15 Ways Marketing Can Support Your IT Sales Success

January 2nd, 2012

Just as suicide bombing has become popular in recent years to draw attention and cause horrific damage to both life and property, forced selling in the IT industry without due marketing has also gained popularity, based on the false notion that marketing is a waste of money, and the secret to higher sales is just hiring higher number of more aggressive salespeople who are willing to go through concrete walls to meet buyers.

But it has turned out to be a big belly flop, and as a result of that retarded approach, most IT companies are forced to compete on price as replaceable vendors. The status of the respected industrial authority, even if it’s ever existed, is dead and gone.

So, IT companies either carry on competing on price and duking it out in bidding wars, responding to RFPs, or pull their stubborn heads out of their arses, realise that times have changed and start changing with the times.

And this is what we discuss this month’s toe-curlingly exciting episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled, 15 Ways Marketing Can Support Your Sales Success.

Hope you find it valuable.

Enjoy!

Posted in Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Market Positioning | View Comments

“How To Segment The Marketplace For Your IT Business

November 25th, 2011

Imagine a thoroughbred race horse that is locked up in a small stable.

The horse feels something is wrong but doesn’t know what. He wants to run in the fields, but his owner denies him the privilege. The owner, who knows nothing about horses, is frustrated because the horse is acting up by kicking the door or the walls of the stable.

Then on race day, after six months of confinement and lack of training, the owner brings the horse out for a race.

Of course, the horse loses, and the owner is now thinking about turning the horse into sausages.

Now, I don’t say that you should turn your bad clients into sausages or show negative feelings against inappropriate prospects. All I’m saying is that in all your dealings, favour prospects with “great client” potential and emotionlessly walk away from problematic prospects.

Note that it is your market that defines your branding, positioning, packaging, pricing and even the claims you make.

You must know your market’s size, growth rate, demographics, psychographics, technographics (technical sophistication: abacus vs. computers), needs, purchasing habits, and many other factors. Different companies segment their markets differently, but this segmentation method you’re about to read about applies to every industry.

There are two attributes to consider…

And this is what we discuss this month’s mind-menglingly splendid episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled, “How To Segment The Marketplace For Your IT Business”.

Then come back here and voice your thoughts.

Enjoy!

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Sales Lead Mismanagement In IT Companies And How To Remedy It

October 28th, 2011

Do you know that in Sweden prostitution is perfectly legal, but it’s absolutely and positively illegal to hire a hooker? I mention this hair-raising fact because while sales lead generation is legal, many IT companies believe it’s illegal to use automated and systematic approaches to do sales lead generation.

Ask most IT managers about sales leads, and most of them tell you they need a lot more leads than what they have.

Then you look at their operations and see that they generate all the leads they need, but as much as 80% of all sales leads mysteriously disappear, and the a large percentage of what’s left is not properly qualified.

So, what can IT companies do to improve their practices of generating and nurturing sales leads without losing the best of them?

And this is what we discuss this month’s stupefy candid episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled, “Sales Lead Mismanagement In IT Companies And How To Remedy It”, and located at http://www.varjan.com/articles/1110-oct-sales-lead-mismanagement-in-it-companies.shtml

And after reading this literary masterpiece or listening to it, feel free to hop back here to discuss it in some detail.

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How to Use After Action Reviews to Debrief IT Consulting Projects

October 4th, 2011

Speech coaches have been teaching for years that the most important parts of a speech are the beginning and the end. Pilot instructors teach their students that the most dangerous parts of flying are take-off and landing. And I know from experience, that the two key moments of skydiving are leaving the plane and landing. In skydiving there is a third moment: the opening of the chute.

In IT projects, there are two key moments. The start and the finish. These two elements have the greatest impressions on clients. Yes, we want to do a great project, but we’d better place extra emphasis on the beginning and the end.

And this is what we discuss this month’s brain-fryingly exciting episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled How to Use After Action Reviews to Debrief IT Consulting Projects.

Enjoy

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17 Common Direct Mail Mistakes IT Companies Make Part 2

August 31st, 2011

Have ave you heard that in a desperate effort to win the Second World War, British scientists had come up with the brilliant idea of feeding Hitler with female hormones, so over time, he would have become docile and submissive just like his younger sister, Paula Wolf.

This great strategy, as explained in Professor Brian Ford’s book, “Secret Weapons: Technology, Science and the Race to Win World War II”, was that British spies would mix oestrogen into Moustache Dolfie’s meals, and slowly but surely he would “calm down”, so the Allies could reason with him.

The other piece of British warfare imbecility to win the war was by putting glue onto Nazi soldiers’ boots and sticking them to the ground.

So much fuss for nothing. Or as good ol’ Will wrote a few years ago, “Much Ado For Nothing”.

And the interesting thing is that this is happening in so many IT companies as well. They hire the big fancy advertising agencies to come up with new slogans, but nothing significant happens. Lots of smoke but no fire.

And this is what we discuss this month’s brain-fryingly exciting episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled, 17 Common Direct Mail Mistakes IT Companies Make Part 2.

Enjoy your reading and share what you think.

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17 Common Direct Mail Mistakes IT Companies Make Part 1

July 27th, 2011

Have you heard that every year 13 people are killed by vending machines? Yes, that’s correct. Machines fall on them and literally squeeze the living daylights out the poor bastards. It usually happens to people who raid vending machines and try to pry the goodies out of them.

By a mind-menglingly staggering coincidence, similar fate is waiting for IT marketing managers who try to pry too much out of their direct mail campaigns without doing the necessary preliminary work to prepare their campaigns for best performance.

They haphazardly put their packages together, and then equally haphazardly roll them out to their markets. And quite often, the highly anticipated marketing campaign performs a spectacular belly flop and falls flat on its arse.

