The post Generate Hot Leads on Autopilot with The Sales Funnel Method appeared first on Cargill Financial Services International Ltd.
]]>Do you ever feel frustrated because your products / services are better, yet your competitors are more successful?
Time to change that right now!
If you are a small business owner, a start-up or a freelance professional and you are not getting the sales you want, here is something fantastic for you:
There is a new method to create incredible levels of interest for your product / service and it can increase your sales 10 times over within just 3 months.
Sound too good to be true? We thought so too, until we tried it!
The Sales Funnel Method, created especially for small businesses, enables you to generate hot leads on autopilot.
It is based on offering value first, building a relationship with your potential customers, and showing your product or service only to those who are interested.
So few entrepreneurs use this that, if you invest a little bit of time to understand and apply it, your small business will be in the top 1% in your industry.
Yep, you read that correctly!
It doesn’t matter how many people know of you right now. It doesn’t matter what product or service you sell. What matters is that you share some of your knowledge with your prospects and build value for them before you expect them to pay you.
Carry on reading if …
If you answered YES to any of these questions, you will be glad to discover these must-do tactics so you attract clients and have them begging for your product / service …
Tactic 1. Talk about your prospect’s problems. Address your clients’ needs so you bypass the default, “I don’t want to hear about it” mode.
Tactic 2. Show the value of your product / service. Talk about the benefits for your prospects and not the features of your product or how you go about performing your services. Show them what they really get from you.
Tactic 3. Go the extra mile and help them even further! This way you build trust and respect with them.
Many entrepreneurs understand these basic principles. But most don’t apply any of them or apply them incorrectly.
When you build your your Sales Funnel, you will notice how beautifully these tactics are incorporated and how simple it suddenly becomes to use them.
But What Is a Sales Funnel?
This is just a fancy name for a model that maps the customer’s buying journey – from the moment a brand or product attracts the customer’s attention to the point of purchase (developed by Elmo Lewis in 1898).
In essence, you raise their interest by offering prospects something they need. In so doing, you start a relationship with them… and then you nurture that relationship… and at some point a sale will happen.
The Sales Funnel is simply a path you set for your prospects to experience a series of positive interactions with your brand / product / service. Research shows that in today’s economy it takes on average 14 such experiences (14 “touches”) to get a prospect to buy, and a lot more to turn them into enthusiastic fans. These touches can come in various forms: seeing your ad, reading your article, hearing about your product from a friend, etc. Our tests show that the more educational touch points you provide, the quicker your prospects become clients.
Want to know how to do it?
Follow The Sales Funnel Method – the approach that works best for small businesses, start-ups and freelance professionals – and see prospects come knocking at your door, not vice versa. Put a proper Sales Funnel in place and see sales coming in while you enjoy life!
The Sales Funnel Method consists of 5 steps:
Step 1 Online Ad
Step 2 Educational Article
Step 3 Lead Magnet
Step 4 Tripwire Offer
Step 5 Upsell and Downsell
Advantages of this method:
In essence, what you need to do is put up Facebook / Google Ads and build 5 landing pages.
It takes 2 minutes to set up each ad and 30 minutes per landing page. No technical skills required – it can even be done using copy and paste from Word or PowerPoint.
Contact us now to learn about the next Sales Funnel Online Masterclass
The post Generate Hot Leads on Autopilot with The Sales Funnel Method appeared first on Cargill Financial Services International Ltd.
]]>The post The Story of Giorgio Maschietto: How to Win the Battle against the CEO Disease? appeared first on Cargill Financial Services International Ltd.
]]>To the surprise of puzzled engineers and concerned managers, the solution came from one of the line operators. This employee had the brilliant idea to replace the expensive weighing machinery with a small jet of air across the conveyer belt. The regulated compressed air created just enough pressure to throw the empty cartons off the belt. A simple idea from the factory floor solved a huge problem that proved to be too difficult for the highly-educated staff.
Maschietto was the kind of manager that knew how to listen to his employees and how to encourage his line managers to do the same. The empty carton challenge was not the only problem that was solved by a line operator at Pepsodent. Another idea from the factory floor solved an even more painful setback. The factory’s production schedule was constantly being interrupted by the need to wash out the steel toothpaste tanks. An ingenious solution proposed by an operator reduced changeover time by 70% and significantly increased productivity.
