Business Leads UK

Morning,

 

Happy New Year and let’s make 2010 a year to remember...

Check out how we can help you and your business pals get off to a flying start here at BLUK ...

Go spread the word ...

http://www.businessleadgeneration.co.uk/news40.html

 

FREE Blog with RSS feed ...

“So what’s that all about Jon?”

Go find out ...

http://www.liaiseonline.co.uk/news213.html 

 

Sustainable business development project

I’m looking for a project where I’m not just using my online marketing skills but re-engaging my business development sales skills. Go take a read and connect me as you see appropriate ...

http://www.jondavey.co.uk/news39.html

 

The best sales strategies to increase sales

Seven of the best sales strategies to gain increased sales results and sales effectiveness in FY2010

This was written to help sales managers boost their teams at the back of 2009 but it makes for great reading and direction for the start of 2010!

http://www.salestrainingconsultancy.co.uk/news18.html

I have published Strategy 1 to get you in the mood...

Strategy 1 – Are you sales people working harder or smarter?

The pressure is on at the end of year to get as much revenue in as possible. There is no time for slacking and mangers want to see their teams being productive and taking positive action everyday towards achieving the team targets. However, with the increased pressure to perform, are your sales people really taking positive action that will actually help them to achieve targets or are they simply keeping busy?

When I visit sales organisation, I like to spend some time listening into sales calls and identifying how sales people are utilising their time. In order to check if the are using their time effectively, I generally ask the sales people to show me their 'to do list' for the day.

Once we have, the ‘to do list’ I then go through each item and ask them…

• Why is this task important for you to do today?
• How will it help you to achieve your goals and target?
• What is the benefit of taking this action today?
• What is the consequence of you not taking this action?
• How long have you had this on your to do list for?

I promise you, you would be amazed at the results I get. Approximately, 30% of what is on their list is actually important for them to do today and the other 70% is simply keeping them busy.

Try it today, Sit down with your sales people and ask them to show you their 'to do list' and ask the above questions. With only eight weeks left in FY2009, time is off the essence so the tasks on your sales peoples 'to do list' should be helping them to work smarter not harder.

By completing the above exercise, you will undoubtedly improve the effectiveness of your sales people.

 

http://www.salestrainingconsultancy.co.uk/news18.html

 

Let’s get the party started...

Jon Davey

01753 852904

P.S. Just time for a snow ball fight before lunch and then back to my desk to start saving the world!!
 

Service helps businesses grow online and offline relationships

London, UK – 24 November 2009: WeCanDo.BIZ Limited, the online sales leads and business referrals network, has launched a Social CRM addition to its established website to assist small business owners to turn their social networking contacts into customers.  Called WeCanDoCRM, the service is free to all businesses at www.wecando.biz.

Social CRM is the merging of social networks with Customer Relationship Management to help businesses manage and build customer relationships using the information that customers freely share through their online profiles.  Social CRM also includes using social networking resources to help improve customer dialogue.

Focused towards small business owner/managers looking to use social media to help grow their businesses, the new features announced with WeCanDoCRM enable:

-          Consolidation of contacts from website enquiry forms, Microsoft Outlook, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ecademy and existing customer databases to one location, making contacts and customers easier to manage and communicate with

-          Improved data currency and accuracy through linking CRM records with public social networking profiles

-          Access to further rich data collected from public social networking profiles to supplement customer information already held

-          Advanced Customer Relationship Management features such as lead & sales management workflow, HTML email & mobile SMS (Short Message Service) campaign marketing, customer surveys and rich reporting as an upgrade option

-          Integration to online accounts systems, such as Kashflow, providing full sales workflow from leads through to invoicing.

These new Social CRM features are in addition to the many business networking features of WeCanDo.BIZ, including Biz Need business sales leads; and an endorsement system to share customer endorsements on your social networking profile, blog or website.  The WeCanDo.BIZ website has over 12,500 registered users.

