Online Marketing And Sales Strategies That Win In A Recession Small And Medium Size Organization

What is the effect of recession?
Why Traditional Marketing and Sales Strategies are not Working
An analysis of why traditional methods of marketing and selling do not work in the Recession
What is the strategy to win in a recession?
Smart and Innovative Strategies that Work!
A walkthrough of the different smart and innovative strategies for winning in the recession
What is the right technology for implementing innovative strategies?
The Technology for Transformation of Customer Acquisition
Overview and supporting features of SharePoint and new generation tools and concepts
So, how do we move forward?
The Roadmap and Approach for Moving Forward
An overview of the roadmap, approach and ROI

Why are Traditional Marketing and Sales Strategies working?
Traditional Marketing = Brand Building and Mass Marketing techniques
Inappropriate for small to mid-size businesses
Generating quality and quantity leads using traditional marketing is people and process intensive
SMBs get caught in managing people and processes rather than focusing on smart ways of generating the required volume and quality of leads
Inefficient mechanism for SMBs to go with only traditional marketing especially during recession
Cost Intensive
Use of print and electronic media is really expensive
Does not allow for efficient tracking of leads
Longer sales cycles required to generate revenue
Lacks focus and targeting
Traditional marketing lacks focus, leading to a wide swathe of customers, reducing the amount of quality leads generated
Low conversion rates
Not as effective and persuasive enough to convert leads into opportunities

Why are Traditional Marketing and Sales Strategies working?
Traditional Sales Strategy = Cold Calling and… Playing Golf!
Higher cost of customer acquisition
Traditional sales strategies rely heavily on people intensive processes for follow up using cold calling, travel to customer places and spending time with the customer for building relationships
Does not focus on strategies to get the customer to pay in a short span of time – increasing the cost of customer acquisition as the day passes
Smaller Pipelines
Traditional sales strategies are focused more on closing the sale “IN PERSON”, making it difficult for a sales person to efficiently grow and manage a large pipeline of opportunities
Larger Sales Cycles
The nature of traditional way of selling inherently increases the sales cycles

What is wrong with the process and technology supporting marketing and sales today?
Current Process Issues with Marketing
“Made for traditional marketing”
Current products and services are designed to be marketed and sold using traditional marketing and sales techniques
Lack of Online Selling Approaches
Traditional marketing lacks the focus on utilizing the internet as a marketing and sales platform
Lack of electronic catalogs and online selling approaches increase the cost, effort and people required to sell a product or a service
Lack of Variable Selling Approaches
Most often than not, products and services are sold at fixed price
There is lack of process and thought built within the system to allow for variable pricing and promotions of the products targeted towards different types and sizes of audiences
Marketing and Sales do not go hand in hand
There is no direct link between marketing and sales – marketing sets up the expectations around a product or service to the customer and sales team pitches the same product in a manner – leading to a very confused customer, and customer loyalty towards your organization

What is wrong with the process and technology supporting marketing and sales today?
Current Process Issues with Marketing
Messaging is more “Generalized”
In most cases, marketing messages are not focused and is generalized to meet the curiosity and interests of a large base of potential buyers
Even if the messages are focused, there is a lack of ability and mediums to deliver the messages effectively to targeted audiences without increasing the costs
Current marketing processes cannot assess the interests of the end users so that they can tailor marketing messages specifically based on their interests in your organizations products or service offerings
A Closed Approach
Traditional marketing does not allow itself to adapt to the latest and extremely effective internet media, search engine and community based marketing

Current issues with Technology
Effective Technology is Cost Prohibitive for SMBs
Only large organizations have invested in comprehensive portal technologies that enable targeted marketing
Smaller and medium size organizations have to rely on the Excel Spreadsheets or CRM systems to manage their marketing and sales processes – leading to lack of systems to truly “Enable” these teams for Smart Marketing and Sales
Lack of Technology / Solution infrastructure
SMBs generally lack the infrastructure and solutions that are comprehensive and allow them to change and manage product pricing, and promotions through a single technology platform
Lack of integrated marketing platforms for email, social, and web marketing
Traditional marketing employs traditional systems – which are nothing but data storage and reporting systems, but are not extensible so that they can be integrated with email, social and web marketing information

