Author Archives for Josh Krafchin

B2B/non-ecommerce marketers and their potential customers have a problem.

The marketer is responsible for driving revenue, but often there’s a significant delay between when someone shows interest in a product/service and when a deal gets signed, which is why many marketers fall back to the performance metric of leads generated.

Potential customers need someone to pitch in but have minimal extra time because they’re so busy trying to cover the gap they’re looking to hire for. They need to quickly evaluate many highly complex solutions, often without an objective point of reference to guide the process.

This blog post evaluates the “free consult” as a solution for helping marketers set up qualified conversations for their sales people and potential customers to quickly but effectively determine whether this is the right solution. While, yes, there are customers who know what they want, call the company number and place an order, in working with hundreds of lead-gen-driven sales processes, my take on the data is that more complex sales processes can’t be reduced to an e-commerce transaction and require a live conversations driven by both parties.

Marketers have several tools in their arsenal to facilitate this conversation — we’ll focus mainly on the free consult but want to set the landscape.

The marketer’s lead generation toolkit

1. List a phone number. While only ready buyers, people selling something or customers with an issue tend to call a listed number, it’s good form to make your people easily and quickly available.

2. Provide a contact form. Not everyone is a phone person, but there are folks who will get a conversation going via a contact form and then email leading up to a live conversation.

3. Have a social media presence you monitor. Yes, people will tweet at or LinkedIn message you. It’s one of my favorite ways of connecting with new people and companies.

4. Offer a free content resource such as white paper or webinar in exchange for contact info. #1-3 are communication methods for someone looking to buy. If you create valuable resources, people may genuinely just be looking for good information. How to uncover which of these leads are real buyers, or get them to the point where they are, is one of the great challenges of modern marketing. Nonetheless, this can be an incredibly powerful revenue generation methodology.

5. Newsletter subscription. Like #4 but less information has to be given by the prospect.

6. Offer a free trial. This is an incredibly powerful conversion tool for companies that offer a try-able product or service, but there will be a significant number of participants who are just researching.

7. Offer a free consult.

Many savvy people immediately become cautious when they see the words “free” and “consult” joined together. Nothing is free in this world. At a minimum, having a conversation costs us time, which is for many of us is our most precious resource. More importantly, if we’re reaching out to an expert for help, we’re likely to take that person’s advice. Thus, even though it may be “free” in the financial sense, there’s a lot at stake for a prospect entering a free consult.

The 7 golden rules of free consults

If a marketer/sales person/company cares about you, the prospect, they’ll do the following to ensure your free consult is valuable.

1. Ask what you’re looking for AND give you that as quickly as possible or say sorry I can’t offer that.

2. Ask you questions that diagnose your problem not just qualify you as a buyer.

3. Offer as complete a solution as quickly as possible. I believe strongly that ideas, concepts and theories are a public resource. I only want to be paid for helping you implement the thinking, not for making you aware of it.

4. Answer questions directly and transparently. There’s nothing worse than asking someone what something costs, how long it takes or who else uses it and getting a round-about answer.

5. Get to the point quickly.

6. Ask: “Is this what you were looking for, and how else can I be helpful?”

7. Always come from the perspective that it’s better to give extreme value regardless of compensation.

Personally, I’m extremely cautious about booking free consults. I try to do as much research only as possible first and use the consult as a way of answering questions that I’ve found to have less clear-cut answers. I also use the consult as a way of evaluating whether this is someone or a company I want to do business with. When I get the vibe this is someone who genuinely wants to be helpful, I keep going through their sales process. As soon as I feel like I’m being worked, I bail.

When it’s me giving the free consult, I work as hard as possible to do a good job with the 7 Golden Rules of Free Consults. Regardless of whether someone becomes a customer, I want them to feel that their time has been well spent and they’ve gotten real value.

If you want a free consult on your conversion optimization/online marketing program, reach out to me to set up a time for a free consult.

Yes, the agency business is cyclical, but last year we noticed something strange. It seemed increasingly harder and harder to bring on new clients.

A few brave friends risked offending our online marketing pride by pointing out our website might need a refresh. At first we bristled, but then the logic became clear. We had outgrown the minimum viable product website that we used to launch Clever Zebo.

We took our time, spent days breaking down our strengths and key value proposition. Rather than let our accomplishments stay hidden or be communicated half-heartedly, we invested in developing great case studies and recording passionate testimonials. We started with paragraphs, trimmed them to bullet points where possible, iterated wireframes and went through a vigorous design and redesign process.

We knew the new site looked and communicated better, but would it really make a difference?

The results have been incredibly clear. Not only has our conversion rate skyrocketed, but the companies who connect with us tend to be remarkably aligned on values and mission.

From the beginning of Clever Zebo, we wanted to be more than just advice-givers but fearless hands-on marketers who practice what we preach.

If you think you may be due for a website redesign, here are a few pointers for setting yourself up for success:

1. A redesign is more than new fonts and colors. That’s just a/b testing the look. A redesign requires getting in touch with your customers and what they’re looking for. It requires clarifying your value proposition, how you organize information and what are the key actions do you want your customer to take.