“As I build contacts online WeCanDoCRM captures customer data straight into the system  – that’s fantastic, as I can be straight onto potential opportunities with fundamentally no delay or need for administration,” says Will Hawkins of Healthy Business Ltd., a WeCanDo.BIZ user and early adopter of WeCanDoCRM.  “I have access to information about my customers that many large businesses can only dream about!”

“A lot of business owners are scratching their heads, trying to work out what social networks can do for them, how they build their contacts and then how they convert them into customers,” says Ian Hendry, founder and Chief Executive of WeCanDo.BIZ.  “The fact is, there are opportunities being presented all the time through social network connections, but unless you record them they’re quickly lost amongst the noise.  WeCanDoCRM assists in building rich customer profiles of your online and offline contacts; then provides tools to help advance the relationship to the point where business gets done — quickly and easily.”

WeCanDoCRM Social CRM is powered by the InTouch CRM platform and is available immediately, free to all businesses from www.wecando.biz.  WeCanDo.BIZ Pro Networker membership is an optional upgrade enabling small businesses to use social media to grow even faster from £19.95 + VAT per month with no contract.

About WeCanDo.BIZ

WeCanDo.BIZ is an online new business network for sales leads and referrals. Using social networking methods to broker valuable new business relationships, it provides simple tools to members which help generate sales leads, leverage customer referrals and win new business.  The web-based service is available to all businesses at www.wecando.biz.

For the non-techies that means you can come and have a play with a test version!

Our Twitter Sales Leads page puts all the posts Twitter users are making for a need for products or services you supply on one page.  We filter out the 27 million 'tweets' a day to just those relevant to you and expressed as a need for what you offer!

You can view your Twitter Sales Leads now at http://www.wecando.biz/sales_leads.php

You can sign in with your Twitter account (like this site offers) and you'll need to complete a quick business profile so we know what you do to go and find the leads.

All feedback welcomed!

I got wondering just where people’s expectations are as far as the cost of a sales lead. So I decided to draw up some comparisons with methods I have advocated in the past. I’d love to read your comments as the article is bound to get some reaction from an audience focused around business leads!

A summary of the stats:

Telesales/telemarketing — CPL £200 – £385
Email marketing — CPL £179
Web advertising (banner) — CPL £30 – £50
Web advertising (affiliate) – N/A
Web advertising (Google Adwords) — CPL £21.50
Twitter Sales Leads tool — CPL £1

As we get more feedback to the article from Twitter and other sources we're improving the accuracy f the figures on our original article at  http://bit.ly/3NjoDu.

Let us know what you think or whether you can provide more accurate figures to update the article.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

I'd like to know your thoughts on this...

How many people do you think are visiting our Businessleadgeneration.co.uk website using the search string business leads ... we have been top for a few months and the various seo tools tell me to expect x and y but we appear to be getting z !

For the phrase business leads, how many people do you think search that phrase in a given month?
 

I recently carried out a survey of over 60 companies that asked which marketing tools are best for acquiring new customers. In #1 slot was Face to face networking. In #2 & #3 slots were Partners & agencies and Articles & white papers.

Many prospects use their perception of Relationship, Expertise and Trust (RET) to help select suppliers. The top 3 certainly help support this view.
By comparison the bottom three marketing tools were: Call centres, Price cuts and Cold calling. None of these are very likely to help anyone’s RET rating.

 
We carry out RET customer surveys for individual clients and while results do vary the results of this multi company survey are pretty consistent. I can certainly see that RET is becoming increasing important to prospects as the economic environment becomes harsher. Hence the increased drive to be more customer focused in everything that we do.

To read more about the survey results on the best marketing tools visit www.simpleplans.co.uk/7.HTML   Be interesting to hear if you get similar results.

Because I spend a significant chunk of my time wandering around all the various networks that touch on sales and selling issues, I see a lot of anguished debate about selling and sales management, much of it essentially revolving around core questions like “How can I sell better/more” or “How can I recruit/train/motivate my sales staff so that they will sell better/more”.

