Share on FacebookMay 1, 2008
by Mike Cooch | www.everonit.com
Everyone has heard this promise: Using the internet can grow your business, increase profits, and simplify operations.The question, however, is: How many businesses are using available web tools and know-how to their greatest advantage?
The answer when it comes to small businesses is: not many.
About a decade ago, when the web was first getting hot, it was nearly impossible for small businesses to take advantage of the web; it was just too expensive and difficult to find talent to help you. Thankfully this has all changed.
Over the last two years in particular, it has become much easier to find tools and talent that are specifically geared towards helping small businesses find success on the web. One of the most exciting and lucrative opportunities for small businesses is to create an integrated, complete sales process that’s built on the web.
What are the advantages of building a web-based sales process?
How to create a web-based sales process?
For the sake of this article, let’s assume that a sales process has the following steps:
During this process, it is fair for you to expect to see accurate data that measures the success of each step, giving you insight about what works and what doesn’t.
Let’s look at strategies and tools for each step:
Creating awareness
The first step to generating new business- let the world know you exist and that you have valuable products and services available for the right customers. There are many traditional ways of getting exposure for your business, all of which can be duplicated or enhanced using the web. These activities include:
Let’s look at pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns as an example of building awareness on the web. You’ve probably heard of PPC campaigns; this is the service that has made Google the dominant force that it is. It’s pretty simple, you post an ad through Google that appears when someone searches for a relevant search term. Your ad appears and you get charged a success fee if a prospect clicks on it.
Don’t be fooled by the simplicity – this is incredibly powerful for small businesses. Why? Because Google is bringing you pre-qualified prospects, and you only pay when they acknowledge your ads existence. Powerful stuff!
Capturing leads
Now that you’ve got their attention, you want to get to know them. For most businesses, you’ll do this in one of two ways:
Once they’ve raised their hands and expressed interest, they become a more likely lead for your business; their value to you goes up dramatically. Thanks to available technology, these events are completely measurable, so you know exactly what results your website is generating and what the value is to your business.
Communicating with leads on an on-going basis
Now that they’ve raised their hand, you’ll want an efficient way to keep in touch with and qualify these new leads to determine which ones are the real deal and worth spending more time, money, and energy on.
This is where a great tool called auto-responders comes in handy. Auto-responders allow you to automatically reply to a prospect’s contact request my sending a personalized email message from your company.
The real power of auto-responders is that you can also pre-schedule an entire series of communication to your new prospect, giving the impression that you are thoughtfully following up with them over time. The key to the simplicity of this- it’s all automated, and it’s all measurable.
Qualifying leads
As I mentioned in the ‘Capturing leads’ section, qualification begins as soon as someone expresses interest by clicking on your ad and either filling out your contact form or calling your company.
Depending on what you are selling and your sales philosophies, you may now further qualify this lead by in-person meeting, a conversation over the phone, or through continued email correspondence to the lead.
The beauty of the last method is that it doesn’t require any manpower, making it almost infinitely scalable. How do you further qualify using email? By sending a series of messages, you should effectively be able to trigger and move the most qualified leads down the sales path, eventually getting them to complete a transaction with your business.
Completing a transaction
Finally, the big win – completing a sales transaction with the customer – after all of that hard work you just did.
But wait a minute…was it hard work?
Not really, considering the whole process was automated, with minor exceptions for some industries or products. Now, I’m not saying it wasn’t work…this all requires some thoughtful set up and ongoing management based on the measurement feedback you are getting – but that’s a lot nicer than making 150 cold calls per day!
Filed under Small Business Web Strategies