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The #1 Problem With Home Improvement Lead Generation Companies

Whether it’s attic insulation, solar, windows, or anything in between, a home improvement business owner’s primary goal is to convert job leads into appointments and sales.

Getting leads is the easy part. There’s dozens of different channels including old school methods like canvassing, cold calling, trade shows, and direct mail. In addition, newer channels such as email marketing, Facebook, Google, and Nextdoor all provide great opportunities for home improvement companies to generate leads. These are often the primary tool for home improvement lead generation companies.

In the age of online advertising and marketing automation, and with a seemingly infinite supply of leads, appointment setting should be easy, right? Wrong.

While technology can be a great accelerator in generating more leads, there’s still the problem of converting those leads to appointments. This problem stems from an over-reliance on the technology itself. With that being said, there’s an important distinction to be made. Converting leads to appointments isn’t a technology problem. It’s a human problem.

Simply, we’ve gotten lazy as marketers and sales people. To convert more leads into appointments, embody the below home appointment setting formula. This isn’t a script. This isn’t a new lead gen system. It’s a mentality. Use it to connect with home owners, build relationships, and ultimately gets into more doors to sell product and services. The homeowner wants to buy from you. Give them a good reason.

95% of home improvement lead generation companies are a waste of money. The #1 Problem With Home Improvement Lead Generation Companies is that they do less than half of the work. They just generate leads, not appointments. Want to improve your close rate and reduce your overall cost per sale. Contact us to purchase qualified set appointments for your home improvement business and close more deals.

3 Ways to Set More Appointments

Be Aggressive

When you think of being aggressive, you imagine a noisy, boisterous and annoying salesman, right? Wrong. You need to be strategically aggressive. Just remember, the lead came from someone in need of your service, so be quick to follow up and capitalize on that. After generating a lead, allow 30 minutes to an hour to reach out. This is prompt enough to show responsiveness, but also allows enough time for the potential customer to not feel as though they are now stuck on an overly-automated campaign that doesn’t care about them.

Being aggressive and zealous in your pursuit is important, but too much of this can push the potential client away. No one wants an automatic notification straight to their phone as soon as they explore a potential service. Avoid the solicitation feel and schedule follow ups once some time has passed. This process allows you to stay top of mind, and puts the ball back in the customers court.

Be Consistent

Consistency is critical if you want to improve your appointment setting results. Do not let too much time pass before you follow up. Once you initially reach out and allow the potential customer room to breathe, follow up if you haven’t heard back! Don’t be afraid of this part. According to Sirius Decisions, even if a potential customer is interested in your product, it takes about 8 to 12 attempts to reach a potential customer by phone. And if you can’t reach them by phone, try sending a text or an email to coordinate a time to chat.

A good way to make sure leads don’t fall through the cracks is to set reminders for each one. Not following up is the easiest way to lose good business. According to PhoneBurner the best times to reach out for a sales call is at 10am and 2pm. It’s also smart to stick to business hours for these calls. Many consider it rude or annoying to receive sales or business calls on nights and weekends.

Follow up calls should begin by getting straight to the point in a polite manner. No one wants to pick up their phone to a salesman who “just wants to chat.” Begin with your name and why you are calling, and keep it short. This is your time to listen to what they have to say. You want to connect with the potential customer to clear up any questions or hesitations they may have moving forward.

Make sure you have gone through a potential list of questions they might have and have those answers ready. You want to be able to help the potential customer pave their path to setting an appointment as soon as possible.

Be Human

According to Salesforce,  92% of all customer interactions happen over the phone, and an astounding 85% customers report being dissatisfied with their phone experience. This highlights the need for customers to be treated as a human who needs your help. During a conversation, don’t be afraid to “go off the script” when it’s appropriate. Basic manners go a long way and respect is never ignored. Reading the room (even if it’s just over the phone) is so important.

Trust and respect will not only attract new customers, but will help you retain the ones you have. After all, acquiring a new customer will cost you 5 to 25 times more than keeping an existing customer according to Harvard Business Review.

Get Qualified Appointments

The above formula isn’t a get rich quick scheme. It’s an honest approach that we’ve refined over years of trial and error. We have implemented this approach for numerous clients in the home improvement industry to generate high quality in-home sales appointments.

At Orpical Group, we’ve made a commitment that we’ll never be just another lead generation company. We understand that 9 times out of 10, lead flow isn’t the problem. It’s converting leads to appointments, and appointments to sales.

95% of home improvement lead generation companies are a waste of money. The #1 Problem With Home Improvement Lead Generation Companies is that they do less than half of the work. They just generate leads, not appointments. Want to improve your close rate and reduce your overall cost per sale. Contact us to purchase qualified set appointments for your home improvement business and close more deals.

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Learning From Accidental Porn In Your Marketing

 

 

Have you ever taken a Rorschach test?

You know, one of these:

 

Also called an inkblot test, you’ve probably seen one of these in your lifetime. They’re pretty common in pop culture. In short, the goal of the test is to show you a seemingly random splattering of ink on a page and to ask you what you see.

Your answer is supposed to suggest some form of inherent perspective that you have. Since the ink is not “supposed” to be anything, whatever you see is what your mind is “looking for,” in a certain way.

