thing to remember is that if someone reads your email or marketing piece, they only have a few seconds to decide whether to continue reading the email and take action on your offer. Those few seconds usually involve reading your headline. You have to grab them at that point or you lose them.

When you write a headline make sure it contains the following:

– Describe the pain the prospect/client may be experiencing
– Refer to the solution
– Describe the offer or call-to-action

I know it sound like a lot to include in a headline but it can be done. Let me give you a quick illustration.

Late last year we conducted a lead generation campaign that consisted of telemarketing, direct mail, and email. Our goal was to generate most of these leads from telemarketing but also to up the ante on email and direct mail (especially with email).

We created an email with a subject line that we felt would be great. We followed the rules outlined above and were hopeful it would work very well. (By the way, I won’t get into subject lines but they have a couple rules of their own but, for now, they are very similar to headlines.)

The results of our first email blast? We received 60 responses from prospects. We were thrilled because these were 60 people who took the time to fill out an 8-question application for a face-to-face meeting with us, a reseller.

Based on the number of emails we sent out, this was a good return. We attributed it to the power of our strong, well-written headline.

Now, let’s consider a poorly written headline. Once the vendor saw that email, they decided it didn’t fit in with their marketing guidelines and made us change it. So, we changed it and sent out an email campaign the following week. Can you guess our response rate? We got 4 responses.

Yes, our headline was watered down and corporate marketing guidelines won out. The real loser? Yes, the Value-added Reseller - but also that vendor corporation.

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

Are you boring your customers? When you market by telephone or face-to-face selling, are you approaching your customers from their perspective or from yours? And are you interesting, different from all the other messages they receive?

Napoleon Hill, author of the famous book *Think And Grow Rich* (a must-read for serious students of success) tells how Andrew Carnegie’s mother once went into a department store to a buy a little furnace. The salesman started giving her the long lecture on BTU’s, energy efficiency, and quality construction. She finally interrupted and asked, “but will it keep me*warm*?”

Sometimes we get so involved in our desire to sell, what I refer to as our Need-to-Sell vs. our customer’s Need-to-Buy, we forget to see a buying situation from the customer’s perspective.

The question to answer: Is what we are selling or offering going to help them solve their business problems, issues, challenges or help them meet their goals? It’s a simple concept, yet why do so many sales and marketing folks in the technology industry, from vendors and resellers alike, do the exact opposite?

This not only occurs in face-to-face selling situations but in the copy written in marketing collateral. We start with “speeds and feeds” too quickly; we discuss product before we even know the customer’s situation. Just look at the ads in technology magazines. Most go right for features before even talking about “how it solves a customer’s problems.” There is so much of this kind of marketing and selling that we simply bore customers, make them numb.

Finally, the customers have nothing left but to focus on *price* and, as a businessman, that is a place I prefer not to live in.

One of my mentors tells me that the worst crime you can commit in marketing is “being boring.” For instance, are your marketing pieces generic, unoriginal, identical to the other boring advertising and marketing?

The problem exists because we look at what everyone else is doing to “judge” what is the acceptable “norm” in marketing. Boring. That just causes everyone to look and sound the same.

Why not be different? Why not stand out from the crowd? Here are a few ideas you should consider when getting started:

– Review industries other than technology. What are other B2B companies doing?

– Apply consumer marketing techniques. What are business-to-consumer marketers doing? (In the end, all your prospects are consumers as well as potential clients and they respond better to consumer-type marketing applied to the technology industry)

– Be outrageous. Don’t be afraid to make your clients laugh or chuckle. They’ll see that you are a real person or company and that may help them warm up to you. Besides, in my opinion, this business is about relationships.

– Add your personality. Talking about relationships - people do business with people, not companies. Why not use personality in your marketing? I know there are some real characters at the helm of your companies. Why not use the personality of your CEO in your marketing? Use his/her image and expressions when talking to clients in person, etc. This will more closely connect your prospects and clients to your company if they have a personal relationship with you.

Don’t hide behind the corporate facade. Don’t be boring. Be outrageous, be genuine, be real, and people will respond.

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

Like me, I’m sure you know a lot of people who want to succeed. Business owners, entrepreneurs, sales and marketing folks, blue and white-collar folks alike; we all want more than we have now, whatever that *more* happens to be, for each person.

