Overcoming Objections

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this at 4 this morning, probably not my best work but thought I would leave as is, it could be humorous.

As I prepare for our sales meeting today I was thinking about the one piece of the agenda that seems to be on every sales meeting agenda I have ever attended and it will be part of ours as well. That section is overcoming objections, or Challenge/Response.

No matter where I have been one of the ways I can tell the people who are going to have the fastest path to success are the ones that do not start every conversation with their sales management team with "But the customer asked INSERT OBJECTION HERE.." The people that never have to ask how to get around those questions have the easiest path in the sales world. They just naturally have a knack to know what to say ahead of time.

For the past 10 years I have noticed this same thing, it just is.

For those that do start with that question and focus on the challenges they will always have a harder time, typically this means they need more training on the sales process from those that have been through it successfully. It means they need to make sure they answer the questions before they get asked and need to be told what to expect.

Now, I will say, if you are at a company that just has poor products or solutions then overcoming objections may be tough. But if you are at a company where you believe in the solution then usually it is just a matter of training to get the person to never have to hear the objection again.

The way I have always approached sales, and I try to help anyone that is on my team approach sales, is to think ahead of time to what the potential objections may be. Depending on the type of company you are at it could be any one of a million things, but the trick is to recognize and morph your presentation to answer the questions before they even get asked.

This is very important, if there is a valid objection then maybe you cannot hit that one, but the way most successful sales people never get asked the tough questions is because they answer them before they even come up. If you can establish your product and your company and focus on talking about the key points that many customers have asked that you know you have a positive answer too then there is never a negative perception.

That is one thing that many people miss, once the customer asks a question there is always a chance that there will be a slight negative perception even if the answer is solid. But if you lead with the answers and establish yourself then that negative vibe never comes into play.

Many people just naturally approach sales this way, they focus on the positive and come in with a passion for their company or product that tells the customer that there is something good here, I should be interested. And that right there is what it is all about, passion. Whether it be a domain name, a dog house, a cellphone. It does not matter, if you can be passionate about it and they recognize that it is real, then most objections have been overcome automatically.

Top 5 Small Business Website Mistakes

As we work with small business owners daily to develop their plan for their online presence we hear a lot of the same questions and at the end of the day the customer is always right but there are things we try to help people keep away from or things that we find that maybe they did not do the first time they built their site that they should do this time. Here are 5 things small businesses either need to avoid or need to think about when they have their websites built:

Music playing on site- This is a major thing to avoid, when websites were being bought and deployed because they were "neat" and new this was something a lot of people did. Also I have witnessed this a lot on customer sites that were built by non-professionals. Without fail the majority of people visiting your website will be turned off by the auto-playing music as soon as they hit your site. This is an absolute avoid. Please please do not do this.

Using templates based on framesets - This is something else I see weekly by customers who have bought websites from people that focus on vertical markets, many of these niche market template websites are based on frames and you lose the ability to link to individual pages of the site. This is very late 1990's. If you bought your website from a niche market provider or you had your website built in the late 90s or early 2000's and your site is built with frames it is time for an update.

Working with developers that do not understand SEO - This is also very common, in my mind if you are having a website built and basic SEO is not part of what they do by default what is the point, if you spend 5K for a website and no one ever goes there does it matter? No. This is a very common issue with older technology companies in an area that have never upgraded past the "tech" part of websites. This is also very common when people focus on the flashy/pretty part of the site and not on attracting customers. If you ever hear someone say "Oh yeah my sister was gonna build my website" this is probably going to be a problem as well. For the small business customer that may read this and needs to understand what I mean please feel free to use my contact me form.

Using Flash and only Flash to build a site - Last week I sat down with a potentially large Missouri.me advertising customer who also wants a custom website developed. Although we do not focus on custom websites in this case it makes sense for us to do it. But what was interesting is they brought up the site of their would be competitor and it was done almost 100 percent in Flash. Sure it looked great and did some cool stuff but it ranked no where in the search engines, all their traffic was from PPC. They focused on pretty and not getting customers. Flash is another item that decreases the ability of the small business owner to optimize their site for the search engines. Avoid making it the focus of your site.

