How’s your week been? I hope productive and successful and you’re looking forward to a refreshing and relaxing weekend filled with idle moments and sunspot naps.

Seems as though my week was filled with administrivia. One of those weeks where every day you get in to your office, look at the things you need to get done, then get to work. At the end of the day, you look back at your accomplishments and wonder what happened to the day! Yikes, I hate it when that happens.

We did make progress on a few things though.

We launched our ACT! On-line training series this week with a GoToMeeting class on Thursday morning and another this afternoon. Both sessions filled to capacity pretty quickly with ACT! users hungry to learn more about segmenting their database using Groups, Companies, and Relationships. Next week our On-line series will be on Activity Management in ACT!. We will be talking about some advanced techniques in how to make sure you get done what you need to get done, when you need to get it done.

On April 28th, we are hosting an ACT! User Group meeting at the Southdale Library in Edina. Our topic for April is Eat That Frog! Have you read it yet? Awesome book by Brian Tracy. Brian goes in to great detail on his 21 ways to stop procrastination and get more done in less time. Great read. At our User Group meeting on the 28th, we are going to discuss and demonstrate what Brian teaches in his book applied in an ACT! environment. Should be an entertaining and perhaps even educational meeting.

I would love to hear back from you especially if you have any suggestions for topics. You can add a comment to this post if you want and let me know what you would like to see as an on-line class or discussed at one of our User Group meetings.

Enjoy your weekend and I’ll be back in touch soon.

Ken

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1. Events
2. Database or Rolodex?
3. Thanksgiving thoughts.

So, is it me or is everyone feeling like the days are just flying by? I feel like the Adam Sandler character in the movie “Click” with the fast-forward button stuck in fast-forward mode. Good grief! I certainly don’t remember time going by this fast when I was waiting for my 21st birthday to come around.  Sorry, I’ll stop whining now.

OK, so here we are at Thanksgiving. What are you thankful for? I’ve got a list, long as my arm of all the things I can think of, right off the top of my head. You probably do too. Top of my list are our troops. God bless them and the work they do! Without them, we wouldn’t have the freedom to be an entrepreneur, or own a business. Sure, times are tough right now. Economy is down, job market is tight, belts are tighter, but in this Country, life is good, and for that, thank a soldier!

You know what else I’m thankful for? Technology. I LOVE technology! Bring it on and bring me more! I’ve got one television in my house and five computers. The computer on my desk that I’m using to write this has more processing power, memory and hard-drive space than the computer that ran the entire hospital I worked at back in the 80’s, and that computer filled a room. A very big room. This computer sits under my desk.

Speaking of technology and being thankful for things, I’m really thankful for backups. In the last week, I’ve worked with two clients that had to recover data from their backups. The recovery process was smooth and their systems restored perfectly, but I’m reminded that it’s easy to become complacent and take that sort of thing for granted. A few months ago I worked with a client that wasn’t so fortunate. Their backup didn’t restore, and that recovery process was an entirely different story. Painful, to say the least. So, what’s in your backup? Have you tested it lately? Do you have the peace-of-mind that if you had to restore from backup you actually could? Are you backing up all the mission-critical files you need to keep your business running smoothly and of equal importance, have you tested your backups to make sure recovery is possible, not impossible. I really do love technology but I love it more when it works! Stop back again next week as I’ll share some more insight on some awesome technology designed to save you time and make you more productive.

All of us here at True North Partners wish you and your family a wonderful and blessed Thanksgiving holiday. Enjoy your freedom and say a prayer for our troops!

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3. 16 Rules For Success by Bob Parsons

Automation is a great way to improve processes across all divisions including….

• Technology
• Administrative
• Marketing
• Sales
• Customer Service

Man power is often the largest small business expense. Today’s hosted technology can offer incredible efficiencies without the hardware and licensing costs of previous solutions. Look for Software as a Service (Saas) companies that can help you interaction with your customers, employees and vendors without as much human interaction. New technology offerings are available everyday and many allow you to try before you buy.

Many small businesses mistakenly try to cut costs by doing everything themselves. The truth is, you’ll probably save a lot of time and money by implementing effective administrative processes such as:

• Use technology to manage administrative tasks such as billing, collections and data management.
• When human resources are necessary, consider interns, virtual assistants or shared resources.
• Make sure you have systems and processes in place. When your business grows you want to make sure your company can scale with the growth and not come unraveled.
• You can’t be an expert in everything.
• Don’t be afraid to outsource. For more great tips check out: http://www.insidecrm.com/features/78-ways-save-economy-101408
• Don’t be afraid to renegotiate your lease…now is the time
• Renegotiate with your vendors/suppliers
• Turn to your employees to ask for efficiency ideas
• Lease equipment instead of buying
• Consider bartering or exchanging product/services
• Hold off on new hires and consider contract labor
• Negotiate discounts based on volume or longer-term commitments
• Go green – turn off unused electricity and find ways to cut waste

There are efficiencies that can be made to your marketing processes.