In short, they reveal how you look at things. Sometimes something that is ‘designed’ to look like nothing, or perhaps even something completely different, can be interpreted in an entirely different way. As we recently learned, it’s a concept marketing professionals should keep in mind.  

Our Happy Little Accident

Our internal discussion about perception came up after we ran into what Bob Ross would call a “happy accident” on a website we were working on. Here’s what happened…

Take a look at this stock image:

 

 

Harmless, right? We thought so too.

Our plan was to have text overlaid on this image on a website we were working on. So, to make the text pop more, we blurred it out, like this:

 

 

Still not seeing it? You shouldn’t really, it’s just a harmless blurry picture. Or so we thought.

The final step was to resize the image to fit within the page design. So we cropped it a bit, enlarge it to scale, add our text, bada bing bada boom, and voila:

 

 

Oh.

Oh no.

If you still aren’t seeing it, don’t worry, we didn’t at first either. But lean back in your chair, maybe take a step back from the desk and unfocus your eyes. Kind of like you would if you were, I don’t know, aimlessly scrolling through a web page. See it now?

The troubling visual — which was lost on us until a brave soul in a focus group was bold enough to share their thoughts  — is the general shape of a naked man on top of a shirtless woman.

It took us by surprise too. But once we saw it, we couldn’t unsee it. We’ve since swapped out the picture, and with the help of multiple focus groups, confirmed there is no more accidental porn on the website. All in a day’s work.

After we texted our friends about the mistake, we realized there were a few takeaways worth noting from this incident.

  1. QA test your products like they’re movies. If you want to make a G-rated website, put on your X-rated goggles and comb through the content carefully.
  2. Perspective is subjective. Don’t fight that, just remember it, adapt to it, and use it.

The second takeaway sounds obvious, but it’s not 100% clear what to actually do about it. It’s a t-shirt away from being merchandise at a networking event.

But marketers who actually use this advice are better for it. Here’s how.

Embrace The “Porn” Of It All

Here’s one of the best pieces of advice I ever received: just because your opinion is an educated one, doesn’t mean it’s a good opinion.

“What you suggest can be based on research, white papers, reports, and data, and it should be. But it isn’t a good marketing opinion until the market proves that it works.”

That is the bottom line with marketing: the only good suggestions are ones proven by the market. If it doesn’t end up leading to more profit, in the long run, it’s not a good suggestion.

Our “happy accident” is an example of what we thought was a good idea proven wrong by the market (in this case, users). In our case, we were actually lucky that the error was so glaringly inappropriate. The fact that it was pseudo-scandalous was actually a blessing: it was an error we could not justify, so we replaced it.

But that’s not always the case.

Too many marketing professionals rigidly adhere to their own plans even after the market tells them they don’t like what they’re seeing. They may try to explain away why their strategy isn’t working; it’s advertising’s fault, we aren’t spending enough money, they just don’t understand the messaging, yadda yadda yadda. But if the market’s perspective isn’t seeing the same thing you want them to see, you can’t change how they see it.

It’s not the market’s job to see it how the marketer sees it. It’s our job to show them. So in these instances, we need to do our jobs better.

When we say “embrace the porn of it all,” we simply mean that a different perspective is not your enemy. In fact, it’s a benefit. You get feedback on what you’re doing and can adjust accordingly to create what the target audience wants. Isn’t that what we’re trying to figure out in the first place?

Different preferences and perspectives are half the reason marketers do so many of the things that we do. A/B testing, focus groups, demographic data — all of it is because we have a desire to account for the things outside our assumptions.

Good marketers account for different perspectives, adjust, and use it to better their campaigns.

Bad marketers blame the market.

It All Comes Back To The Client

At the end of the day, marketing teams have one real goal. Make their clients more money, and keep them happy. If those aren’t being accomplished, then there’s no point in our work.

If the marketing team is too prideful to adapt to the market, then they simply aren’t going to be able to deliver on that promise for their client. This is not the industry to have an ego. Marketing success is 100% based around how well a marketer can embrace their missteps and turn them into better results down the line.

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How To Avoid Cookie Cutter Digital Marketing

Chips Ahoy, or homemade chocolate chip cookies?

I’m hoping you chose homemade. Unless, like myself, you’re an awful baker. Then I understand.

When it comes to quality, it’s hard to justify the assortment of dusty, crumbly discs that lay within the Chips Ahoy carton. On the other hand — when made properly — homemade cookies have the potential to bring you as close to a religious experience as a 12-gram pastry possibly can.

We’re here to explain some ways to help your digital marketing strategy be a little more homemade and a little less factory-formed. Here’s our breakdown of the best ways to avoid cookie-cutter digital marketing.

Know Your Brand, And Wield It

You can’t sell a product if you don’t know what it is.

The trick is, you have to know what you’re selling. Whether you’re running a high-staff company or selling homemade crafts on Etsy, you likely have a good understanding of what it is you’re selling to your customer. You probably know your product inside and out.

But in digital marketing, you aren’t just selling your product. You have to sell your business first. In all likelihood, a larger portion of the effort behind your digital marketing strategy is going to be placed on selling your business rather than your product.

