| May 20th, 2008 | Communicating Value |
Abstract: People buy for their reasons, not yours. This article covers the key elements that prospects want to hear you talk about. Always, but especially during lean times, effective sales professionals know the importance of communicating value. Budgets - if they ever were discretionary - are tighter. Business customers are being asked to do more with less. Decisions are increasingly less on WHERE to spend the money and more on WHY we need to spend the money. Value is the customer’s perception of your worth, excellence, usefulness, or importance with respect to them or their business. Value addresses the customer’s question, “What can this person or company do for me?” Even spending time on the phone with you must return something of value to the customer. You must initially and continually earn the right to have the customer invest their time and money with you. Position value by explicitly answering these questions throughout the sales cycle:
How would YOU answer these questions for each of your prospects or customers? If you don’t have the answers, expect resistance. If you do have answers and your solution is directly linked to your customer’s articulated needs, you will be successful even in these difficult times. Successful reps tell their customers what the value to them is - customers shouldn’t have to work to figure it out themselves. If you don’t explicitly quantify the value your customer can expect to receive, and your competition may be doing this work for your customer, who is going to win the business? This information comes from Forming Business Relationships, a module in Entelechy’s High Performance Sales training. Check out this module as well as our 40 other modules, training tools, and eGuides at http://www.unlockit.com. About The Author Terence R. Traut is the president of Entelechy, Inc., a company that helps organizations unlock the potential of their people through customized training programs in the areas of sales, management, customer service, and training. Check out our 40 customizable modules, training tools, and eGuides at www.unlockit.com. Terence can be reached at 603-424-1237 or ttraut@unlockit.com Posted in Commerce Resources | Comments Off
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| May 1st, 2008 | There are Lots of Auction Sites to Choose From, But Which One is Right for You? |
Anyone who has used the Internet knows that a big chunk of Oltiby.com has a unique When looking at auction sites, you want one that will get you Another important factor in choosing auction sites is the fees Posted in Commerce Resources | Comments Off
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| April 22nd, 2008 | Customer Service - Dead or Alive? |
Discover how to increase customer satisfaction.
Why can’t customer service problems be handled and solved faster, more courteously and completely? Why does it seem like we can never speak directly with a real live human being? And when we do manage to speak to a live person, why does it seem that they are speaking to us from thousands of miles away? Maybe because they are indeed thousands of miles away from the U.S. The answer is that most companies that have customer service departments know they lose tons of money on their customer functions. To be blunt, customer service is a loser proposition. Period. Therefore for the best way to minimize the losses is to run as bare-bones operation as possible. “Too bad that a customer can’t get past the electronic attendant and speak to a person. Too bad that the customer isn’t happy with uswe’ve got lots more customers.” How would you like to have the lost dollars from just one hour of poor customer service as practiced by American companies? I guarantee you could retire for the rest of your life…and so could all of your family and all of your friends could join you as well! My late, great friend, Ray Considine co-wrote a book called Why Are You Making It So Hard For Me To Give You My Money? Taking the first letter of the first seven words in the title he fondly called what became his passion “WAYMISH. He and his writing partner collected at least a bazillion examples of real life stories concerning awful experiences in the surreal world of customer service. My sense is that perhaps we should rename customer service departments “no customer service departments.” Recently a friend emailed me a ’secret” list of about 6 pages with dozens of phone numbers of credit card companies, airlines, computer companies etc. so as to avoid the endless minutes and some times hours spent on hold waiting hopefully for a person to pick up the phone somewhere in cyberspace, who might be able to help solve a problem. To get this list contact me at the link below. Gene Pepper Consulting Gene has extensive experience in strategic business planning, business coaching, turnarounds, and exit strategies. His common-sense approach leads to highly successful business transactions. Posted in Commerce Resources | Comments Off
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| April 8th, 2008 | Holidays and the Affiliate Site |
