Small Business Marketing & B2B Sales Leads

1. DON’T Spend Money on Brochures. Save your money. Remember people who ask for a brochure are not real prospects or interested in your services or products. If they were, they would meet or talk with you, not ask for a brochure. If brochures worked to sell B2B products or services that would be all the marketing you would need. Most people buy brochures for their business because they don’t know what else to do to market their business and it’s easy.

2. DO If Necessary, Offer Your Brochure Only Online. If you must have a brochure to “impress” your prospects just know that it won’t deliver you any sales. At most, create your brochure for online distribution only. This will save you a lot of money and show your “green side” in helping the environment.

3. DON’T Deliver Your Sales Messages Using Mass Marketing Methods. Save more money. Using mass marketing delivery methods like TV, radio or mass marketing direct mail are very expensive for small business and akin to using an atomic bomb to kill a fly. Your audience for your products/services is very small usually no more than 20,000 prospects and usually less than 10,000. Mass marketing delivery methods are for reaching hundreds of thousands and millions of prospects. Mass marketing relies on the law of averages to work. Meaning unless you have millions of prospects that use and can afford your products or services you are wasting your money.

4. DO Use Strategic Marketing Techniques & Highly Focused Delivery Methods. Strategic Marketing has everything to do with what you say, how you say it, and who you say it to. In other words, it's the content of your marketing message that counts. The more specific and targeted you can be in reaching out to your market the more successful you will be in obtaining quality sales leads. This approach also allows for small business to afford the cost to market everyday because you are not wasting resources on people who are not your target audience.

5. DON'T Use Brand or Institutional Advertising. Placing trade ads in local newspapers, or industry trade magazines is not only expensive, but it won’t result in anyone contacting you either. Do this type of marketing when you become a large national or global company.

6. Do Use Marketing Strategies that are Accountable. Use marketing delivery methods that are accountable. Know what works and what doesn't and any method that generates sales inquiries from qualified prospects is best.

7. DON’T Use Public Relations to Build Brand Identity. Getting a lot of media exposure through public relations efforts that only promote your company name will have no impact on your sales or profits. Building brand identity takes a lot of money over time save this form of PR for when you are no longer a small business.

8. DO Use Public Relations as Part of Your Marketing. This is an affordable weapon in your marketing arsenal. A profitable public relations effort needs to be focused on developing rapport and creditability with your prospective customers by informing them on how you solve problems they encounter everyday. This will result in generating sales lead inquiries from prequalified prospects that already know something about your company before they contact you. Yes, done right prequalified sales prospects will contact you. Exactly, what you need to grow sales.

9. DON’T Send One Newsletter to all your Customers. Many businesses produce newsletters that contain the wrong information for their various target audiences and too much of it. What information you send to your existing customers needs to be very different from what you send to new prospects. Trying to sell more or additional products or services to existing customers is fine but not to prospects. Prospects aren’t going to buy from you until you have built rapport and confidence. Leave the hard, up and cross sell sales pitches for your existing customer base. Remember, the purpose of a newsletter is to deliver information and stay in contact with prospective clients so you are top of mind when they are ready to buy. Success stories or white papers of even one or two pages work best. The content volume of your newsletter is not nearly as important as how regularly and the content value of the information you deliver.

10. DON’T Even Think About Telemarketing. Have you ever heard anyone say he or she loves talking to telemarketers? Selling is about building respect confidence and rapport with prospective customers. not making them uncomfortable, irritated and downright mad. Only a handful of very skilled telemarketers are adept at using this method to obtain prospects. Besides legitimate telemarketing, firms are expensive, why because they use mass-market techniques meaning they have to call a lot of people to make this work. This is not small business friendly.

11. DON’T Just Deliver Educational Messages. Yes, people do want information. That's why they surf the Internet and request free information. But simply supplying information to those seeking and requesting information is not sufficient to turn prospects into customers. You can spend a lot of time and money educating people for free at your expense.

12. DO Consider Customer Centric Marketing Programs. We recommend you invest in a marketing program that attracts qualified inquiries that actually reach out to contact you. This way you avoid creating bad first impressions on people you are trying to develop a long-term business relationship with. When prospects seek, you out you are no longer viewed as selling, but a valued consultant that can help your prospective customers solve problems this is the best way to forge lasting customer relationships.