Here’s why: out of all the tactics used in digital marketing — paid advertising, search engine optimization, social media, email campaigns — only a couple of them are going to have the primary job of selling your actual product to the end-customer, with the most obvious example being your website. Once a visitor stops by your website, it is then the website’s job to make the sale. But it’s the job of all those other tactics to get visitors to your site in the first place.

This is why we say you must know your brand, and wield it. Your brand is your business’ biggest unique selling proposition; it’s what sets your advertising apart from everyone else’s advertising. Your brand needs to be conveyed, integrated, and optimized across your digital marketing tactics.

It’s because of this that businesses need rock-solid brand foundations. You need to know what you stand for, why you stand for it, and how your business enacts those tenets on a daily basis. Your brand identity isn’t just for internal morale and wishful thinking. If done right, a smart and thorough brand manifests across your marketing materials — both print and digital — to create stronger marketing campaigns and more customers.

If your brand is cookie-cutter, your marketing will be too. And it is going to affect sales.

Flank Your Competition With Content

For some hyper-specific businesses, getting a foothold in the market is fairly straightforward. When you don’t have a ton of competition, simple press releases and commonplace marketing tactics might get the job sufficiently done.

It’s a lot tougher for those trying to break into more popular market niches. Businessmen and women who want to find footing in fields like health and lifestyle, self-improvement, beauty supplies, or e-commerce (just to name a few) are going to struggle — god forbid you are trying to start an app. The first few pages of Google are a cross-industry bottleneck, and there are millions of professionals trying to force their way in.

To fight back, businesses need an alternate route to attention. One of the most effective methods is through content. Whether it’s articles, videos, infographics, or presentations, content can be the supplementary digital marketing tactic you need to push your name out in front of your competition.

The key to content is to make it trustworthy and valuable to either your target customers or your industry peers. Often times, your content doesn’t even have to directly relate to what you’re trying to advertise. As long as you can present useful, honest information with authority, the content is valuable.

More than anything, content provides a way for the end-user to differentiate your business from the competition through the assertion of your humanity. Content is your opportunity to showcase some creativity and personality outside of promotional channels. You can write an article in your own voice, not the voice of your business.

With good content, an end-user can find themselves identifying with you as a person in a way that rarely happens with a brand. This is how you outflank your competition. Put your individuality on display through your content, and the customers will recognize it.

Own Your Limitations

Apart from a vague brand identity, one of the most commons errors found in digital marketing is inefficient resource allocation. AKA, people spend too much and waste too much time.

If you’re a small business owner seeking growth, the internet is an amazing platform for you to find it. Unfortunately, businessmen and women who are not digital marketing savvy attempt to combat their own inexperience by simply throwing as much time or money at their digital marketing campaigns and hoping it sticks. That doesn’t work.

When that happens, we end up with a digital advertising space flooded with unoriginal, generic advertising methods that not only overcrowd the market space but turn away customers for everybody. People shopping online are smarter and fewer patient shoppers than anywhere else. They won’t tolerate lazy marketing, and when they’re hit with yet another “6 Ways To Improve Your Kitchen” article, they flat out leave the marketplace altogether.

So, what route is there to take for businesses who can’t afford to learn the ins and outs of digital marketing? Simple: cut your budget.

Don’t allocate more money for digital marketing; work with less, and you’ll be forced to use the money wisely. Cookie-cutter digital marketing is barely effective on a large scale, so a reduced budget is going to be aggressively unhelpful to your business.

With a smaller budget, you can allocate funds to the aspect of digital marketing that will improve your business the most in the short-term. Break down what your business needs are today, and begin to build out a focused digital marketing strategy that will have an impact tomorrow.

Does your website look like it was made in 2009? GIve it a revamp. Are your social media accounts active and effective? Start reaching out. Are you trying to grow your brand’s recognition and become a thought-leader in your industry? Start creating valuable SEO blog posts for traction.

All of these tactics are valuable to a business, but simply dumping finances into them and moving on isn’t going to net you nearly as much return as a focused, deliberate, and engaged effort on a singular improvement.

Target As Specifically As Possible

You know how businesses are always told to “find their niche”? In digital marketing, you need to find your niche’s niche.

Digital marketing becomes cookie-cutter when it’s crafted and executed to appease the lowest common denominator. It’s sole, shallow focus is engagement at all costs, and in the long run, it costs your business time and money. It ends up being the vanilla ice cream of advertising — and not even Ben & Jerry’s. We’re talking store brand.

If you want scalable results, don’t market with vanilla ice cream. Localize your campaign strategies and target the audience you know will give you the most conversions.

Consider the same tactic in the direct marketing sphere. Not every business needs a billboard. If your audience is smaller, harder to reach, or only active in certain locations and destinations online, there’s no reason for you to advertise anywhere else.

Too many people advertise on a generalized, wide-breadth scale because they don’t know any better. In reality, the places you make the most out of your digital marketing aren’t going to be the largest, but the most concentrated.
Conclusion

All the tactics we’ve listed here aren’t just applicable to your digital marketing strategy. When implemented, they manifest across your business practices, from production and sales to employee interactions and culture.

Good digital marketing is the fruition of brand utilization, localized strategies, and confident execution. Know who you are, demonstrate why that’s valuable, and own the lane you carve for yourself.

