Would you like a 14.56% Conversion Rate?

We are looking to hire for two part time positions. These are perfect for stay at home moms who are looking to re-enter the professional life again!

Sales Executive Position

Successful Sales Executive candidates for Invesp Consulting will posses these core competencies: Passion for Sales, Ownership Mentality, Proven Sales Skills, Confidence, Energy, Positive Attitude and Persistence.

Responsibilities include:

• Develop and aggressively grow sales in designated geography through prospecting, cold calls and relationship development.
• Develop and maintain relationships with existing customers through effective account management and service. Ensure their understanding of our services.
• Maintain a high level of customer service through training and customer support.
• Ensure satisfaction by responding quickly and accurately to problems, concerns or needs of the customers and prospects.
• Help proactively market Invesp to clients in territory and convey the advantages of our services.
• Candidates will work from home and be responsible for attaining specific revenue and account base goals.

Requirements:

• 4 to 6 years of solid account management and sales experience.  Online marketing sales experience preferred but not required.
• A proven inside sales and account management track record.
• College degree.
• Technical skills to include, Microsoft Office Suite including strong use of Outlook and Word. 

Key Skills and Qualities:

• Candidates must have a winning attitude and be able to work effectively in a self-motivated environment.
• Clear communicator with a winning personality.
• Superb organizational skills.
• Well organized, with strong relationship building capabilities.
• Proactive, results oriented, self starter.
• Ability to quickly assess needs of customers

Please note that this is a part time job with 25-30 hours per week.

PR Consultant Position

Invesp consulting is seeking to hire a PR consultant to assist in the public relations area.

Responsibilities include:

• Develop a focused media relations plan that promotes brand awareness and positions the company as an industry leader.
• Develop and grow relationships with targeted media/reporters.
• Identify and create opportunities to obtain media coverage for Invesp Consulting
• Identify and create opportunities to obtain conference speaking engagements for Invesp Consulting
• Develop media supporting materials (fact sheets, response statements, news releases, event outline)
• Candidates will work from home on part time basis and be responsible for attaining specific goals.

Requirements:

• 5+  years of public relation experience. 
• Online marketing experience is preferred but not required.

If interested, please send your resume to careers@invesp.com

Tags: career, jobs, part time jobs, stay at home jobs
Posted in Business, Miscellaneous

Marketing folk often say your past customers are your best leads for the future. Then there is countless advice on warming up prospects, qualifying leads, and farming your market. You can very quickly get to the point where you have lists overflowing with names .

This is all very well, but what happens when you collect all this data and don’t know what to do with it?

After you collect your data, you need to start mining it.

A very simple technique that all CRM tools, and even an access database or spreadsheet, can perform is an RFM analysis. RFM stands for Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value.

• Recency - How long ago did they last buy/interact?
• Frequency - How often do they buy/interact?
• Money - How much do they spend? What is their budget?

Take your list and sort by each, giving a score from 1-5. When you have sorted and got three scores, add them together. This will give you a ranking from best (15), to worst (3).

For example,

Mr Big Co buys every week to the value of $1,000.
He is a much better prospect than Mr Flint who bought one $10 product last year.

If you take your top 20% from the list they are your gold customers or prospects. Now you know who to target with your most lavish attention!

Posted in Miscellaneous

I hate popup blockers and find them quite annoying; but then who doesn’t? And although it is hard to find users who are “okay” with popups, some sites continue to use them ignoring the basic usability and conversion principles. But of course, that shouldn’t seem too strange since experts in the industry are recommending that ecommerce sites continue the popup practice. We came across a “recognized leading expert in web site usability and ecommerce marketing strategies” who gives the following advice to ecommerce sites that are trying to get more information about site visitors. Our expert recommends:

aggressive in collecting e-mail addresses, especially if it intends to eventually cease using direct mail as a touchpoint. For instance, it could use pop-up screens to capture the e-mail addresses of forum participants and of people who abandon searches or shopping carts

Continue reading Popup Hell

Tags: ecommerce, marketing, popups
Posted in Business, Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

Understanding your visitor is the underlying answer to creating a successful website. However, gathering the required information can prove to be quite a task. There are a variety of ways to gather key information about site visitors and of course the more methods you utilize and implement the greater the results.

As we’ve noted in previous blogs, persona development is crucial to your site’s success. Creating hypothetical individuals that represent your market is key to increasing calls to action. But many people struggle with ways to gather and sometimes decipher through all the data because not all data is useful data. You want information that will achieve specific business goals you have set for your company.

Continue reading Research: Getting to the Roots of Your Site Visitor

Tags: analytics, market research, market segmentation, Personas, usability
Posted in Sales & Marketing

Get a group of business people in a room and ask about leads and you will get varying definitions. That’s fine if you are at a networking event, but if your own business can not agree on definitions you will find your sales process hampered before you even begin.

Branding might define a lead as someone warm towards the brand.

Marketing might define someone as in the target demographic, or perhaps someone who has read the materials.

Sales is only interested in people ready to buy, but even then (often depending on how their targets are determined) might disagree on strict definitions. Is someone in the market a lead, or do they have to have contacted you? Should they be about to buy, or do they have to have expressed an interest in buying from you?

Without getting to the bottom of all this how can you possibly track and tune your sales process? How can your marketing link up to sales? Are you ever going to be able to create a qualification system if nobody can agree on what a qualified lead looks like?

What is the minimum your people should agree on?

1. You have contact information
2. You have permission to contact them
3. They are in the market

On the last I would go even further and say they should be ready to buy.

