Thinking About Doing Some Cold Calling? Try This Instead…

I’ve talked about this subject before not too long ago but since I’ve had several clients, readers and potential clients in the last month pushing to start a cold calling campaign, I thought I would give a quick write about an alternative.

So when you think cold calling you are envisioning getting a list of let’s say a few hundred to a thousand prospects that may fit your criteria of a good client. Now if you really wanted to push ahead with this idea there are many things you need to put in place.




Normally that includes a better job of whittling down that list to really good candidates if at all possible to help your success rate out. Unless you can handle work in a large geographic area, chances are you really don’t have hundreds or thousands of true potential clients. Especially when a large number may not be worth your time and effort.

Then you have a short and sweet script that has a call to action and what I call a “Plan B” if the main call to action is not in the cards. Do you send out something in the mail first before calling? Who will be making these calls?

Next you have more relationship building for those that took the call to action as well as to those that took Plan B. Then you have your sales process to contend with.

Wow, that’s a lot of work. It’s a long process since this is done completely cold. Not exactly a way to quickly turn over some business especially since this idea usually comes into most people’s heads when they are pretty close to panic mode. It’s almost a guaranteed stress festival that will spit out slow and minimal results.

By the way, the quickest of sales is always to find other products/services that would be a great addition to help out current clients. But that an entirely different subject.

If you really want to cold call someone, why not give a ring to a business telling them you want to give them money and not take it from them? Huh, you say?

What I’m referring to is often called a joint venture (JV). Not the type where you literally partner up in a new business, but where you agree to help each other out.

This could be a quid pro quo where they do something for you and you do the same for them or more likely a “you do this and I’ll pay you for the results” type of thing.

So who would you partner up with? The best people are other professionals that provide services to your typical clients and better yet their contact point being the same person you would want to talk to. You may have to do a little thinking on this, but typically that would include accountants, attorneys, software companies (such as line of business apps), telecommunications, etc.

Big vendors may need a different approach than small vendors, but the point is to utilize the list they already made and turn them into YOUR prospects. Thus adding them into your marketing funnel a whole bunch of steps ahead of any type of cold prospecting.

You will need to get a bit creative with the deal you need to make with this JV partner. You’ll also already need know what you want them to do for you, how you want them to do it, how you are going to pay/reciprocate and what they are driving these client to (such as a webinar or lunch and learn etc).

Sound confusing? Let me sum it up for you. No matter how you look at it you are looking to get new prospects in your marketing funnel. Cold calling starts by contacting A LOT of unknown businesses so you begin at point zero out of let’s say 10 steps to get them to your sales funnel. And you are contacting them to sell them something.

A JV has you contacting a handful of unknown or possibly known businesses to let them know you want to give them money or trade somehow for endorsing you. Not for a sale but for information/educational purposes that will lead to a sale. This way they don’t think they are inconveniencing their clients or prospect lists but understand they will get something later on down the road, unless a quid pro quo situation.

Any prospect you get from that effort has them starting out more likely at step 5 of 10 in the marketing funnel with a bit of a relationship already in place.

So which scenario do you think a “cold call” is easier to catch someone’s attention with? I’d say the one giving money away instead of the option screaming “I want to sell you something”. I’d also rather only have to make a handful of calls in order to arrange for leads generated in the middle of a process/funnel than from ground zero.

Think about it next time you are looking to add a new type of marketing campaign to your mix. Especially if in panic mode and you think cold calling is the answer.

You know where to find me if you have any questions or comments.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

Common Google Adwords and General Marketing Mistakes

I read Google Adwords (and Facebook) impresario Perry Marshall’s emails every time they come to me. In touting a colleague’s new book (Howie Jacobson’s Adwords for Dummies) this week, he went over a bunch of beginner mistakes in the book which hit home not only for Google Ads, but for other written marketing as well.

I decided to pick a few out and put my 2 cents in as well as put in some comments relating to non-Adwords marketing mediums. Here they are:






Neglecting to Split-Test Your Ads: Very important in online advertising as well as written advertising like direct mail. In Adwords the "create new ad" link is used to create a 2nd and 3rd and 4th ad and try different text.

By running them simultaneously, you can see how small changes like one word, a word order change, a capital letter change or even a change in the URL you display can make big differences. Although not as easy, split testing email and direct mail marketing is a must. Even if just the subject/headline to see which does better.

Letting Google Decide Which Ad is Better: In Campaign Settings, turn of the "Optimize Ad Serving" setting and check daily or at least every other day to see which ad is doing better. When you keep this setting on, Google decides itself which ad is better automatically and it isn’t always as accurate as you think. Let it run itself to see what happens. Which leads into…

Declaring a Winner Too Quickly: Letting a split test run for two days to yield a few impressions and a few clicks is not a good idea. Let them go until you have 20 clicks on one ad but better with 20+ clicks on both ads. With a tight B2B scenario like you are in, at least 10 clicks on each if it seems to be taking too long. But that could also indicate not so good keywords or a really bad ad to begin with if it takes a long time.

When dealing with email or direct mail, you should be looking for results in a week or so and sending out enough to get a good test sampling. A very tight list of prospects falling under a tight set of criteria will allow you to see true results with a small mailing of 100 split 50-50.

Declaring Split-Test Winners Too Slowly: The faster you figure out what works, the faster you can go full steam ahead on implementing it. Although you are really creating a new control to once again split test against and should keep testing. Keeping an eye on your results on a regular basis like mentioned before is important.

For Adwords you can also go to http://www.splittester.com and enter the # of clicks and the CTR (Click Through Rate) of any two ads and it will indicate if the one that seems better really is.