Don’t allow your online presence to become just another cheaply made, mass-produced box of cookies in the aisle of online advertising. Make it custom to your needs and abilities; that’s hope you get something with homemade quality.

Mix Up Your Strategy

Looking for more help? Contact us today — we can start talking about what digital marketing approach is best for your business.

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What ‘This Is Us’ Crock-Pot Fiasco Teaches About Damage Control

Dear fans of the NBC’s drama ‘This Is Us’: this article contains the lightest touch of spoilers that we could sprinkle in.

We will be discussing (as vaguely as we can) events that occur near the end of Season 2, and how a real-world company has handled some surprising fan reactions. These events relate to an ongoing plot that has been at play for most of the show’s run. We won’t say which plot, or which characters, but we will have to say a little about the company at the center of it all.

So if you aren’t caught up and have a zero-tolerance policy for information about how the Pearsons are doing, just go watch the show.

Seriously.

Go watch it.

DISCUSSION BEGINS HERE

When this week’s episode ended, fans were hot with emotion. In typical ‘This Is Us’ fashion, the episode’s cliffhanger left many fans flustered, sad, angry, and confused about what to do next. For many fans, they took it out on the scapegoat in their kitchen: the Crock-Pot.

The brand saw itself on the receiving end of social media’s fury last week for the small part their slow-cooker product played in the episode. Fans seeking some form of catharsis unleashed their emotions onto their own slow cookers, as the trending tab of Twitter turned into an abusive slideshow of Crock-Pot insults.

Not used to being the center of anything besides a potluck, Crock-Pot quickly took to social media to try and defend their brand. A new Twitter account was created, and the company’s social media team began making amends.

‘This Is Us’ writer Dan Fogelman took to Twitter to defend the company as well.

Their Facebook also has a lengthy response for fans of the show (WARNING: that post contains spoilers). We won’t post it here, but check it out if you’re feeling distraught.

The situation brings up an interesting conundrum. How do businesses react to uncontrollable brand damage? There was no way of Crock-Pot knowing how bad the backlash would be, and no real way for NBC to expect — and subsequently warn Crock-Pot of — that kind of a response. So what is the right approach?

Be Prepared For Anything

The most important distinction to be made in Crock-Pot’s reaction is that it is aggressively reactionary. The company created a new Twitter account to interact with fans tweeting how angry they are with the device, but the Crock-Pot brand didn’t have a Twitter account before this incident. You may not think a company like Crock-Pot needs a Twitter, but for modern companies, it is nothing less than a liability to not be in touch with your audience.

If we had asked at the beginning of the week what your opinion of the “Crock-Pot” brand was, what would you say?

For most people, the only words that would come to mind would be some variation of “good,” “useful,” and “reliable.” Now here comes a primetime, Emmy-award winning show to indirectly tarnish the company’s reputation — the primary thing still getting people to buy Crock-Pots.

Seriously, what other product out there has a more stable brand identity? Elmer’s glue? Morton’s salt?

While this situation obviously can’t be anticipated, it’s important for businesses to at least have the tools and internal architecture needed to respond to something like this.

This case is a testament that every company, no matter the product, market, or brand strength, should have a dedicated social media, PR, and digital marketing team on standby.  You never know when you’ll be blindsided by the wrath of Twitter.

Pick The Right Angle

On top of having the right kind of hose to put out the PR fire, companies need to be savvy about how they put out the fire. The Crock-Pot strategy? Direct responses.

As noted above, Crock-Pot decided the best course of action was to reply directly to people who were showing unwarranted frustration with their product. They created a new account, pinned a post on Facebook, and have been effectively shouting from the rooftops that their product does not deserve the hate it is receiving.

This strategy may, in fact, be the right one for Crock-Pot; most people associate the brand’s with warm, home-cooked meals and a sense of familial togetherness. So it’s on-brand to respond with sincerity, compassion, and personalized assurances. Crock-Pot may not be the kind of brand that wants to utilize this buzz to their advantage with a spin tactic. They’ve stayed fairly vanilla in how they’ve handled things, and maybe that’s a good thing.

This isn’t the only way to go about it though. Social media has proven that any brand can have a unique voice and use it to their advantage, regardless of the situation. Take the notorious Moon Pie Twitter account. The company sells packaged pastry snacks, but their Twitter account has expanded their audience by having a fun personality.

Furthermore, Crock-Pot is in desperate need of new business guidance. Reports coming out just before the episode showed the parent company, Newell, had already seen stock prices drop 49% since their record mark last June. Since the episode aired, the Crock-Pot product’s stock prices have also plummetted, dropping 24%. While the attention from the episode has been negative, the one benefit has been the Crock-Pot brand is now in the forefront of pop culture for a brief period of time. For a company in desperate need of some magic, it doesn’t appear as though they are utilizing their moment in the spotlight as the opportunity it is.

Lessons From Dr. K

Are there other social media/marketing strategies which could have been implemented to turn this into a win for Crock-Pot and Newell? Could this have been spun to their advantage? Possibly, but it’s difficult to expect anything better from the company when they didn’t prepare themselves beforehand.

Pop culture blows such as this are often short-lived. People, businesses, brands, they’ve all come back from worse blows — blows that they themselves might have caused — and turned out fine on the other side. But it’s still disappointing to see such an opportunity being handled in the most bare-bones fashion.

