Part of lead optimizing your website and marketing is to make sure all the links in the sales chain are strong from advertising through the close of the sale - and even follow up. Why waste marketing dollars when your sales person is going to aggravate your hard earned lead? No matter how effective your marketing becomes customers are going meet disappointment when they reach your bad sales person. Fire a bad sales person.
Over the past few weeks I have been trying to convince the owners of a great company to fire a bad sales person - a very bad sales person who bothers other employees, wastes time, and repels customers. My wife tells me I am mean. I think I am being nice - to the managers and owners of the company, to other employees, and to customers who deserve great (at least good) salespeople.
We have all seen rude, incompetent, downright horrible salespeople keep their seats because…well, I don’t know why but I have heard a lot of excuses. If you have been in this situation you have definitely heard some, and maybe all, of these “reasons” (i.e., excuses) for keeping the bad salesperson around:

• We need the warm body to answer the phones
• He/she has good margins (probably no volume, though)
• “Customer X” likes him/her
• He/she is related to…(could be anyone from a secretary to owner)
• We don’t want to train someone else
• We have invested more than X into training and (whatever else)
• We are busy with other things

If you are a sales manager and have said one of these things yourself then shame on you. Alright, anyone can make a mistake but get out there and do what needs to be done. You have good salespeople, too (hopefully) and they want to work around other good salespeople who give their company a good name. “Low performers drive away high performers,” says Steven Johnson, author of Selling is Everyone’s Business, in this article from Next Level Sales Consulting. It is way more fun to say, “Ted is a great sales person and makes us all look good.” instead, “Ted’s an idiot.”

Companies have limited resources (e.g., money, time, people, equipment, customers, suppliers) which they must use effectively to attract more resources. Think of your salespeople as resources and rate them based on how well they attract (or repel) additional resources (e.g., more customers and money). Maybe you should consider time. How many additional hours do other employees have to spend repairing mistakes?

Salespeople should be resource attractors. If you find that a salesperson is not attracting as many resources as he should, let someone else try. There are plenty of deserving sales professionals out there who would be happy to attract resources (that is, sell) for a fair wage+commission.

Firing people is never easy, especially when you have been working closely with them. You have to worry about morale issues, lawsuits, your conscience (not if you are firing someone for the right reasons), the short-term effect it will have on service levels (one less warm body to answer calls), and the short-term effect it will have on your schedule while you train someone new but you have to use your resources effectively and be fair to all parties involved from owners to employees to customers - heck, even yourself! Culling bad salespeople is good for sales.

I hope you are blessed with a salesforce that is blazing trails but if you are not, drop the poor performers - you know who they are. Now get out there and fire away! Maybe that does sound a little mean but I like it anyway. Fire every bad sales person you have!
Here are some good general and straightforward tips about firing salespeople and here is a good look, albeit a slightly humerous one, at some of the typical sales personalities you will run across.

Wanted: Dream web designer who understands my business, is inexpensive, offers a multitude of capabilities for my site, and updates and upgrades my site for free.

Selecting a web design company is similar to searching for any other service vendor. You need to consider costs versus quality, capabilities, and the level of service you will get (the total value set). Consider using a web design company who specializes in your industry. Building Online (www.buildingonline.net), who specializes in the construction industry, starts on building industry web sites with a very firm idea of who their clients’ customers are from the beginning. They will make websites for anyone in any industry but if you are in the construction business you have an immediate advantage in using them because in addition to their reasonable prices and excellent capabilities they have a team of professionals who have experience working with construction industry professionals. Further, they offer promotion for their clients and have developed an excellent network of client sites that link to one another – great for your SEO efforts. Some design companies that specialize in a given industry are:

• Building Online at www.BuildingOnline.net – Construction industry
• Scorpion Design at www.ScorpionDesign.com – “Professions” such as law, accounting, medical, etc.
• cvbTV at www.cvbTV.com - Travel and Tourism industry

Scan the portfolios of the companies you consider to see how they design sites. Check for mistakes (most companies will proof-read content before loading it), broken links, and graphics that do not load. Do not be afraid to call some of the companies in the portfolio to ask for opinions and references. Ask what success really means to them and if they are getting that from their website.

Ask if you will have a dedicated rep for your website projects – you will be glad to have a friend to call by name if you do not understand something, need to add an update, or are having trouble with a form. Make sure they have the capabilities you will require for your site. At a bare minimum, they will need to be able to create, manage, and implement the following:

• Forms – contact forms, newsletter signups, questionnaires
• Database and information capture – for capturing the information from your contact forms and questionnaires
• Java Script – fly out menus and information boxes
• Flash – in case you want to use it for slideshows or how-to illustrations
• Newsletter service – do they offer newsletter maintenance or at least work well with 3^rd parties so you can collect email addresses and send a newsletter?
• Changes – how fast can you expect requested changes/updates to take effect?

