Big problems take Big Ideas and people of Detroit are trying
The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years and pump new investment into stronger neighborhoods. In the neighborhoods that would be cleared, the city would offer to relocate residents or buy them out. The city could use tax foreclosure to claim abandoned property and invoke eminent domain for those who refuse to leave, much as cities now do for freeway projects.
I have to say after reading that I was impressed on how it made sense. All that wasted land, buildings of no use to any credible party or person. So, why not knock it all down and start over and renew the city at the same time reduce its overhead for keeping all of the old stuff. Good luck!!
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100308/ap_on_bi_ge/us_downsizing_detroit
Video Chat taking the face to face to online Sales & Service
So, are we there yet where video chat can now be used as a piece of your online sales and service model? A new article by AdAge discusses how brands can use video chat for their sales branding exercise. From my view its just the next step in the evolution of everything we do for sales and service from instant chat, on demand video, demos, tutorials and automated email response systems.
I’m not going to speculate when the video chat will be readily available to companies but we already know that there is a large community of users that have the personal hardware and bandwidth to support video chat technically. The use of Internet powered telephony services are enough to know its possible and throw in Skype and how large a user group it supports makes video chat seem like a viable solution.
So, your sold now what do you do? Where do you start how can you implement this? Well if you just want to test the waters you can go open source route by using Google Chat or Skype and just post your contact/user information on your site. Both services provides easy to use scripts you can plug and play into your site to discover if your web site has an audience receptive to it.
So who’s first to try this out?
I have recently read Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness and found it to be pretty entertaining. I have a dual purpose when I read sales books. First, is to improve my own sales effectiveness and identify traits in sales people that I may hire or work with in the future. The second and in my line of work just as important is to determine if there are creative ways to use technology to implement a particular sales process and/or concept.
So, in reading the Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer I found some interesting concepts that could lead to improving lead generation systems. Granted a lot of the book is for the face to face sales person so being able to translate 100% of that to a lead generation system won’t be a pure capture of the essence of every “Principle” in the book.
- Powerful Opening Questions - the author continually reinforces to the reader that you have generally one-shot to make single call into an appointment and into a long lasting relationship for business and friendship. So, you must open with Powerful thought provoking questions instead of stupid old sales questions. The author recommended establishing a set of 25 powerful questions that makes the prospect consider you intelligent and serious about their business.
IDEA: Part of your lead generation system should take into account these powerful questions into your online process or offline prospecting process. Why not capture put some thought provoking questions on your lead form? Instead of the dry old questions and blanks?
Nothing new here but one thing that was prominent in this book was that the author believed that all sales people know what to do but just refuse to do it for lack of confidence or laziness. So, a great benefit of using a lead generation system is to take out the refusal and laziness of an individual and make your process as effective as possible. Emulating what the best sales people do for lead generation can only make your system even that more effective.
Recommendation: If you want to improve your lead generation system talk to your BEST sales people who prove everyday why they are the best. See what you can emulate and how you can make them more effective with your system. Then leverage what you come up with to help the weak links in your sales process and staff.
Just some thoughts.
A New Way to Measure Online Campaigns
Like everything online that relates to lead or sales generation there are some best practices that should be part of what every online company should use to measure the success of their lead / sales generation campaigns (either organic search or PPC campaigns).
I suggest that with the major impact of mobile technology today and its influence on how easily the online and offline participation can become mixed we need another measurement for online campaign measurement.
Online Campaign Call Tracking – this utilizes web analytics to track campaigns, referrals and search keywords and matches it with offline phone tracking capabilities. This allows you to capture the call to action that lead your prospect to your site and then capture the phone call they made instead of only online actions (a sale or lead capture).
There are companies already tying together the offline (IVR) and online world and some of us (that’s right my company – Arrive Technology) can take SMS, IVR and the Web and manage them all as one continuous measurable conversation…stay tuned.
Thoughts? Let me know what you think what you see that is working? What’s not working?
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