The keywords and phrases people use when searching over the internet can be fascinating to observe. Recently though, one searcher caught my attention. They had typed into Google the following: “Selling Yellow Pages is getting harder”. Pausing to imagine the person behind the search I envisioned a veteran yellow pages sales representative facing sales rejection and feeling fearful and under pressure in their current work environment. They are searching in anonymity on the web to find answers on how to achieve success. The wonderful thing about the web is that you can search for answers to things without your boss knowing. So, this blog is written to you my anonymous friend. While a large part of our focus was on sales to national non-advertisers to Yellow Pages (timeframe to close generally 2 years) I believe the same sales tips apply to both environments. It is my hope you will find the below comments useful towards your quest for success in 2009.

Top 5 Sales Tips:

1.        Listen

2.        Be prepared

3.        Keep your presentation short

4.        Uncover all objections (most are hidden)

5.        Close

Listening is something you do with all your senses. It is something we can all do well if we slow down, drop any agenda we may have, and release the need to control. Often the best sales call is when nothing is sold at all. People buy from people they like. And people they like, like them. Being a good listener opens the door to great relationships. (You also learn all you need to know to adapt your presentation and set the correct course to close the sale).

Preparation for a yellow pages sales call involves knowing everything about the customer’s business and environment. What kind of service or product are they promoting; who are their customers, what advertising are they doing, who are their competitors, etc…Research, research and more research. (Also, have your contract and product brochures with you but don’t bring them out without asking if it is okay to do so).

Keep your presentation short. Presentations should be custom, succinct, and not boastful or intimidating. Know your audience and whether it is the appropriate to bring out your new laptop. Your presentation it is not about you or your company it is about the customer.

Sales Objections are mostly hidden and often difficult to uncover because people are not always straight up. Some open ended questions help flesh out what they are really thinking. You might ask a question like, “How do you feel the yellow pages are working for you?” If the client perceives it is expensive and is unsure about continued expenditure keep them talking. “Is there anything else you don’t like?” This is the first step in uncovering objections. Then through illustration you can share an experience of perhaps another customer who felt the same and how together you built a program that addressed these same concerns.

Closing the sale is accomplished if steps 1-4 have been handled. It flows naturally from successfully uncovering and handling the objections. Ask for permission to bring out a contract though. Consider the old concept of “automatic renewal” as dead. No one has to be in the yellow pages. With a buyer who is price and roi conscious you may close with: “If I could show you how you could have a yellow pages program that brings you increased business at the least cost would you be interested?”  

And finally, I believe you should find comfort in the fact that all sales is hard (not just yellow pages), however, the sales process is a numbers game. The more calls you make the more you’ll close, and you can’t close them all. Sales success is a journey and it is something that is best shared to be achieved. In this regards, it is important that you are working for a company that values people and in particular values you. Values are not posted on the company wall they are part of the organizational DNA and evident in the leadership and vision of the company. In the same way you treat your customer so should your employer treat you.  

Best of luck in 2009.

Inspired by social networking tools like Facebook, Wikis, Mashups, Twitter and Digg, the ever changing workplace is becoming more interactive and new business models and strategies are forming. From boardroom, to desktop, to laptop, to mobile we are moving to a space where more collaboration will take place. A study from Pew Internet and American Life predicts that with technology interfaces like touch-screen and voice recognition, the mobile phone by 2020 will have considerable computing and be our primary point of internet access. This technological trend may even be sooner than this. Other informational technology trends that will help create a sustainable advantage for business include:

• Cloud computing environments will expand CRM and HR systems.
• Servers will continue to be virtualized for better efficiencies and lower costs.
• Applications built on Web 2.0 technologies will continue to prosper and be more cost-efficient.
• Document management systems will become more robust.
• There will be more collaboration and cross-functional tools that combine business processes and advanced reporting capabilities.
•  Video conferencing and high definition virtual meetings will take off allowing us to connect with new and existing customers. Companies will be able to embrace the cost-savings and productivity benefits of virtual meetings vs business travel. In addition, video functions will be incorporated for on-demand content and training application.
• Automated speech technologies are becoming more sophisticated and being used to better serve the customer.
•  VOIP will evolve to UC (unified communications) networks to integrate various systems, media, and devices such as cell phone.
• SaaS or software-as-a-service will become the rage.
• There will be a greater need for security across all our intermingled devices.

At the end of the day IT strategies will contribute to the bottom line by driving greater efficiencies across all areas for the business.

