Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

In the channel we are well-versed in productising products and services. We know how to package them, how to promote them and how to sell them, promoting our USPs over the competition. We seem to accept processes as part and parcel and rarely productise them. Are we missing a trick?

When the processes we offer form part of our USPs, we are definitely missing a trick by not productising them. Everyone says they offer ‘excellent customer service’, but what if this is the one thing you know makes you different from the competition? By productising your processes, you can demonstrate the value to your customer base and reap the benefits.

Where to start?

By defining your customers needs. What are customers looking for? How do you meet these requirements better than the rest? What evidence do you have to support this? By noting down the journey, you can productise your unique process, reflecting back the customers’ needs and how you are meeting them.

Understand success

By mapping processes next to KPIs to help you track success, you can start to see how you achieved success. Analyse your biggest customer deals, where did the original lead come from? How was it generated? How was it converted? How was the first opportunity generated? How was this closed? How was the order placed and processed? How did you prevent any installation issues? How did you ensure the customer was billed correctly? How did the customer feel when the first order had gone live? What support was given along the way? How does the customer rate the support given?

Map your unique process

Once successful order journeys have been mapped, unique processes ensuring success become visible. Describe and name each step of the process. Write it up as a flyer and advertise it on your website and as part of your proposals.

If you are thinking about re-designing your website, it is important to consider your SEO – Search Engine Optimisation, to ensure any changes you make, do not have a negative impact on web enquiries.

Strategy

The first thing to do is to revisit your SEO strategy and consider how major changes may affect this. For example, you may have written many blogs on a subject, which include source links back to your webpage. If you decide to remove this webpage completely, when readers click through your blog pages, they will receive error messages instead of the content you wanted to point them to. By mapping your existing strategy, you can ensure that page links are re-directed to the new content.

Structure

Secondly, consider your structure. It is important to ensure that any new URLs, page titles and meta descriptions all match up properly, because if they don’t this may affect your Google rankings and key word traffic. This may result in your prospects not finding you when they need you.

Build on what you have

If you have a good flow of high quality web leads, you should protect this. Don’t remove historically important pages, edit them instead and build additional content and links into those key pages.

Understand your site structure

Spend time understanding the flow of traffic to your website and where visitors spend their time. It is worth mapping all the URLs your content points people to, to ensure any changes do not break old links.

Noindex

It is worth ticking the noindex box to ensure Google does not index your test site pages as you are drafting them, otherwise when you launch you will create duplicate content, which has no value in the eyes of Google.

As part of our on-boarding process at Jola, we help partners with current opportunities and explain how our product portfolio can help them to win them. Many join us with a growing need for internet connectivity or hosted voice, and as they move through our training programme, they uncover opportunities for additional services such as mobile data.

Adding new services can lead to brand repositioning, to reflect new solutions and USPs in key vertical markets. It is tempting to think that by changing your website you will achieve brand repositioning, however the strategy will impact every area of your business.

Where to start

Start by establishing why you are repositioning your brand. The reasons why will determine the extent of change that is necessary. For example, if you want to be known as a specialist in one area, you need to research the market, the suppliers, the competition, the customers and the products, to see where you fit into it and how you can differentiate yourself within it.

Testing

Test your messaging to ensure it reflects reality. Are you the market leader? If you are, then back it up with facts. It you are a new entrant, you need to test your content and your messaging over time, to reflect reality. Build up case studies and testimonials across key verticals and target similar prospects, to build market share. Ensure you use the right terminology, as this will help prospects find you.

Over the last twelve months Jola has launched on average, one new product a month. This takes a lot of detailed planning to ensure we have the right product, at the right price, which meets the specific needs of our partners and their customers. Once we have launched a new product, we help our partners launch to their customers and measure success against clearly defined targets. We have developed some top tips to help partners with their own launch process as follows.

Step 1 – Know your audience

It is tempting to think that every customer will benefit from your latest new product, but this is rarely the case. We encourage partners to think about problems faced by existing customers, which the new product could solve. We then get more granular in defining the problem and the characteristics of the customers that could benefit. From this we build a list of top prospects.

Step 2 – Plan your communication

Using the information gathered in step one, we encourage partners to define the problem, then simply explain the solution, outlining what the product is, what it does and how it solves the problem. We provide a lot of the basic information, but it is important to tailor the content with specific concerns and relatable solutions. We advise partners to research the competition to understand how their solution is different and promote the differences over and above what is already available. This information gets written up on web sites and incorporated into campaign materials.

So often success is measured on anecdotal evidence. “It’s not as busy as it was last year...” “I was expecting more...” On the basis of one or two opinions, events can be deemed successful or not worth repeating.

Most marketers will be ready with measurables, such as leads generated, meetings conducted and predicted returns, however unless objectives and success were defined prior to the event, the figures lose their impact.

Before planning an event, it is useful to draft objectives, set a strategy and outline deliverables. Involve key parties, such as the sales team, to set joint targets everyone agrees defines success.

Key measures such as total cost of exhibiting, hosting or attending, plus total visitor numbers are good to gather as a starting point. You can then set targets for lead generation against costs, or as a percentage of the total audience, and follow up with leads converted and order values over time. This way you can calculate the return on investment and time taken to achieve the return.