For all the negativity this episode brought, what was provided was attention, something that is as critical to harness as it is difficult to obtain. When businesses get a shot like this, it’s in their best interest to do more than damage control.

Crock-Pot, so far, has been doing an OK job, all things considered. And for a company that didn’t have a Twitter account before this week, that could be considered a win. But how many executives are ever satisfied with an OK job?

There’s always a way out for a company’s PR nightmares. But if you aren’t prepared, you limit your options.

In the words of Dr. K:

“Find a way to take the sourest lemons that life has to offer, and turn it into something resembling lemonade.”

Looking For Marketing Solutions?

Contact us today to see how we can help.

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Building Better Business Relationships

First of all, what is etiquette? For the uninformed, ‘etiquette’ is not a word that means you have eaten a ‘quette,’ whatever that may be. The word is derived a bit from German but mostly from the French language, and, as many of our American English words, adapted for our use.

Some would say that proper etiquette is the same as good manners. They would be partly correct. Definitions vary, but etiquette has to do with knowing what acceptable conventions of behavior and practice should apply in particular circumstances. Good manners are general guidelines put into practice.

For instance, giving your wife or husband, child or parent a warm hug upon greeting them at a restaurant would almost always be both good manners and good etiquette. However, that same warm hug would not be good etiquette or good manners, were that warm hug given to someone not interested in meeting you at all.

“Business relationships come down to having proper etiquette,” said Edward DuCoin, CEO of Orpical Group, during an interview. “In order to have a really great rapport with someone you are working with, they need to not only feel comfortable, but also a level of mutual respect.”

In business, sometimes people fall prey to the erroneous mindset that merely functional roles are good enough. After all, the salesman works for the vice-president, doesn’t he? The receptionist is paid for her time, and that should be enough, right? Wrong!

Regardless what the functional relationships may be, employees, colleagues, prospects, customers, and competitors are still human beings. They have feelings, challenges, schedule pressures, hopes and fears, just like everyone else. Suppose you are the boss. Are your employees more likely to give extra effort to meet goals for the company when they feel as though you really care about them, or when they can’t wait to find a different job?

Of course, your employees will be more productive, efficient, and more highly motivated when they are confident that the boss actually cares about them.

How does business etiquette relate to sales? Ask any seasoned and successful sales professional, and s/he will tell you: you’ve got to not only know your product or service. You must know your prospects, in terms of what they might want to buy at what price point. You must also know why your prospects might want to buy. How can you know those what’s and those whys?

Some practical pointers for good etiquette:

  • Show more interest in the other person than your own goals whenever possible.
    • Before the meeting, whenever possible, learn about the interests and accomplishments of the other person.
    • Ask questions of the other person regarding their interests. Treat them as an expert, and don’t try to display a superior knowledge to theirs about anything.
    • If you are asked questions, answer them accurately and with humility.
  • Use good eye contact whenever possible. If talking on the phone, imagine you are looking at the other person, and speak accordingly.
  • Smile when you first greet the other person, and reveal your genuine pleasure in the experience of having a conversation with the other person. (If that sentiment isn’t genuine, think through and adjust your own attitude before arriving. You’ll be glad you did!)
  • Don’t use flattery, which is vague and generalized praise such as ‘you are so great.’ It might feel good to the recipient of the flattery, but it might also cause them to believe your goal is to manipulate their feelings for some unscrupulous motive.
  • When appropriate (and it will be in some way if you are paying attention) pay specific compliments for behavior, achievement, awards granted, or some other genuinely valid point of congratulation. The other person will feel genuinely appreciated, instead of feeling manipulated.
  • Call the name of the other person a few times during the discussion, and do so respectfully, in a way that expresses the dignity and value you ascribe to them. This will also help you to remember their name!
  • Respect the time of the other person. Whenever possible, arrive early. If the meeting is a phone conference, be as well prepared as possible, and then make the call a just a few minutes early.

What does this all mean? First of all, great sales professional, a great leader, and a great executive have this in common: they know how to ask appropriate, interesting, timely questions and really listen to what is being said, to what is not being said, to the tone of voice and what sort of emotional language is used, and more.

“Open communication is key,” said DuCoin. “The most rewarding relationships stem from being able to give constructive criticism, along with being able to share new ideas with someone you know will be honest with their critique, as well.”

Beyond that, great managers, executives, and sales professionals pay attention to body posture and body language whenever they are physically present with those with whom they wish to have good business relationships.

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Social Media: Sharing Without Borders

This might seem like a given; when you post something on social media, it goes across the world. However, there is more to the concept of sharing without borders. For instance, what exactly constitutes as a border?

A border doesn’t have to be what separates Mexico from being America. Borders can be physical, political, national, political, religious, cultural, economic, and can be defined in many ways and as other types. Borders can, and usually do consist of more than one category from those just named, and can include other categories, as well. A physical / political boundary may be the first kind of border commonly considered, but that’s not the limit to what it means.

What Is Social Media?

Social media is the medium by which people network, such as web sites and computer applications and mobile phone apps that allow people to share communications via messages, pictures, images, files, audio, and video, or some part or combination of these. Well known social media includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, and many more such communities that allow people to share ideas, thoughts, and conduct online conversations by posting messages and other items of interest.