Some affiliate sites lend themselves to holiday celebrations and promotions, and the holiday spirit does wonders for affiliate sales. This isn’t just true of the traditional holidays, but the many lesser known holidays, such as National Clean Out Your Computer Day, the second Tuesday of February, referenced on the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) Chicago-area site at http://www.napo-chicago.org/holidaysandevents.asp. Also, have you noticed how Google dresses up its logo with holiday themes throughout the year? It sets you up to feel that today is different with new opportunities - all waiting at the end of a search. It’s easy to build events, online and offline, around holidays. Contests for the best of and the worst of, as well as articles, photos, advice from professionals, and discussions all lend themselves to holiday themes. If you pick a holiday related to the theme of your site, visitors will have their own stories and advice to share. Holidays are also a way to feature related but new and different merchandise offered for sale by merchant partners. For federally recognized holidays, some merchants will offer special banners for use during a certain period of time. Others will have discounts and specials. This gives you new opportunities for product features, reviews and comparisons. For instance, for the clean out your computer holiday, a site focused on small business office issues could review scanners, key fob storage devices, shredders, spyware blockers, file organizing software, web-based storage, books and electronic devices, to name a few. These create solution sales in the context of a larger subject - and it’s what sets you apart in online sales. Karen Kari’s articles and more information on the affiliate business can be found at: Posted in Commerce Resources | Comments Off
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| March 20th, 2008 | Everything a beginner need to know about Affiliate Marketing |
Understanding affiliate marketing from top to bottom, from left to right is a MUST in doing online business. (Or if you just want to create some profit in the cyberspace, affiliate marketing is the way to go) Before fighting your war, you should sharpen your sword!! Let’s put in your due diligence to examine some of the definitions for Affiliate Marketing in cyberspace: **This is a system of revenue sharing between one site (the affiliate merchant) which features an ad or content designed to drive traffic to another site (the advertiser). The affiliate will receive a fee based on the amount of traffic generated. **A system of advertising in which site A agrees to feature buttons from site B, and site A gets a percentage of any sales generated for site B. It can also be applied to situations in which an advertiser may be looking for marketing information, rather than a cash sale. Popular among startups with very small marketing budgets. **A business relationship with a merchant or other service provider who allows you to link to that business. When a visitor clicks on the link at your site and subsequently makes a purchase from the merchant, you receive a commission based on the amount of the sale, a referral fee or a pay-for-click fee. If you are familiar with offline marketing models, in fact, affiliate marketing share the very same nature as Network Marketing or MultiLevel Marketing (Through sharing a good service or product with people, you are compensated with commission). Of course, usually affiliate marketing tends to have less layer commission payout than offline Network Marketing or MLM. Affiliate Marketing usually pay until first or second layer only. Why should we start our online business or create our profit from Affiliate Marketing? Yes, this is a million dollar question. There are tons of reasons. Look, now I want to give you the TOP 5 reasons. 1. You DON’T need to crack your head to come out with your own product. The products are already there. Be noted!!! Coming out with your own product is as difficult as stretching your hand to reach the star for most of the people, especially for newbie in Internet Marketing business. 2. Literally, you can choose from an INFINITE number of products for you to affiliate with. Moreover, you call the shot to choose only the best products (in term of quality) to recommend to your customers. 3. The third reason, if you overlook it, good luck to your business. Affiliate Marketing is the most money & time saving to start with. To come out with your product, you need extra cost and more importantly your precious time (it worth a lot to me, I believe it is same to you). By using affiliate marketing, you are risk free in promoting other people product. What if you put in all the TIME & MONEY to create your own product and then you again PUT IN all the TIME & MONEY to promote it but all effort comes to zero or gives you a bad sales, would you want to take the risk? 4. You don’t need to write your sales pitch. NO SALES COPYWRITING! When you recommend people product, the best sales pitch is done by the creator of the product. 5. You don’t have to process the orders once people click your affiliate link. The merchant handle all the processes needed for sales. Besides, the merchant also deals with the customer problems. All these are what I want to share with you about Affiliate Marketing. Hope you can benefit from this humble piece of information. Regards,
P.S. I am Kah Jin, personally come from Singapore. Dont think me as a Guru in Internet Marketing world. Yet, I sincerely like to share my result of research and my humble knowledge with all beginners who are looking out for suitable information for them. I truely believe that before we start to RUN, we must learn to WALK. For more basic information regarding Internet Marketing/Online business or Affiliate Marketing business, feel free to visit www.how2startonlinebiz.com Posted in Commerce Resources | Comments Off
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