What is Working? – Smart and Innovative Strategies that Work!
Marketing using the Internet is Definitely Working!
Internet is the place where today’s Customers are going
The capability of the internet to lend itself to allow end users to research and compare products and solutions before they can close in on the buying decision has made it a popular destination for today’s customers
This has made the internet literally a Gold Mine for smart organizations – not only because they can find customers easily, but also because they can close opportunities at minimal costs
Moreover the internet provides the ability to deliver variable messaging to targeted customers using micro-sites, track the results, and fine tune the messaging in a quick and efficient fashion.
The emerging technologies and tools on the internet has made it possible for organizations to further reduce the costs of customer acquisition by using tools like online conferencing and virtual meetings – delivering the right kind of products and solutions to customers at their desk without getting out of the office
Internet

The Internet and the Masses – some Statistics

191 million U.S. people age 2+ online in a month, spending an average of 30 hours online per person.
77% of 841 million global Internet users now outside of U.S.
99% of online population search in a month, conducting 80 searches per person
73% of online population stream a video, viewing an average of 83 videos per viewer per month. Up 50% vs YA
67% of online population visit a social networking site, spending 4 hours per month per visitor
Online consumer spending totaled $200B in 2007, up 20% vs. YA Non-travel represents 8% of consumer spend (excl. food, gas, and autos) .

Source: ComScore
How does the Internet Matter to your Organization?

90% of all internet users rate using a search engine as their most common practice while online
Out of this 90% of Internet Users, 80% ranked researching a product or service online as their first reason for using a search engine followed by weather and news

Marketing using the Internet is Definitely Working!
Internet is the place where today’s Customers are going
The capability of the internet to lend itself to allow end users to research and compare products and solutions before they can close in on the buying decision has made it a popular destination for today’s customers
This has made the internet literally a Gold Mine for smart organizations – not only because they can find customers easily, but also because they can close opportunities at minimal costs
Moreover the internet provides the ability to deliver variable messaging to targeted customers using micro-sites, track the results, and fine tune the messaging in a quick and efficient fashion.
The emerging technologies and tools on the internet has made it possible for organizations to further reduce the costs of customer acquisition by using tools like online conferencing and virtual meetings – delivering the right kind of products and solutions to customers at their desk without getting out of the office
Internet

One Stop Shop is Out – Niche is In!
defining your Blue Ocean
Organizations have to move towards delivering niche products and services using an optimal combination of value based as well as cost based selling
Targeted and focused marketing efforts
based on search keywords, My friends, My Interests [social media], and Online communities [email marketing through communities]
Expanding beyond immediate geographies
Using the power of the internet to capture larger market shares and larger customer base with low investments
Thought leadership
Engaging customers through whitepapers, online seminars among other cheaper and effective engagement models
It pays to have a relationship with a profitable customer - Get them paying first and then build a relationship!
Which ever the customer, whatever the product – it is very important for sales teams to get the customer to pay first, and then spend time on building relationships

Making Sales Processes Work in Tandem with Marketing

Allowing Sales Teams to do more with Less
Currently, marketing just provides a bunch of leads to the sales teams who then follow the long and tedious process of qualifying, following up and converting the lead into a sale
Marketing should contribute immensely to the lead qualification and conversion processes – upfront filtering and qualifying the leads, so that Sales spend time only on following up and converting the HOTTEST leads
This makes the sales teams more effective, productive and efficient, and also reduces the sales closure cycles
Making sales and marketing teams smart, efficient and focused
Marketing knows exactly who are the target audiences for specific products and offerings, and how to target them to generate a lead.
Moreover, marketing has greater research intelligence and market knowledge than the sales teams who are just focused on closing the deals / increasing the pipelines
The sales teams would be greatly benefited by the marketing and research information and allows them to be smart when targeting a customer for the sale of a product or a offering.
Moreover, sales teams can collaborate with marketing to provide feedback based on real life customer experience, which can be used by marketing to fine tune the messages to generate quality leads easily through campaigns, eMarketing or the website.

Desired Features of Technology Supporting New Generation Marketing & Sales Processes
A Technology Platform or a Solution that can
Centralize the marketing and sales activities – from targeting to lead generation to sales closing and building relationships
Should provide a centralized collaboration environment which can help bring together the sales and marketing intelligence which in turn can help the teams to focus and target markets and customers in an efficient manner
Should allow provisioning of tools and applications in a self service, automated and contextual manner, reducing the time spent on the managing and executing internal processes in turn increasing the amount of productive time to focus building niche product and services offerings and closing sales in a better informed manner
Should support integration of online meeting and collaboration tools like web conferencing, chats, virtual meetings among others.
Should be capable of bringing together information from backend marketing and sales systems like CRM and Lead management solutions and deliver it to the teams in a meaningful manner
Should allow for tracking and analysis of campaign statistics, sales effectiveness among others to help build future trends and roadmap for moving forward towards building a successful organization.

