iPads - a must for sales people

Many readers may already have an IPad and are pleased with the way they can use it. So in this article I would like to offer a personal view about using an IPad in sales and encourage others to find out more about this fascinating device.

Hands up - who has used an IPad to show a prospect, customer or colleagues your latest product or service and found the IPad an embarrassment? Well I can put my hand up and I learnt a lot from the experience.

My company, Reputation Selling, is about helping businesses to attract more customers through word of mouth. I do this by bringing recommendations and referrals to life with videos for websites and sales presentations. It is vital that I show my videos seamlessly on laptops, Smartphones and iPads.

iPads for networking - I recently used one at a networking event. I was talking with a really promising prospect but they had a concern that I had to resolve. So I brought out my IPad and blushed with embarrassment. Why? Because I had not got my visuals set up for fast access. It seemed to take ages meanwhile my prospect was getting fidgety. I could see he was getting bored and I was at Defcon 2 danger level of losing his attention and the business opportunity. I brought his attention back by getting him to navigate through the presentation. He was more engaged and could identify the features and benefits that applied to him. Thankfully I ended up at Defcon 5. So if you show video testimonials or case studies on your iPad be aware that they can be a conversation stopper so make sure you have a narrative to guide them through.

The Tsunami of iPads - The iPad’s slim 1.5-pound frame and 10-hour battery make it ideal for sales professionals. According to a report by Tecmark in Feb 2011 in September 2009, 0.02% of internet traffic to a website in the UK was traffic using mobile devises. In January 2011, 8.09% of traffic to a website was using a mobile device. More UK website visits originate from iPads than Android powered devises. Source, Information Intelligence Corp.

iPads in the sales process - IPads are getting more and more popular in sales because you can use them in the key stages of the buying process. In a recent survey respondents were asked how they'll use the iPad, 64 percent said they'd use the iPad for business, 31 percent for personal use, and 86 percent for both. The other benefit of an iPad in sales is the sales team’s ability to present a consistent product message including video and interactive brochures, potentially wrapped up in an iPad app.

On the move - Travelling sales teams will find the iPad so useful; record leads on the fly at tradeshows, manage new and existing contacts and access their web-based CRM tools. The iPad is going to open the door to a huge application market geared for sales.

iPads at Mercedes – They saw an opportunity to use the iPad in its dealership sales process. Mercedes dealers began to record key customer information while they were standing next to – or seated in – the car they were selling. It also gave salespeople on the dealership floor access to marketing programs for specific models. “The iPad will provide a competitive advantage to our dealers by increasing their service levels through a more flexible financing process,” said Andreas Hinrichs, vice president of marketing for Mercedes-Benz Financial, in a release. Source: Mercedes Benz.

iPads in clothing - It is easy to use and it fulfils the needs of the sales force. Just imagine being able to sit in front of a customer and tap through the different clothing ranges you have to sell. You create a quotation on the spot, tapping through sizes, colours and other configuration variants. Tap a button to calculate pricing - including all the complicated pricing routines you have in your ERP system - and include customer specific discounts.

Look at benefits and blockers

Category	Benefits	Blockers
Displace laptops	Lightweight Handheld Unobtrusive Intimate	No microsoft No mouse support On device storage
Replace clipboards	Familiar experience Connected Application driven	Durability Theft Missing apps
New place applications	Immediate answers Highly interactive Inuitive experiences	Emploee acceptance Back end integration

The advantages and disadvantages of tablets in enterprise, according to Forrester Research Inc. is an independent technology and market research company.

In conclusion, I think that the IPad or tablet is not going to take over from a laptop or smartphone but it will be used more and more in selling situations; raising awareness, informing, resolving customer objections, getting to YES and of fast internal administration. So if you haven’t got one yet try one out and keep your customers engaged and not bored!

Webinars for generating sales leads

Webinars have been around for some years now and they are becoming more popular for generating new sales leads and improving customer retention. They are particularly effective when you are selling and marketing an intangible service. You may be running webinars now, you may have just started to use them or you may be considering it. So for some this article may be a refresher and for others it may be a prompt to investigate further.

It is widely acknowledged that companies of all sizes are using webinars as part of their sales and marketing activities and that a properly run webinar can generate vital sales leads and engage existing customers. Research carried out by Marketing Profs Research in 2008 shows trends that are still valid today. Those participants who were asked “why your company conducts webinars?” 67% said to generate leads, 57% to build loyalty, 40% to drive website visits, 28% to drive offline business, 37% to build in house database and 69% to increase brand awareness. In terms of frequency, when asked how often they ran webinars over 50% said between one and five per year and the rest quoted six to ten per year.