The whole thrust of what my company’s services and consultations are about is to help VAR’s (Value-added Resellers) succeed. Helping them get *more* leads, more sales, more revenue, etc.

However, I think that we, the sales and business community, can make the mistake of being more concerned about collecting tips and techniques for success rather than collecting what my mentor, Dan Kennedy, refers to as “behavioral characteristics”.

When experiencing challenges in business and life, we need to corral all the resources we have but, bottom-line, talent and education (regardless, from Harvard or the local city college) are a far second to *character*. Character shows up when trouble comes; do you quit, do you give up; or, are you resilient?

My company has been growing at a fast pace. This growth is fantastic; however, with it comes a whole new set of challenges. Those who are experiencing this know what I mean. There is a lot of pressure. To have your butt on the line and to have enormous pressure is not for the meek. However it is essential to succeeding, especially for a business owner or entrepreneur.

Having your own business is the ultimate “sales” job. You have to always be selling. If you have employees, you’re not only earning commission day in and day out for yourself but for all the others dependent on your success. Now that’s what I call pressure.

Another type of resiliency, within the behavioral characteristics family, is the ability to truly understand sales - and accept its reality. When I see a sales rep who doesn’t do their prospecting, who expects every lead to be a prospect wanting a quote, who expects every lead from the marketing department or vendor to be a prospect ready-to-buy, then I see that they shouldn’t be in sales. It takes resiliency to be successful in sales.

Napoleon Hill, author of *Think and Grow Rich* said that you have to have a “definiteness of purpose”. You have to know, feel, and expect every sale to be closed.

Zig Ziglar, sales guru, describes the successful sales person’s attitude: “you’ve got my money in your pocket, and I’ve got your product in my briefcase, and I ain’t leaving until we make the exchange.”

Resiliency is not the only characteristic but if you look at all the great entrepreneurs in the world and in history and you examine their personal characteristics, resiliency is certainly one of them. It helped them come back when others wrote them off.

Study the great entrepreneurs and business leaders who have stood the test of time and collect behavioral characteristics. It can pay off in millions.

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

I recently read some stories about an IT services company called Sparxent whose founders created the company with the “premise that the current Value-added Reseller (VAR) model for the middle market needs to evolve to better serve the segment.”

They continue with, “mid-market companies in the past have had to choose between traditional VAR’s with deep expertise in a single vendor’s solution, or VAR’s that sell a broad variety of software but have little expertise in creating integrated solutions for the customer. Sparxent’s approach will be to consult with mid-market customers to find and deliver the ideal business or IT solution, regardless of vendor or delivery model, that tightly integrates with their existing environments.”

While I don’t know these guys and I have no idea if they will be able to properly deliver on their vision, my strong opinion is that they have the *right* vision when it comes to their engagement approach. They believe you must deliver the ideal solution to the client *regardless of vendor or delivery model*.

My experience is that findings on studies and surveys are always the same - clients have high regard for *unbiased* consultation from their IT advisors. Companies pay high fees for unbiased consultation. They want to know their options. They want full input from their consultant. They want to know that they are making the decision, with deep and comprehensive information from their consultant. After all, companies are answerable for these purchasing decisions. They want the full panorama of options offered from an expert. That’s why they pay the high fees.

In my estimation, the “unbiased” consulting approach is the future. The reality is that clients have information readily available and what they need is someone to make sense of it all and make it work for their particular environment. That’s where you come in.
Products can still be sold in the backend. The company Accenture, in their previous life as Andersen Consulting, sold $100’s of millions of dollars of hardware and software because they were positioned as a thought leader and unbiased in the eyes of their existing and prospective customers. They provided just what their clientele wanted - unbiased consultative advice.
I believe the questions you should be asking yourselves are:

* Do I have the right business model?

* How do my clients want to do business? Am I serving them in the best way possible?

* Am I biased in the eyes of my clients and prospects?

* Am I positioned as a thought leader and consultant or as a reseller of product?

As always you decide your fate. Choose wisely.

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

I know the number one reason why your customers don’t buy from you again. And it is probably not what you think.

It’s not that the project had some challenges, some hiccups (the implementation didn’t work out as smooth as you would have liked, but you got it done), and they didn’t want to work with you again. It’s not that your personality clashed with the main contact at your client’s site. It’s not that your prices were too high (believe it or not).