After this little incident, campaigns are often abandoned to their fate, and die a slow and agonising death.

In this article we look at 15 ingredients that are often missing from direct mail campaigns and undermine their overall performance.

And this is what we discuss this month’s mortifyingly mesmerising episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled, “17 Common Direct Mail Mistakes IT Companies Make Part 1”.

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Three Practical Objections Against Cold-Calling To Sell Premium IT Solutions

June 27th, 2011

Believe it or not, Carl Lewis has undoubtedly been one of the greatest athletes in US sports history. During his career he won nine Olympic gold medals and eight World Championship gold medals. He became an athletic icon.

But this iconic status got somewhat shattered when, in 1987, he decided to get into music, and created the pop “masterpiece”, entitled “Break it Up”.

Rightly or wrongly many of his fans started ridiculing Carl for his musical act.

So, what does this event have to do with cold-calling?

Well, just as Carl’s brave act alienated him from lots of his fans, cold-calling alienates sellers from their target markets.

Today, in the age of suspicion and scepticism, buyers regard cold-calling, that is, calling them, a hanging offence, and I bet some of them are working hard on criminalising cold prospecting.

Buyers rightfully believe they have the right to buy whenever they are ready, not when sellers try to ram something down their throats.

And buyers raise massive walls, well, peddler fodders, to keep peddlers outside of their operations at a safe distance.

And what do sellers do?

Well, this is what we try to figure out this month’s brain-boilingly stupefying episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled, Three Practical Objections Against Cold-Calling To Sell Premium IT Solutions.

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Two Business Development Diseases And What To Do About Them

May 31st, 2011

Do you know that Americans, on the average, eat 18 acres of pizza every single day? That’s almost the size of 10 soccer fields side-by-side.

The other interesting fact about these 10 soccer fields is that they could easily be filled up with people who sell various IT solutions but suffer from two major sales diseases.

One disease causes salespeople to piss off their prospects with their bully-like persistence, and in many cases prospects just pack up and go to the competition.

The other disease leaves prospects on the lurch as to what to do next.

And the problem is that buyer and seller can never really discover whether or not they have a mutually beneficial basis for doing business.

No, I’m not saying every interaction must end in a sales or the salesperson has failed.

What I’m saying is that when a buyer and a seller come together to discover possibilities, the seller has to take the role of the diagnostician to x-ray the buyer’s company to establish if she has a business case to work on with that specific buyer. This interaction excludes hard-sale tactics but must include a next step.

So how to make sure that sellers gently but firmly lead the interaction and that every interaction ends in a clear and specific next step?

This is what we discuss this month’s revoltingly euphoric episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled, “Two Business Development Diseases And What To Do About Them”.

Enjoy.

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10 Common IT Client Acquisition Misconceptions

April 26th, 2011

Are you telling me the Russians are lacking creativity? No they don’t.

Then just look at what happened in July 2010 on a beach on the Sea of Azov in the Cossack village of Golubitskaya.

As an improvised advertising campaign, the entrepreneurial owners of the local parasailing company attached a donkey to a parasail and started pulling it with a speedboat.

All they wanted to achieve was to attract more people to the beach, so more people indulge in some parasailing. Well, they certainly attracted lots of people, but instead of trying parasailing, they started filming the poor donkey’s ordeal.

Eventually the donkey landed in a rather atrocious way by being pulled at high speed in the water, and the local police took away the masterminds behind this fiendish act.

Those parasailing entrepreneurs had some misconceptions about acquiring clients just as so many IT business owners do.

They thought it’s flash, glitz and glamour that attract clients. Sadly, this is exactly what many IT business owners believe, and waste truckloads of time, money and energy to create more style basically without substance.

And they do that while their markets are desperately seeking substance to aid their decision-making processes as to what sort of technology they need to stay technically up to date, and safe from hackers.

So, there seems to be a wide gap in what sellers offer and buyer seek.

And this is what we discuss this month’s seriously brain-taxing exciting episode of Tomicide Solutions, entitled, “10 Common IT Client Acquisition Misconceptions.

For your enhanced education and entertainment, there is a podcast version as well.

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Are Your Follow Up Messages Too Aggressive?

March 24th, 2011

Being an avid reader and learner, I sign up for many online programmes to learn new bits and bobs. I do this in spite of knowing that as soon as the presenters get my email address, most of them will start bombarding me with follow-up sales pitches to get as much of my money and as quickly as humanly possible.

And while I understand and agree that the purpose of sequential autoresponders is to stay in touch with interested people who one day decide that our stuff is valuable and buy something from us, I also believe that the purpose of the process is sharing valuable information with these people and in doing so PRE-selling our stuff in a dignified and professional manner.

Now, I know that at this point some people may say that I’m a useless salesperson, and they are 100% right. If I had to sell my services without properly marketing them first, I would rather lie down, pull a paper bag over my head and let a tree grow through my body.

Actually a while ago Bob Bly wrote a a great article about this issue, entitled Are You in Marketing Because You Can’t Sell?

You can drastically reduce your sales effort by beefing up your marketing. And doing the marketing bit is much more enjoyable and less confrontational. When you communicate with a captive audience, there is not much rejection.

Anyway…

So, follow-up messages and attempts to sell more are fine and dandy. We all want to make money in our businesses. However, what bugs me is the methods some of the so-called gurus use to exhort money from their victims. One of these methods is using aggressive and pushy but otherwise worthless messages.

And this is what we discuss this month’s conspicuously exciting episode of Tomicide Solutions, mysteriously entitled, “Are Your Follow Up Messages Too Aggressive?”

Posted in Lead Nurturing, Marketing | View Comments

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