Split Testing for Improved CTR Only: At first, CTR is the only thing you can measure. You want it high so you get the most traffic. But the real metric you are going for once they respond to any marketing is conversion rate and cost per new customer. All response and no conversion does nothing so remember that a Google Ad or an email or a direct mail piece needs to have a complete funnel to take people from interested to the sales process.

Creating Ad Groups with Unrelated Keywords: When making a Google Ad, don’t look to put every keyword you can think of in the ad. Tight ad groups based on a narrow set of related keywords matched closely to the ads and the landing page are what you are looking to do. Thinking like this for email or direct mail will also keep you focused on that all important one subject targeted to one target segment of your list.

Ignoring Negative Keywords (Online Ads Only): Often ignored but important is negative keywords which keep away the truly unwanted. Your list of keywords for your ad may attract clicks from those looking for similar information that you don’t want and impressions for searches you don’t want such as people looking for a networking group versus networking services.

Unwanted impressions and clicks mess up your CTR as well as give you a much lower conversion rate because they should not have responded to your ad in the first place. Not unlike having a bad description in your natural search to find your website causing you to see a lot of traffic and no results (of course no results could be a bad marketing funnel but that’s another subject).

Ignoring the 80/20 Rule: The 80/20 Rule says that the vast majority of outputs (impressions, clicks, leads, sales) are caused by a very small minority of inputs (ad groups, ads and keywords.) Spend your time on the vital few instead of the insignificant many. Same goes for email and direct mail.


Remember that with any marketing campaign, and especially in a very cramped Google Ad, you need to focus on one item to market and drive people to a page on your website talking immediately about just that one item. These initial contacts, no matter what format they are in, are leads into your marketing funnel which feeds your sales funnel.

Best of luck and keep on testing!


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

How Do You Answer “What Does Your Company Do?”

I touched upon the subject of a clear “elevator pitch”, which is a quick version of answering the question, “what does your company do?”. After hearing some recent pitches and coming across some good examples to explain it better, I thought I would elaborate on it a bit in this post.

Many business owners and sales people make the same mistakes in answering this “what does your company do” question. Most lead with some sort of solution statement even though it’s pretty obvious this should not be the first thing said.




Why? Because it’s human nature to try to utilize the positive up front when in this case, identify a typical client and their typical problems is the way to go even though it seems to lead on a negative tone.

Before going further let me list out the order of what we want to have in a good elevator pitch:

- Target
- Problem
- Outcome
- Story

So let’s start from the beginning at the target. It’s a good bet that leading with the types of clients you actually work with is the way to go. That should immediately be followed by the typical problems that you solve.

These can often be summarized in one sentence. As an example, which sounds better?:
“We make technology work for small businesses.” OR “We work with attorney and accounting companies that are afraid of losing sensitive client information and need access to that information at all times.”

I would say choice #2 wins on this one.

Once you have identified the who and the what, now we can mention the typical outcome of working with these targets on the problems you identified. For example to go with the above:

“We provide them with backup and disaster recovery systems as well as network and computer equipment service plans designed specifically for their industry.”

These first three parts make up your main marketing message and can be used in any written or verbal communication with slight modifications to fit the specific audience you are speaking to. Meaning if you know you are talking to a partner in a law firm, then everything gets slanted towards a law firm.

Now we are set to bring it all together with a quick story. And I do mean quick.
The story should stick to the same premise as the first three parts. It should go over the target, the problem and then the outcome or solution. For example:

“Recently we were referred to a partner in a law firm that told us access to the server which held his client documentation was slow and he was afraid that the drives might be failing. We were able to get in there the next day and audit his entire network. It turned out that his drives were almost full and his backup system was not set up properly. Within a week we supplied him with an upgraded server, set him up with a backup solution and they are now on one of our signature service plans to keep it all running without worrying about downtime or the integrity of their data.”

You can even shorten that up a bit and it still works.

Put it all together and parts one, two and three take an entire 15 to 20 seconds max to spit out and maybe another 15 to 20 seconds for the story that fits who you are talking to using the same target, problem, outcome principle.

Think about it and see what you can come up with to solidify your main marketing message and be able to better answer the question “What does you business do”.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

Developing Valuable Email Marketing Lists

Email marketing is by no means a perfect medium. To be honest, if it wasn't free to send emails, the return on investment would be no different than the best direct mail campaign.

But that's really what email marketing is... direct mail with no postage required.





In some ways it's a much harder thing to pull off than direct mail because you don't have many options to compel someone to open it.

And of course the other minor snafu... being nailed as a spammer. This can happen even if you did everything right and emailed the best content to someone that GAVE YOU their email address. Some will forget that little detail and complain anyway.

Sometimes you just can't win and the only saving grace is that a wasted stamp was unnecessary.

Now to my real point.

Just like absolutely any type of marketing, email marketing starts out with the list. Who you are sending an email to matched with a headline (subject) and then the right message in the content is key. Just as important as it is with mail or calls or knocking on doors.

So how do you make the best, most responsive list? Watch this 7 minute video below for a few pointers to generate and manage a solid email list:

As I said in the video this can be a pretty comprehensive conversation to fit all of the pieces together and make a plan to have it work as a part of your particular business's marketing campaigns. But having an understanding of a good list, ways to make that list (without buying it) and tools to manage it are important basics.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments below or to feed me with any topics you may want to see covered on the blog.

To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

To Niche or Not to Niche- That is the Positioning Question

I’ve been reading on some forums lately a subject that comes up in many business circles on a regular basis. A true hot topic for those that deliver technology consulting and services especially in a business to business environment.

That topic is about positioning. More directly the conversation is about asking the question “do I really need to service a niche or be some kind of industry expert?”






