Photo Source: Flickr, Thorsten (TK)’s Photostream
Small businesses can always use more (lower cost) ideas for growing in this suckey economy. So I’m always trolling for small business marketing (customer) strategies, tactics to beg, borrow or outright steal. Yesterday I hit the marketing mother load.
At the San Diego AeA Sales roundtable discussion, Sales Strategies for Tough Times, three sales VPs from local companies shared ideas and insights for dealing with meeting objectives during this recession.Now these are larger companies, but these guys were very generous with their insights and strategies for tackling the uphill sales climb. They are:
Darin Andersen, COO, ESET; ESET delivers the fastest, most effective and most proactive antivirus and antispyware software solution to eliminate viruses, spyware, adware, worms, trojans, rootkits and other malware before they attack your system.
Tony Wyatt, VP Sales, Indyme Solutions, Inc.: Indyme Solutions develops “event-triggering”, communication software and solutions, for the retail environment, that seamlessly integrates with today’s most popular in-store devices.
Jeff True, VP Sales, Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) is the global leader in integrated Web, data and email security providing Essential Information Protection for more than 42 million employees at more than 50,000 organizations worldwide.
Here are 9 strategies and ideas:
1. Listen. Listen to your customers, channel reps, your sales folks. If you’ve got a sales force or channel sales, give them opportunity to vent. This will give you chance to see which way your market is shifting.
2. Stay close to your customers. (Music to a marketer’s ears.) They talked about holding small lunch sessions with 12-15 customers at a time. No selling. Just bring in one of your company’s experts. Then help your customers use your products and services better. Answer their questions.
If you’ve worked for Corporate America, you’ve probably participated in a “lunch and learn” session. Everyone gathers around the conference room at lunch time. Someone orders sandwiches or pizza, or brown-bags it. Then an expert comes in and teaches you helpful stuff. If you’ve never heard of this, you might want to try it. If you’ve heard of it, are you using lunch-n-learns with your customers?
In a recession, when marketing and sales budgets are tight,a hundred bucks for sandwiches for 15 people looks like a great marketing tactic. If you don’t have a conference room large enough, find a local hotel with reasonable rates for a conference room and sandwich lunch.
Two big benefits of holding regular customer sessions like this are:
1) Build your brand.
2) Build a community around your brand.Your customers meet each other at these lunch events. And they learn from each other. You’re the host. You win big for bringing everyone together. You begin to foster word of mouth as customers value these small seminar settings. Your customers learn something. You learn what’s on their minds. What’s not to like?
3. Select your 2009 trade shows carefully. Show attendance will be down next year. Look at ROI (return on investment) for each show. For a larger, more costly show, participate with a channel partner. Join them in their booth. Take your marketing collateral. Look for regional trade shows that cost less. But still help you connect with customers.
4. Educate your sales force. Keeping your sales folks motivated is more important than ever when the selling is a steep climb. Share new product info with them. Share advance copies of collateral.
5. Find creative ways to bundle products. Tap into your partners’ customers. Bundle products and services with partners. Learn about a new set of customers this way.
6. Be even more responsive to your customers. Do not lower your expectations. Provide super customer service. If a competitor pulls back/reduces staff, be ready to jump in and fill the gap.
7. Review your strategies more often. Be nimble and prepared to change when you understand that your market is shifting. When you know your customers are changing their buying behavior.
8. Try social networking, social media. (Honest, I did not plant this one.) Look for novel ways to market. Don’t always seek immediate returns. Think of social media as lots of little experiments. One VP said, “It’s a lab. Remember, it took 35 rockets for the US to get the first one into space.”
9. Stay visible in your market. You’ve gotta keep alive out there.
I’ll share more tactics in a few days.
For those of you who are already doing all of these things to keep your marketing and sales on track. Any other ideas? We all should share ideas until the economy rights itself.
Thanks so much to Jeff True, Tony Wyatt and Darin Anderson for sharing their insights.
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