Clip Art Animated GIF's - Just like the music reference above, this is very late 90s early 2000's. Having clip art based graphics on your site will turn users off. The little guy walking across the screen that is on a graphic is not something that is neat anymore. Please avoid this, clean nice looking graphics will be more interesting to your visitors.

Thanks to @DanSanchez for inspiring this post.

If you have questions about the right steps for your small business website please use the contact me link above to contact me. If you have more suggestions for small businesses to avoid feel free to put them in the comments section below.

Why I Am Not Afraid To Think Different

I have had people tell me I am a bit of a goof ball because I approach things a little different. I do not post the same thing all the other domain bloggers post or people say that I am nuts for saying invest in .COMs, .NETs, and .ORGs but then I go and build a business on .MEs.

Well, it is all about thinking different, most of the very successful people I know have always thought differently, they tend to have quirks and they tend to say or do things that people think are just a bit odd because, in the end, they did not think of it themselves first.

Most startup companies that do great things are successful because they were different, their founders were different, their idea took an old idea and made it something new. People said no way but by looking past that and seeing what could be (having vision) they succeeded in showing people that they need to quit looking back and start looking forward, or thinking different.

Well, I have a long history of being just a bit different and people telling me so at the time but I always felt my direction was going the right way even if I had headed down a different fork in the road than the person that went long before me.

A few examples of where I was a little "different":

I road Freestyle BMX (back in the day, mid to late 80s) before it was part of the multibillion dollar alternative sports industry. On a domaining note, I own BmxFreestyleBikes.com:)

When my mentor at AT&T told me to focus on something other than the Internet because it was a fad like the CB radio, well I did not listen. Good thing huh...

While at ATT I was asked to work on the first VoIP network team, all the 30 year Bellhead guys said get away, it is not going to work, you are wasting your time. Well I made it through the several years of telecom layoffs without ever losing a job because VoIP took off and grew. Heard of Skype or Google Voice, yep VoIP services.

In other words, I am ok with people questioning why I choose to do things a certain way that may not be the same path they took because in time a different approach may be needed for people just entering a certain area.

The point here is at times a different fork in the road may be needed to find success. In many cases the people that came before had a different set of circumstances that led to their success. But in most cases it took someone thinking differently, its ok, be different. Build that .TV or that .ME. If you cannot afford that 100K .COM find a new way to build your business.

Focus On What Could Be And Not What Is

It still amazes me (ok, probably not actually) that people ask me why I took the time to start a business on a dot me domain name. Why waste the time???

Well, as I have mentioned in past posts, the first thing domain investors need to do when they start to think about building a business is step outside of the inward focused thinking we all do since we are so close to our domain investments. We need to quit thinking about the NAME and more about a business model.

Much like buying the right domain names to resell is about building the correct domain investment model, the same goes when you have an idea for a business based on one of your domain names. No less than three times I have had people say why not just buy the .COM for X amount of dollars.

Come on, seriously, if you are going to start a business and you are not already starting with 10 million bucks in the bank of someone elses money before you have a dime in revenue how smart is it to actually spend hundreds of thousands on a domain name?

I know there are plenty of "dot anything other than .COM haters" out there that are disagreeing, probably never will read this blog again, but oh well. It is the truth. There is a reason you see many companies that have started up not get their .COM domain that they end up spending 100K on until after the fact. That reason is that they would of never even got off the ground if they would of spent that money on the name rather than focusing on their business first.

Do not get me wrong, most people miss the point with the conversation above, the point is not that the name is not valuable, but it is not so valuable that the business should never start just because you do not have the name. It cracks me up when people act like that, and I see it virtually anytime I head to the message boards or make a post about alternative extensions.

I know you are thinking what the heck, why would you say this when you want to sell domain names at a profit. Once again, you miss the point, the point is the name is valuable, they should buy the name at some point. In many cases these whiz bang new companies end up on TechCrunch in a story that XYZ company buys ABC name after getting their B round of funding. How many times have you read stories like that? It has been more than a few times. But if the company had 250K of seed funding does it make sense to spend 100K on a name? NOPE NOT AT ALL.

So, if you are a domain investor and you have a great idea for a business but since you are so close to the domain industry you cannot see what could be but instead are only focused on having to have the .COM before starting you need to step out of the industry for a second and think like so many other people who HAVE started successful businesses without their keyword .COM and get moving.