You might be able to guess my 2 cents on this but watch the quick 5 minute video below to get the scoop.

Leave any comments or questions below. And feel free to contact me about this or any other business topic as I'm always looking for blog post material.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

Slow Growth vs Lead Generation Marketing Systems

Now for something a little new for the blog. I asked people for some questions so I could answer them on the blog using video. I only picked out a handful for this method as they reflect issues common to most rather than truly individual scenarios better served in a different forum.

These will be 5 to 10 minute clips of me talking instead of writing out the answers or topics.

I'll be putting out a few to end out 2009 starting this week. Below is the first one:



The question I answered for this post is: When you have a product that everyone (seemingly) likes and that serves your clients well how do you jump off the “slow growth” train and start getting people to ring your phone more often?

Our biggest problem is we cannot seem to get enough inquiries to call or meet with us. I do not know if it’s an issue of exposure or just signs of the times...

Question from Vision Computer Solutions, in Michigan.

This is a terrific question and was picked for this post because it hits home with many technology businesses even those, like Vision Computer Solutions, that are well established and in business for over 10 years. Here's my answer in the video below (10 minutes).

Looking forward to setting up the next video post. As you know, if you have any comments, post them below. If you want to talk about this subject, set it up here for a free 30 minute coaching session.


To Your Business Success

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

Joint Ventures and Making Them Happen

There are misconceptions on the part of most small business owners. Many think that Joint Ventures (JVs) are a concept out of their reach and that they are only for big players. And this thought pattern happens in two ways.

First it’s thought that big players are the only businesses that do JVs and they don’t want to deal with a small fry. Second is the notion that small businesses are boxed out from being in the JV picture at all because they have nothing to offer. Another misconception is that the entrepreneur thinks they are not in a business conducive to doing JVs at all.





Without fully understanding what a JV is or could be, it’s easy to see where this train of thought may come from.

Let’s start with the first misconception and define a JV better. Although it certainly could be, a JV is not necessarily two bug companies leveraging off of each other or a medium sized business catapulting off of a huge business. As a matter of fact, many small business see tremendous growth due to a JV with any size other company. It’s not greatly publicized but that’s how most medium and big businesses actually “made their bones” in a relatively short time period.

Joint ventures come in all shapes and sizes but only one part of this widely misunderstood marketing medium is true. The true part is that it’s all about leverage. The real misnomer is in a small business thinking they have nothing to offer another party of any size. Yes, the odds of a $100k business being able to make a worthwhile contribution to a $100 million business is slim, but it could be possible. For our purposes here we want to aim a little lower, but not quite as low as you may be thinking.

The key to a JV with a business the same size as yours or one 10x bigger is thinking more in terms of two ways. First, the other party must be a non-competing entity but have the same target audience. Second you need to think in terms of “what would they want from me to let me borrow that list and endorsement”. If you can’t reciprocate by giving them an opportunity to use a similar sized list of targets, then high value information/education or money is usually the great equalizer.

What you are really trying to do is gain potential clients that fit your target audience without spending marketing and sales dollars to find them. That’s why you want the JV partner to do the introduction and endorsement for you and not just “rent” the list from them. That defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.

So the result of this is that you either get yourself in front of potential clients that you already know spend money and can use your services/products or actual instant clients without the dancing, courting, and waiting. For a service, door #1 is more likely and the best plan.

In return, the JV partner either gets a well educated audience out of what you gave their list or gets some kind of return on the gross revenue that you make for their part down the road. Depending on what you are selling, this could be a one time commission or recurring fees for a set period of time such as a year for each purchase made by each client you gained from their help. Just so you’re not hit between the eyes when negotiating a fee, you need to do your numbers to know just how much you can give up especially if you also included some kind of discount to the list to make the JV partner look good.

To not waste the effort or the possible slight loss you may have taken to acquire these new clients, you had better have your client management process lined up so you can turn them into long term clients. I’ve seen businesses triple their client list (and profits) with one carefully played out JV. Of course the rest of the business was also set up to handle this influx as well.

So let’s quickly go over the thought that you may not be in a business that can do joint ventures. The truth is, as long as another non-competing business/industry exists that has the same target audience as your business, there is a JV opportunity. All you need to do is open you eyes to the possibilities.

Before I tell you what I want you to do now, I want to make something clear. Although a JV can lead to some sort of true partnership, the nature of a JV is just sharing resources with a simple “you do that for me and I’ll give you this in return”. A true partnership is a much more complicated entity than a JV. But doing a few with the same company is a good litmus test on what a partnership with them may be like.

So here’s what I want you to do. Grab a piece of paper and list out what products and services you would like to form a JV around. Then list out what kind of break even margins or small loss you can deal with giving out as a payment. If you can barter with something else other than commission based payments such as providing their audience with superior information/education or reciprocating an endorsed offer to your list for them, write that down as well.

Next list out the specific target audience(s) for each JV item then find non-competing potential partners that serve the same target to contact. Keep in mind that sometimes a good JV partner is an independent sales person and not necessarily a business entity.

Remember, getting buy-in from a JV partner is the same as selling to a potential client. It’s all about spelling out what’s in it for them. In turn, you might just find someone to work with that adds a new passive revenue stream to your business as well.

If you would like to discuss these topics for your particular business, just follow this link to set up a free 30 minute session http://consultantscoach.com/FreeStrategySession.php.

To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

It's All About the List- Part 4

In part 3 we talked about using Joint Ventures to generate a list of qualified leads. This time around we’ll go over some ways to do it all on your own.

This means not having a list at all to start with but utilizing a few of the many available methods to have leads find you versus you finding them. Most of the methods I like to use with my clients do not involve a budget at all but some may require a bit of money outlay to get done.




