Month: February 2019

Ethical selling is not often something which springs to mind when people picture a sales person. Only 3% of people asked trust sales reps, so it’s not surprising that businesses can be reluctant to outsource their sales to an external team that they don’t know on a personal or professional level.

However, at Air we want to change that. We want to show that the vast majority of professionals in the outsourced sales industry are trustworthy people, looking to help businesses develop and grow. Of course, we have targets to meet and we are ultimately accountable to that, but what actually drives Team Air is people and, more importantly, our ability to build relationships with them.

From day one we are upfront and honest with both our clients and prospects, we base our entire sales journey on ethical selling. Offering a consultative approach, we work with our prospects and clients to help them to make smart businesses decisions.

We know it’s all well and good to hear us saying that, but let’s break down how we achieve it:

• Realistic campaigns and goals: If a prospect approaches us and we know that they simply can’t afford to work with us, or at least can’t afford to work with us in the way they want to, we tell them. We will never sell our services to a prospect who doesn’t stand a strong chance of generating tangible success with us, whether that is through ROI, conversations with decision makers or leads. That’s not to say that we won’t work with them full-stop, but we will arrange further conversations to better understand their budget and goals. From this, we either recommend a reduced campaign or other approaches that may work for them – such as digital marketing, utilising the services of our internal marketing company, Roots to Market.

• Transparency: At Air, we don’t just take your money and run with a campaign – we want you to be involved at every stage. When you express an interest in starting a campaign with us, we will invite you to the office to meet the team and view our office culture before you even start working with us. From there, you will be invited in to assist with the training of your dedicated dialling team and provide insight as well as getting a clear understanding of our approach. As the campaign runs you will receive weekly reports and calls as well as having access to our live time reporting system in the client portal.

• Accountability: Our campaigns are driven by learnings and so the strategy or approach may change throughout depending on the results that we generate. However, through your weekly calls and reports you will be made aware of this and able to see our reasoning and the difference in results. As well as reports, you also have access to every call made on your campaign, upon request, so that you can listen to how we handle your calls and prospects, ensuring that you are happy and can voice any concerns or questions that you may have.

If you are looking for an outsourced sales team, who place an emphasis on ethical selling, get in touch today. Email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk or call: 0345 241 3038.

As your business grows, you’ll find yourself having more and more conversations (both in person and over the phone) with potential leads. Whilst this is great news and shows that your business is developing good traction, do you really have the time to sift through all of those conversations to find the diamond in the rough? Unless you have an in-house sales team, the simple answer is probably no.

In order to close qualified leads, you need to be able to spend time talking to prospects after the initial stages of the sales cycle. This is where outsourced Inside Sales comes in.

Some people may be dubious of the benefits of inside sales at first, asking, “is it not just telemarketing?” Whilst both are predominantly phone-based selling, they deal with opposite ends of the sales cycle. Whereas telemarketers are often cold calling and forming a first point of contact between a business and potential client, inside sales reps act as a final touchpoint, being the ‘expert’ and nurturing or closing warm leads.

With continuous developments in technology, inside sales is growing 15 times faster than field sales and buyers are becoming increasingly comfortable holding remote conversations and making remote purchases. But how does inside sales differ from traditional sales? And how can it become your secret weapon?

1. Location

Similar to telemarketers, inside sales reps work in the office, contacting their leads via phone, email or video calls. This method of sales is both time and cost effective when compared to field sales reps who may find themselves travelling up and down the country attending dinners, presentations and meetings.  By having your sales team all in one place, they are always contactable and not prey to delayed transport or miscommunication of locations.

2. Technology

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are vital in assisting inside sales team and ensuring a smooth sales operation. In having a CRM assisting your sales, all prospect information, campaign updates, messages and appointments can be kept in one place and visible to both your team and yourself. Also, if you do choose to employ both inside sales and field sales, your inside sales can do the ground work and then pass key information on to your field sales team. At Air, we also offer full reporting. We understand that it can be daunting to outsource your sales activity which is why we created a unique client portal where you can see your campaign and it’s results in live time.

3. Scalability

You may have the best field sales rep in the world or be amazing at closing yourself but if you’re generating a large sales pipeline, who is going to manage all of those leads.  By having inside sales reps that work as a first touch point, a relationship can be built and solidified before you or your field sales rep gets to the prospect. It also allows you to reach a broader audience, even a global one if you see your market growing to that extent. Team Air are experts at holding conversations with senior decision makers in businesses of all sizes and locations – we’ve even worked with a company in Bermuda.

