‘Cause customers won’t give you a second chance.
My wife loves shoes, and buying shoes is definitely her weakness. So we’re lingering about downtown doing a little window-shopping when we wander into a rather upscale shoe store. As my wife perused the displays, a sales clerk approached and asked us if he could be of assistance. Holding a pair of Christian Louboutin’s she politely asked the clerk if he could tell her why they were so expensive? If you’re a shoe enthusiast, you’ll know that to purchase a luxury ‘red souled’ Louboutin requires to most a second mortgage. This was the perfect opportunity to convince – or at the very least influence – a customer on the value of the Louboutin brand. Unfortunately our sales clerk at this high-end shoe store failed miserably creating not only a lost sale but also a negative customer experience.

If your B2B company is about to undergo a website redesign there are a few important design elements that need to be considered prior to reconstruction. The face of your organization’s website is not something that should be overlooked. Some may argue that the back end or ‘what’s under the hood’ is what’s most important, and who can argue with that? After all, most companies today are focused on increased traffic and leads, so naturally their attention to ‘what’s under the hood’ is to be expected.

According to the “B2B SalesPulse Survey” from business information company OneSource B2B sales cycles are longer than a year ago, but pipelines are growing. The survey found that traditional outbound prospecting still produce the most qualified leads for U.S. B2B sales reps. However, companies are relying more and more on their corporate websites as well as social networking sites like LinkedIn to help with lead generation.

We’ve written many a post exploiting the virtues of business blogging and the positive effect it can have on your company. But, we’ve never touched on the area surrounding your post – notably the ‘side panel’ that is quite often neglected space.

Last week we wrote about the benefits of lead nurturing (The ‘Holy Moly’ of Lead Nurturing) and why every B2B company should be employing a process to keep in frequent touch with acquired leads. Forrester Research provides this incentive: companies that nurture leads have a closing rate 300% higher than competitors that don’t.

In the old days decision makers used a number of different sources to find the information they needed to help solve their business problems. Today, the old methods – brochures, tradeshows and even salespeople – have been replaced by the new order of doing business.

I think most blog posts are too long. I don’t think people have the time and for the most part people are intimidated by verbose and lengthy blogs. That’s why newspapers break up stories with bold ‘heads’ and ‘sub-heads’, add photos and diagrams, ‘cause they know you’re going to scan the article and they want to make it inviting to read.

If your business depends on the revenues of the upcoming holiday season then now is the time to take action. I know that we've all heard this before but I think it's worth repeating: "he who fails to plan, plans to fail." If you simply strategize your marketing efforts around these next few months you’ll stand a much better chance of increasing your sales volume over last year.

Most often we think of Twitter as a means of informing people what we're up to at any given time. This may be what we see on the surface, but used effectively, Twitter can accelerate the growth of your brand and your business.