The Salesby5 Blog

Last week, our friend and colleague Ryan Kelly, who works on all the SalesBy5 customer websites, won top awards by technology judges. He won because he took a complex message and made it simple to understand and simple to use. Click the first link below and enter your website. A few seconds later, you will get detailed information for your web developers to use today to make your website your best salesperson. Find out more about Ryan Kelly and Pear Analytics below.

Pear Analytics Website Analyzer

Pear Analytics scores first prize at Innotech Beta Summit

Yesterday, Laura Lorek from the San Antonio Express News (@mysa) wrote Recession Spurs Startups, an excellent article about us and a few other local companies, such as IncSpring, Blellow, Pear Analytics and Third Party Code doing cool work in San Antonio.  We’ll let you in on a little secret – reporters want to know you and write about you as badly as you want them.  Here’s how we did it.  We do things a bit differently by working to dramatically increase sales backed by data, not by pretty ads or slick marketing pieces (not that we won’t use these tactics in the overall plan).  As Woody Allen says 80 percent of success is just showing up, so we did just that.  If you’ll notice, many of the companies at the tweetup are also in the article.  In case you don’t know, a tweetup is a twitter meet-up, where people on twitter meet face to face.  Here’s the abbreviated lesson of how to get media coverage:

1. Do remarkable work.
2. Get on twitter and develop relationships with the media, genuinely, by providing them real value
3. Go to or start a tweetup in your town and invite your media friends
4. At the tweetup, talk to your media person and introduce them to all your business friends that are doing interesting work. “You need to meet Ryan, he’s doing really cool work for…, he’d be a great person to know for a write-up.”  Your job is to make your media person’s life easy. Give them substance, something cool.

If you have questions on how to do any of this or how to talk to your media friends, drop us a line.  They’re human just like (most of) the rest of us.

“Great sales people wake up and say, God bless the competition ’cause I am going to kick their ass.”

Recently we had a meeting with Alan Weinkrantz, Ryan Kelly and Steve Patti.  During our discussion, we were talking about how important it is for companies to live their brand on the inside of the organization before taking it to the public.  This ensures that everyone is on the same page as far as what’s being sold, what’s been promised and what the experience should feel like.  Steve put it into his words by saying that the gap the customer feels between the brand promise (what the customer expects) and the experience (what the customer actually receives) is what ends up affecting the perception of the brand.  The closer the brand promise and the brand experience are to one other, the better the client feels about having done business with the company and the more likely they are to return.  Conversely, the further the gap, the more damage is done to the brand.

Consider if you went to Wal-Mart (low prices) and you purchased an item, then later found that Target actually had lower prices.  What if you were to go to a Ritz-Carlton Hotel and not experience remarkable, world class service?  These experiences would clearly cause a disconnect between the brand promise and brand experience.

Have you had a similar experience or the complete opposite experience, where you expected less and got more?  Share with us in the comments.

photo by dustin