More than once recently I’ve been asked by a client, or a potential client, about sales. “How many more sales will we make if…” is a question I’ve heard more than once. My answer was – can only be – “I don’t know”. And it’s the truth. This may come as a shock to some readers, but sales and marketing aren’t the same thing. They are often bound together mentally, in “Sales and Marketing”. But they are very different things, and I’m not even sure that someone focused on one can be focused on the other.
I was having one of those “over coffee” meetings yesterday in a small cafe. We’d never been there before but the decor was inviting. After the preliminaries of who was having what had all been taken care of, and I had indicated to the waitress behind the counter that I was paying, I stepped forward with credit card in hand. I vaguely recall hearing the cafe’s landline phone ringing off to one side, but I didn’t pay attention because, well, I was in the middle of paying for my group’s tea, coffee, and snacks.
The waitress serving me evidently did pay attention, because she picked up the phone and answered it.
When my partner first moved to Adelaide, our house very quickly filled up with bottles of lovely wine from various wineries around the Adelaide Hills and the Barossa Valley. It’s not that we are obsessive wine collectors; it’s just that, being new to South Australia, he had wanted to see the sights, so we visited a number of the wineries for which the state is rightfully famous. The thing was, if he had done a tasting and sampled some wines, wherever we were, he was utterly incapable of walking out of the cellar door without buying something. He just couldn’t do it.
There are two clients available to you during a recession: the clients you currently have and the clients who are currently using the products and services of a competitor.
We have completed a number of client projects lately that involved working with client Internet domains and domain names. In more than one case we have had to recover domains on behalf of clients who had lost control of them. For a domain name to be registered and used by your organisation, a number of [...]
Many Australian businesses are starting to experience the financial pressure of a recession. In times such as these some businesses “turtle” – they withdraw into a shell, cutting marketing and communications projects. Other businesses “go nova” – they spend up large on something, anything, just for the sake of being seen to be doing something. Neither approach is good for business.
Email has become one of the most important communications channels between a business and its audience. The Direct Marketing Association has estimated that every dollar spent on email marketing generates nearly $50 in return.
However, email’s not just about “selling stuff”! This is demonstrated by the way that we’re working with Hayes Knight SA to get the most out of email communications with its clients.
The search engine is by far the most effective tool for finding information on the Internet. (Does anyone remember life before Google?). When you are the bearer of the information, that means a search engine is the most effective tool you have for getting your information found. The art of tweaking a website so that [...]
At Chilli Chocolate Marketing we’re all about relationships. About letting your clients know you love them. And when it comes to showing the love, the most important event on any company’s calendar is the Client Christmas Function. It’s where you say thanks; where you show off to your clients what great clients you have; and [...]
In the course of our daily activities we see a lot of email addresses. And we are continually surprised at the number of people still using ISP-provided addresses (like “alice@bigpond.com”) or free webmail addresses (like “bob@hotmail.com” or “carol@yahoo.com.au”) for business communications. Your email is for promoting your business, not Bigpond or Hotmail or Yahoo! Relying [...]