So what makes a good webinar? Most important of all is the matching of the subject and content of your webinar to your targeted market. Think of those times when your inbox is peppered with webinar invites. What do you do with them? Within a few seconds a quick scan separates out the interesting ones which are worth more attention. This is the challenge – making sure your webinar subject is going to really motivate your target audience to register, attend and take action.

Powerpoint presentations with commentary are the most common forms of webinar but sometimes the slides presented are simply awful with too many bullet points and too many words so it becomes absolutely essential to follow good practice in slide layout. You may want to embed a video clip or two. This can work very well to get a point across or to show customer testimonials but care is needed. The clips should be no longer than 1.5 minutes or shorter, the content must be relevant with a compelling call to action. Don’t embed too many otherwise the commentators role becomes secondary.

There are three main stages to producing an effective webinar; invitation, implementation and follow up.

Invitation stage – This stage is vital to get people aware of you and so the subject matter must be tailored to grab interest. Remember that as well as selling a webinar you are promoting your company and brand at the same time and this needs to be reflected in the words and illustrations you use. Email invitations should offer a one-click access to a simple registration form. Email reminders or teasers are important too and should be sent out 24 hours and 3 hours before the webinar.

Implementation stage – generally free marketing webinars will last between 30 – 60 minutes. Since the average webinar attendee will tend to join the webinar about 5 minutes after the start time, plan your content, including questions and answers, for either 25 or 55 minutes. Remember to hold the webinar to fit in with your target audience usually mid-week at mid-day or for a financial services audience 7.00 pm may be better time for them.

For improved audience engagement you can set up the webinar with a live question facility via a dialogue box, the same as you would expect to see in chat rooms. For smaller webinars you can set it up for two way discussions and mute when appropriate. A challenge that often arises is keeping participant attention during the webinar; we’ve all done it; gone off to make a coffee finish some emails etc This is a difficult one to resolve but advice from experienced webinar users is to ensure the relevance of the content to the audience’s needs and interest; the better the match the better the attention. To keep involvement another idea is to introduce short question and answer sessions during the webinar and not just at the end of it.

Follow up stage – a ‘thank you’ email is obvious but make it useful by providing a link to a copy of the slides or even a recording of the live webinar. You can offer free reports, samples or price reductions. Above all make sure your communications have a “human touch”; we all like that.

In making a webinar more attractive you may wish to collaborate with a non-competitor; a company that compliments your service or is linked to your subject matter. The advantage is that you can present two sources of information to the audience. It also creates a useful way to communicate with the non-competitor’s prospects and in doing so will increase your pool of new leads.

Are you going to try it out. Give me a shout if you want to chat about it. Love to hear from you.

Nick Belcher www.reputation-selling.co.uk

Chill out dude so we can make a great video testimonial

When you are videoing someone giving a testimonial about a product or service they received - they have to be relaxed to be genuine - right? So why do some video companies make filming such a nervous business.

Just imagine what it might be like - The date is set for the filming and your advised that a full film production unit will do the work. They are very professional with all the latest gizmos, cameras, trolleys and dollys. You start thinking about what you might say and you are given a guide of what to say, a mini script if you like - nerve level at Defcon 3.

Then the day arrives and you are guided to the filming location. You are fixed up with a microphone, bright lights are set up around you and you start to feel a bit nervous, quite a few people are looking at you - nerve level at Defcon 2.

Filming begins. You are off tripping up on a few words which you get over easily as the camera a rolls. You are asked questions to help you give the required response. OOOps the words don't come out quite as you expected, start again. You begin to clam up and feel very uncomfortable - nerve level at Defcon 1.

It's all over and a few days later you see yourself - eeeek I didn't know I looked like that or whoopee I do look lovely. Usually not the latter but that's ok everyone is a bit critical about what they look like. Some charming works well.

OK a bit of a fun story but I base it on my own experiences and I have learnt from them. So I am very keen to make the videoing that I do an enjoyable and less hectic experience for testimonial givers.

On the subject of scripts. One sure fire way of making people clam up in front of the camera is to use a script. So dump it. You don't need them for testimonials. I remember being in this situation - I had spent a couple of hours rehearsing and then I messed up big time on the day, my voice was all over the place, I couldn't remember my lines and I was not talking from the heart at all, it looked so contrived. So when I dumped the script I let it all come out in my way, it was terrific.

I think videographers need to know the impact of their behaviours on others, in other words it's ok to have a brilliant filming technician but if they cannot make people relax they will never get that 'from the heart' feel to the video.

So the key is about making testimonial givers chill out, there is the challenge. A magic mushroom soup perhaps? A good bedside manner?

Any ideas?

I hope you are having a great day!