Analysis of last year’s attendees and performance compared to this year’s statistics, gives you facts you can analyse. You can also compare visitor numbers and break them down into target audience and compare that with the number of leads generated. If target audience numbers were up and leads were down, you may want a closer look at how the stand was run.

The challenge for marketing teams in the channel is to continually promote their USPs to win new business, without becoming predictable. As marketers, we plan our strategy to deliver on objectives. Overtime we develop messaging and campaigns that work and we know which buttons to press to get results. We need to balance new copy with existing key messages, to stay on track.

Business owners are often focussed on the ‘next big idea’ and can influence copy. Some companies change their brand, their messaging and their offer regularly to stay fresh, but can lose brand identity and enthusiasm for the campaign, if it doesn’t deliver expected results.

As marketers, we know that prospects don’t absorb every key message the first time they see it. It takes time and several touch points to attract their attention, engage with them and convert them. We also know the importance of key messages and layouts to differentiate ourselves and build a recognisable brand.

Don’t be tempted to throw out what is working in favour of the next new idea. Try to incorporate the new idea into existing templates, that contain key messages and USPs. This way the copy can be regularly updated to meet changing demands of the market, without losing your brand identity and key messages.

Reporting is key. By analysing engagement, conversions and order value, you can see if the new campaign is working and make necessary changes.

For more marketing tips, read our blog.

For some partners attending and sponsoring exhibitions is part of their marketing strategy and multiple events are booked every year. For others, investing in an exhibition is a big decision, with many internal discussions around investment and potential return. Often the Sales Director makes the final decision and organises it. These partners sometimes turn to suppliers for help and support to maximise their success. There are three key factors to consider when planning an exhibition.

Research your market

Who attends your event? Who attended last year? Are these the types of prospects you are targeting? If so, think about your approach. How do you plan to interact with these prospects?

Many will take an exhibition package, giving them either space for their own stand and materials or a pre-built stand package, branded with their corporate logos. Whatever option you choose, think about your shop window, how your image will compare to your competitors and factor in any additional costs such as broadband and electrics. Ensure you have the ability to demonstrate and promote your services in the most effective way.

Attract your audience

Think about how you will attract prospects to your stand. You don’t have to spend thousands on bill boards outside the event, videos at the entrance hall and internal signage to get attention. You can invite prospects to your stand beforehand but be aware they may also visit your competitors. You can advertise yourself in the show guide and work the stand to ensure that every prospect that passes your stand is approached and qualified.

LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform for business. You may have a LinkedIn page for your company, but are you making the most out of it?

Have a goal

Having a measurable goal is a good way of assessing how well LinkedIn is working for your business. Often businesses will track number of connections or number of likes and comments, however this may not be the right metric to track success. Think about what you want to get from LinkedIn. From a marketing prospective we are trying to attract, engage and convert our prospects into leads. By adding a strong call to action to all your blogs posted on LinkedIn and tracking them overtime against a target can be a good metric.

Build up a mailing list

When you have generated interest from content posted on LinkedIn and they have visited your website, the objective is to generate a lead to convert. This is often a process over time. By adding web prospects from LinkedIn to your mailing lists, with all the appropriate permissions, you can build a list of warmer prospects to send targeted and personalised content to.

Plan multiple contacts

Five contacts over a six month period from blog to email, to webinar, to call, to face to face meetings helps to engage and convert LinkedIn prospects. A joined-up sales and marketing approach is key.

One of the biggest frustrations for marketing is good, qualified leads that showed an interest but didn’t go anywhere. Not every lead you generate will convert, however when you have profiled your mailing list, crafted a campaign and generated some great opportunities, it is useful to know what went wrong.

Missed

The most common mistake when following up leads is leaving it too late to reply. With a prospect contacting you, there is a window of the same working day to respond. If you make contact in a timely manner, understand and meet the requirements, you will establish a relationship, which you can build from. By forgetting to respond and being reminded by the prospect, you are on the back foot and may have already given the competition a head start.

Misunderstanding

You have managed to hit the right person at the right time but you have misunderstood the requirement. He contacts you for pricing. If you can’t get hold of the prospect to fully understand his requirements, you may send the wrong information and miss the opportunity. The prospect may not have time to take sales calls, but without properly qualifying his requirement, the opportunity will be lost and the prospect challenging to re-engage with.

When new partners sign up with Jola they visit the partner portal and download our white label materials to update their own. They often then get in touch to share their marketing experience, especially if they did not get the results they had anticipated.

Writing effective advertising copy can be tricky. We advise partners to start by outlining their key messages in a very clear and succinct way. What problem are you solving and how is your solution unique? Avoid exaggerated claims and unnecessary adjectives. How is your message compelling? How is your message engaging? You may have a list of unique products or features but this may not be engaging.

You need to attract attention, generate desire and provoke a reaction. Think carefully about who is reading your message to align the right message with the right audience at the right time. 

If you are targeting MDs, how will your product help to grow their business, cut costs or improve ARPU? How is this solution different from the competition? Where can they learn more? What do you want them to do if they are interested? MDs tend to be short on time, so asking them to read a long web page, white paper, guide or attend a webinar may not work, however offering a quick price comparison may pique their interest.