A Brief Overview of SharePoint as the Desired Technology Platform
Reporting and Dashboards
Content Management
Extensible Search
Multi Lingual Websites
Metadata
Management
Workflows and Forms
Rich Media Integration
Document Mgmt
Marketing Teams
Microsoft SharePoint
End Users / Consumers
Marketing Portal
Content Rich Multi Lingual Web Sites
Sales
Teams
Collaborative Sales Portal

Proof in the Pudding - Case studies
eMarketing and Sales enablement
Solution implementations using
Microsoft SharePoint

Walkthrough of Solutions that Go Beyond CRM, and eMarketing
FSI Benefits from Implementing a Public Website with Centralized Lead Capture and Management with SharePoint
With a goal of reducing the costs involved in managing and maintaining a large marketing and sales teams, FSI decided to implement a website which by itself was capable of converting leads to making a sale online.
Optimus BT implemented the FSI public website with WSS 3.0 – a free add-on on top of Windows Server 2003 which provided them with the following features

A self service based approach for creating and managing website content, delivering promotions and capturing and managing leads in an automated fashion
Delivering information about their products and courses online, and also self service based selling approach using a online shopping cart – transforming their website from not only being a marketing tool, but also a robust sales tool
Implementation of community based features like blogs and RSS that allowed them to build a good user base without spending a hefty amount on marketing
Web 2.0 features including metadata and taxonomy management, allowing for a personalized user engagement model based on the user’s context
eMarketing (SEO and PPC) friendly website, further reducing the cost of marketing the offerings of FSI through traditional marketing approaches

The FSI Public Website
Completely implemented using WSS 3.0 this portal utilizes the best of breed features of SharePoint to deliver the following functionalities

Online Lead Capture and Management
Online Shopping Cart of Courses and Products
Online Delivery of interactive rich media like video and audio files
Self Service Based Content Authoring and Publishing
Community based marketing using Blogs, RSS and Live Chat functionalities.

Online Lead Capture
Various tools and approaches for capturing of leads online. The leads that are captured are stored and managed using SharePoint lists on the Website
Engaging the Users
The Website included various user engagement models including the use of interactive audio and video files, again integrated with lead capture mechanisms

The Online Product Catalog
The Product catalog was managed and maintained completely on the SharePoint infrastructure using SharePoint lists and libraries, including the end user shopping carts, statuses and transaction information
The Online shopping cart was integrated with online payment gateway for allowing users to buy products directly from the website by providing their credit card information, paving way for closing the sale right on the website.

Community and Social Marketing
The website included various methods of community and social marketing approaches including community blogs, information syndication, bookmarking among others. This allowed FSI to build and maintain a good user base leading to word to mouth marketing, further reducing the costs while increasing the user base.
Web 2.0 Features
Some of the web 2.0 features like tagging and metadata management, contextual information aggregation and delivery tools like top downloads, popular products, favorite demos among others were implemented – allowing the content of the website to be tracked and rated by end users. Moreover, these features allowed FSI to target specific content to specific target customers increasing the quality of leads.

Looks Complex and Prohibitive?
The Solutions were built and deployed in a time frame of 8-12 weeks
The costs of building the solutions were < $ 50,000 - including planning, architecting, implementing, testing and deploying…
We provide All in ONE Total Marketing Solutions for Small Businesses
- Designer, Developer, Artist, Writer, Marketing Guru, SEO specialist, eMarketing Specialist and More – all in a cost effective and affordable manner.

Overall Roadmap for Implementing New Generation Marketing and Sales Processes

Our Services and Offerings for Marketing and Sales Enablement
Strategy, Market Research and Tactical Plan
Search Engine Optimization 2.0
Google AdWords / Yahoo SEM and Analytics
Email Campaign
Networking Marketing
Webinar Promotion
Whitepaper Syndication
Press Releases
Brochures, Logos, Booth Designs
Web 2.0 Website Design
Sales Enablement Portal, Design Development and Implementation with SharePoint

Our Packages

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