On page 20 of the September 2010 issue of “Fast Company” they mention that September 12 is the date of this year’s “KaraokeFest” in Pomonoa, CA.

In the short article it is noted that annual sales of karaoke music and karaoke machines in the U.S. “have fallen a whopping 80% off their…peaks to just $40 million.”

This is where the inspiration for this post enters the picture. Rick Priddis, president of the-soon-to-be-defunct (in my opinion) Priddis Music inspires readers with this little gem,

“It’s gotten a lot worse because of the rise of the Internet. But we’re all just continuing on and hoping for the best.”

So let me get this straight: This dude, Priddis, says the Internet has hurt his business (it is 2010, right? The internet has been a viable business platform for at least 15 years and he’s been open since 1984.] and his solution is to HOPE FOR THE BEST?!!!

Are you kidding me? This guy has 25 years (actually 26 years. He hasn’t bothered to update his logo from a year ago) and his plan to get through these tough times is HOPE and he blames his tough times on THE INTERNET?

Sure, piracy has gotten worse over the years but if there are 100,000 people willing to come down to Pomona, a.k.a., the armpit of Southern California, and compete for trophies for karaoke singing then there are at least 10 times if not 100 times more people (that’s 1 million to 10 million for those of you from Pomona) willing to spend $1.46 per week for a new track for their machine.

Doing some back-of-the-napkin math shows that if just 1 million people download just one track at $1.46 per week then this is a $72.8 million a year industry just in music alone for a simple $75.92 per year hobby, not counting the machine.

So poor ol’ Rick’s response is to hope it gets better. Well, Rick’s hoping has paid off. Here is a brainstorming list of things that are streaming out of my brain as I sit here this Sunday afternoon pondering the business that could be Ricks if he’d stop hoping and start doing!

If business is down 80% I’m sure a heck of a lot of his competitors have gone out of business. How many did he contact and offer to buy their domain names / websites? If their domain names have expired he can just buy them on GoDaddy or any other big registrar.

What about buying the phone numbers of past competitors and having them forwarded to his office? (I use VOIPO.com and got my phone number for $99 for two years. That’s a good investment to buy your competitor’s phone number when they go out of business. It won’t take many sales to make back a $4.13 per month investment.)

What about buying the contact lists of former competitors? Offer them 10% of every sale for life.

What about making them affiliates of his when they go on to their new careers and paying them 10-50% of every sale they help generate through their affiliate links?

What about partnering with other business owners that serve the same market but don’t sell karaoke-related devices or music and having them become affiliates and they then cross-promote for one another?

What about offering free karaoke machines in return for a 2 year subscription to his music-of-the-month club? If this model works for printers and coffee machines why not karaoke?

What if this guy sold a hand full of machines each week, leveraged the internet to promote his music and machines world wide, maybe offered a membership / subscription program, kept his website up-to-date rather than posting events that are over a month in the past (not to mention his logo, which is a year out of date), offered tips and suggestions on how to throw a fun karaoke party for special occasions such as:

• kids birthdays
• retirement parties
• reunions (DUH!)
• sales meetings
• trade shows
• county fairs

Instead, he has a static Joomla website with broken links, no way to capture visitor information via some sort of free report and web form, poor SEO (search engine optimization), which is evident in his source code, which shows – I kid you not – 127 keywords with no commas separating them including neutral words such as “free,” “pdf” and “with.” Furthermore, the page Title and Description are terrible and neither mention his MONEY WORD, karaoke!!

No wonder this dude is relying on HOPE to carry him through these tough times.

This guy is a classic example of the danger of thinking small, looking backwards and focusing on the obstacles instead of the opportunities in the business world in general and in his particular industry specifically.

If you need to think bigger about your business, talk to Steve.

If you need to optimize your website and generate traffic, talk to Roger.

If you need to grow, take action. Motion beats meditation now and for always. Now stop reading and start doing.