You will quickly learn how much costs can vary from one company to another. There are so many factors but my experience and education has always reinforced that you get what you pay for - especially when you starting asking, “can we do that thing I saw on [insert big website name]. It costs more money to pay someone who knows better programming and it costs more to have someone on hand to give you great customer service.

Another option is to send your design and programming work overseas. I have never personally worked with overseas outsourced designers but have colleagues who have had excellent experiences with Indian companies and realized significant savings for an excellent product.

Make sure you understand the total cost of your website from initial discussion to the design phase, through implementation, and monthly maintenance costs. How many hours of site work will be included in your monthly expense? If your traffic should skyrocket (hopefully), will you be charged more? Is there a charge for adding a new page (or ten pages) each month? If you decide to switch firms because of bad service, who owns the layout, content, and images on the site (you should)?

Understanding the total value of a design company’s offer – the costs versus what you can expect from the initial design through ongoing maintenance and upgrades will help you make the best decision about your website designers.

Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends & Influence People” is the best book you can read to help you learn about working with people.

Professionally, the book is excellent for salespeople and anyone in any kind of leadership position. Mr. Carnegie’s insight into working with other people is timeless and real. I have never read a book with more positive and immediate impact on my life than “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

I just read this article which is largely based on this article and it asserts that bidding for the top spot on Google Adwords is a waste of money.  I agree that it can be a waste of money and that marketers sometimes place too much emphasis on the number one Adwords spot but whether or not to demand top spot depends mostly on two things: 

1.  Who you are competing against.
2.  How good you are at copy writing (especially this).

If your direct competitor is in the #1 spot then take it but if the number one for the word “deck” is filled by a skateboard site and you sell building materials, take #2. You should take care of this with negative keywords, though. 

Lastly - and I cannot stress this enough - get really good at copywriting. Everyone thinks they are good at first and that is all I need to say. Take a class, read everything you can about copywriting and pay attention to the metrics of each of your ads.

After you turn your searchers into visitors, make sure you turn them into readers (keep them there) by giving them excellent content and a superb value proposition.

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To generate leads, your visitors must become readers.

Visitors —> Readers—-> Leads —-> Customers

Website visitors skim the pages they visit. That is, they quickly run their eyes down a page looking for something that applies to what they need or want (keywords, for example). I know. I know. You put painstaking hours into each and every article and every detail deserves to be seen!

Again. People skim. The goal of your format is to create a page where your visitors will easily find the valuable information they want as their eyes pass across your beautiful page.

Effective titles and headlines are your front-line effort at persuading visitors to read your content. People tend to read differently on a screen than on printed media such as books and magazines so effective headlines are even more important online.

Now that your great title has induced your visitor to read it is important that the body of your content is tailored to online reading. Write informative and concise paragraphs. If a paragraph flows into more than one thought, you run the risk of losing your visitor’s attention. Also remember you are writing for search engines as well as for visitors and the requirements of each are very similar - visitors have short attention spans and search engines do not like fluff so be informative and concise and you should keep them both coming.

Use bold letters for the main points in your paragraphs. When your content is clearly focused on the needs of your targeted visitors, your main points will be your keywords. Bold keywords are also helpful in use on landing pages and will catch your visitors’ eyes as they skim down the pages of your site.

Use clear and direct language. Fluff and jargon are not welcomed by most visitors or search engines. Say what you mean clearly using terminology people and search engines understand. Avoid acronyms, industry jargon, and “salesy” marketing phrases. Be informative.

Be personal with your visitor. This goes against what I have written above, right? Don’t get so caught up in writing concisely that you forget you are writing to people. Let your visitors know who you are and allow them to experience the culture of your company through your copy. You have to find the balance between being concise and approachable. After all, you want your visitors to feel comfortable contacting you.

Speaking of contacting… contact me about including your article to the Lead Optimize! blog carnival or about using your site as a case study.

Finally, use bullet points for short lists or if you have a few main points to cover or reinforce. Bullets are great for summaries of what you are about to tell or what you just told. For example, here is an overview of techniques you can use on your website to keep your content format simple and user-friendly:

• Effective titles and headlines

• Informative and concise paragraphs

• Bold letter on main points and/or keywords

• Clear and direct language

• Be personal

• Bullets point

Writing content for web pages requires a different writing style than what is typically used for magazines, journals, or books - especially where paragraph length is concerned. If you are not a natural, you will improve with practice.

Edit, re-edit, cut, clip, and revise until you have content that is searchable, clear, concise, and friendly. When writing for the internet, I edit and revise every article I write with the goal of cutting 50% of the fluff or until I am left with only what is required.

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