Our client Terry Foster, President of Cision Canada (world’s largest PR & Communications software) taught me about “Paid, Earned and Owned Media”. This is the staple from any PR professional – how can they maximize their Earned Media without having to Pay. The very best PR teams have found innovative means of achieving this very concept.
We at Sales for Life (Canada’s leading Sales Agency) are a services firm with a shoestring marketing budget. We’re constantly pushing the envelope of maximum cost-to-ROI, by using only tools that are cost effective but extremely effective. I know that sounds cliché, but our 4-Pillars of Guerrilla Marketing have been so successful, we teach it to our clients. There is no coincidence that our clients are also in a similar marketing position, as they are growing technology companies stretching each marketing dollar.
It’s important that our prospects and clients understand that a B2B company can achieve extra-ordinary results by spending less than $1,000/month on marketing! In no particular order, here are the tools we use (and the majority of our clients) to drive 100’s of Sales Qualified Leads each year.
1. Marketing Automation using Net-Results
Marketing Automation is one of the most important marketing investments your team MUST, MUST use. We’ve partnered with Net-Results to distribute our original content (like this article) to our prospects and client to help measure their engagement. We not only track how this article does, but every article we’ve ever sent! Based on a prospects engagement (Lead Scoring), we can determine where in buying cycle they might be. We can also create workflow tracks to nurture a prospect with a multitude of original content (based on their engagement) from our 1st encounter, all the way until a sale is made.
We have an entire content marketing process that works, and Net-Results is a very powerful cost effect solutions to assist our prospects and clients with their buying process.
2. Webinars
Whether we host the event, or are invited to be a guest speaker, Webinars are amazing at creating an engaging story. Webinars have a captive audience of 50, 100, 500 prospects that have signed up to learn. If your content provides the juicy tips and suggestions that helps your audience and drives them to want to learn more, you’ve accomplished what many are not able to do but if your content is a glorified product demo – you’ll be one and done with your webinars. The best part of a webinar is how the recording goes viral days after the event, and your phone/email account will have prospects asking to know more.
LinkedIn is a staple in our marketing diet. We’ve booked 100+ meetings with prospects using LinkedIn over the last 18 months. Sales for Life has made tens of thousands of dollars – all started from a simple 100 word message on LinkedIn. Our cost is $100 a month! Not bad, spend $1,200/year to make at least 100x in 12 months!
Hootsuite is our tool to monitor Twitter, with a smaller ROI but important part to our overall Social Selling platform. For $10/month, we know what every prospect and client is saying on LinkedIn regarding subjects that matter to us. Not bad for the cost of a sandwich and Coke for lunch.
4. Event Marketing – AA-ISP and soon to be Beer Night
If you’re a sales leader and you’re not taking advantage of AA-ISP, you’re missing out. This is one of the world’s largest network of sales leaders sharing everything SALES. AA-ISP was founded as an inside sales network, but as inside sales is growing exponentially faster than field sales, it’s become the sales champion. Sales for Life gives back to the sales community by hosting AA-ISP meetings and attending AA-ISP events. This opened our eyes to all the major players and supplemental events we need to participate in.
Starting in Q4, we’re going to take a page from Carolyn Betts @ Betts Recruiting and host a Beer Night (each quarter). This will gather the top sales leaders in our local community to share thought-leadership over a pint. By combining fun & learning (all at a minimal cost), we can connect with dozens of amazing prospects each meeting.
We do all of this for less than $1000/month!
How does your strategy/budget stack-up? Want to learn more about any of these innovative strategies please drop me a line or book a meeting with me below.