To keep it simple and the cost down, we’ll talk here about just a few that are at the top of my list:

Websites: 10 years ago a website for most was a way to cut down on printing costs by making it a big brochure. Information and branding was the name of the game. With the low cost and simple tools available out there to automate your website to a pretty far extent as a lead generation system, there’s no reason not to do this.

Some in the technology business world have been moving towards this by providing a sign up for an emailed newsletter. That’s a good start and better than nothing but it’s very hit or miss. Most doing this have nothing compelling a visitor to sign up for the newsletter so many lead capture opportunities are missed. Even worse, you still don’t know how well these “leads” stack up against your true client base criteria.

A newsletter is great and it should definitely be sent out to current/past clients but it’s not much of an attractor to new possible clients. But stepping up the technology behind it and utilizing a true autoresponder to capture those to put on your lead list, manage that database and separate them into what they are interested in so you can automate most marketing to them is a better idea.

Now you can go beyond just offering a simple newsletter that has a variety of information and start offering on your website pinpointed information in the form of white papers and reports that will separate those looking for Service A and Service B. You can not only just target market to them but keep them informed on your company and send them the newsletter.

Again we’re back to message to market match and your list(s) are now allowing you to take warm leads that told you what they were looking for and be able to use the autoresponder to automatically market to them based on this knowledge. You can also take your marketing offline if you move these leads into giving you other info such as phone numbers and addresses. And all it costs is some upfront setup time and a few dollars a month for the autoresponder.

PPC and Natural Search: Ok so this is still website related as you need to get people to the site and capture those that are interested in what you have to offer. This can be even longer than what I wrote above for websites (which was still much shorter than all the details involved) so I will really keep this simple.

Having a solid informational site with lead generation ability is great but you have to get people there and they need to be the right people. This is not a perfect science but doing what you can to have the right people find you will make a big difference in not wasting your time. There is no point in attracting 100 visitors a day if 90 of them got there by accident trying to look for something else. You are not Amazon selling 1000’s of items.

Setting up a website with all of your essential pages is a must but it’s hard to pinpoint how you come up in a natural search as you can’t really make a page work to be found for a slew of keyword phrases. So what you thought was a 5 page site might really be better off as a 10 page site that has pages that shoot off to talk separately about your products and services.

But we’re not done yet. To really get noticed in natural search you should have a variety of these 10 pages that are distinctly optimized for each search phrase you think your true audience is looking for. Now your 10 page site is a 30+ page site. Many small businesses fail at making a 5 page site into a 10 page site but almost all don’t take the time to become a 30+ page site. And it makes no sense since it shouldn’t cost you any more to host a bigger site.

Besides natural search, you can also set up this 30+ page site to attract visitors based on pay-per-click (PPC) methods. This will cost you a few dollars to use a service like Google Adwords, but if done right it becomes a much more effective version of direct marketing on the web.

It’s also a good way to test those keyword phrases you think are suitable for your business. For $1 a day you can find out a lot. And if you want to make PPC a full part of your marketing mix once again it’s automated, acts like offline direct marketing as you are advertising to those you don’t know, but you only get charged when a viable prospect clicks on the ad.

It can be a low cost effective way to generate leads depending on how well you construct the ad, but just as importantly how well the landing page they go to is designed to meet what they were trying to find and compel the to take action and make themselves a part of your list. Otherwise the flip side is you could lose your shirt, but let’s assume you wouldn’t go into PPC without getting help.

Speaking Engagements- Speaking is a very low priority to most technology business owners as even more than most, speaking in public is not on the top of the “like to do” list. I can’t blame you but that’s what makes it such a great separator from the pack. And it could be a low to no cost way of getting in front of a captive audience that chose to listen to you. In some cases you may even get paid to do this marketing/branding.

Although this is a variation on using a Joint Venture, I consider it a separate entity since it involves the speaking effort. Bottom line, groups and organizations that contain your target list are always looking for people to educate their members. So finding a few that fit your target niches will allow you to hook up with them to do webinars, teleseminars or in-person events.

This is really the best way to generate a list as you have knocked down a lot of barriers by being an expert, having them come to you, and moving right to establishing a relationship. Especially at in-person opportunities.


Ok this post is more than long enough and yes I know I could have gone into greater detail but room and individual needs make this the wrong forum.

I hope you got a ton of ideas from this 4 part series. If you would like to discuss these topics for your particular business, just follow this link to set up a free 30 minute session http://consultantscoach.com/FreeStrategySession.php.



To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

It's All About the List- Part 3

In my last post on this subject of creating lead generation lists, I spoke about buying lists. This next round is about using Joint Venture partners (JV) to cut down the cost and find already active potential clients.

I would recommend setting yourself up with JV's that work in a quid pro quo manner versus paying somebody for use of their list. The reason why is because these lists are not exactly vetted in particular for you so you would be back to buying 1000 names that aren't a particular fit. That is except for the fact that the JV you are working with should have been checked out enough to have a good chance that their list fit at least your basic criteria and maybe a point or 2 on the detailed criteria.



I may be confusing you so here's an example. Let's say you have a niche in the medical field for general practitioner doctors that you sell your IT services to. A joint venture opportunity would be with people that sell niche specific software packages to these doctor's offices.

Buying that list would probably get you a bunch of doctors with office too small or in locations that don't fit your geography etc etc. So why buy that 1000 name list when 50 fit your criteria. That's wasted time and money.

Besides, the real point of a JV is to have your partner ENDORSE you and send out the notice for you. Not make you pay for a list of people that don't know you causing you to have to set up a mailing campaign with 4 to 8 sequenced mailings to get some bites or a bunch of emails that can get you spam canned.