What Are Some Kinds of Sharing Without Borders?

Some organizations are engaging volunteers, teaching children, raising funds by various means including bake sales, cupcake auctions, blogs, and more. Chefs are teaching children how to cook, and many bloggers and local groups around the country are reaching out to help children to have enough healthy food. No Kid Hungry is one force behind this movement.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was started in France in 1971, and has provided medical care in over 60 countries. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the group in 1999. Social media such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook is part of how MSF communicates the needs of people in desperate situations, and gains private support for their work. Concerns and needs such as the malnutrition intervention, obstetrics, surgeries, and much more.

Collegiate Research combines the expertise and experience of professors, and sometimes students, across different campuses and in different nations to advance the search for answers, solutions, and scholarship itself. Columbia University is an example of a school taking an active role in pursuing this kind of social media sharing.

Business and tax planning across international borders is another realm through which knowledge is shared through articles and comments. One law firm with offices in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania actively pursues international business opportunities and service using social media; in their case, a blog serves to communicate on many topics.

Recruiters looking for qualified employees are increasing their use of social media to identify and reach out to potential job candidates. LinkedIn is widely considered to be the largest social media platform for professionals in the workforce, and it’s not unusual for members to be presented with job opportunities, whether or not they have actually looked for a new job. LinkedIn also has a number of ‘groups’ to allow people who share common interests to conduct interesting discussions, find new ideas, market they or their business, and much more. Other social media sites have similar groups, too.

Summary:

Using the Internet as a communication’s tool, political borders are seldom a barrier to sharing ideas, doing business, making friends, or finding talent. In recent years, social media has truly made it much easier than ever before to accomplish sharing without borders.

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The Habits of Every Successful Salesperson

Too many people fail to take advantage of the opportunities to maximize their employment. Worse yet, otherwise competent employees can be heard complaining about their job, their boss, the need to occasionally work past ‘quitting time,’ bad coffee in the break room, failing to be thankful to be gainfully employed at all, or just grousing in general.

You can be ‘absotively, posilutely thoromazingly’ (translation upon request) sure that successful salespeople do not do the ‘crybaby complainer dance.’ Successful salespeople do, in fact, do a dance. It’s an elegant, exciting, delightful, and enriching experience for both dance partners, when done well.

The successful salesperson has a dance with prospects and clients. Sometimes, the salesperson leads, while other times, the salesperson invites the prospect or the client to lead the dance. Sometimes it starts as a group dance, but as the music plays on, the dance is ultimately between two partners whom each have the freedom to decide whether to dance, or to dance again.

This dance probably won’t involve holding hands, leaping in rhythm, or pressing your cheeks together. It will involve some mental and emotional exercise, and there will be give and take between the partners. The dance will definitely involve paying close attention to the steps of your dance partner.

That’s enough about the dance for now.

Habits of a Successful Sales Professional:

  • Listen to the marketplace. Get an idea what people in you marketplace may want or need.
  • Identify suspects who are people that may have an interest in hearing about your product or service.
  • Determine what sort of marketing best suits your suspects, and how that marketing should be delivered.
  • Plan and set aside regular time to identify and add suspects to your pipeline of people to approach.
  • From the suspects, determine which have become qualified prospects. This would include decision-making authority, interest in the product or service, the urgency of need as viewed by the prospect, and opportunity to meet with you.
  • Those still classified as suspects (not prospects) should be marked to the ‘suspect recycle bin’ for follow up at some future time. Rank them as a) on a slow day, b) when logistically convenient, c) after obstacles to doing business have been crossed, or d) probably never.
  • Professional salespeople will, when speaking with a prospect, endeavor to:
    • Think along the lines of what the prospect wants and needs
    • Learn what obstacles, frustrations, processes, and time-lines the prospect has on his/her plate
    • Identify whether your prospect must consult with someone else before making a buying decision, and work to include that person either directly or by inference in the discussion
    • Refuse to gloss over real concerns or objections from the prospect
    • Identify whether the prospect is uncertain and ‘hedging,’ or is waiting for you to clearly invite him/her to buy
    • Never leave a conversation with a prospect without an agreed plan with the prospect for the next step
    • If / when the prospect is determined to not actually be a qualified prospect, be pleasant, and get out of the interview. This avoids wasting the time of the non-prospect, and your own time. The non-prospect may be a qualified prospect in the future, and will remember your professional courtesy when that time comes.

Professional Salespeople will also have the following habits:

  • Punctuality. Plan to arrive early. If someone is apologizing for being late, let it be the prospect.
  • Preparedness. Have a plan for the discussion. It’s much better to have a plan from which to depart, than to not have a clue where to start.
  • Well-rested. This might be more difficult at times, but a well-rested salesperson is more efficient.
  • Knowledgeable. Know your product or service inside and out, backwards and forwards. Be familiar with realistic delivery schedules, costs, possible results, and especially how your product or service is a good fit for the need(s) or your prospect.
  • Constructive Listener. Everyone – everyone wants someone to hear them, appreciate and understand their situation, and respect their roles and contributions. The salespeople who consistently walk away ’empty-handed’ from what might have been a sale have mostly likely not listened well to the prospect. Ask thoughtful questions, then listen. Taking notes can be a great idea. After your client has told you their thoughts, then summarize to them what you think you heard them say, and ask them to confirm. This will add to your knowledge, and to the confidence your prospect will have in you.
  • Build Value. Any intelligent businessperson knows they must make a profit, and will eventually admit that you must do so in order to continue in business. So make the price as irrelevant as possible by demonstrating that your product or service will enhance their ease of doing business, their profits, their employee morale, or any combination of these and other concerns.
  • Ask for the sale. Any experienced, professional sales person can tell you that there had been times when s/he didn’t expect to get the sale, but asked for the sale – then closed the deal!