Lots of questions are then sub-sets of those basic problems and questions, like “Why won’t sales people use CRM systems?” or “What percentage of salary should be commission based?” or “What is the best sales process for getting from unknown, to lead, to prospect, to customer?”

All the time, I guess my subconscious was churning these various questions, answers and sales tips around – looking for the numero uno “best” answer. And this included reflecting on my own career in sales, across a wide range of multi-media products and services.

So there I was then, having a leak, as you do, and the answer popped into my head. Want to know what it was?....

“Sell the stuff that people want to buy!”

“Simples” right? Well, it’s a simple sentence alright, and it’s supported by a mass of incontrovertible proof. For example from my own life, listening to advertising clients of Certified Accountant magazine (quite a tough sell, even though we did make a series of pretty steep targets, initially quadrupling revenues), meant that we launched both PASS magazine to hit the part-qualified accountants and The Accountants’ Exhibition, between them achieving something like 8 times the revenues of even that quadrupled sum. So, comparatively, they were an absolute breeze to sell, and certainly financially rewarding – personally and corporately.

Or look to the wider world, and what or who do you see selling spectacularly well these days? Google, Microsoft? Yes sure them and lots of other IT firms following or fuelling the massive surge in online and computer-based activity. But check out the top 10 FTSE performers since 1996 too, and you’ll see some eye-watering results in property (Savills) and construction (McCarthy & Stone – retirement flats) or Workspace Group (flexible office accommodation) plus oil & gas, all feeding the very basic and overwhelming demand from us all, for more and better places to live and work, with the energy supplies to go with it. And let’s draw a veil over tobacco and hedge funds – possibly a bit controversial! But are these companies doing so spectacularly well because they employ only the best, and a different breed of, sales people? No – or I doubt it anyway. They’re having a great time selling, because they’re selling what the maximum number of people actually wants to buy.

The “simples” aspect starts to evaporate, however, if you face the fact that we can’t all work in the rising industries, nor do we all have the freedom to adapt and innovate around our core products and services quite as easily as with my personal examples (although maybe we should be pushing harder in this area – and actually it wasn’t all that “easy” folks!). However I have found, when starting to question the “Tip” from these different angles, that it does, nonetheless, have a similar robustness of truth and validity in it. If, for example, you apply it to the issue of lead generation or cold calling, you can use it to guide your thinking and activities to seeking out the people who really do want to buy whatever it is you’re selling.

So then, let the example be fitted kitchens and ask yourself “Is my next ‘unknown’ contact likely to want to buy a fitted kitchen?” And, if the answer is “Well, 99 times out of 100, probably not”, then ask yourself what you or your company could do that would make that 9 times out of 10, or 4 times out of 5, or better? (And this might also give you a clue as to why 99 prospect contacts out of 100 do not make it on to the CRM system).

Or maybe have a little listen to the 99, and see how many of them might want anything to do with home improvements, like feedback to you saying “Well yes, we are hoping to sell this house, and a new fitted kitchen would certainly help it to sell, but we haven’t got the finances to achieve that, and anyway we can’t work out the sums to show that £10K spent putting one in would get us £15K back in an improved sale price – can you help with that?” Perhaps, that way, you’d find that offering a “home improvement package” that included not just the fitted kitchen, but also the (good value!) financial support to get the job done, you would indeed have improved the likelihood of offering what people (on that cold-call list) wanted, from 1 in 100 to 5 in 100. And, if you layer on top of that the possibility of targeting relevant looking property that was sitting around unsold, and focussed your calls on those – we might even be getting to 10 in 100. Mind you, if it were at all possible to tie up some kind of referral package with Savills (doing very well, but we all want to do even better), such that they recommended that “sticky” property owners applied to you, for that “self-financing kitchen refurbishment package” well, who’s to say you wouldn’t be talking to 50 out of 100, very successfully indeed!?

