You CAN Win: Lead generation and sales for Small Businesses

Marketing Sherpa published the chart below on sales conversion.  What’s stunning is that 50% of companies have NO processes or system in place.  That’s an opportunity for smaller organizations.

How Organizations Manage Their Marketing-to-Sales Process

While a customized Salesforce application and IT staff may be out of your reach, you can still effectively manage your sales pipeline and compete against the bigger boys with the right product. I recommend WeMeUS Relationship Management and Lead Generation for Consultants and Small Businesses.  WeMeUs is a personal CRM with full Lead Management for lead nurturing and tracking. Read more on WeMeUs for Sales

Daily Deals & Dallas

I’ve had a number of people ask about daily deals for Dallas.  I created a page where you can quickly review over 20 sites for Daily Deals in Dallas and other top bargain shopping sites.  Get 50% off or more at  MyLinkDallas.com.

Free US long distance for more people

I was one of the beta users of Grand Central (now Google Voice) 5 years ago.  I extolled the service’s innovations in Unified Communications.

What makes it a breakthrough is the innovative integration of telephony, Internet, and usability (similar to what Apple did with digital music). I use Grand Central for long distance calling to any phone from my office that is faster, cheaper (currently free for long distance), more convenient (I’m already at my computer), and more powerful (integrated with online address book, automatically adds phone numbers from previous calls) than picking up the phone to dial. Plus I can put their widget on my web site for free so that visitors can call me for free (they just enter their number and it dials us both, calling all my phones).

Google Voice has spread its tentacles to mobile and now email spheres. Any Gmail account can now initiate free US long distance phone calls.

You no longer need a Google Voice account.  But you might as well get one.   Google finally opened the free service to all visitors after its eternal “beta”.

The only surprise  is that this expansion has taken so long. Innovation has virtually been at a standstill as Google has slowly assimilated Grand Central over the past three years.

Is advertising on Groupon, LivingSocial or another group buying site “Fee Splitting?”

I last wrote about Daily Deals or Group Buying in I Can Get It For You Wholesale.

WikiPedia defines fee splitting as either a kickback or a non-licensed professional getting paid for a referral.

Groupon and LivingSocial sell licensed professional services. They take the customer’s money, keep part of it, and give the remainder to the professional.  Therefore the platforms encourage and facilitate “Fee Splitting.”  They should not be used by any licensed professional to offer his services as it’s prohibited by the licensing body as a fee splitting activity.  Right?  Am I missing something?

I’ve seen dentists and chiropractors in Groupon, as well as cosmetic surgeons and MDs (but no lawyers or psychologists yet).  So how can they advertise on these sites if they’re prevented by fee splitting?

Join the discussion on LinkedIn.

Charity: the trick to consumer-set pricing

This economic depression has forced marketers to be more creative.  It’s kickstarted a renaissance in pricing.  I wrote earlier on Daily Deals in I Can Get it for you Wholesale.  Another trend is letting the consumer set his own pricing.

The difficulty with such variable pricing is that there are no standards, norms, or techniques  to prevent freeloaders who wouldn’t normally buy or “selfish” consumers who maximize their own value at the expense of the seller and pay nothing or close to it.  This is a classical Tragedy of the commons situation.

Typical tactics to increase pricing include:

• Suggested price. Provide a minimum, suggested amount, or related guidelines, similar to donations in the public sector world.
• Peer Pressure. Displaying what other users paid.
• Premium. Award a bonus or publicity scaled by payment amount.
• Transparency. Disclose actual costs so the consumer can hopefully make an informed decision about how much profit he’s willing to let you make.

Add Charity share to the list.  Giving an amount or percentage to charity has long been a part of the marketing toolset to raise sales or conversion.  But it works especially well with consumer-set pricing.  The Freakonomics blog  points to a wonderful study in  How to Maximize Pay-What-You-Wish Pricing where donating a major share of the payment has a huge impact on both consumer sales and price.

Ayelet Gneezy, a marketing professor at the University of California-San Diego, conducted a field experiment at a theme park (sample size: over 113,000).  Gneezy presented four different pricing schemes for souvenir photos: a flat fee of $12.95; a flat fee of $12.95 with half going to charity; pay-what-you-wish; and pay-what-you-wish with half going to charity.  At a flat fee of $12.95 per picture, only 0.5% of people purchased a photograph; when customers were told that half the $12.95 purchase price would go to charity, a meager 0.59% purchased a photo. Under the simple pay-what-you-wish variation, 8.39% of people purchased a photo, but customers paid only $.92 on average. The final option — pay what you wish, with half the purchase price going to charity — generated big results: purchase rates of 4.49% and an average purchase price of $5.33, resulting in significant profits for the theme park. “When the charity factor is introduced, these casual freeloaders balk at the idea of paying nothing, because it’s more likely to reflect badly on them,” writes Ed Yong. “Rather than naming a higher price, their preference is to avoid buying altogether -– for them, it isn’t worth it. Sales fall, but the actual profits go up because the remaining customers are motivated by their desire for the product and for the cause, will pay for both.”

What other techniques have you seen?

