Coffee for Closers | Leads360 Sales & Marketing Blog 

The 2010 AdTech show in San Francisco was a hotbed of on and offline marketers primarily for B2C companies. Quite simply, there is no shortage of companies that will take your money and drive clicks and maybe even leads, but do they really care what happens after that? I’m not sure that they do. In speaking with nearly a dozen marketing service providers, that incidentally offered only a slightly varied product, I found a sharp lack of concern about conversion. Well, I shouldn’t be that harsh, they care, but not that much.

Obviously if you ask about how well traffic converts, of course you can’t beat it. But in my experience the real test of quality comes in how much effort the marketer is willing to put into conversion after the lead has been generated. That means they need to care about what their clients actually do with the clicks or leads. That means they need to care about a part of the process they don’t make money from. Of course, any shrewd lead generator knows that when clients get better at this part of the process, they buy more leads; just ask Matt Coffin from LMB. But everyone I spoke to at AdTech didn’t give a “#%!!@$&” about it. Some were even quite vocal about it.

It’s sad. For us it’s sad because we aren’t likely to get referrals for their clients to use our lead management software. I can pretty much guarantee they will convert more leads and subsequently spend more money, but why would they want that. Somehow the success of the lead generation industry, and it’s embracement of lead management software hasn’t quite permeated to online marketers at large. Maybe it’s no surprise that all the lead generators decided to stop participating in AdTech; maybe AdTech is still stuck in the 90’s.

Do you have a marketing strategy in place to touch past clients? How about current ones? Are your current clients aware of your new products and technologies? What are you doing to keep your product[s], your company, and most importantly YOU, on their mind?

The easiest, most trouble-free, and best business is return business. It is relatively simple to get if you know how to get it, and it breeds new referral based business.

Furthermore, what’s the easiest way to lose business to a competitor? Become just another part of someone’s day. Become a nameless, faceless feature of someone’s operation. This makes it easy for your competitors to walk right in, and kick you right out.

What are you doing right now to keep in touch with people whose trust you have earned in the past? Let’s talk about it. E-mail me at mmorelli@leads360.com or call me at 310.256.2947 so we can discuss some Best Practices.

We like our brands like we like our friends; with a personality.

Andy Sernovitz (word of mouth marketing expert) wrote a quick note about Zappos which has been successful, in large part, because of the personality which it has created for itself.

Here is the juicy part:

Call their customer service number: 800-927-7671

Every day a different employee hosts the phone calls. Today (Halloween) you get singing:

“Trick or treat, smell my feet, Zappos Customer Service can’t be beat. Hi, my name is Amber, and my name is Kimberly, from our product information support team, and we’ll be hosting today’s daily greeting on this spooky October 31st.”

Plus, every call ends with “Press 4 to hear Zappos Joke of the Day.” Two more employees tell you a joke.

Zappos is not afraid to say that they have a personality, and that’s just the kind of company that people want to deal with.

Zappos is a company that is an inspiration for us at Leads360, because it is built on customer service. When Zappos was just starting up they knew that an incredibly high level of customer service would be required to let people buy shoes, without trying them on. They developed a class-leading organization which revolves around making it as painless as possible to buy AND return shoes.

“We’re a service company that just happens to sell shoes.” Read the whole interview at Inc.