2. Involve the key stakeholders. A website redesign isn’t just a marketing exercise; it’s an organizational one. Get feedback and input across your organization. Not only does it make people feel involved, but you’ll be amazed what you learn about your customer and value proposition.

3. Don’t rush the stages. I highly recommend splitting your process into three stages (wireframes with copy, design and coding), each of which should be complete before moving on to the next.

4. LOVE the design before you start coding. It’s relatively easy to change a design, but once you start writing code it’s a lot harder to make changes. Get the design 100% right first.

5. Be patient. Change isn’t easy and may take some time.

This is a guest blog post by McKay Allen, Inbound Marketing Manager, at LogMyCalls. Not only has he spoken at SMX, SES, Social Media Strategies Summit, etc., but he is one of the most adventurous, talented and creative marketers we’ve met. The technology and techniques described in this post deserve serious consideration in your analytics suite.
-Josh Krafchin

Most digital marketers track their metrics fastidiously. A lot of marketers could probably instantaneously recall landing page conversion rates, unique visitors, daily White Paper downloads and ecommerce transaction data. Heck, most could probably easily locate data about on-site behavior, bounce rates, funnels, goals, conversions and even page flows.

And this obsession with data is a good thing. Marketers make better decisions when they have more data. Recent IBM research found that companies that gather a lot of marketing data and business intelligence have 40% higher revenue than direct competitors that admit to gathering fewer analytics.

But, here’s the problem: the black hole in many ROI calculations is phone calls. Most marketers—particularly agencies—are not getting credit for the calls they produce.

Calls Matter

A Google study released in early October 2013 found that 70% of local mobile searches result in a phone call. (That’s up from 53% just 12 months ago).

Businesses receive over 30 billion phone calls each year.

And they’re good calls, too. BIA Kelsey research found that 68% of businesses say calls are the best leads they get. And, stunningly, it takes 4 web leads to produce the revenue of 1 phone call. (Read that one more time….wow).
Phone calls matter. And, because of mobile search, they matter even more than they used to.

So here’s the question: if deep analytics are so important and phone calls are so important…where are the deep call analytics?

The Case for Deep Call Analytics

SMBs, agencies, and enterprise-level companies use call tracking to determine which ads, keywords, and campaigns generate phone calls and which don’t. In other words, call tracking can tell you how many calls are coming as a result of organic search traffic, specific PPC ads, direct mail campaign or any other marketing activity.

Call tracking tells you which marketing channel generated phone calls.

That’s good.

But our message is that this level of call analytics isn’t enough. It isn’t deep enough. It certainly isn’t as deep as the web analytics tools you’re used to using.

A lot of important things happen after the phone rings. Gartner says there are 420 billion words spoken on business phone calls every day. That’s a lot of data that isn’t being analyzed.

So, that’s why we launched Conversation Analytics, to analyze that data…those words.

Conversation Analytics: The Awesomeness Revealed

Basic call tracking, as we said above, tracks what happens before the phone rings. Conversation Analytics analyzes what happens ON the call.

Conversation Analytics actually ‘listens’ to the call with sophisticated speech recognition technology and then analyzes the call with hundreds of simultaneously running algorithms. These algorithms are looking for specific phrases, words, intonations, speech rate and context. Conversation Analytics can extract data like lead score, sales readiness, missed opportunities and dozens of other things.

For example, if the caller said ‘I need to come in for new tires tomorrow,’ that would be a good indicator of a sales ready lead.

Again, it does all of this based on the words and phrases that are actually said during the call.

Here are a couple of use-cases for Conversation Analytics.

– Agitation – Based on the words said on the call, Conversation Analytics can determine if a customer was agitated. It looks for specific words and phrases, increase in volume, higher rate of speech, and other telltale signs of an agitated customer. If Conversation Analytics determines a caller was agitated, it could immediately trigger a text message sent to a manager alerting them of the situation. Or, it could send a Webhook to a CRM changing the prospect status and triggering a new workflow or call back. Or, it could fire a Webhook to a marketing automation platform sending an apology email to the prospect. Or, an alert could be sent to your CRM that mandates that the lead receive an immediate call back.

– Lead Score Reports – When Conversation Analytics determines that a caller was a really high quality lead—again based on the words the caller said during the call—you’re going to want to see that data. You could see how many callers had a high lead score each month, day, week or year. You could even see which campaigns, ads or keywords are producing the highest quality leads.

Keep in mind that calls are more valuable than web leads, and they’re becoming ever more common (even for ecommerce and B2B companies). So, why wouldn’t marketers want deep analytics on phone leads similar to the deep analytics they demand for web leads?!

Conversation Analytics fills the blind spot you need to provide a full picture of your ROI. And, as you can see, the technology is incredibly cutting-edge and cool.

To learn more about Conversation Analytics download The Quick Guide to Conversation Analytics.