Don’t get me wrong, all of these reason above play some part why a client won’t do business with you but the #1 reason — drum roll please — is that they forgot about you.

In the VAR (Value-added Reseller) world we unfortunately are very transaction oriented. We are in pursuit of selling more products. We sell to a client, then move on. Let’s face it, our follow-up is not what it should be. I speak to VAR’s all the time who tell me they don’t have time to do marketing, to send out regular communications to existing clients (such as direct mail, newsletters, emails, etc.). They say they are busy, for goodness sakes!

I know you are, as well, but consider thinking of your clients as being in a sales bucket. But your sales bucket has some leaks. It’s not that they don’t want to buy from you but they don’t hear from you so they don’t think of you the next time they need to purchase something. They don’t know that you sell security software, they don’t know you can help them with outsourcing, they don’t know that they can purchase a VOIP solution from you. And so they leak out of your bucket.

Clients need regular communication. They need to know what you are capable of and what you are offering and they need it on a regular, consistent basis.

Otherwise, if you don’t communicate to them, the following two things will happen the next time your client wants to purchase something:

– They answer your competitor’s call (you know they *are* calling into your client accounts, right?) and find out, yes, they can get it from another VAR.

– In the absence of having a clear choice of VAR’s, they go to Google and start to research for a solution and someone else they can purchase from.

So, how do you avoid all this from happening? It’s simple but can be difficult to implement, considering your already hectic schedule. The answer is to communicate more often. By phone, yes, but you can also set up regular communication such as email, direct mail, or faxes. And setting this up, while a little time-consuming at first, gets easier the more you do it (plus you have companies like my own that can help you).

Bottom line — don’t let them leak out of your sales bucket. Let them know what you are doing, how you are helping other clients, what you are offering, what your capabilities are, etc. Stay fresh in their mind. Capitalize on the relationship you already have with them. Or risk them not buying from you.

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!

Again and again, when speaking with my clients, they tell me that if they had more leads or their sales staff, it would solve their challenge or problem. If they only had more leads. Yes, leads are great. But I’ve learned that that’s not the problem they are really sharing with me.

The real problem is that their sales folks are not doing proper follow-up on the leads they are getting.

While there are plenty of VAR (Value-added reseller) companies that do not fall into to this category, it happens in about 4 out of 10 cases; that is too much for me to ignore.

Below is the type of scenario they share with me.

** Management directs business staff to:

- Schedule an appointment.

- Immediately send the prospect/lead an 1) email confirming the appointment and 2) a hardcopy letter further confirming the appointment.

This confirming and re-confirming the appointment conveys to the prospective buyer how important we believe they are - and how important it is to us that we speak with them - and that we respect how busy they are - and that we respect their time. This investment is to make sure the lead keeps the appointment.

** Sales representative process:

- The sales rep doesn’t keep the appointment.

- The rep calls back a week or two (or more) and reports that the lead didn’t keep their appointment.

Unfortunately, this is not the truth. My clients share that they conduct surveys with all leads to ask the prospects how the call went. They learn that the appointment was not kept by the sales representative. In fact, many times the prospect/lead either calls the company, angry that no one showed up, or reveals this on the survey.

The solution? It is a top-down solution. Management has to enforce a process or behavior that ensures that leads are followed up on and that the money spent on campaigns is used wisely.

However, what I hear from VAR execs is that this is “too difficult”, that it is hard enough to get these same reps to input customer information in their CRM, much less change even more of their behavior.

Let me just ask, Who Is The Boss, Here? Who signs the checks? Who is running the show? From an executive standpoint their needs to be some enforcement, plain and simple.

While scheduling and keeping sales appointments can have complexity, the solution can be simple. In tandem with simple, clear, firm enforcement, an executive can also create an environment that makes it easy for these guys to follow-up, as well. You can create marketing and sales *systems* that can save your rep’s time and make them more efficient. There will still be work on the part of your sales reps, there is no avoiding that. However, a strong marketing or sales system can make big improvements in your business. Again, who is running the show?

Ramon provides more marketing information, especially created for the IT VAR industry but also applies to everyone who wants to improve their sales. Stay up-to-date at StreetSmartVAR.com and while you’re there, don’t forget to sign up for Ramon’s popular, no-cost online marketing course!