I will say it one more time, focus on what could be not what is!

Internet Marketing Seminar In Bonne Terre – Thanks Small Business Leaders!

Thanks to the small business owners from Bonne Terre, MO and surrounding communities for taking the time to come to our local search and online marketing seminar held at Mario's Italian Grill. I know that you are all extremely busy and taking 2 hours of your time after hours is asking a lot, especially when it is concerning a topic that is new to many and before the presentation was probably something you thought a business in rural Missouri may not need to be concerned with.

As you know now, it is very important to take advantage of all online avenues to create a holistic online marketing plan, from your Domain Name selection to your use of Facebook and Twitter, it all needs to work together to make sure you customers remember your brand and know where to go to find out what you are doing next, what specials you have or new products you are introducing. As I mentioned, finding targeted visitors for your website is key, understanding what customers are searching for when looking for a service or product you sell is how you focus on turning browsers into buyers. As I mentioned, no longer is having a website something you do simply because you can, now with the shift of newspaper readers and local business search moving online faster than ever you have to think about how your customers use the web even if you do not.

As I mentioned a portion of the content on this blog is targeted at helping my small business customers, as such I thought I would point out a few posts that I have done that you may find useful:

Why Small Business Should Advertise Online - Open Letter

Why Small Business Should Advertise During Down Times

Offline Ways To Promote Your Website

How To Create A Facebook Fan Page

Once again, thank you for my time and let me know how I can help!

You Never Know Who Is Watching

Just got back from an all day meeting so this post will be short today since there is so much left to do today but wanted to tell a little story.

As a blogger (I still do not really consider myself one, but I guess technically I am) we tend to put out what we think, somewhat edited for public consumption, sometimes not so much. I have a balance I try to play here between domain news and general online promotion and marketing topics and so far no one has screamed so the balance I hope is working. As of late I had some level of focus with some of my posts around what my customers would want or needed to hear.

One of the posts was An Open Letter To Small Business Owners which focused on the various things that businesses needed to think about as the Internet changes the way they promote their business, I was not targeting the big multimillion dollar corporations but more the rural or even large city small businesses that are trying to determine what to do as  newspaper readership drops and other advertising mediums continue to have less impact on their businesses than they had hoped.

Well, now to why the title is You Never Know Who Is Watching, last week I received an email from a lady in rural Kentucky who is working to promote her business but has just had no success with conventional advertising but searched for how to advertise to rural America. She landed on my post and felt it was exactly what she was wanting to hear. We had a call this morning I expect we will end up doing business together.

This is the second time that I have had something like this occur outside of the domain investor crowd who makes up the majority of my readers, first with the communications director of a professional cycling team and now with a potential customer who liked the message. There has been much talk lately about targeting end users more directly as it pertains to domain value, well part of that may start with domain blogs focusing more on the external world instead of being so inward focused.....

Also, on this topic take a look at Aron Meystedt's post at Symbolics.com today....

Get Out There And Make It Happen!

A laid back Saturday for me but thought I would quickly relate a story from this past week that led to a larger post here than I planned. Several weeks back when I did the seminar in Cape Girardeau, MO discussing topics such as local search, social media, domain names, and other online business topics I had met a gentleman who had a business that had been running out of the same small shop for many years.

Well, when I say many years I should define further, more years than I had even been alive (I am 36, so this business has been running successfully for many decades). The owner was in his late 70s and explained that although he did not have Internet access in the office or at his home, after listening to this seminar he understood that he was likely missing customers that were looking for his products online and finding his competitors.

What he had learned was that he needed to start thinking like his customers, after many years the way business was being done had shifted and there was an opportunity to grow, even if just incrementally, by having a presence online.

The next week my account manager for the area sat down with the customer and defined a plan to help him get online, it was more than a website, more than an ad, it was a solution to a problem and not just a product (that is a post for another day).

What is exciting about this is before we could even turn his website over to him he had already started getting calls and emails. Let me repeat, his products were in such demand before we could even hand it over to him he was getting business from it.

What does this mean, well first off it means that a person does not have to spend 20 thousand dollars to find value in doing business online. But even more so I think it shows that even people that have never had a presence online, businesses that have been around for decades, can still find value in doing something, even if it is small, online.