At Air, our inside sales team is driven and dedicated to getting you the results that you want, often exceeding expectations. If you feel that you could benefit from working with our expert team then get in touch – call: 0345 241 3038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk

Supposedly, it takes multiple contact with a prospect – studies say as many as eight are required – before a sale is closed.

In 2018, 75% of companies said closing more deals were amongst their top priorities. However, with 63% of prospects having little to no knowledge of a company before a sales rep approaches them, with a new product or service, it’s no surprise that 40% of sales people are finding closing the deal more challenging. So, how can direct marketing help?

Direct marketing is a great way of introducing your product or service across multiple touchpoint, over a variety of different platforms which include: direct mail, email marketing and telemarketing to name just a few. When delivered tactfully this marketing tactic will:

• Help you build relationships with new customers using personalised and targeted messaging
• Test the appeal of your new product or service
• Take your prospects or current customers on a brand journey that appeals to their own values
• Measure and advise you on which marketing platforms connect with your target audience best
• Provide customers with compelling content that will help nurture them through your sales cycle
• Indicate where prospects sit in your sales cycle using specific call to action that inform you if a prospect requires more information, a follow up call or a way of purchasing your product
• Allow you to base your sales strategy on fact and customer needs, increasing your overall success rate

So, how does direct marketing nurture your prospects through the sales cycle and at what stage does it need to be implemented if you want to reap the best reward?

We like to think of marketing and sales as the gatherer and the hunter. The gatherers job is to go out and make the initial contact with the prospect, discovering where they spend their time, what needs or problems control their impulses, and how best they can nurture this prospect to help them improve their situation. The hunter on the other hand is programmed to close the deal. Using the information/data the gatherer provides the hunter can increase his chances of success, he has inside knowledge of where the prospect can be found, he understands what problem areas are best to attack and he knows the prospect is at a stage where they feel safe enough to take a closer look.

In our 7 step sales and direct marketing diagram you can see exactly how we optimise this integrated approach:

We have learnt that both direct marketing and sales need one another to be truly successful, so, investing in a strategy that aligns the two is a wise move heading into the new financial year.

There’s even evidence that supports this approach, according to 2018 statistics, companies who better align their sales and marketing teams experience 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts, 73% agree their buyer’s journey has a higher conversion rate, 38% have higher sales wins and 36% experience higher customer retention rates.

Looking to better align your sales and marketing strategy, increase customer loyalty and boost your ROI?
Air Marketing Group work closely with their sister company, Roots to Market, to deliver multi touchpoint campaigns that benefit our clients bottom line. To get in touch call: 03452413038 or email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk.

On average, for every £1 our clients invest they achieve an £18 ROI. Are you ready to see results?

When I first started working at Air I found myself in a whole other world. I had landed a job in a fun, dynamic and rewarding start-up where we worked hard and reaped the returns. Air has a culture that we all want to be a part of and is a company that you truly want to contribute to. But when I started one thing did have me stumped – the method of permission based selling.

I won’t lie, I was dubious at first. It was different to anything I had ever known and the sales person inside of me was so well versed in the hard sale and simply working to turn a “no” into a “yes”. This new tactic of asking the prospect for permission at various points to progress the call simply seemed alien to me, I just wanted to get my information across, follow up on a lead and close the sale. However, I quickly came to see the method in its madness.

Many telemarketing companies conform to the stereotype of cold callers – they’re more interested in their numbers, not the people on the end of the line. At Air, we’re different. Permission based selling is a non-traditional selling technique in which sales people reach out to prospects after they have received permission from them to do so via opt in forms, email or calls etc. This method allows us the opportunity to be professional and polite but also assertive when building rapport and developing a 2-way relationship with potential clients. In turn, this often ends up saving us and our clients more time and money. This is for two reasons:

1. People love to buy, but hate being sold to. Today, prospects prefer a personal approach, they want you to be consultative and guide them through the sale with clear expertise.
2. Instead of pushing a hard sell that fails to close, by taking the time to read a prospects response and ending the conversation when you don’t strike a chord you will spend less time chasing unlikely leads.

So, how does permission based selling fit into our sales process?

 

 

At Air, we understand that no one thing will make a sales call great, as different prospects will respond to different tactics. Cold calling is about the combination of many small things that increase your chances of achieving the right outcome – and in my opinion, permission based selling is one to be practised.