Infusionsoft (some people mistakenly type in “Infusion Soft”) has included integrated help in their September 2010 release. This is a nice little upgrade for users because you can now get your Infusionsoft application questions answered within the application itself, thus speeding up your work and increasing your productivity.

Below is a screen shot for the search phrase “Automation Links.” Results include links to Articles, Community Q&A and Other Resources. This enables Infusionsoft users to quickly scan and access the information they need FAST!

Another cool benefit is the fact that this new, integrated help function is dynamic. What that means is that it “notices” the page you’re on in your Infusionsoft app and returns results that most closely support the content and features on that page.

For over 2 years the staff at Infusionsoft has continued to impress me with their willingness to listen and incorporate user feedback into their hosted CRM / sales and marketing automation platform. If you want and need more leads converted to paying customers please click my Infusionsoft / Infusion Soft link below and remember to tell them Wes sent cha!

Here’s my response to a friend of mine still in his free trial on Infusionsoft who asked, “Why are some of the features hard to use?”

“I know what you mean but you have to remember they give you:

1. Email marketing
2. Autoresponders
3. Tagging and Segmenting of Lists
4. CRM
5. Shopping Cart
6. Web Forms
7. Reporting
8. Ecommerce
9. Digital downloads
10. File Storage
11. Affiliate Marketing
12. Multiple Licenses
13. Unlimited, Lifetime Free Tech Support

It’s easy to make one or two of those appear easy. It’s hard to do it all up front.

Remember the alternative is to use:

1. Outlook
2. Constant Contact
3. 1ShoppingCart
4. Excel
5. QuickBooks

…and hope you have the correct info in each otherwise you’re hosed at the end of the month/quarter/year.

You’re working on automating your entire workflow. That’s not going to be easy. The alternative is to grind it out for another 30 years doing repetitive tasks over and over and over…

For your own 30-Day Free Trial of Infusionsoft check it out here. And tell ‘em Wes sent ya!

98.76351% of small businesses do NOT need a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) because they:

1. Don’t know why customers buy.
2. Don’t know why customers don’t buy.
3. Don’t know how to write.
4. Don’t know how to offer an upsell.
5. Don’t know how to develop and offer a free bonus.
6. Don’t know how to build a list.
7. Don’t know how to leverage social media.
8. Don’t know how to leverage eCommerce.
9. Don’t know how to ask powerful, relevant questions that make their prospects stop and think.
10. Basically don’t know how to market.

CRMs have become little more than an online calendar, address book and place to hold quotes that were created in a reactionary manner as they responded to an RFP that was created by their competitors with lock-out specs that guarantee the competitor will win.

What small businesses need are tools to automate their marketing. Google will give you a free calendar and address book. Outlook will let you schedule conference calls and send emails. Why are you paying big bucks for those things with some bloated CRM that was created for “the big guys” then dumbed down, scaled down, backed down in a feeble attempt to make it work for your 7-person, $800,000 business?

If you would like a 30-day free trial of a system that helps you automate your marketing, list building, prospect nurturing, client upselling and affiliate building check this out.

Are you a sales manager or business owner that is:

• Frustrated with sales people not making enough prospecting calls?
• Upset at the complacent, whiny, wimpy nature of your sales people when it comes to getting new business?
• Concerned that your marketing budget is being wasted but you don’t know what else to do about it?
• Maybe even ANGRY that despite pouring your heart and soul into your business revenues are down and you’re not quite sure how to turn it around?

If any or all of the above describes you please join me Wed Sept 9 from 8:30 to 9:45 for a live webinar entitled “Fix Your Follow Up Failure” where I will show you how to DOUBLE YOUR SALES GUARANTEED!

This is not a small claim that I take lightly. During our time together I will show you a system that, when and if followed, you will double your sales in 12 months or your money back.

WARNING: This is not a get-rich-quick-scheme. This is a system that will require some work and thought and planning and effort but both the Infusionsoft staff and I will be with you every step of the way.