Them endorsing you will also give you the opportunity to help them not waste their time by doing their own vetting so they send it to those that can really use your service, thus making them look good in the process.

There are a variety of ways to do this and I'll list out a few here but this is not the forum to get into heavy details. You know where to find me if you want to discuss this in detail to fit your business model exactly. So here it goes:

Total Quid Pro Quo: They send out an email for you that you write and they add in their 2 cents at the beginning with an introduction and endorsement and you do the same for them. Cost = nothing. A little tough to do if you have a much smaller list than them but it's possible if you ask. And if the JV is with an association or community often they will endorse anything that helps their members.

I think it's necessary for me to add in that we are talking lead generation so this is a free offer to capture name, email and/or other info. Unless you are selling a low cost product, this is not the time to go in for the kill. We're looking for leads from true prospective clients to put into the marketing funnel and build you personal list.

Back End Payment: This may take a little trust on their part unless you can set up some kind of system to track it, but usually a quick written agreement will work. They agree to send an endorsed email, or an insert in a regularly mailed newsletter, or with their bill mailings, etc and they get a cut of any business gained. Depending on what you are selling the "cut" could be all over the place so I can't go into detail but let's just say you shouldn't be stingy as your costs are minimal for them to do this for you. Don't forget that this is for lead generation so you should be selling in the endorsement but giving something away for free to capture the lead. Then you track the lead to give them a cut of the sale.

Website Thank You Page: In this case you have 2 choices. If selling a low cost product, you could make an up sell offer on a thank you page to something they sell and give up a cut again. In most cases it's better to truly make it a lead generation tactic so giving away an audit, white paper, teleseminar, webinar, etc makes more sense. It doesn't have to be on a thank you web page but think of it this way.

A thank you page indicates that this person already bought something or got something for free so they are already in the right frame of mind to take you up on something else since they are already there. As long as it fits with what they just received from the JV as you are selling this to the JV as something good to put in front of their customers to make them look even better.



These are some basic ways to use other people's lists. Especially lists that are actual customers, not just prospects as they have the propensity to be the decision makers you are looking for. Again the objective is really to pull from their lists those that belong as prospects on your list.

So I encourage you to write down what businesses in your niches would make good JV partners. Then fiddle around with a pitch to them that says you can help them look like heroes to their clients and even better if you can put some money in their pockets.

In the next part for this series we'll go into generating your own lists from scratch.

If you would like to discuss this for your particular business, just follow this link to set up a free 30 minute session http://consultantscoach.com/FreeStrategySession.php.



To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

It's All About the List- Part 2

OK, so in Part 1 of lead generation- the secret is in the list we talked about why segmented lists are important to your marketing system. You may want to reread that post as a refresher and then get into the info below talking about how you actually compile segmented lists.

So I left you off telling you that I consider 3 ways to generate a segmented list to market to. I will repeat again the notion that marketing pieces should be done talking about 1 particular product/service and worded to fit the audience AKA message to market match. And this goes for web pages, direct mail, telemarketing calls, seminars and everything in-between.




Now let's get to the generation of these lists. The 3 ways are: You buy them, you joint venture with someone whose list matches your segment(s), or you generate your own.

Let's start off with buying a list. This is more of a science than an art as the first thing you need to do is breakdown your current best/ideal customers into what makes them the best/ideal. If you don't have any or many customers, you still need to have criteria in your head as to your true target.

Basic things to include would be industry, specific industry niche, location, revenues, employees, ideal decision maker (Owner, VP of XXX, Manager of YYY) etc.

Then you want to get a little more specific depending on what you are selling to really fit your ideal client. Do they use specific systems? Do they need to have a specific network infrastructure? Do they cater to a specific client/consumer/industry niche? Do they subscribe to particular industry magazines or resource organizations? Are they members of a particular organization? Do they have a specific internal department structure? Do they have a solid budget for your service/product? Do they already buy services/products that compliment your offer?

Again, anything that would distinguish them in your mind as an ideal client, which obviously includes the need for your product/service and the ability to pay for the value you deliver.

Now you have enough to go on to employ a list broker service as this is the fastest and most accurate way to go about obtaining a list. And there are list brokers servicing all kinds of industries including yours. Google them and you will see this very quickly.

Providing them with this very exact criteria will yield a compact list of targeted prospects. Of course this compact list will cost more than giving them only the basic criteria but wouldn't you rather target 100 that fit your need than 1000? The increased cost of the list you bought pales in comparison to the amount of wasted time and marketing dollars that a bloated list would cost.

For example, would you rather pay $150 for a 1000 name list that will cost you $4000to do a direct mail campaign on (assuming 4 mailing sequence to the list) for a 1% to 2% repsonse rate? Or would you rather pay $500 for 100 names that have a good chance to respond at a 10% to 20% costing you more like $400 for the same sequence of mailings?

That's what I thought.

Next is joint venture lists. This is the quickest way to find and move people into your marketing funnel and is fairly accurate if you pick the right partners. It's not the most accurate as there will rarely be an exact fit, but it can be free or it can cost you on the back end after a sale. Not bad either way.

But again, this is another posts on its own so you'll have to wait until next time. (you can get to part 3 here http://www.georgesierchio.com/2009/10/its-all-about-list-part-3.html)

In the mean time, write out your ideal client criteria and check out some list brokers if you like to use that route in your business. Find a couple for your short list that fit your budget and have the capability to produce the list based on your basic and detailed criteria.

If you would like to discuss using list brokers to build a targeted list, just follow this link to set up a free 30 minute session http://consultantscoach.com/FreeStrategySession.php.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

The Secret to Lead Generation- It's All About the List

When attempting to generate sales in a technology consulting and service business, you need to market your business. Directly going for the kill is not going to work unless you get a call from someone that says "I need help now and I want you to do it".

