We provide Engineering Design Services since 9 years in the domains of Automotive, Utilities and Industrial Designs. The slow down in our target market has hit us which is evident from our last two quarter results.

Our services normally comprises of Product Design, Tool Design, BIW Design and Detailing, Machine Tool Designs, etc.

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Jay’s Answer: Instead of focusing on selling your services, ask your clients what services they currently need. It may be that they’re not in an innovation cycle, but rather trying to figure out how to to better sell their existing inventory. Once you’ve identified their need, if you can help them directly, you’re in good shape. If not, find vendors that can help them directly, and subcontract them out to your clients.

Consider looking in different regions or niches for prospective clients.

Need your help to give some input on our Management Trainee Program.

We would like to start Management Development Program and the objective is to hire the best salespeople (area sales managers and sales sups). They will undergo 3 months training covering – credit application, sales, inventory management, financial management etc.

My question is – what commitment do we have to ask them since the training will involve some investment to mold them to be super star salespeople. Do we have to bind them into legal contract that they have to continue work for our company and are not allowed to resign before they are assigned to the branches across the country.

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Jay’s Answer: You can’t force people to work for you, no matter how much money/time you invest in them. You can require them to sign a non-compete agreement but that’s not legal in all US states and the courts don’t always enforce them.

Some other ideas:

• You could make the training unpaid.
• You could pay a lower rate during training and a much higher rate after “graduating”.
• You could pay them a salary for attending the training, and commission only after “graduating”.
• You could train them only after 90 days on the job (the first 90 days is a “test” phase where they learn the business in general, and are assigned various non-management/sales projects)
• You could also do what Zappos.com does

What advertising/ PR strategies could be used while promoting an educational institute?

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Jay’s Answer: It depends on what your ultimate PR goal really is:

• To include the local community?
• To attract talented staff?
• To encourage more companies to participate in work/study
• To attract more students?
• To encourage endowments?

Each of these goals would have different strategies associated with achieving them.

I work for a company in Nigeria. It started off as a web company with its head office in the states. Because the web industry is just picking, my company had to diversify into the advertising industry which is kinda related to web designing. Anyway we are doing a major rebranding for a telecommunications company. we’ve done the pre-launch and launch and are at the post launch stage. in the course of some personal research on what some professionals think about it; they were impressed but want to see if it will effect a change because i was told this isn’t the 1st rebranding exercise they’ve done and the major problem is their services and product. is there anyway my company can influence our client so that the whole marketing communications strategy isn’t a futile effort?

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Jay’s Answer: Your clients are asking for proof that your rebranding will work. The truthful answer is you have no idea.

When re/branding, you are telling your prospective customers a message and hoping that they will purchase your product/services. The reaction of your market is complex: based on the copy, the placement of the message, the history of the company, the visual, the offer, the prospect’s “experience” communicating with the company, repetitions, and luck (sometimes the right message gets in front of the right eyes for random reasons).

If your company has a history of other successful work, then they will help build your credibility. Better yet, if you have statistics showing that your recommended colors, graphics, copy, (etc.) produced measurable benefit, even better.

How you can best serve your client is to provide tracking to all of your rebranding efforts. How did people find out about the product/service? What message resonated best? What web pages were the most effective?

Another idea is instead of providing a full rebranding effort, start small and test. Show that your first action produced measurable results, and continue to evolve. You can always focus test, but the best results are always real-world. Split test your copy/website/ads.

Show your client that you’re willing to do what it takes to make them successful.

If the problem is that the client’s product/services aren’t so good, then you have other issues:

• You can tell your client the truth, that unless they change their business nothing they say will really matter (and each time they rebrand fewer and fewer people will believe them). This will keep your integrity high, but might lose you an important client.
• You can help your client to improve their product, so it’s more than words. You might need to bring in a business consultant to help them understand where there problems are. This will keep your client, and help them to improve.
• You can do nothing, and take the money, and watch the company continue to do poorly. This will keep a client, but won’t help your portfolio.
• You could commission a survey to uncover public perception, and present it to the company. This will be impartial information that will help them to fine tune both their actions and your rebranding effort.

How can my husband market himself to diversify his business? His new residential business has hit a major low with the bad economy. How can he target new areas? He is a Master Electrician.

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Jay’s Answer: In a word, “specialize”.

Instead of simply being a master electrician, have him focus on a narrow area. For example, home theater systems, burglar alarms, solar panels, etc. People look to hire experts in an area rather than a generalist to solve specific problems. Have him become that expert.

One concern people have in becoming a narrow expert is that they’ll lose the opportunity to work in different non-expert areas. Currently, he’s not getting that work, so it’s not a problem. But when the economy comes back, by being an expert, he can charge more and market better. There’s also no reason he can’t also have a “master electrician” business card, but by starting to focus in a new niche (perhaps with a new business name & website) he can avoid any confusion.

I am working as VP of Marketing and Sales for Manufacturing Company.

My question is What topic and sales tips/ideas on how to change the technical oriented salespeople to marketing oriented salespeople.

Our salespeople are technically educated from engineering faculty and sell our shrimp food to farmers.

The problem with their approach is they focus more on their technical skill and experience in selling the products.And neglect the marketing / sales conversation to close the sale.

My goal is how to talk the business aspect not technical data whereas the customers / prospects are more knowledgeable that even our technical support.

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Jay’s Answer: The simplest thing is to basically ask the prospect, “What information do you need from me and why?” and listen carefully.

Before you can sell anything, you need to know what your potential customer’s mindset is. Are they focused on price, supply, technicalities, competition, quality, customer service, or something else?

The “why” part of the question is to understand their “story”. Have they used the product in the past and had poor results? Are they looking for something new? Do they have a specific problem that they need solved? Are they the decision makers or simply gathering information on behalf of someone else?

Technical people (as a rule) tend to feel more comfortable talking technically. They’re skilled at problem-solving and details. To sell well you need to talk in the language of the customer and from their perspective. So, give your technical people a problem to solve: Find out what it would take to sell the product.

For your workshop/training, you don’t want to try to make the technical people into sales people – that might cause a lot of internal friction. Instead, role play. Create a simple scenario to sell your product (you can have tech people play both roles: the client and the salesperson). Give the “client” a goal (who they are and why they want to buy it). The salesperson needs to find out these things (ideally without asking directly) and then sells accordingly. After each “scene”, critique it. First, have the actors tell their perspective on the conversation, then have the observers critique it. Changing the perspective of conversation and language is simply one of practice. Make the selling process more familiar and less unpleasant. What will naturally happen is that the actors will ask for more information to do a better job – and here’s where you can provide some simple resources for them. For example: You Can’t Teach a Kid…

Alternatively, hire a consultant that would craft a workshop to help train your technical people.

I am the marketing director for an IT consulting business. What would be the best source of learning material to achieve expert level status on SEM? Not so much the SEO portion but the PPC and CPA and other options. I recently read Perry Marshalls book on adwords twice. Have searched online but came up with nothing except expensive courses in far away places. Is there a book you could recommend? Or an online course?

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Jay’s Answer: After you’ve read a little, invest some money in your learning by doing. Work on a real website (yours or a friend’s) and start learning what works in reality. Really understand: how long it takes, which keywords, which geographic area, the offer/copy, etc.

As you create these various experiments, document them well. They’ll become the basis for your own “bible”. As you have problems, post the questions to SEO forums to get input. Real questions are much more valuable than theoretical ones.