Statistics show that 48% of sales people NEVER follow up with a prospect, 25% make a second contact and stop, 12% of sales people make three contacts and only 10% of your staff will ever make more than three contacts.

Yet 80% of all sales are made on the 5th-12th contact.

Learn how the top 4% of all salespeople make 60% or more of all sales and how you can bottle up their “magic” to double your sales.

For a short informational video please follow this link.

The Great Lies of Sales & Marketing

“Pick up the phone and bang out more calls today than you did yesterday.”

~~~

If you can still make money banging out calls then knock yourself out. But in my 14+ years of selling I am seeing this form of client development really diminish as an effective use of a sales person’s time.

And if the return on your time investment is diminishing, the answer is NOT to spend more time doing it. That’s just dumb. Besides, unsolicited phone calls performed by product-pushing, commission-hungry sales people is just plain annoying!

Today, when you hear a “rah-rah” guy on stage getting you pumped up to pound out phone calls, get thick skin, ignore rejection, “they’re not saying no to you but to your offering,” picture this: your son’s 7th grade flag football team lining up against the Dallas Cowboys with a great attitude and screaming as they plunge into the pile of 300 pound men.

A handful of little ones will survive by quick-footed, focused, intelligent luck but the odds aren’t in their favor. Even if they do survive is that the goal? To survive? Or is the goal to prosper?

If your thick skin and positive attitude when dialing for dollars are your only weapons in sales you’re running into a painful game that will end ugly. And as this next decade unfolds, the problem’s going to get worse, not better.

Look at it this way: 30 years ago factory workers began facing competition from machines and cheap foreign labor. The worker cost $22 per hour but the robot only cost $1.75 per hour but could work 24 hours a day, didn’t take breaks, have babies, hurt its back or steal toilet paper from the men’s room.

Are you willing to work for $1.75 per hour?

Lots of you in sales are doing just that when you add up all of the time you spend preparing and following up and cold calling and chasing leads and preparing proposals and sending literature and hoping and praying your ship comes in.

Websites and Marketing Automation and Salesforce Automation and drip campaigns are displacing old school sales people. (When was the last time an Encylopedia Brittanica sales person came to your door? They were quite common just 40 years ago. How can they compete with Amazon or Borders or Barnes & Noble?)

The answer, of course, is they can’t. That’s why they are a thing of the past. My kids will never meet a door to door encyclopedia sales person because they can’t compete and provide their customers with the level of service or selection we’ve come to demand.

A person selling books door to door is not much different from an insurance or telecommunications or computer sales man today.

But there’s HOPE: IF you carve out a niche (I’ll cover that in later installments) and IF you use automated tools like your website and Infusionsoft and direct mail, you CAN become more efficient, more competitive and more profitable, which means you will win.

As an added bonus you won’t pester and annoy your prospect base in the process and it’s amazing how motivated you’ll become!

I’ll say it again for you hard-headed types: You MUST carve out a niche, and you MUST use communication tools to deliver relevant content in a timely manner with the cunning and planning of a fox.

Most of your competitors will not do this. Most websites not only have no particular purpose in mind, most are just static brochure sites that just sit there and inform – barely – those unfortunate enough to stumble upon them. Most people don’t have a clue how to create a direct mail piece that will make the phone ring. (That’s why they think direct mail doesn’t work.)

BOTTOM LINE:

1) You MUST have automated marketing tools that do the grunt work for you.

2) You must adjust, modify, tweak, measure and test those tools until they’re effective.

There is no silver bullet. A lot of what you try won’t work the first time.

But the good news is, once it works, it will usually work for YEARS.

That’s why time spent on marketing is absolutely the best time investment you can make – IF you’re educated about what truly works and what doesn’t.

Tomorrow I’ll another big Lie in the realm of Sales and Marketing:

“You’re not giving enough presentations!”