As I have said before, sometimes those of us that spend our life online like to talk about how others just do not get it. I look at things a lot differently these days, I say "What can I do to help educate the people who need it most?"

Everyone continues to sit back behind their computer screens and type away but the large (I would venture more than 99 percent) never get out with the majority to make things happen. They like to talk about end users, customers, etc but who is taking the initiative to connect with the larger populace?

And I am not talking other tech focused crowds (although when it comes to domain names in general there is much value in that and kudos to Chef Patrick for starting down that path this week.) I am more talking about connecting with local Chambers of Commerce, local business organizations. In other words, groups that are outside your comfort zone of tech friends?

It benefits us all the more the general populace is educated on the value of doing business online, heck I do not even mind when I see competitors out doing the same. Sure they will get some business but it also makes my life easy when I go in to talk to the same business later.

Once again, what are you doing to grow your business outside of the online community? Are you sitting back and waiting for it to come or are you making it happen?

BruceMarler.com Open For Advertising

The blog redesign is complete for BruceMarler.com and it is now much more advertiser friendly. If you are looking to promote a product to the domainer community or to any of the followers of the blog I am now offering ad spots to people looking to offer their products or services.

Although the blog has been targeted at the domain investment community the traffic has also grown from people looking for social media and marketing help. If you are looking to target these areas I am happy to help.

I would prefer to work with advertisers looking for long term contracts but for specific organizations that have shorter term needs I am willing to work with you to meet your needs.

The traffic to this site continues to grow and the Alexa rank drops everyday, my one month average is less than 50K at this point and as recently as yesterday ranked number 19 out of 100 domain focused blogs but looking at the recent Alexa trends will be moving up the ranks quickly.

Although I have taken paid advertiser banners before I have never publicly offered it up in a manner like this since I did not feel the blog was setup to be as advertiser friendly as it should be. If you are interested please use the contact me page above to shoot me a message and I will send you rates.

10 Offline Ways To Promote Your New Website

Whether you are looking for ways to promote a new small business website or a major web development project it is important to find ways to promote the site, although search engines and targeted PPC advertising help drive traffic it is very important, especially for local small businesses to promote their sites on a  day to day basis as their storefront on the Internet.

Too many times I have sat with a business and they talk about having  a website but then talk about how it has never had any traffic, in other words it was a  neat thing to have but they never thought of it as a way to connect with customers or promote their business.

Here are a few ways to promote your online presence with offline methods:

Business Cards - Plain and simple, the standard business card is a standard in business, if you do not have your website listed on the business card you are missing one of the most effective ways to promote your site. I have seen this to many times, someone has a website but you look at their card and sure enough it is not there. Having your domain name in your email address is not enough, make it clear where to go to find your business online.

Take Out Menus - If you are a restaurant do not miss the chance to promote your website on your take home menus or even on your table menus. If you are a business in the area of a restaurant that has take home menus ask if you can buy space on their take home menus for your logo and website. It works, people take these home and stick them on their fridge and see it everyday.

T-Shirts - If you happen to have a business where a uniform is used or have had T-shirts printed up for various reasons make sure you stick your website on it, I have seen people have their phone numbers, addresses, hours, basically everything you can think of on it except for their domain name. A large portion of people focus on remembering the website name these days not the phone number. They can get the contact info from the website.

Billboards - Same as above, more people are looking for the website to go to more so than a phone number these days. A person I spoke to just tonight who is a very non-tech person said he even realized today that he realized it is now the FIRST thing he looks for and never pays attention to a phone number any more on a billboard. If you have a website and have bought billboard advertising do not miss the chance to promote your online billboard (website).

Newspaper and Radio Ads - Lets face it print media is dying a slow (but quickly turning to fast) death so why miss the chance to promote your online presence if you are still advertising in print media. You know people are heading online, make sure they know where to find you there. If you are advertising on radio same thing goes, people are tuning out ads more and more on radio, make sure you get in your website name so they know where to find your online presence, they are more likely to remember that than just about anything else that you may say.

Magnets - Want to keep your logo and site name in front of people hand out refrigerator magnets in your place of business. People use these to hold up pictures, menus, etc so it is a constant reminder when they go to the fridge.