Summary:

Professional salespeople are interested in their product or service, but are even more interested in how they may improve the lot of their prospects and clients. As the legendary Zig Ziglar often said:

“If you will help enough other people get what they want, they will help you get what you want.”

Effective, knowledgeable, timely, compassionate conversation will lead to the crafting of appropriate solutions, and the professional salesperson continues to develop the study of the prospect so as to offer the best available solutions to the prospect. The client and the salesperson both win.

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Are Tweets the Ticket to the Super Bowl?

What JCPenney’s Super Bowl Tweets Might Mean for Super Bowl Advertisements

by Lauren Wainwright

Even as a Seattle fan, it got a little boring watching the Broncos continually hand the ball over. After feeling pretty confident the Seahawks were bringing it home, I wound up perusing through Twitter.

It seemed like JCPenney was having as rough a first half of the game as the Broncos.

JCPenney jcpenney on Twitter

The company sent out two tweets that appeared to be written under the influence of a few too many super bowl cocktails. However, afterwards, they send out a tweet with a picture of their new mittens, apologizing for the typos. 

Was this a planned publicity stunt or a well-handled blunder?

JCPenney jcpenney on Twitter2

 

 

Judging by the prepared image that was sent out after the fact, I would have to guess that this was fully planned. However, the huge response couldn’t have been planned. Twitter users across the board were re-tweeting the messages, making jokes about the brand being too inebriated to have a Twitter account.

However, possibly even better handled was Snickers. Whoever is in charge of their Twitter account made a perfectly executed reply, shown in the image below.

snickers reply

Snickers wasn’t the only one who jumped on board and offered J.C. Penney help with their tweeting problem.

responses

The interesting part? None of the brands that were part of the Twitter conversation were advertisers in the Super Bowl.

With a 30 second commercial costing $4 million, it’s no surprise a lot of brands decided against the splurge in advertising this year, but it seems a lot of them have taken to social media. Rather than spending millions on short, highly competitive air space, there seemed to be more happening on social media.

It also felt like every commercial was trying to start its own hashtag.

hashtag

It makes me wonder what the future of Super Bowl advertisements will look like, and whether or not companies that do decide to spend the money on these advertisements are getting their money’s worth.

While on Twitter, I didn’t see any #StayRestless conversations, or #VW for the Volkswagen commercial, yet there were thousands of shares for the brands that stuck to the Twitterverse. While Jeep’s tweet with the hashtag they paid millions of dollars for with their commercial got 15 retweets and 23 favorites, the reply Snickers sent out about JCPenney’s tweet alone got 3,193 retweets and 1,489 favorites.

It will be interesting to see in the next few years whether the classic Super Bowl commercials will stay the course or if Twitter or Facebook stunts like J.C. Penney’s will take over the main stage.

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Changing Your Social Media Practices

Consider The Burma-Vita Company, a company Pre-Facebook, owned by Clinton Odell. Sales of their liniment were ‘sparse,’ so in 1925 the company introduced a product with wider appeal. The result was Burma-Shave, a new, ‘brush-less’ shaving cream.

American culture at that time included the assumption that most employees and most drivers were males, during a time that full face beards weren’t common in most parts. Many towns then and now have restrictions on the number and size of commercial signs on the roadside.

With almost no limited-access high speed highways, most people were thrilled to drive speeds once described as “a mile a minute.” So, we have men (who for the most part shaved daily) on well-traveled highways, moving at comparatively slow speeds over long distances, with little to do, but drive.

Did we mention there were no cell phones (the first real world cell phone call was in 1973), and CB (Citizen’s Band) radio, although an earlier technology was invented in 1940, didn’t become truly widespread outside of license-holder groups until 1975; prior to the late 1970s a license was required. “HAM” radio was expensive and required the passing of tests showing considerable technical acumen. Distractions or entertainment? No Sirius satellite radio. FM radio wasn’t invented yet. 8-track tapes, cassettes, Compact discs? Future, science fiction stuff in 1925.

I know.  I know. How did people survive! Today, anyone without an iPhone seems like  a caveman.

But modern reality in 1925, and for about 40 years was boredom on the road. The company had the new Burma-Shave product, and the son of the owner, Allan Odell, had an idea: pay attention to the cost-effective, result-generating possibilities of focused target marketing and advertisements that potential customers loved to see. In modern parlance, RTM (routes-to-market).

Burma-Shave Signs: Marketing Genius

Then came the Burma-Shave signs with their witty, funny, and effective ad slogans spaced out over some distance on the highway driven by men who looked forward to reading the next sign.

This was marketing genius. With a 1925 marketing budget of $250, sales increased dramatically. Imagine: advertisements that prospects loved to read.

