Sales team

Have you noticed how fast the summer seems to be going? Hard to believe but, I booked my first fall networking event today. WOW. Things seem to move forward faster everyday.

If you are sales professional, business manager or entrepreneur who attendes events, you know it is a business development investment. Whether it is a trade show or a monthly association meeting, any event you attend is an investment of your resources both time and money.

You invest your time;

• researching various trade shows and evaluating whether the event will attract the right target market for your business
• your time attending

You invest your money;

• trade show registration/booth fees & staff time
• travelling costs

Attending events helps to raise the visibility of your business in the marketplace and generates prospect leads for your business. These leads come in 2 forms,

1. attendees you met and with whom you started a conversation and
2. the atendance list which includes attendees you did not met and with whom you could start a conversation. 

Back at the office, the questions are;

• how do you maximize your attendance investment by following up with the highest number of prospects and driving that traffic into your follow up sales funnel?
• what are the next steps to follow up and
  • continue the conversation with attendees you met?
  • start the conversation with the list of attendees you did not met?

In the past, for trade show follow up marketing, we would mail out sales literature and then try to get prospect on the phone, but follow up methods are changing.

Today, I help my clients utilize the technology they currently have, to build their next follow up steps.

• First, database set up to centralize all of the prospect leads, a CRM Customer Relationship Manager such as ACT, Maximizer or Goldmine.
• Second, set up an email blaster such as  Swiftpage with ACT  to send out emails.
  (Swiftpage can also work without ACT)

The great thing about this newer methods is that we can collect statistics, for example, about delivery. Depending on your follow up next steps, you may also be able to track the additional traffic your follow up drives to your website.

If you are interested in learning more about how to follow up and maximize your trade show or networking event attendance, I offer several options.

2 hour sessions Follow up – Discover Your Next Step  and a session about taking action and implementing the follow up steps in your business Follow Up – Take Action. This session is about database set up, database maintenance and outbound cold calling.

Follow Up Training - Set The Stage For Follow Up and Automate Your Follow Up Process. Attend yourself and bring this business training for your office. You will learn how to build a Follow Up System that maximizes your business development investment and help get you past that 1st contact to the 2nd and beyond to the 5th contact where 80% of sales are made. You will save time, stayed organized and drive more traffic to your business!

Questions? No problem. Contact  Cheryl Scoffield, Follow Up Specialist.

Third annual Small Business Showcase: a Bridges to Better Business event taking place on Wednesday 7^th October, from 2pm – 9pm at the Waterloo Inn Hotel,Waterloo ON features small businesses from Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph and beyond!

The details as posted on their site;
The 2009 Small Business Showcase is made possible by the generous support of our sponsors. We’d like to take some time to recognize their contribution and helping to make this year’s event more successful than ever!

Firstly, our recently announced title sponsor, Scotiabank, will not only be sponsoring the event, but hosting the Bridges to Better Business seminar for Showcase exhibitors. Scotiabank is a proud supporter of small business and promise to share some insight from their “Get Growing for Business” initiative.

Tibor Shanto of Renbor Sales Solutions, Inc. is sponsoring one of the Showcase Seminar sessions. As a widely recognized sales expert, Tibor will be asking, “What’s in your pipeline?”.

Martin Buckland of Elite Resumes is sponsoring another of our Showcase Seminars, where he will be talking on the topic, “Help Build Your Business and Your Brand in a Competitive Environment”.

(Just a reminder, Showcase Seminars are FREE to attend, for both exhibitors and the visiting public!)

Last, but my no means least, Adam Smith of My IT Guy is sponsoring our refreshments–that’s right, he’s keeping the exhibitors running strong throughout the day!

The July August 2009 issue of this great regional business information publication features Southern Ontario’s Mayors Speak Out. Tom and Wendy Peters do a great job of publishing this long standing newspaper that promotes business in Mississauga and the surrounding area. The circulation is 30,000 – from Mississauga to Windsor..

For this issue they also sent a copy to the Prime Minister and the Ontario Premier’s Offices as well as to all the MP’s and MPP’s located in the distribution area of Southern/South-western Ontario.