Of course that happens here and there as you are an established (well positioned) player in a particular niche, but it's not a normal occurrence. The typical sale is made by marketing your business, getting prospects into your marketing funnel and then leading them into your sales process.



Unfortunately the skill of lead generation escapes many technology businesses or seems like a very difficult process to get right. But just like any other skill and process, it takes learning and testing to get it right and keep it working. That's how this particular necessary business operation works.

But the real secret to low cost and effective lead generation is in the list. What you are marketing and the medium in which you are doing it are best served with a targeted and segmented list. Any other way is usually a dissapointment to say the least.

Let me explain. A targeted list represents only prospects that fit the same criteria that make up your best customers. That means the same industry, size, revenues, operations structure, etc.

A segmented list takes this targeted list and breaks it down into like parts. This is how you get a message to market match as you get much better results tweaking your marketing to fit exactly who you are talking to. If you are doing a marketing piece on a service (and you really should only talk about 1 thing per piece) you are going to get much better response by talking to each segment directly.

For example if your marketing piece (direct mail, telemarketing call, particular web page, PPC ad, etc) is selling Service A, you will get much more traction by making your content talk directly to Small Construction Companies and change things up to make more sense to Large Manufacturing Facilities That's matching your message to the market.

So now you're probably thinking "where exactly am I getting these list from". In my book there are 3 ways. You buy them, you joint venture with someone whose list matches your segment(s), or you generate your own.

Since that's a post of its own, come back next week for that explanation. (You can get to Part 2 right here.)

If you would like to discuss building a targeted list, just follow this link to set up a free 30 minute session http://consultantscoach.com/FreeStrategySession.php.



To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

Part 3- Quick Tips on Using Telemarketing to Sell Technology Services

Ok, so we're getting some really nice results now with the telemarketing adjustments I'm chronicling for one of my clients. It's amazing what a few adjustments can do for your marketing ROI and the results they can return as well.

So let's continue on to what else we did and the results during our 1-on-1 coaching program they enrolled in with me.




In Part 2 we set up a more distinct criteria for the list that the telemarketers were making calls from. The theory behind this was to get a better set of people to call based on matching a new list that reflected current clients who we know are more inclined to become good prospects.

And this is what happened.

We got a much more responsive list set up and also cut the hours that were being paid for to call them. With a better and tighter list, the call time previously paid for was not warranted anymore. By cutting the hours in half, we automatically saved 50% on that. Excellent ROI. By culling a better cold list, we also upped the response rate to the call to action (purpose) of the call by 50%!

We went from a 19% response to the call to action rate to a whopping 38%. All told that means a little more upfront work resulted in a 50% cost reduction with an increase a 50% increase of response. Does it get any better than that?

Well actually it does as we're not done yet.

The next thing we are working on is the script changes for an even better response as well as a better set of calls to action that should result in more positive reactions. The premise is to shorten up the call script and have 2 offers so we can make an A (took the #1 call to action), B (took the #2 call to action), C (follow up) and D lists (dump them).

Stay tuned for Part 4 when the results come in.


To Your Business Success

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

Part 2- Quick Tips on Using Telemarketing to Sell Technology Services

So as I mentioned in my last post, I'm not a huge fan of telemarketing (or cold calling in general) to market or sell technology services. But there are ways to set up a good system that will work if you're willing to put the time and energy into it as a way to effectively generate leads to put in your sales funnel.

For this reason I'm chronicling a journey that a client of mine is taking on us working together to make the telemarketing actually get the results he's looking for. This one of a few results we are working on together as the premise for the 1-on1 coaching program they enrolled in with me.



In the last post (Part 1), I talked about his set up, which had all of the needed components in it (list, script, training, purpose of call, call to action), but wasn't doing so hot for him. Just enough for him to keep trying.

I left you with knowing that I was going to dive into their first element and make some changes. That would be the list he was using.

The list that was being given to the telemarketing company had a local element to it, covered many industries of various sizes that might have been interested in the products and services and targeted a few business titles within those companies. Not too bad of a start but this is like using buckshot and hoping to hit the right people instead of using more of a sniper rifle.

This is what we did... we used the arsenal of information we already had by breaking down the company's current and past customer list into as many demographics as possible. This resulted in a target base with a set of criteria we knew from experience would be interested at some level or another.

We used this to get a new list that had a much better shot at a response. In the process, this lowered the cost of the list as well as the cost of the telemarketing service.

Now the test was to take this list and apply it to what was already being done with the current script, purpose of the calls and the call to action within the call. At a minimum, we had already upped the ROI by lowering the cost but also expect better results.

More on that next time.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

Part 1- Quick Tips on Using Telemarketing to Sell Technology Services

If you’ve read my books or heard me speak about various forms of marketing, you would know that I am not much of a fan of telemarketing when it comes to marketing technology services.

Honestly, it’s a tough method for marketing anything as its success depends on many factors woven inside of the campaign. But, if treated like a very sound direct mail marketing campaign, it can actually produce solid results. Of course that also assumes you’ve done a good job in prepping a group of telemarketers who probably know nothing about your business.

Since I have a client that has used telemarketing as a lead generator before joining forces with me and he wanted to continue using this method along with adding others to the mix, I figured I would chronicle what we’re doing and how we’re making it work.



So here’s part 1:

OK, so when I asked this new IT hardware and solutions provider client how he was marketing, he said mostly referral plus an OK website that was getting traffic and telemarketing. Although we decided to mainly concentrate on making the website convert much better and locally, I also agreed to have him not waste money on the telemarketing he wanted to continue doing.

