By Chris Ilcin, Account Superintendent, Sonnhalter
How to Keep and Generate Business with Social Media
So, you’ve got a social media presence. Congrats, but if you’re just looking for likes, and pushing out press releases, all you’re doing is pushing out.
How do you also use Social Media to pull in potential customers? Utilize a two prong strategy.
Part One – Tell us How We Messed Up (more…)
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
Sales and marketing need to work closer together make the selling process better. Marketing departments that create great content but don’t share it with the sales force are missing opportunities. Yes, it’s important to get it out on the blog and other social media avenues but your sales force doesn’t always have access to or are aware of what’s up there.
Sales is looking for support in the selling cycle no matter how simple or complicated the sales funnel is. This chart from emarketer.com illustrates that point.
Well-produced and -managed marketing content sets up awareness, creates demand and enables sales. Here are some key takeaways on how marketing departments can use content for sales support: (more…)
By Rachel Kerstetter, PR Architect
How should you run your social media?
To answer that question, perhaps you should ask instead, “How would my grandfather have run his business?” Or at least that’s the question Mark Schaefer asked. Mark is a globally-recognized speaker, educator, business consultant, and author, and he blogs at one of the top marketing blogs of the world.
One of his recent videos, “Social media marketing lessons from my grandfather, the plumber,” dug into the attributes that made his grandfather successful in the plumbing business and how they can be applied to social media. For those of us marketing to the trades, his example is even more important.
How did Mark’s grandfather, a plumber from Pittsburgh, grow a successful business? (more…)
By Chris Ilcin, Account Superintendent, Sonnhalter
I’m addicted to TEDTalks. If you don’t know what they are, here’s a primer from their website.
“TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.”
Part of this initiative is a weekly radio program that takes a look at a theme through insights from several TEDTalks, called the TED Radio Hour.
They recently had an episode dedicated to Value, Brand and how our brains process the “worth” of something. Turns out, it’s all way more subjective that you may think.
Every day you assign value to a thousand things without ever thinking about it. How? What biases come into play, and what can nudge those biases so much that you notice that you’re being manipulated? And can you even use that realization to your benefit?
And that’s the line great content marketing should straddle. Yes, at the end of the day you are trying to push the customer towards your product, and a consumer should realize that as well. But if the content itself still provides useful information, or is packaged in a way that acknowledges that transaction, it can still be beneficial.
This post originally appeared on INSIGHT2PROFIT.com
While common, price overrides can be dangerous. They train your sales team and customers that price is negotiable and interferes with one of your primary goals: sticking to your pricing strategy.
If that doesn’t worry you, consider this: companies that grant high numbers of ad hoc price exceptions are more likely to experience price erosion across all customers.
An effective and mature pricing strategy includes a policy for establishing price overrides. But what would such a policy look like?
From experience, we know that managing override activity is a multi-layered process. It requires adapting your internal systems, developing new guidelines, and transforming your culture. But at the end of the day, your goal is to establish a framework to monitor and manage potentially dangerous price overrides. When we help our clients with the same goal, we use the following four-step process.
Step 1: Grow Your Awareness: Understand what pricing overrides are happening and why
Step 2: Determine Market Relevance: Set appropriate prices for specific customer and product segments
Step 3: Set Policy: Establish guidelines and controls around pricing authority
Step 4: Encourage Training: Empower the sales organizations with the tools they need to handle pricing conversations with clients
Let’s dig deeper into each of the four steps.