As a result of my association with HAPPEN (Halton and Peel Professional Executive Network) and Hugh Black of HMB Communications, my article “Build Your Business With Networking In An Economic Downturn” was included on Page 16 of this issue.

If you are interested in advertising in the Mississauga Business Executive for October 18 – 24, 2009 which is Small Business Week, please contact Tom Peters, t.peters at busexec.com. He mentioned that this website is averaging 100,000 requests per month which is excellent for a B2B publication.

Trying to bring in more sales to your business? Find out how you can get into your clients’s head and heart without going out of your mind!

Join my business coach, Michel Neray from The Essential Message, for the next Essential Message Workshop Sales Telepathy –  April 22 - 4pm EST. You can still get the Early Bird pricing $27.77 which includes the workbook. Michel always gives great content and value for your money.

If you’re a coach, consultant, financial advisor, business owner or if your livelihood depends on sales in any way – and that probably includes everyone except government workers – then register for this teleclass now. This is going to be fun and a great way to build your business!

Interested in generating growth but facing the fact your existing team can only accomplish so much in any given day? Here is information to build a strategy and grow your team and achieve your goals. Click this link to read a great article from Jeremy Miller at Leapjob.com. Also you can see Jeremy interviewed on CP 24 regarding building the Next Generation Leaders. Surround yourself with great people and get the power of collaboration working for you.

If your business could utilize support on a flexible basis while you are out seeing clients and closing deals contact Cheryl Scoffield at www.ExecutiveSalesSupport.com. We will collaborate with you to build a system of support that works with you, increasing your effectiveness. Start planning and take the steps necessary to delegate work outside of your area of expertise.

Consistently communicating your message is an essential part of your marketing and a key element of sustaining momentum within your sales pipeline. Everyday your customers and prospects are become busier, therefore your message would benefit from being delivered on multiple channels. You may not know which channel will reach through and deliver the message that tips the scale, bringing your business to the top of their mind.  Increasing the channels you communicate through and the frequency of that communication, increases the chances that when your customer is on a burning platform and looking for solutions, your message will be there to solve their problem.

Email, phone, direct mail letters and email campaigns can all play a part within your communication package. Last newsletter I mentioned I use ACT as my contact database and SwiftPage to deliver email campaigns. For example an email campaign was used to deliver this newsletter message. You may have considered sending a campaign for your business. This newsletter, we will look at email campaigns and how analyzing the statistics they generate, can help sustain sales momentum.

We might think of email campaigns as the direct mail of the internet, although there are several added benefits when you utilize email to deliver your message. Benefits such as delivering your message to more customers and prospects and delivering it faster are some of the first I think of. These benefits alone help sustain sales momentum simply by increasing the number of customers and prospects that hear your message.

Delivering by email campaign gets your message working overtime in several additional ways. Most importantly, email campaigns generate statistics. Let us take an overview look at how analyzing these statistics can improve the effectiveness not only of your message but also your follow through.

One way to start utilizing campaign statistics is to implement split testing to improve message targeting. Split testing is a method that sends your message with two slightly different wording and uses statistics to determine which message drew more attention. Another important factor about email is that it enables you to highlight words within your message. The highlighted words, called hyperlinks, take the reader to places such as your website where more information about your business and the products you offer can be found. As these links are followed, statistics are generated. Analyzing this statistic, gives you insight into generally which products interests your customers and prospects and specifically who is interested in those products.

In summary, email campaigns improve your ability to sustain sales momentum by not only delivering your message to more customers and prospects and doing it faster, but also by producing statistics. Analyzing these statistics, gives you insight into what interests your contacts, enabling you to target your message more effectively and improving your follow up by equipping you with statistical knowledge.

While you are out seeing clients and closing deals, do not forget to ask how your customers and prospects heard of your company. Their answers will enable you to track which communication channel is providing impact.

If email campaigns are an initiative you would like to investigate or implement for your marketing and sales cycle, but time or knowledge has been holding you back, take this opportunity and learn more on our dime. Email today for your consultation Cheryl at ExecutiveSalesSupport.com

If you would like to use this article please include this bio box – Written by Cheryl at Executive Sales Support.com