I can get it for you wholesale

The Daily Deal bubble continues to explode.  VCs pour in ever more money.  Aggregators and white labellers build out the market.  Major estores and sites like have even joined the fun.  Amazon bought Woot. Twitter has @earlybird.  Marketers contrive 90% off packages that include “free” services, fake retail prices, and future discounts.

It’s no coincidence this product segment took off during a global depression.  It’s 2010-style coupon clipping.  This isn’t just a discount.  With today’s deals, you don’t just avoid paying retail.  You can buy at wholesale prices.

The deals started to move discontinued merchandise.  It was only a short hop to extend them to service businesses that have a high margin.  Now there are so many deals that you can get much of what you need -  such as PC … headphones … restaurant … massage … golf … trip – all at 50% off.  Or more.

This isn’t just promotional marketing. It’s deflation in action.  People have less money and are spending less.  Businesses have to cut prices.

When was the last time you paid regular prices for dinner when you could have used a 50% off deal?

Stupid users TNG

Ignorant technology consumers have always been a source of great frustration – and amusement – for those on the other side of the fence.   The genre takes a leap forward with the video ‘iPhone4 vs HTC Evo‘.

It’s the funniest video I’ve seen in years.  So good  I laughed, cried, and then had trouble breathing.  Or maybe that was my asthma.

The producer is Brian Maupin, a Best Buy employee who sells mobile phones.  His reward - likely getting fired.

PS – For you non-Trekkies TNG is The Next Generation.

The Failure of Capitalism

Sometimes do you feel you’re the only adult in the room?  Now I do have the misfortune of living in a red state but … when are we going to grow up and take responsibility in this country?

We are heating this planet to extinction, at least for us humans who like dry land and moderate temps. We had a mortgage disaster  that precipitated the worst economic collapse in almost a century.  Think about it, that’s four (!) generations ago, long before computers, Xboxes, and even TV and The Real Housewives of New Jersey.   Now we have an oil spill that’s turned our nation’s backyard pool into a toilet.

Our vaunted capitalism has done little to address critical world issues.  Indeed it’s the cause for both escalating calamities and feeble attempts of response.   BP is (or was) worth one quarter of a trillion US dollars.  It’s is the world’s fourth largest company in terms of sales.  Have you seen the CEO of this colossus?  It reminds me of Bush. And we’re counting on him?

The myth of a market economy is that it exists in isolation.  In our shrinking world, virtually everything we do – or don’t do – has consequences.  Oil consumption contributes to global warming.  Financial securitization masks risk.  Deep sea drilling increases the magnitude of damage from accidents.

The real cost of a product or service is not just the price of labor and  parts. It also has to encompass the entire spectrum of externalities that encompass the individual, the community, the nation and world, and the planet.  These externalities cannot be priced or managed in a laissez-faire economy where the market rules.

Responsibility as an adult means taking control of not just your own actions and life, but that of your family and your community.  Companies can hardly be counted on for self-regulation, must less looking out for consumer welfare or public good. The political establishment, virtually run by the corporations, has done little.  The current Administration’s idea of change is reusing a leaky bandage, the proverbial finger in the dike.

Whether you despise or support the tea partiers, they have one thing right.  They feel and articulate the visceral impact of a world spinning out of control.  Sadly their isolationist me-first solution gives even more control, not less, to corporations.  This  notion of retreating to the past is the coward’s approach of avoiding the hard work the needs to be today … and tomorrow.

Capitalism is not bad.  It’s a powerful theory and effective practice as a means for organizing production.  It has a critical role in today’s world.  Just like the government, it is prone to abuse when the institution is too powerful.  It’s only one tool in the civilization toolkit.

When will we get past cleaning messes and leaky bandages and discuss a future that works, for us and our children?

New ventures: Watch the burn … and your own pay

Startup Lawyer Ryan Roberts publishes a  reminder on the importance of startup CEO pay, both in keeping your burn rate reasonable and attracting investors.

VC Peter Thiel wrote

The lower the CEO salary, the more likely it is to succeed.

The CEO’s salary sets a cap for everyone else. If it is set at a high level, you end up burning a whole lot more money. It aligns his interest with the equity holders. But [beyond that], it goes to whether the mission of the company is to build something new or just collect paychecks.

In practice we have found that if you only ask one question, ask that.

Email: Quality is more important than ever before

The average businessperson receives 200 emails per day. He spends  30-40% of his working time just managing that email torrent.  Do you think he needs yet another one of your impersonal emails? It’s little wonder harried people today click ‘Spam’ on perfectly legitimate messages.

Business is increasingly about trust and building relationships. The top email marketing tactic is sending custom content to a targeted group, according to a MarketingSherpa survey (below). Impersonal email blasts rank at the bottom of the list.

What about the email that you send to your business customers and prospects? Email marketing services like iContact and Constant Contact can be useful.  But sending out blasts of hundreds or thousands of emails is increasingly ineffective.

Large businesses have the manpower and budget to customize CRM systems like salesforce.com. Small businesses and consultants don’t.  Check out tools like WeMeUs Contact Management and Lead Generation.  They enable highly personalized emails for messages that have impact … and actually get read.