Burma-Shave signs, starting in Minnesota, were in 45 States, including along Route 66; which was the name of a popular TV show aired from 1960 – 1964. It was ironically the same time that the new Interstate highways were being developed. Route 66 still carries an air of legend and was even featured in the 2006 Disney / Pixar movie, “Cars.” Burma-Shave ads were well loved part of the American way of life.

A Change of Culture

The demise of the Burma-Shave signs, and also the loss of the incredibly increased sales that came (and went) with the three-foot signs was caused mostly by the increased speeds allowed by the new Interstate Highways authorized by legislation passed June 29, 1956. The creation of the “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” mostly bypassed the highways of the 1920s that involved slower driving speeds. The roads with Burma-shave signs were becoming less traveled.

Huge billboards replaced the three foot painted signs, along with the ability to actually see, and want to see, the Burma- shave roadside ad campaigns. The signs are mostly now in museums, and the once-wonderful sales revenues went out with a whimper. So did the company, which was sold in 1963. Online discussion groups have men relating that they were fortunate enough to have actually found Burma-Shave products sometime in the past several years. The Burma-Shave brush-less shaving cream was discontinued, with the company itself in 1966. 1997 saw the re-introduction of the Burma-Shave company, but no actual Burma-Shave brush-less shaving cream.

How could this have happened?

Yesterday’s Genius Can Be Tomorrow’s Old News

The genius of low cost, high return and great RTM principles and strategies used by Burma-Shave was a force that changed the practice and science of effective advertising. However, as Burma-Shave discovered, irrelevance will cost you. When the climate of your prospects change, as with the introduction of Interstate highways, failure to adjust to current realities will cost you time and money.

Burma-Shave failed to adapt their marketing strategies to current realities, and the result was a catastrophic loss of sales revenue leading to the sale of the business, and its ultimate shut-down.

The Times, They Are Always Changing

The list of social media platforms goes on and on.  The most appropriate social networking sites that will yield the most favorable audience for your business could be completely different days, months or years from right now. Remember Burma-Shave. Emulate their smart, out-of-the-box moves, but don’t make the mistake of failing to realize that the cultural environment is subject to change.

3rd Party Info: 6 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2014

Plain and simple, your social media strategy should resemble a gymnast.  Strong, agile, balanced, able to take direction—and of course, flexible.  With these qualities, your social media practices are poised to bring home the gold on a consistent basis.

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7 Ways to Minimize Small Business Risks

Calculated risks are a bold, but crucial part of growing as a person and a business. They can be scary at first, as it can be human nature to overestimate the possibility of failure, but by evaluating the risk level for each opportunity that presents itself, you are more equipped to weigh the pros and cons of each situation.

A calculated risk is the key to good decision making, especially in a small business or organization that has big plans to grow. Overall, it is a chance of exposure to gain or loss for your business that might be undertaken after the advantages and disadvantages are carefully considered.

If you have been playing it safe with your business, it might be time to take a risk that will change how you look at decision making. Here are 7 ways to minimize the risk for your company:

1. Analyze Which Risks Make Sense for You

Risks are different levels of extremes for everyone, depending on their comfort level with change. For your business, you may want to become more efficient with your processes. For another, the concentration might be on growing their customer base. These two businesses would need completely different and specialized plans for what they wanted to achieve.

2. Set Your Goals and Brainstorm

By knowing your goal and working backwards to see how much time it will take to make the change, you prepare yourself for the process of the change. This step in the process also makes you aware of how many people will need to be involved and when.

3. Evaluate the Risk Level of Each Opportunity

When researching and preparing for the possibility of taking a risk, it is important to be unbiased to judge – such as an accountant, insurance agent, or marketing insight – to tell you when it will not be a good opportunity for the growth of the business. By getting an outsiders insight on your business, you get a more solid foundation of where your business is and where it could end up.

4. Create a Detailed Plan of Execution

With a calculated risk, you have to figure out what your goals are and fill in a roadmap of what will need to be done to make it happen. For example, coming up with a training program to roll out new procedures in your business works best when there is a set plan of exactly what each employee will learn and when.

By thoroughly researching the change you are planning to make, you know the consequences and benefits of what you are about to do. Stepping out of your comfort zone and taking on new opportunities presents your business as a leader in the market, and a carefully calculated plan can open you up to a world of possibilities that you hadn’t even considered in the past.

5. Edit and Change the Process As You Go

If you get halfway through a process and realize it is not going as planned, don’t be afraid to change it! Every business is different, and plans sometimes need to be tweaked to best fit what will work for your specific goal.

6. Review the Results

Whatever the outcome of your plan, use the results to help you adjust future decisions. Maybe you needed more funding or more time to complete the goal – now you are more aware of what to expect in your next endeavor.

7. Don’t Be Afraid to Fail

Not all risks go as planned, but it is crucial that you learn from your mistakes. Here at Orpical, we want to teach you how to make positive, calculated risks that will increase your profitability, open up new opportunities, and start a new way of thinking. While there is always a chance of failing, we feel as though risks can be very beneficial to everyone involved when they are well thought out and executed properly. Risk is unavoidable, so controlling it with an informed decision is the best approach you can take for your business.

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