Aquila & Company

As the World seemingly heads towards recession and managers are having to cope with recruitment freezes and layoffs, how do businesses keep selling? 

One solution is to outsource their new business development to experienced and highly flexible organisations like Aquila & Company.  We can “keep the lights on” without breaking the much slimmer operating budgets that companies are faced with at the moment. 

We can work either on a moderate monthly retainer (you get a team for the price of a single employee, without the extra costs), or on a campaign basis.

If you’re in need of some sales help in these challenging times, give us a call on 0208 123 6075 in the UK or +1 404 418 6679 in North America

That elusive citadel of advertisers being able to target individual users is getting closer to reality every month.  Micro-targeting online is the foundation of much of Web 2.0 search and social-ad-driven models, but what about nano-targeting?

Now, using Facebook it is possible to create a series of nano-targeted advertisements targeted at specific individuals. Reporters and experimenters are already trying out select ads, but how long before the mainstream digital creatives get into the idea… watch this space

Voicemail, like SPAM is one of my pet hates.  Not that voicemail as a technology is a bad thing, but that in many businesses, it is used in completely the wrong way.

Years ago, BVM (before Voice Mail), if you wanted to leave a message for someone, you had to do it via one of their colleagues.  The messages therefore needed to be sucinct and contain only the most important information.

Now, with the advent of VoiceMail our messages can be upto two minutes (or sometimes longer!).  This creates a problem straight away. To begin with, a telephone “conversation” with a voicemail system means that the person leaving the message has the ability to speak about the purpose of their call for a long time, without being interupted.  This is a nightmare for the recipient who has to endure some of the most boring sales pitches over their voicemail.  Result - our propects get turned off listening to their messages (so much so that in some cases they either don’t bother listenting or just delete the message straight away).

The flip side of this VoiceMail cancer is that prospects use VoiceMail to avoid doing their jobs. They “hide” behind the “I’m sorry I’m away from my desk/ on another call”… and don’t bother to pick up the phone.  This may be due to the high number of unprofessional and poorly trained telephone sales people calling them.

So what is the solution?  VoiceMail is here to stay and it is a useful technology.  Some advocate using the voicemail to make your pitch. I say pitching over the voicemail is a complete waste of your telephone sales time.  I stopped pitching to voicemail and my telesales life has picked up!  Now I ask my prospects; don’t hide.  Use VoiceMail not as an excuse to avoid doing your job but as a tool to help you do your job more effectively.  Lets talk!

Like millions of other “professionals” I have been queried, invited and even cajoled into joining the growing number of business social networks.  Most prolific of which, in my opinion, is LinkedIn.  More than 30 million people have now apparently accepted. 

But while looking up old colleagues, (probably to see if they are doing better than we are although we will justify it in terms of “networking”), is seen as a valuable use of executive time, I have come to question whether this is actually a help or a hinderance?

As a sales professional, LinkedIn offers access to a potentially huge database of prospects, but the question then becomes, how good are we at actually making such a database work for us?

Does it give you the true introductions to the people whom you can help with your product or service, or does it just waste your efforts in trying to get that elusive introduction to the decision makers?  The jury is still out on this one.

One of the biggest frustrations facing the modern day teleprospector is the hypocracy shown by many companies in the UK.  On the one hand, these companies invest millions in their own “pro-active” sales development, employing telephone sales people to cold call prospects.  Then, on the other, these same companies hide from any attempt to recieve such prospecting calls from other companies.

Every day I am faced with everything from “no name policy” to “Mr/Mrs X doesnt take sales calls”  Now, I know that it is not the receptionist’s fault but why do these companies even bother to have a telephone?

In one particular case I was informed that I needed to write a letter(!) (not even an anonymous email!) and then if they could be bothered I would be called. Then a few days later, whilst on the roof of my house fixing the ariel I recieved a call, not from the person I was trying to reach but from one of their salespeople trying to sell me their products!  The hypocracy of it was amazing. 

To be honest, the challenges in teleprospecting come not from “gatekeepers” as we are lead to believe, but from this crazy hypocratic approach to business.

This is a question that every Sales Manager should be asking themselves right now.  Are you selling enough?  Could you sell more? 

In these difficult economic times, prospects are becoming more scarce and sales teams have to work harder to maximise their opportunities.  Now is the time to put a bigger, not smaller resource behind your sales and marketing activity, yet the first thing that seems to happen is that the sales and marketing departments get canned.  Variable expenses like Sales and Marketing are always the first to go.

If you’ve been caught in the sales trap of lower resources but a harder sales environment, Aquila & Company can help.  We can provide tactical prospecting campaigns to help you to maintain your sales momentum.

Call Aquila & Company TODAY for an informal chat about how we can help you.