Personally I prefer to use the following phrases

• Suspect - Someone you have identified to be in your target group.
• Prospect - This person is a suspect who has interacted in some way. A warm prospect will have requested information, opted-in to a list or granted some other permission for follow up.
• Lead - A prospect becomes a lead when the need for your service is expressed. This might be explicit or implied (discussing product in detail).
• Customer - Customers are people who have bought from you in the past. Past customers are often your best prospects for the future.

It doesn’t matter if you agree with me, you just need to be sure within your business of your own definitions.

How do you define leads in your business?

Posted in Sales & Marketing

**Thank you for all the wonderful comments and suggestions of analytics tools. This is an update of our last post with 5 more more great tools to add to your list.

Never undermine the importance of testing and analyzing your site. On the most basic level, analytics data will help ensure whether or not you’re on the right track. And if the data is reviewed and utilized on the site it will help you increase conversion rates. Who doesn’t use analytic tools these days? You’d be surprised. We have come across ecommerce site marketing VP’s that can barely tell us the number of visitors, conversion rates, or results and rankings for paid and unpaid traffic. Now, for those of you who are familiar with analytics data and tools, I thought this was a fun little blog that may pique your interest to what’s new out there.

We’ve worked with these 15 tools that can be found on Techlicous’s to help analyze and gain a better understanding of your site’s traffic.

Continue reading Top 20 Site Analytics Tools to Help Optimize Your Site

Tags: analytics tools, Conversion Optimization, ecommerce, software
Posted in Conversion Optimization, SEO, Technology

Why is it that so many, otherwise kind and intelligent, people try to be sales predators?

Last night a guy came to our community knocking on doors trying to sell his garage locks. He had my wife listening to his script for several minutes about how homes had been broken into and how many houses on the estate he had fitted his locks for already. In the end I interrupted him to tell him we don’t buy from the door. Ever. He looked insulted, made a culturally offensive remark, then said “you are guessing, I know” before leaving.

To be honest I was a little intimidated, he had that body builder physique and was getting visibly irritated that I was interrupting his flow with questioning and wasn’t giving him free run at his pitch.

His whole approach was confrontational, fear mongering, and intended to pressure us into buying his product. Little did he realize that our garage is full of junk and never locked. Of course we would have told him so had he actually asked any questions. He didn’t even ask if we were the owners of the home.

Does that sound familiar? What were his mistakes?

• Interruption - He chose a time in the evening when most people would be home from work, watching TV or eating. IE. prime interruption opportunity. This alone is not a deal breaker but on the other hand launching into an obvious pitch sets you down a losing path.
• Sales speech - His entire gambit was to talk us into buying. You can’t bludgeon your victim over the head with your “facts” and expect them to be persuaded.
• All Features - Not one of his points made any sense to us, it was all about how strong and secure his locks were and looked.
• No Empathy - Had he taken some time to ask some questions we might have been inclined to listen more
• Zero Trust - Selling door to door damaged his credibility, being aggressive more so.

How might he have turned us from skeptics to customers?

Rather than going straight in for the kill, he should have tried to understand the needs and concerns of his prospects. His first approach should have been to give something, provide or offer, in return for permission to call back. That changes the scenario from aggressive salesperson and victim into “here is something you might find useful, sorry for the interruption”.

My approach would have been to arrive with a leaflet highlighting the recent break-ins of the specific area, some tips on general home security awareness, preferably backed up by quotes from the Police, and end with call to action that involved a free consultation and quote. In addition some form of “recommend a friend” deal or bonus to get neighbors to recruit each other.

Bait, nibble, reel in.

As it is, his predatory approach just caused my fight or flight response to kick in. Sale lost.

Posted in Sales & Marketing

• What is giving companies with seemingly zero revenue, multi-million dollar valuations?
• How did I show an extremely savvy and blue chip company that their $60k loss making project was in fact worth over $2million in the positive?

I will give you a clue; it’s not what you know but who you know.

Or rather, it’s who is willing to listen to you.

So many businesses see marketing as an expense. The costs come right off the balance sheet as outgoing expenditure. In fact, a better way to think of marketing is as an investment.

When you think of an investment you get into the mindset of putting money in to get money out. The aim is to get much more out than you put in.

Look at lots of advertising though. It’s money out but nobody knows if it is coming back in. “We have great visibility”. “It’s about getting your name ‘out there’!”. Yeah, all well and good, but who is buying?

So this is where we decide enough is enough and start building assets. You likely have a huge asset right under your nose.

Want to know what it is?

Your list.

Or, rather, lists.

People have bought from you or given you permission to talk to them. Do not underestimate the influence and value of this.

Common sense dictates that these lists are worth their weight in platinum, but many businesses neglect or even ignore their lists. At best they treat newsletter subscribers exactly the same as their customers.

That’s like keeping your cash under the bed instead of in an interest bearing savings account.

Pull your lists out, polish them up, and put them to work!

Posted in Business

I experienced one of the most valuable lessons in the late 90s when I ran my first business, Quill Publishing. At Quill we had achieved the majority of our business and financial goals and had taken great strides to carve a nice niche for ourselves. Everything seemed to go exactly how I had envisioned and hoped.

Until one day…

Continue reading 8 Lessons you should learn from your online competitors

Tags: blogs, competition, competitve advantage, marketing, online-marketing, SEM, webinars
Posted in Business, Sales & Marketing

We’ve all been there … when a client thinks they know your job more than you! We’ve experienced clients that argue that he or she want a specific element or application on the site even though your research has proven that it has negatively impacted conversion. The site visitor in this case is the decision maker. Do site visitors decide everything on the site? No, that’s impossible. But if I know the visitor well enough I can determine what will trigger interest, confusion, etc. and make certain to address all the concerns throughout the site.

Continue reading The User Knows Best

Tags: Conversion Optimization, market segmentation, Personas
Posted in Business, Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing