Direct Selling Ads on Geo Domains

Had a hard time selecting a topic for a post the past several days because there is just so many good things happening its hard to focus on anyone. But thats not a bad thing, activity is good, and even better when results are coming from it. Thats one thing anyone in sales management will tell you, there are alot of people that like to talk about all their activity but at the end of the day if it does not turn into real dollars at the end of the day its still just activity. This is one of the hard things for people to realize, they think being busy means productive, but that is not necessarily the case. I know quite a few people that work alot less hours than others but have a higher close rate in the short time they work. Which is better???

Anyway, this post may ramble a bit, its really just some thoughts and notes from real world experience dealing with end users, not over the phone either, we are talking real face time with real businesses large and small. I cannot give all the secrets but I will give some thoughts, many of these are things that people that have been selling for years should know but things that you may need to teach more junior sales people:

1) When building something new there will likely be a validation phase, there are a couple ways to handle this a) you can soft sell for a period of time before actually positioning for a sell, this means passing out pamphlets to people or other such things or b) you can anticipate the types of questions you may get and when you go into talk you answer the questions before they even come up. Its important that you have confidence in what you are doing and WAY MORE IMPORTANT that you have examples to back it up. I personally go in with examples, I do not like to actually sell anything, no snake oil needed here, I like to show examples of results.

2) On the marketing side of things you need to pay attention to what is going on in the communities around you, if you do not have feet on the street in those areas this can be a challenge. Especially for something statewide, in my case since I happen to be a cyclist I understand the value of the only statewide event in Missouri, the Tour of Missouri. Without going into all the details around the race I will say that 400,000 people attended some aspect of the event last year. We have plans to use our knowledge of the sport and do something interesting. More details will come later on that.

3) Think strategically, its smart to have various ad types on your site so you can help all businesses no matter what the budget but for those customers that can get the most value from high quality ad spots make sure you keep them available. Its important for both your visitors and the advertisers that you put the right types of advertisers in the right spots. Unlike shotgun advertising in other media formats, target Geo ads are actually a valuable service when done right.

4) Price your product right and don't get greedy. This is a problem most companies will have as they start to see success, they will want to raise the price to high. Thats a mistake. Offer something at a fair price that provides something that is useful and everyone wins.

5) Its ok to be friends with the people you sell too, but you still need payment. This is a business, unless there is something bartered then you need to be paid. Nuff said.

6) On the bartering topic, starting a business requires a lot of stuff (technical word) and when a lot of the work is grassroots theres a lot of value in bartering for grass roots access to people. We are doing this in many different cases, make it fair though, people can see if you are not providing equal value.

7) Train your people, every startup thinks they are too busy to take a day out of the field to hide in a room and lock everyone in. Well, lets see, if you can get 5 more sales a day because you took the time to train your people properly I think that one day was worth it. We have our first sales meeting scheduled in a couple weeks, a full training session, catered, the people will leave with all the materials they need. This is good for the customers and the people because now the customers will be able to understand the full value of all the products offered.

Partnerships are probably the most valuable component of it all, if you can find the right partnership that can accelerate your growth without cause issues with delivery make it happen. We have one in process that is going to ramp us up faster than we could of imagined, its a complete joint marketing effort. But you cannot just pick any partner, they must be synergistic with your needs. We have that in ours, we could not of found a better partner (my past life allows access to several large companies that fit right in what we need, sometimes stars align). They already have us scheduled to speak to 2 very large groups of business owners in a conference center, they are paying for commercials, billboards, radio ads, and other offline media to drive people to an event about why targeted online advertising is the most effective way to advertise now. More details to come on that as well.

Anyway, thats probably enough for tonight, and before you think this is specific to something like we are doing here you would be wrong, most of the tips above relate in someway to any sales and marketing effort for a startup.

Please don't yell at me for being disorganized or off topic:) I was in the mood to write and needed to get a post moving before my focus shifted to a new topic, special thanks to Tia Wood for moving me forward:)