It does mean that your opening “sales pitch” will not be anything remotely along the lines of having fitters in the area or special offers for show homes, yada, yada, yada. Because to find out what they want to buy, you’ll have to ask something like “Is there any reason or way that you would want to improve the current kitchen in your property?” – without assuming that they see it as a “home” that they want to improve for their own consumption. And if you get some “smartass” answer like “Sure, if it was free!” you’ve at least got the knowledge that they do want to improve it, and now the possibility that, if they are selling in the foreseeable future, then it might not only be free, but profitable – for them! (Be sure to have your proof available though, won’t you?)

All good, as far as I can see – but I’d be interested if any of you have further examples or scenarios that would support this fabulous new sales tip – (or shoot it down in flames, of course, because I’m listening!)

Jon Davey can provide you with a bunch of tools to help you drive web visitors and turn them into sales leads... we can even take those sales leads and drop them into a CRM system which will allow you to dialogue with them until they buy or fly!!

We have a few websites that have a business lead focus and I wanted to understand how well those sites are performing in relation to other sites. The only way to do this was to compare how many of our pages are found page 1 of Google for the top 20 key phrases that relate to sales leads or business leads.

For the top 20 key phrases currently (September 09) in use around these core terms we have an average page one listing of 36% ... that means if you use one of the top 3 search engines and you are using one of the top 20 key phrases around business/sales leads then one of our websites will appear on page 1, 36 out of 100 searches!!!!! Yahoo brings us to the party 46% of the time...

Sounds pretty good to me ... looks like we know what we are doing ... do you know of better?

• Do you want to know more?

• Would you like to know exactly what these phrases are to check things out for yourself?

• How about a list of key phrases relating to your world, your product, your service?

Call Jon on 01753 852904 or complete our form with your question.

Thank you.

The online community for business men and women who like the idea of connecting face to face online before they take time, energy and resources to meet in real time!

The economy is static as we all wait for the big companies to become brave again and start spending money so it can filter down to the smaller businesses who make up the bulk of the business community here in the UK.

Business Leads UK is about generating business in the UK for UK businesses. It is the only way the real businesses will survive. You need to do business with local businesses that pay taxes locally. It might be cheaper from the Far East but how does that help the local economy? OK, when China owns all the banks in the UK then it might be politically correct to favour their offering over... oh, nobody else’s! Do you hear what I am saying or have you still got your head in the sand?

You can sign up for Business Leads UK for FREE until the 20th October 2009

On the 20th October 2009 the site will be officially launched at a business networking event at The Firestation, Centre for Arts and Culture in Windsor, Berkshire. You can attend this event by booking here: Building Your Own Online Community

On the 20th October the fee to join will be exactly £1 for every current member, or £100, whichever is the lowest, we’re not greedy!

The fee will be a one off fee, we all hate having standing orders coming out for amounts we’ve forgotten about, especially when they are £100 or more... it creates a bad vibe.

As the membership grows, so will the value of the contributions and so therefore will the one off fixed fee... seems like a fair model to me... but then it would... does it work for you?

• Go join up ASAP for FREE, add your profile, send us your feedback on the categories you would like so we can add one, just for you!

• Comment on the articles of others... be friendly and other members will engage with you.

• You can add articles, promote events, take RSS feeds off to other sites...

And on the official launch day we will also be bringing you REAL TIME VIDEO CHAT! The ability to chat online without having to leave your office with other members of the community... now that’s exciting and takes this community one step ahead of the rest... which is where you need to be if you want to find new business leads in the UK.

We’ll have some basic rules about quality of content... if people are pitching all the time with no other contributions then they will be asked to leave as that can be irritating for the rest of us who want to grow our businesses but understand we need to assist our fellow community members.

There will be no banner advertising on the Business Leads UK site... the revenue will be drawn from membership and we will invest back into the community in regards to offline networking events as the momentum grows.

Thank you.

Check out www.businessleadsuk.co.uk

Jon Davey
NEW Business Generator
www.jondavey.co.uk
01753 852904 – 07881 744495