All marketers want to know best practices and share experiences about driving sales. Here are 25 metrics you should select from to prove marketing drives sales... and to track progress.
9:47:54 AM    

If this true for you, then consider it a great opportunity for email marketing segmentation strategies. By segmenting your prospects, you can boost revenue, improve conversion from email marketing, strengthen buyer satisfaction, and build your brand. Sound like a tall order for a segmentation strategy? Consider these ideas.
9:47:51 AM    

So here is the question of the day: How well do your pages work together? Or to put it another way: How strong is the transition between your pages?
9:47:48 AM    

Which means that Web site optimization experts such as Karen Breen Vogel are in very high demand. Vogel understands how to lead organic traffic to Web sites—but, perhaps more importantly, she understands how to give those users the content they are looking for when they arrive. Here Vogel cuts through the clutter and gives invaluable advice on how to build disciplined Web site optimization programs that build on strengths and business objectives.

Note: Vogel is a presenter at the upcoming MarketingProfs conference: Driving Sales. Check out the complete program.
9:47:46 AM    

Here, Jeanne Bliss focuses on Detractors, and how to mine the gold by listening hard to their feedback to improve your organization and relationship with your customers.
9:47:44 AM    

Only time will tell whether the trust is well-placed.
9:47:43 AM    

I don’t write enough about the financial aspects of running and growing a company because I, like many of you, don’t pay enough attention to the power of the numbers.

I ran into Jack Stack, founder of SRC Holdings, author of The Great Game of Business and shepherd of a school of business management known today as Open Book Management. Jack was a keynote speaker at the Inc 500 Conference and was kind enough to retell a portion of his presentation for the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.

Jack introduced the idea of companies possessing two wheels, one wheel is the vision the creativity the reason you got into business. The second wheel is the numbers. According to Stack, the second wheel rarely turns until it’s time to figure out why you are working your tail off and not making any money.

Stack’s open book management and Great Game of Business teaches business owners how to learn, use and teach the financial information coming out of your company to grow, make decisions and build a community IN your business. Do this, and the community around your business will flourish.

9:47:42 AM    

American Express OPEN President Susan Sobbott, announced today a new credit card from American Express called the The Plum Card.

First off, the card offers some interesting terms. Remember the old 2% 10, Net 60? In other words you get 60 days to pay off the balance or take a 2% discount if you pay the balance in 10 days.

That’s all well and good, but the coolness factor may be what makes some sign-up - the card is as you can see in the photo, plum colored. I think it’s a great marketing play.

Oh, and the Inc 500 companies in attendance at the announcement all got an iPhone, not that’s what I call a nice conference souvenir. (I don’t know if they also get to claim the $100 rebate being offered by Apple.)

9:47:39 AM    

Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, delivered a simple message this morning in a presentation titled: The game is changing but the rules are the same. The theme of the talk was a road map for growing a business in today’s environment.

Here are the three major points for Intuit’s success according to Cook:
• Treat your employees as a volunteer workforce - Nurture your employees as entrepreneurs
• Ultimately the work is delivered by people and process - Experiment and Adopt tools that let you stay agile
• Word of mouth is more important than ever - Demonstrate value ahead of the sale and Proactively create customer delight

These words were delivered by the leader of one of the biggest companies around and yet, they apply to the one person shop equally.

Intuit is famous for measuring and evaluating the customer experience and Intuit created a page that allows you to grab Cook’s presentation, the actual survey tools, something they call the NetPromoter Survey and other related customer delight tools.

This is a great resource - go grab it all

9:47:37 AM    

Pre-conference photos

On my way to General Sessions:

• Great Entrepreneurial Minds: Unlocking the Secrets of Small Business Growth with Susan Sobbett, President of OPEN from American Express and,
• Marketing in a Digital World: How to Leverage Technology and New Media to Build Lust for Your Brand
  Mark Jarvis, CMO, Dell

9:47:35 AM    

I’m in Chicago this week and will be blogging while I attend the Inc.com 500 Conference

As you probably already know, Inc recognizes the top 500 fastest growing companies in America based on 3 year revenue growth. The conference, presented with OPEN from American Express, Principal Financial Group and Dell, is a celebration of entrepreneurship and recognition event for the 500 honorees.

Here are couple Inc 500 class of 2007 entries that look very interesting.

• Bill Me Later - #6 - Bill Me Later is a convenient and secure new payment method designed for purchasing on the web or over the phone.
• Zorch International - #28 - New approach to branded promotional products
• Right Media - #46 - Interactive ad network now owned by Yahoo!
• Wpromote - #62 - Search marketing firm
• Vibes Media - #92 - Interactive mobile marketing - the phone’s the thing
• Instinct Marketing - #199 - Doing some nice things with local search and CRM
• AbsorbentInk - #216 - Another promotional products company
• eROI - #402 - Lead generation firm using email and other e forms of marketing
• DirectoryM - #458 - Local online directories

More to come!

9:47:34 AM    

This is a blog spam comment that I received and had to share - finally, a true solution to blog comment spam.

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me at (Romanian email address) , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

If you use the Akismet plug-in for WordPress you can block most of this kind of stuff.

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9:47:34 AM    

On this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast I caught up with the ever energetic Chet Holmes, author of The Ultimate Sales Machine.

It’s funny but when I read the title to the book I’m thinking, “I’m not ready for another sales book.” But I noticed the my friend Michael Gerber had written the forward so I dug in and had to laugh because Michael’s forward said the same thing - “does the world really need another sales book?”

When you hear Chet talk and read the first couple chapters you come to the conclusion that this book isn’t really about sales in the common way of thinking about it. (On the show Chet says he fought long and hard with his publisher for a different title.)

The book presents 12 strategies that Chet has used in his own business and those of his clients to systematically grow their businesses. There are lots of strategies that small businesses can employ but I think the best advice in this book is that you should develop a handful that work, that are simple, that are proven and stick with them until you master them. The strategy of lifetime learning and mastery flows through as the primary theme of the Ultimate Sales Machine.

Almost any systematic approach, practiced repetitively, will outshine the “marketing idea of the week” approach.

9:47:33 AM    

Fear is the most basic of human elements and plays a major role in business success and failure.

I spend a great deal of time trying to help business owners understand that one of the most important marketing strategies they must embrace is finding a way to stand out from the crowd. Because this is such a focus for me I can tell you that one of the single greatest fears that many business owners have is being different than everyone else in their industry.

I suppose it goes back to the schoolyard where being different made all but the most independent kids nervous as heck. I find that this goes well beyond simply copying what others in the industry do, it’s a real fear of doing anything that might appear odd. I can tell you right now this fear, and knowing that others in your industry share it, is the single greatest small business marketing opportunity at your disposal.

Here’s an exercise I would like you to tackle. Go to the web site of your four biggest competitors, copy the introductory paragraph from their home page and paste each on a document. Now add the same from your own web site. Lastly, black out any mention of the names of the firms and pass this page around the office or to anyone familiar with your business.

The object of this little game is to see if anyone can identify any of the companies listed, including your own. My experience when I’ve done this is that many business owners struggle even identifying the entry from their own company, but what is usually painfully obvious is that each of the companies is saying essentially the same thing.

I can tell you right now that if the world of prospects can’t tell you apart from your competitors, they will be forced to use price as their only guide.

You must get over the fear of being different and find a way to demonstrate that you serve a very narrow target niche, package your services in unique ways, provide an over the top experience, own a certain way of doing things, do something that someone wants like no one ever thoughts of - and then, proudly declare this difference in every fiber of your communication.

So tell me, how do you stand out, how do you tap the fear of being different?

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9:47:30 AM