The wisdom behind the empty toothpaste carton case is as relevant today as it was in 1936 when Dale Carnegie first published his bestseller “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. Carnegie was one of the first to show the importance of active listening and open communication to sound management.
An open organizational culture keeps everybody in a creative mind-set and gives employees the courage to speak up their ideas. Managers, following the personal example of a truly open leader, listen actively to these ideas and maintain the common sense to follow through when the case.
You can review ideas in your company using simple or more complex approaches: the good old suggestion box, innovation challenges and other contests, specialized software for collecting, ranking and tracking the implementation of ideas about improving the business. These tools work only if people are constantly encouraged to participate by the talk and walk of their leaders. They also have to see that the company turns the best ideas into action. People are looking for facts in order to understand if they are truly welcomed to speak up.
Consulted employees get a sense of recognition and self-value when they are taken into account and involved in the decision making. This builds engagement and facilitates properly-informed decisions in your company.
Making informed decisions is not such an easy task as some might reckon. This difficulty has a special name, in fact: the CEO disease. Top executives are given only the good news and end up living in a protective cocoon. Some are too scared to break the bad news; some think it’s not in their best interest to do it. Don’t let yourself mislead by the name though. The CEO disease can outbreak at all levels of management. It’s just that the higher you are in the organization, the greater your people’s tendency to hide the bad news from you.
Giorgio Maschietto knew that the best inoculation against the CEO disease was to be as open to his people as he expected them to be with him. It really paid off. Literally. Other managers choose to enjoy the comfort of their shielding cocoons, from which it is hard to understand why people never speak out, step up or even care about the company’s problems.
7 Tell-tale signs of miscommunication and poor leadership in your company:
5 Benefits of open communication and transparent organisational culture:
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]]>The post The Three Less Obvious Questions to Ask When Hiring a Consultant appeared first on Cargill Financial Services International Ltd.
]]>To be a successful leader you don’t have to know how to do everything; you just have to know someone who does.
Enter consultants.
The challenge is that hiring consultants can be a daunting task so you need to have the right checklist handy when doing so.
You already know the obvious criteria like checking references.
But you may not know the less obvious questions to ask when hiring. Here are three.
1. Does she have proof of resources? After they are hired, many consultants will take much longer to do a job than expected or initially promised. It’s because to seal the deal they might overpromise. For example, you hire a contractor to remodel your office space. The crew shows up the next day and completes the tear down but after that they don’t show up for two weeks. This is because the same crew is starting ten other remodel jobs during that time. The manager said “yes” to all to line up long-term work for the crew.
Be sure to get some sort of assurance up front that the job will be completed in a timely manner without interruption.
2. Does she have the relevant experience in your specific industry? This sounds obvious but industry experience is very specific nowadays.
You know not to hire an accountant to market your new dating website. But you may not realize that a social media consultant who tweets about hot iPhone apps to his thousands of followers may not be the best one to socialize your BlackBerry app. The same goes for B2B and B2C. Someone may know how to sell flower bouquets to corporations for events but may not know how to sell them to brides for weddings.
3. Could you be stranded on a deserted island with her? Don’t just think about getting along. Think about being stranded with her in a remote place during a stressful time when your lives are at stake. Can you quickly decide who will gather the coconuts and who will build a shelter or would you instead argue about how to go about it?
Make sure there is personal chemistry with the actual consultant assigned to you and not just the person who sold you the service. One way to do this is to spend as much time as possible with the actual consultant who will be assigned to help you before you sign a contract.
Lastly, if finding the perfect human consultant is too much of a burden, consider on-line self-service tools instead like Salesforce.com for customer relationship management, QuickBooks for bookkeeping, and Tooliers.com for business consulting.
You can’t hire a website to paint a room but it may surprise you how far web-based services have gone, especially with advancements in mobile computing, network bandwidth and analytics.
The post The Three Less Obvious Questions to Ask When Hiring a Consultant appeared first on Cargill Financial Services International Ltd.
]]>The post Best Practice from Zappos.com: How to WOW your Customers appeared first on Cargill Financial Services International Ltd.
]]>“If we get the culture right, then everything else, including the customer service, will fall into place.” – Tony Hsieh, CEO at Zappos.com
At Zappos they don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts! The longest call took almost 6 hours and nobody was upset about it. In fact, Tony Hsieh, the prodigious CEO of the 1-billion revenue online shoe retailer, takes great pride in their “a little weird” and outside-the-box approach to making customers happy.