Opinion piece by Shaun Weston, Operations Director

2019 is set to be a year of exciting developments in the wonderful world of marketing – clients can expect interesting developments in personalisation and interaction. After having a read of Forbes’s Agency Council predictions for the year, one thing stuck out to us – Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Love it or hate it, AI will increasingly become a part of our lives over the next year and beyond. From homing in the abilities of voice searches on our Alexa’s and Google devices, to increasingly sophisticated personalisation algorithms, we’d better get used to a robot telling us what it is we want. Not that we’re complaining, if they can tell us what to have for dinner or what to wear we’d save hours of our time!

So, what can AI help SME businesses with?

1. Creating and generating content

Yes, you read that right, machines can now assist with your content creation. Now, they can’t write the whole thing for you, there’ll still be a copywriter huddled over a cup of tea writing the main bulk of your content, but they can help. Using information and data, AI can write reports and simple news – the tools currently on offer include Articoolo and Quill. And they aren’t to be sniffed at, some big names are already using them from the BBC to CBS.

2. Curating content

Oh yes, AI can’t only help with the creation of your content, but also the curation! It can ‘connect’ with readers and point them towards better, more relevant content for them. Think of the suggested items on websites such as Amazon or the suggested shows on Netflix – we know you’re all guilty of falling down that rabbit warren! But this isn’t only for the big players, small businesses can use AI to point clients towards relevant blog pages, products and services in order to keep them engaged.

3. Email Marketing

We know the pains that some SME businesses can feel with email marketing, you spend ages creating the perfect content  for your audience for them to go unopened or unanswered – AI can help! Using data and information of client interactions with your emails, it can suggest the best times of day to contact prospects, how frequently to send marketing material to them and what they might actually want to receive. Using tools like Phrasee, you can also reduce human error and allow it to help you with A/B testing, it can even generate subject lines and cognitive content!

4. Digital Advertising

Personalised adverts, whether you find them creepy or crazily helpful, they’re here to stay and why not? They’re handy! By analysing information such as your interests and what demographics you fall into, they allow companies to get right to their target audience and best asses what exactly to send them. Why not look into something like Google Ads to see what digital advertising can do for your business?

5. Web Design

Tired of the to and fro between yourself and web developers or programmers? There’s AI that can help with that too! You can now use apps, such as Huula, to develop and build websites dependant on certain criterion such as images, text and call to actions quickly and often for a lot cheaper.

6. Chatbots

We’ve all been there, aimlessly scrolling around a website trying to get in touch with the business to help us only to have to wait for someone to come back to you. Chatbots can help here, by having an automated system in place, customers can get a more immediate response and hopefully solve their issues quickly and effectively.

So, let’s look at the Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Personalised and relevant –

Let’s face facts, many of us are time poor so any time we do have is precious. The right personalised marketing can be relevant and helpful to us, businesses must understand that customers want content tailored just to them, not for the masses. By having marketing material that is personalised and targeted towards a certain target audience or customer issue means that wants and reassurances can be solved quickly, saving you and them time and money.

• Streamlined marketing efforts –

Programmes can use customer data to quickly find prospects that are more likely and ready to convert, meaning that you don’t spend limited time and money chasing after improbable leads.

• Personalisation –

It’s been proven that customers prefer personalisation and AI can help you to achieve this seamlessly – no one will feel spammed if marketing material is clearly relevant and can help them or improve their lives.

Cons:

• Chatbot scepticism –

Users don’t like clearly unsophisticated chatbots – especially older or less techy savvy users. When it is obvious that there isn’t a human anywhere on the other end of the conversation people can become untrusting.

• Still a need for humans –

Creativity is an inherently human trait – robots can’t develop thoughts/ concepts, make creative decisions or use their (non-existent) imaginations.

• Algorithms can be wrong –

We all know that tech does go wrong, just think of those annoying bugs you get in apps or the times you’ve been told to ‘just turn it on and off again’. Humans are complex and not everything can be solved with an equation and a robot.

So, in our opinion, it is clear that it is worthwhile having an open mind when it comes to AI. At the end of the day, like with everything in life, you never know what will work for you until you give it a try. But like many new trends, this won’t solve everything for you – humans, with their curious and creative minds, are still needed to drive the AI world.

If you feel that you would like some guidance in finding your way around the world of marketing, or if you just want to chat about what is potentially out there for you, then get in touch. Call: 01392 796702 or email: contact@roots2market.co.uk.

P.s. no robots were harmed in the writing of this article; the copywriter was well watered with tea.