Cheers

Nick

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Webinars for my video testimonial business

Have you been on any webinars yet? Well I have been a bit of a slow starter in attending webinars and I must say that I have been impressed. Predictably I attended a couple about using video online to boost business. It lasted an hour and it was from the US, a bloke talked very well for 45 mins and then there were questions.

He supported what he was saying through some slides which gave loads of useful info. So a bit like a powerpoint conference call, which felt like a lecture. The webinar system they used was Citrix, Webex is another one and the system automatically sends out invite emails and follow up ones with a slide pack.

Stuff he spoke about was interesting to0 Monthly growth rate for video traffic referrals show facebook at 48% and Twitter at 38% PER MONTH. Online video traffic now accounts for 51% of the web. Most importantly 66% of the world's mobile data traffic will grow at a rate of 131% between 2009 and 2014.

So what? For I think this is a great tool for engaging with customers and prospects especially in the B2B market. I am not sure about stats in terms of how many people sign on but I suppose that's about the relevance of the subject.

When I run one I would certainly include more video clips and improve the slide the transitions to make it a little bit more visually exciting.

The cost of these things vary but I recommend gotowebinar - around £50 per month or pay as you go.

I hope that's useful!

AT REPUTATION SELLING WE MAKE VIDEO TESTIMONIALS FOR BUSINESSES TO INCREASE SALES.

Go to WWW.REPUTATION-SELLING.CO.UK

Capture the great things people say

In this clip Jon Devitt, Videographer Reputation Selling gives his view about filming customer testimonials. (The thumbnail pic of Jon has suffered from the Blogger upload but the clip itself is in HD). Jon says that it is all about getting the person being filmed to relax so that he or she talks from the heart with natural credibility. He is a BBC experienced videographer and has interviewed all sorts of people over many years in the UK and the Middle East.

I am Nick Belcher, founder of Reputation Selling, (the bloke to the right!) and I am finding that more and more visitors to websites expect to see video clips of products, services and customers. This is partly because of the impact of YouTube but also the power of word of mouth recommendations that helps people with their decision to buy.

Why not try us out? Our Pilot package will give you an HD quality video testimonial of one of your customers. Prices starting at £750 plus vat. Go to http://www.reputation-selling.co.uk/special-offer for more.

Video testimonials - not just nice to have

7 tips on using video testimonials to increase sales

A recommendation from someone else still remains the most trusted source of information that people use to buy a product or service. So why not use testimonials on your website and in your sales presentations? 


In my experience text only websites keep viewers on a site for under a minute, while sites with engaging and relevant video clips keep them there for almost six minutes. 


Here are seven reasons to consider using well produced and genuine video testimonials.

1. They are useful to you when you are making a sales presentation, you can add a short clip of a customer talking about your service to influence your prospect, you can download them to your iphone too for showing clients in those impromptu situations.

2. Making a video testimonial with one of your customers tends to strengthen the relationship you have with them, quite good for repeat business.

3. Video testimonials make websites 'sticky' in the sense that visitors will stay on the website longer than normal when they view a video clip. The longer you keep visitors on your site, the more likely they are to buy the product or service your are offering. 

4. Sales objections lead to sales opportunities. With careful use of a video testimonial you can resolve customer objections and reduce the time it takes to convert a prospect. Create video testimonials of real clients that are built around a specific objection. Build a selection of video clips that relate to overcoming sales objections.

6. Use video testimonials in emailers/newsletters makes them more impactful and you can encourage prospects to view them via Twitter and other digital media.

7. You can build up a library of video clips to use throughout the year to support your sales strategy - promoting new services, more testimonials, addressing particular customer concerns e.g. speed of response.

See my website http://www.reputation-selling.co.uk/

Gobsmacked about what customers say

I had a fascinating experience recently when my videographer Joe and I were filming a customer testimonial for Reed Harris. We were in an upmarket London gym where Reed Harris had supplied some inspirational mosaic tiles from Italy.

It was hot as we were quite close to the sauna and the lighting added a bit of heat. I was sitting with my client while we asked the customer some open questions to get him talking such as; what made you choose Reed Harris? What did you like about them? Why would you recommend them?

Because Joe let the camera roll there was no pressure on the customer to get it right first time we edited the good bits later. The relaxed and jovial atmosphere helped him talk from the heart in a genuine way. As the session progressed the client and I looked at each other gob smacked at the great things the customer was saying about Reed Harris. I asked the client if she had heard this sort of thing before – no.

It is particularly rewarding when a client hears some genuine and credible stuff from a customer for the first time. It shows what excellent selling power there is in a video testimonial. 

See my website http://www.reputation-selling.co.uk/