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CRAP Marketing

(A Tongue-In-Cheek Explanation of What We Do)

   
If you need more sales, then you need Cold-Calling, Research, Advice and Promotion - CRAP Marketing - from LeadGen.com.

Specifically, if you need to penetrate new markets, if you need to "up" your close rate and make a splash in your industry, if you need to find more customers, or if you just have an urge for more sales, then you need to put LeadGen.com's CRAP Marketing solution to work for you today!

What Is CRAP Marketing?

As shown in the diagram below, it takes four specific thrusts to achieve a breakthrough in B2B sales today:


In brief, in today's hyper-competitive market, it takes:
  • Effective Research to focus scarce resources on targets with a high probability of having a need for your products or services
  • Effective Promotion to "toot your horn," soften up the market and enhance your market research
  • Effective Cold Calling to overcome "barriers to entry," reach decision makers and book the appointments, and
  • Sound Advice to create the strategy that brings the whole symphony together.

Only with LeadGen.com's turnkey Cold-Calling, Research, Advice and Promotion - CRAP Marketing - solution can you get just the right marketing mix, and break through in the market.

CRAP Marketing - for when you need to move the needle!

Research - The "Finger in the Wind" of Marketing

Even though data is cheap today, and email marketing is even cheaper, time isn't. The time you spend writing content and sending email (that mostly lands in the spam folder) is an expense that can never be recovered. Clicks don't pay your rent (they pay the Search Engine's rent). And PPC is simply an arms race that you're guaranteed to lose. Some people say that nothing is worse than having too much quota left over at the end of the year. But the simple fact is that, if your response rate has more digits to the right of the decimal point than the left, you're already in trouble.

As bad as wasting time is, promoting your products to people who don't need them is even more costly. "Waste" in your program - which is actually the biggest marketing exense for most B2B companies - also has hidden costs. In many cases it alienates your prospects. It annoys your salespeople. And it only makes worse the very clutter you're trying to break through.

With a little market research however, you can target your promotions to only those people who have a high probability of buying. In fact, you can almost read their mind! But most of all, it lets you eliminate waste and save time, so you can just harvest your results.

There are two steps to doing proper market research, neither of which is done by most B2B companies:

First, you need to identify companies that are currently spending time, effort or money trying to solve the problem that your products or services solve. It doesn't have to be the exact problem, as your product could be a substitute. But if they don't have even a related need, and they don't have any money to spend, then why bother promoting to them?

Only then should you gather contact information on buyers and recommenders - which is step 2.

What most companies get wrong, because data tends to be so inexpensive, is they just buy as much data as they can afford, making inappropriate inferences of need based on industry or size. And then they blast out their promotions, hoping something will stick. Why not just flush the money - and the opportunity - down the toilet?

Promotion - Silent But Deadly

Given the popularity of inbound marketing, you'd think that they just invented a miracle cure for baldness. But the sad fact is that inbound is often no better than advertising. And most of the time you're just throwing your content into a bottomless bit bucket of noise, so it can actually be worse.

If you want your promotions to work, start by lowering the bar. Promotion isn't lead generation, so stop expecting it to fill your funnel. At best, hope it creates some awareness. But better is to employ it in a direct marketing program where it can educate your prospects, and as a way to enhance your market research by confirming needs and contacts.

The most important piece of promotional material, therefore, is the Case History - which should talk about your customer's needs and problems, and the benefits they gained by using your solution. Anything that articulates your economic value proposition should also be at the top of the pile.

And make sure that your promotions get to the people you actually want to reach. It's better to hand-carry your message to 100 decision makers than to miss with 50,000 emails.

Cold Calling - Breaking Through the Clutter

Any idiot can dial a phone, but not just any idiot knows what to say. There is a science to cold calling, and if you ignore it, you do so at your peril.

While we're at it: don't manage dials-per-hour, contact rate or appointment rate; manage to sales. Understand that most decisions are collaborative, which means that you often have to talk to a lot of people to get a lead. Remember that getting someone to grant you some time is a lot tougher than getting them to give you some money. And don't confuse "time passing" with progress; if the prospect isn't doing something to move the process forward, then the process has stalled.

And remember to watch out for common misconceptions. For example, getting someone to view a demo is a classic case of "correlation without causation." (In other words, just because all new customers viewed a demo, it doesn't mean that the demo is either a necessary or sufficient step.) And learn the difference between "selling the appointment" and "selling the product" before you give your marching orders.

Advice - Don't Forget the "Ready, Aim" Part of "Ready, Aim, Fire"

If you're reading this page, it's probably because you aren't happy with your sales or marketing results, and you haven't been able to fix it yourself. And so what you probably need more than anything else is advice on what to do. Having been a part of hundreds of successful campaigns, there's a pretty good chance that we can help.

So here's our first piece of advice: Don't assume that there's some "magic bullet" that's going to solve your problem. We may have the best solution sitting right on our shelf, but we have to work to figure out exactly what to do, and how to do it correctly for you. So be prepared to pay us to figure out what to do, and to pay us again to actually do it (however we will do a back-of-the-envelop analysis of your marketing or sales program for free, it you'd like).

Also, keep in mind that markets change extremely rapidly. What works today may not work tomorrow. So we have to constantly adjust our strategy. And so you may have to pay us to figure out what adjustments to make, too.

And finally - and this is the bad news - understand that there are no guarantees in marketing. Anyone who insists on a guarantee, or even risk-sharing, is asking to get suckered.

CRAP Marketing to the Rescue

There are many instaces where you can get away with just having us - or any of our thouasnds of competitors - put together and implement a telemarketing plan. We download a list from SalesGenie, or wherever, hit the phones, and the leads start rolling in. But today, for most companies, things have gotten a bit complicated. Their markets have become too competitive. Their margins have become to thin. There's too much clutter in the way. And so their marketing has become ineffective.

If this describes you, then suck it up. It's time to invest in some CRAP Marketing.


LeadGen.com is a service of JV/M, Inc.
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856-638-0399 • www.JVMinc.com • Sales@LeadGen.com