So this is how he told me his telemarketing worked: He provided a large list of potential clients and a generic script to a telemarketing company with a background in technology services. An OK start.

Then he would do some training sessions with the telemarketers assigned to him to get them used to the script and the iterations it took them through depending on reactions and answers to questions from the prospects. OK.

When he would let them loose on the phones, their goal was to set up appointments for him. Again, OK.

So far the set-up was planned and thought out to possibly work out for him.

Now it was time for me to ask about how it was working out for him. As expected, his results were very spotty. After running a few campaigns, he saw a very small but promising response the first round. On subsequent rounds, almost nothing by way of appointments and nothing was getting sold. So all he was getting was a trickle of a cold list turning into a few barely luke-warm leads. Not so good.

So all of the basic elements were in place (list, script, training, purpose of call). Now I needed to look a little closer as to the details of each element. Starting with the all important list.

Check back next time to find out what I discovered, what we did to change things around a bit, and the results.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

Technology Business Website Rant...Again

The first thing I do when I meet a technology service providers at any kind of event is to check out their website. When you are dealing with tech as a business, you need to have a professional and FUNCTIONAL website.

Although many are still pure garbage sites, which I can't understand why anyone would bother, I am happy to see that there are many more coming around to the professional look.

While I just said that let me add in that many have also taken the "too easy" road on this. Yes more nice sites are popping up in the world of small technology service providers, but they are still cheaping out a bit as far as being different. I can't tell you how many of these sites have the same pictures on them. Even worse, the same exact slogan. Are you kidding me?




I know that getting a good looking site up fast is somewhat of a priority if your site was really bad or non-existent but please take the time once it's up there to find out how you can get an original graphic or 2 to replace the same ones everybody else has and think of a new slogan. If your web designer made your website slogan, go to guru.com or something and have a slogan contest paying the winner $50 or something. Some originality is a good idea.

Anyway, that's not even the purpose of this post. The purpose was to talk again about functionality. Whether I am seeing very original or modified cookie-cutter designs, the good news is that newsletters and better yet some sort of download, like a white paper, are being implemented. And if you feel funny about offering people free information in exchange for a name and email address, you are not using your site for it's #1 purpose of automated marketing/lead generation.

So the good news is I'm seeing this stuff. The bad news is that in most cases it's only being half correctly applied.

Let me explain. If all you are doing is collecting names and email addresses from a download and then using that to send out an email blast only when you are trying to sell something, you just wasted an excellent lead generation source. And you're really not applying as much automation to it as you can.

If the database you are using to collect these names does not have an autoresponder attached to it, you just missed out on the real purpose of the information capture. And if you do have the autorepsonder and you don't use it... well do I really have to say it?

Get a download piece on your website and have it on every main page of your site (home, products, services etc) at a minimum. Have the download be related to the theme of the page. Capture the name and email address. Send them the download. Follow up with them. That last one is the missing link, my friends.

The purpose of a download is to give a visitor something useful, put them into a marketing funnel and have them take an action to contact you. That indicates a hot prospect and it's completely automated. That means if the download is a 1 page white paper on subject X, then you should have an autoresponder email series set up to elaborate on the main points over a couple month time frame with an action item to get them to contact you.

If you are not doing this, it has the same effect of sending out 1 direct mail piece and expecting it to generate a response. Even worse, you are taking a warm prospect (they found you and took the download), and thinking that they are ready to buy right now. They are hunting and you opened the door. If you don't follow up and be in front of them when they are ready to buy, then you really just opened the door for a competitor to piggy back off of the great info you just gave away.

OK, the rant is over as this is turning into a novel and can get much more in depth. If you would like to listen to me continue on this subject and help you apply it to your business, you know where to find me.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

New Book Available: Chapter 7 Excerpt

So this time around we are up to Chapter 7 of BYOB- Build Your Own Business, Don't Be Your Own Boss 2nd Ed.

This chapter is all about PR and marketing principals that are extremely important for technology consulting companies. Whether you are a VAR, break fix computer specialist, networking specialist, MSP or an engineering consultant.

There are a lot of "marketing gurus" out there and I'm not claiming to be one but I have been in your shoes as a technology business owner and did figure out a thing or 2 in my day that brought me a million in sales revenue. So I will say I'm pretty good and I know your business/SMB clients pretty well.

So let's get into it.




Chapter 7
Marketing Principles: Positioning Your Business as the Leader to Your Niche Audience

Let’s get to work on the subject of marketing systems. In a nutshell, this consists of
• Positioning your business as the “go to” people
• Determining your business niche or niches
• Laser focusing on the best prospects possible, known as your target audience, and
• Marketing to them to put them into your sales funnel.

What we are going to focus on is ways to find your target audience and the most effective ways for a consulting or service business to pursue this audience.

Positioning Vs. Prospecting

Let’s start this out with a very important statement. The top reason for a long sale cycle is lack of positioning.

Let me explain positioning with a quick example. How often do you get mail at home or at your office from a lawyer? Let me take that back. You do get letters from lawyers advertising themselves sometimes. They are called ambulance chasers. Let’s continue with our example.

Say you need a litigation lawyer. You don’t know him and he doesn’t know you. Do you trust someone you found in the phone book? Some people do and many get burned and don’t do it again. Normally, you would look up someone a colleague has used/recommended or go ask a trusted resource like your accountant. Now you have yourself a top notch litigation lawyer.

Since you don’t know him, why should you trust him? You trust him because he has positioned himself as a leader in his industry. And that’s not by any accident either. He is perceived as the expert because he knows something you don’t and he put it out there that he’s got that expertise.