Connecting with consumers has taken on remarkable new forms in the last year due to technology, the web, and social media. Ad budgets are going to look very different in 2009 as companies try to understand the changes and cope with current economic realities. Here are some trends I see for 2009.

• Search and performance-based media will continue to garner increased attention and budget dollars. There will be exciting advancements in local, semantic and vertical search that will keep search marketers on their toes.
• Social media will be recognized as an important part of branding and connecting to the customer but most attempts to monetize will appear cheesy. Engagement ROI will be hard to measure.
• Online video and digital marketing will grow as connectivity and processor speeds improve. This will provide enhanced presence on the web for companies looking to be found in universal search results.
• Online advertising dollars will be spent more efficiently with greater focus on ROI, measurability and analytics.
• Crowd sourcing will create some innovative, new business models.
• The mobile web will explode with new applications by IPhone, Bold and Google. The best ones will be those that bridge the gaps in search and make our lives easier. Our cell phone will be our favorite device as it will allow us to travel with our favorite shows, alarm clock and baby monitor. We are even going to use our “preferred device” for scanning bar codes and comparing prices online in “real” time.
• Permission-based marketing will continue to demand greater commitment to the customer and their needs.
• The green movement will slow but community involvement and event marketing will see a resurgence.
• Networking costs will be included in company budgets again. Boasting about global connections at cocktail parties will not be unusual as the trend for global connectivity will continue along with our basic human need for pen pals and sharing.

In short Charles Darwin sums up what is ahead quite succintly when he said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”.

Elizabeth Gage, President and CEO of PCM Interactive is pleased to announce the appointment of John R. Brown as Vice President Sales for the company.

John will be responsible for sales, sales channel development, and the client services area at PCM Interactive. He will deliver unique sales opportunities to regional and national advertisers requiring enhanced presence on the web and will be responsible for the promotion of PCMI’s unique toolset in the area of performance-based search marketing.

John comes to PCM Interactive with 20 years of diverse media-sales-management experience in print, radio and outdoor. He also has experience as an independent management consultant specializing in sales of information technology solutions.

About PCM Interactive

PCM Interactive is a leading, full-service print and internet marketing firm delivering performance based search and internet advertising programs to national, corporate, franchise and dealer/distributor firms across Canada, the United States and around the world. PCM Interactive’s corporate headquarters are located in the geographic centre of North America in Winnipeg, Canada.

We have come a long way since 1999 when Napster was fined for knowingly encouraging and assisting copyright infringement by allowing internet users to download copyrighted music files. At the time Napster argued they were protected under “fair use” doctrine but this did not fly with the judges who ascertained that peer-to-peer file sharing was commercial in nature even though no fee was charged. It was the repeated and exploitative copying of musical works of art that constituted a commercial use eventhough peer-to-peer was a free service.

Peer-to-peer was a brillant phenomena that added a crinkle to legislative issues. Firstly no one was making money – though the music industry was losing huge CD sales. And secondly the concept did not include a central server holding the information since in peer-to-peer a server simply points one user to another who has the desired file. This makes it difficult to hold the owner of a server responsible. Well, regardless of these facts Napster was shut down but not before turning some 60 million users onto the phenomena of peer-to-peer sharing. It wasn’t long before Kazza and many other p2p services sprung up to replace Napster.

Today peer-to-peer file sharing is a fact of internet life comprising 45% of internet traffic.

I was recently at a seminar where a young father asked what he should tell his children about downloading music. He had been charged for downloading music through Napster. This man’s question brought much discussion on how the law of “fair use” should be interpreted today.

Should a mother who placed a video on You Tube of her 18 month old daughter dancing to Prince be charged with copyright infringement? Or should the kid who took a photo of Sesame Street’s Bert and placed it peering over Osama Bin Laden’s shoulder be charged? Incidently you may have heard how this photo hit Reuters News Wire as some protestors in Kamal downloaded the photo from the internet and pasted it on 2,000 signs for their demonstration against the US lead attacks against Afganistan. The Sesame Street folks were not amused. I guess you could call that a mashup gone viral.

One thing is for certain when Professor John Palrey, executive director of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Business School stated in November of 2005 that there was something absolutely amazing happening with respect to the Internet but that “Napster was only the opening act”, he was right.

Lawrence Lessig, a law professor from Stanford Law School, and author of “Remix” states that our laws are really out of sync with current technology. He likened the war on peer-to-peer to the war on prohibition – both are failed wars.

How do you control a copyrighted image from appearing on 365 million computers and 5 billion cell phones?