Weirdness alone, however, could not explain the success of a business that started from a simple idea, to sell shoes via the internet, and hit $1 billion in annual sales in 2008. Zappos was so successful that it was acquired by Amazon at the end of 2009 for a reported $1.2 billion. The secret of this success was Zappos’ obsessive dedication to customer service and their organisational culture that started with the idea of constantly wowing the customer.
Tony frequently spells out Zappos’ obsession to make the customer happy using his pizza story. After a Sketchers sales conference, Tony and his vendors returned to a hotel room late and someone in the group was craving pepperoni pizza. Since room service had ended, Tony suggested calling Zappos to test if his staffers could help with delivering pizza in Santa Monica in the middle of the night. The customer service rep who answered the phone was a bit confused at first but she quickly recovered and put them on hold. Two minutes later she returned the call and listed the 5 closest pizza places that were still delivering at that time!
For Tony Hsieh, customer loyalty is a business model rather than the objective of one specialised department. As Tony wrote in his bestseller, customer loyalty and company culture are two sides of the same coin. The standard approach to customer service is not good enough for a business constructed around the idea of delivering the best possible experience for its customers. Zappos does not have a customer service department like other online shops. They created instead a customer loyalty team that is the core of the whole business. Notably, this means among other things that all newcomers to Zappos, be it an engineer or a sales rep, would answer customer service calls as part of their training.
The leaders of Zappos understood the limitations of the prevailing concept of customer service and took the idea of customer satisfaction to a whole new level. This implied that instead of relying on flashy ad campaigns, the company put its faith and money in developing an unmatched customer experience. The marketing dollars were used for sustaining the free delivery, free returns and 365-day return policy. Word-of-mouth did the trick and Zappos’ reward was bountiful. More than 70% of Zappos’ sales come from returning customers, and repeat customers order 2.5 times more in the following 12 months.
You can find some inspiration for your business by taking a look at their main customer loyalty commandments. These commandments have to be understood in connection with the core values of the company, as described in Zappos’ Culture Book.
* Excerpts from Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh
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]]>The post The Entrepreneur’s Business: 10 Signs that You Are Doing Your Manager’s Job appeared first on Cargill Financial Services International Ltd.
]]>Entrepreneurs are indeed free to get involved in the management and the day-to-day operations of their businesses as much as they consider appropriate. After all, it’s their party. Managers are less likely to start behaving like an entrepreneur for the simple reason that they are brought on board to do something else in the first place. Plus, they don’t usually own the business.
On the other hand, it’s worth emphasizing that, just because entrepreneurs can behave like managers, it does not mean that it would be beneficial for their business if they did so! In fact, as a rule of thumb, the more developed the company, the more problematic it is to have entrepreneurs stepping on their managers’ toes.
If you are an entrepreneur and you answer “yes” to most of the questions below, there is a strong possibility that you overburden your diary with activities that you could and should delegate to your managers.
1. Your passion for your company is constantly proven by your unstoppable zeal to cultivate your business on a daily basis
2. You are more interested in improving the management and finding ways to avoid or minimize risks than in creating opportunities, activating change and accepting the associated risks
3. Your main objective is to supervise and create routines, to implement plans and ideas
4. You rarely focus on the objective to innovate, create and act as a change agent within your business
5. You focus on the effective and efficient operation of your on-going business and less on making the business sustainable in the long term and thinking through ways to reinvent it
6. You tend to avoid mistakes at any cost and to postpone failure rather than deal with faults and failures as a valuable learning experience
7. You are used to controlling all aspects of a situation and have a natural tendency to look over everybody’s shoulders until the job is done
8. You feel it is not enough for you to know a little about everything and to learn everything by trial and error (so many entrepreneurs are school-dropout billionaires!)
9. You believe in the incremental improvement of your company and you don’t see opportunities for breakthrough innovation and radical transformation for your company
10. You are deeply involved in measuring these incremental improvements quarterly and annually along the pre-established competitive performance parameters
There is a simple way to double-check whether you act as a true entrepreneur or if you would rather play a managerial role. Review your agenda for the past week. See how many of the activities you planned are about working in the business and how many are about working on the business. This simple exercise can help you better understand what is and what should be on your agenda.
The post The Entrepreneur’s Business: 10 Signs that You Are Doing Your Manager’s Job appeared first on Cargill Financial Services International Ltd.
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