He may not even be the best of the best but either you or your referral resource has been informed that he’s the “go to” guy. You needed a specialist, he’s the one whose name came up in your research and he’s the one you’re going to listen to.

Since you sought him out, you will most likely pay whatever price he throws at you to get rid of your pain. As a matter of fact, if he charges too little, you might take a step back and question his position as an expert.

Are you starting to see the picture I’m painting?

****

The chapter continues on to talk about:
More on positioning
PR and Lead Generation Tactics
Audience Selection
The Perfect Client
List Selection
Marketing Funnels

****

This is a fairly long chapter with no fluff and a lot of items to put into practice in a true marketing system. Like the chapter on Client Management states, when you properly set up client management systems, marketing becomes much easier.

The book will be shipping in the next week or so. Be sure to pick it up right here
http://consultantscoach.com/byobbook.php


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

The "New" Paradigm Shift- What are you selling?

As we are technology people in a growing technological world we realize that things change at a very rapid pace. Throw in an economic nightmare and you can double that speed of change.

We do our best to keep up with shifts in technologies so that we can help our clients not have to worry about it. But how good of a job are you doing in terms of providing for your clients, letting them know what you can do for them and actually making yourself well deserved profits in the process?

If you're like most consulting and service providers, especially those in the tech sector, you're struggling a bit to keep up with the changes in mindset of your clients as well as keeping it in line with operating your business.

So why did I use the term "paradigm" in the title of this post? When I hear this word it often elicits thoughts of big corporation nonsense speak from the 90's or something from a Dilbert cartoon. But to define it better, what it really means is a system of beliefs and ways to do something.

With paradigm defined, I want to briefly talk about one in particular that is important to "shift" in the correct direction in the world we are in today as technology consultants and solution providers.

In selling knowledge and services, it's very easy to get stuck in a comfort zone where something works well enough to leave it alone even when changes in our environment says it's time to makes some moves. This becomes the way of life often in how we determine what we sell and how we sell it.

Seriously ask yourself if you have faced the economic changes by selling the same things in the same way, but worked much harder at it and lowered your prices to boot. The odds are you did one of the two things just mentioned but many have shifted in both ways. Not a good idea.

So if this is the wrong way to shift, then what is the right way? My suggestion is pretty simple, and it works very well. Instead of lowering your prices and working harder to sell and provide your services for less money to a broader spectrum of people, shift in the opposite direction.

First off, stop offering solutions and services and start providing outcomes. Telling clients about a process you have isn't as nearly as effective right now as telling them that you will give them 99.99% up time, a 50% increase in XYZ after 1 year, a 25% decrease in ABC in 6 months, or some kind of peace of mind.

Next, focus more on working your way up a vertical market you are already in instead of expanding into a new market/industry that you will need time to position yourself in. Target potential clients that fit the same demographics as your best clients. Let current technology and your joint venture partners allow you to expand into a wider geographic base instead of trying to suck the life out of a 20 mile radius in every niche industry possible.

Additionally, take a good look on how productive your services are on an internal basis so you can squeeze more profit out of each dollar billed and hour worked. Then add more value to your offerings so that at a minimum, you are profiting exactly the way you were before while giving clients more with the same amount of effort.

As you can see a paradigm shift, or way of thinking, does not have to mean skimping on your business or on your clients even in tough economic times. When things bounce back, and they will, my suggestions will have you in a much better position than the old way of thinking.

Now is the time to step a bit out of the comfort zone and make things happen.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach

The Effects of Microsoft Buying Yahoo

Unless you haven't been paying attention to the news, Mr. Gates is making a big play for Yahoo. Why? Because he's trying to take his brain power and combine it with the originators of pay-per-click advertising to beat down Google.

That's great news for all of us that use the power of Google's Adwords as part of our marketing mix. Will MS/Yahoo succeed in being the #1 source for PPC advertising? Well, probably not.

So why is this a good thing? Think of it this way: As long as they band together and make a play at becoming #1, it puts Google in a position to protect themselves. We win because this will loosen the strangle hold Adwords has on the PPC market.

Don't get me wrong. Adwords is a great resource and it will be for some time. This buyout though will just keep their heads from swelling too much and forgetting about who pays their bills.

So, if you are using Adwords, keep it going. If not, you really should give it a try. Just $1 a day is normally enough to test the waters. Let me know if you need any help.

Is This the Real Paul Hartunian?

It sure is the real Paul Hartunian and I had the pleasure of meeting him and listening to him live not too long ago. (the best part is he's from my home state of NJ)

Not sure who he is? He's the guy who is famous for actually selling the Brooklyn Bridge. And actually did it (in pieces).

But what he really did was use that venture to develop a PR system that has worked for well over 20 years. This man is a wealth of knowledge on the subject and his methods can be applied one way or another to any industry.

Many of the techniques that I apply with my clients come from adapting Paul's methods to the consulting and services industries. The stuff works and it worked for me so why not.

If you want to know more about Paul Hartunian, his methods or the methods I have adapted to your industry, feel free to leave a comment on this blog for me to reply to.

Discussion with Teleseminar Guru Michael Cage

I recently had the pleasure of having a few long conversations with a guy that I know as a true teleseminar guru.

I personally believe that teleseminars are one of the best ways to interact and keep in touch with prospects and clients. They are relatively low cost in certain circumstances, can be put on autopilot as a previously recorded event.

Additionally, having a teleseminar recorded allows you to build a constant arsenal of marketing material and a knowledge base for your prospects and clients to refer to.

I can give you some good insights on using this platform, but Michael Cage is one of the masters of this domain. Feel free to comment on this post with any questions you have on using and conducting teleseminars and I will gladly provide you with answers.