Letterhead - Many small businesses still use letterhead to send business letters or promotional letters on a daily basis. Take advantage of this to get your website in front of the customers or partners you are promoting your message to with your offline paper mailings.

Car Stickers -Window stickers are a great way to get a site and logo in front of people, I see these daily and they are very cost effective to get printed up. Why not get your site name in front of everyone while you are running to get groceries are heading out on a sales call.

Banners - This is something I have used personally, I see many small businesses on a day to day basis that have banners in front of their place of business or in targeted highly visible locations in their area. Most are missing this chance to promote the place people can go to find out more about them, their website.

Team Sponsorships - For years one of the ways local businesses have shown their support for a community has been to sponsor a little league team or maybe the all star soccer team in their area. Think of the value you can get if you give more than just your business name on the jersey and instead put your site name. People are watching their children run around the field for hours at a time, why not keep your site name in front of them.

I am sure there are many others but these are some top ones I have seen used and in many cases not used enough. If you have other creative ways let us know in the comments section.

Personalized promotional items with your company logo and contact information is a great way to promote offline, especially when you give away a products that is useful to people.

Benefits Of Having A Business Partner

As more and more domain investors are looking towards developing their top properties into real businesses I thought I would share my experience with working with a business partner when launching Localtek.

From the very beginning of the Localtek launch it was a team effort. My current business partner and I had been discussing various projects for a year or so but never quite found the "one". At Christmas of last year I started talking about the success I had been having with domain investments and, hard to believe, but yes PPC traffic and also the fact I had been direct selling ads on one of my sites without even making calls, they just came to me asking to buy advertising.

Based on this, very long story short, we ended up coming up with what is now the Missouri.me and Localtek concept. As with most businesses the initial idea is not where you end up but hopefully you build from that initial idea and not subtract from it. In this case it grew but at the core it is the same idea and business, just better than before.

Now, about the benefits of why I started a business with a partner, lets outline them:

No one, and I mean NO ONE, knows everything - Lets face it, even the most confident people in the world do not know everything. It is always valuable to have other people around that have experience you do not have. The reason a good team works is because everyone brings something to the table, various pieces of knowledge being a key piece of that. I talk to people or see people daily that have no intention of ever learning from other people, and that in the end, will be their downfall.

Brainstorming - When launching a business there can be alot of time spent brainstorming ideas around certain pieces of the business. Whether it be marketing, product pricing, growth plans, etc. It is useful to have someone else to check your ideas and build off of them.

Push or Pull - It is always good to have a balance between the partners. In our case I tend to be the fire, ready, aim person and my partner is the pull me back guy. It works perfectly, that balance is always needed. Virtually every successful business launch I have witnessed has had the same combination. You cannot have both people pushing without some checks and balances put in place. But you also cannot have two people both pulling back all the time. Both together is the way I have always found it to work best.

Detailed vs Not-Detailed - Along with the push/pull concept is the detail oriented vs. non-detail oriented balance. Once again, in most companies I have seen launch successfully there is a balance here as well. Just last week I witnessed it while in a meeting with a very successful company local to myself. One person was focused on T's & C's in the contract while the other was focused on what the next phase would be without worrying about the details on the first phase. You need both sides of this.

A Different Viewpoint - This one is very important for us, my experience is business development and sales along with technology. My partners is small business operations and small business marketing. You put that together and in our case you have the perfect balance of what is needed to launch a business doing what we do. Both pieces are important. This comes back to no one person knows it all. If you are starting a business keep in mind it takes multiple areas of experience. This is why many developers have a hard time taking a great idea to market. Being able to make a great looking and functional site is only the first step, being able to take it to market and close a deal is a different story.

I could probably list another 5 but the point I really want to end with is that when building a business in many cases it is very important to have a partner. When selecting a partner in many cases we tend to gravitate towards people that are exactly like ourselves. That is the first mistake you will make. It is important to bring a wide range of experiences together to build a successful team. Although my business partner and myself are alike in many ways we have a different knowledge base that we pull from and a good balance when it comes to the push/pull balance. Make sure you select a partner that balances the partner ship and not tips it over from being out of balance (in other words do not pick yourself).

« Previous Page