• Use data and analysis to make sure you are cutting cost only on those programs that are the least productive.
• Don’t just turn off the faucet all together, cut marketing expenditures only when the analysis proves it is your least effective form of driving revenue.
• Maximize your time and resources.
• Learn how and when to delegate and outsource.

Nurture Your Leads!
How well do you keep in contact with your leads? Remember, being out of touch can quickly lead to being out of business.

Once a lead is created, the worst thing you can do is let it slip through the cracks. Are you guilty of this? Before you jump on Facebook, spend money on Pay-Per-Click, re-design your website to capture leads and kick your affiliate program into high gear, make sure you can properly manage your leads and lead conversion.

Make sure you have a lead management process:

• What happens to new leads
• How are you following-up
• How often are you following-up
• How are you tracking the lead source
• What is your average conversion rate
• How can you improve conversion rates
• Are valuable leads falling through the cracks

Put processes in place to manage leads and ensure you are doing everything possible to convert leads into sales (I am currently working on a series of blogs regarding Fixing Follow-up Failure so stay tuned as those will be posted in the very near future). In short, there are tools to help you manage your customer leads and help you follow-up effectively.

The process of tracking your marketing success is important too. Don’t spend money unless you can prove its value…

• Ask – where did they hear about you
• Use unique phone numbers for different ads
• Use trackable links for online ads
• Use promo codes to track the success of campaigns
• Split test email and website ocntent and design
• Track all referral programs with unique identifiers

Once a lead is passed from marketing to sales, you must be confident that there is a good process in place to convert leads and close deals. A good process will help you:

• Increase sales effectiveness
• Warm leads
• Shorten the sales cycle

Implementing better sales processes will pay off quickly. If you’re looking for a great book that describes how to put together a “bankable” forecast, then take a look at Sales Revenue System 2.0 by Carl Moe. (check it out here)

The average sale closes at 5 or more contacts but sales reps often give up after 3 attempts. What does this mean for you? It means you are losing deals because of follow-up failure. According to Marketing For Success – 80% of potential sales are lost due to lack of follow-up. What is follow-up? Follow-up is simply establishing a long-term relationship with prospects through a series of ongoing communications. Prospects will buy when they are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell to them. Follow-up positions you to be in-front of the prospect when they are ready to buy. Proper follow-up can be time consuming if you don’t have the right tools to manage the process. Automated follow-up will allow you to easily and effectively manage the process.

Visiting your store or talking with a live sales rep should not be the only way a prospect can buy from you. Make it easy for a customer to purchase when they wish, how they wish by leveraging ecommerce. Ecommerce does not always mean a tangible product. Offer service packages, memberships, content downloads, etc via a shopping cart or online order form. Encourage ecommerce transactions with special incentives for online orders. Make sure your ecommerce tool has the ability to add upsells and cross-sell offers to an order. Use electronic transactional receipts to offer additional, relevant products/services. By implementing these ecommerce features, you may quickly discover that your website is your most effective sales rep.

Customer service is a critical factor in client satisfaction and retention. You must deliver excellent customer service to create and keep loyal customers. There are several ways to automate components of customer service in a way that will:

• Cut costs
• Increase the Quality of your Service
• Increase your ability to scale your Service Offerings

Some other thoughts on ways to leverage your customer service experience:

• Use the Internet to post FAQs and other self-help content.
• Use community software to encourage customers to help other customers or to post answers to questions that your general customer base might be looking for
• Create weekly webinars to assist customers in a one-to-many environment vs. one-to-one.

So far we have talked about  3 of the 4 tools in the ultimate THRIVAL kit:

• Loyal Customers
• Economical Marketing Strategies
• Effective Processes

Along with each of these tools, we have provided tips and tricks and specific things you can do implement them in your own business. The final tip is a bit difficult because it all hinges on you. It is a positive attitude combined with a little creativity. Next week, we will conclude our segment on marketing in a down economy, by discussing Positive Attitude and Creativity.

Enjoy your day!

Ken

Related posts:

1. Get Positive!
2. Make Your Business Thrive!
3. Economical Marketing Strategies

Welcome to Fixing Follow-up Failure! This section of our website is dedicated to posts regarding strategies and techniques specifically geared towards stopping the insanity of follow-up failure. We’ve got a lot to talk about so stay tuned and check back often. As a matter of fact, you might want to subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter (you can do both from our home page, upper right corner).

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