That's sales! ahah! I can't count the amount of times I have thought someone was a perfect fit to move forward to learn they are just tire kickers... and some that seemed to be a long shot that closed. If it is not happening frequently then you can stack it up as a anomaly - however that never feels satisfying. What you need to do is look at your sales pipeline and try to understand where things went wrong. Now the best way to find this out is simply ask that lead... Noone really likes to do this, but it works. If you know they have decided to go a different direction then reach out to them with a follow up email to wish them all the best, let them know that if anything changes you will still be there and most importantly use it as an opportunity to ask them why they decided not to move forward with you. Ask what you as a business can do in the future to remedy it! Now if they have fallen off a cliff and you can not get a response you will have to look at your sales pipeline and try to identify similarities between these lost deals that you can improve. This is why it is super important to leverage a CRM.

The answer to this question covers a massive terrain. You can search for generalized answers. For more specific answers, likely best you connect with someone who is successful in your niche + talk with them about how they do lead generation. The gold standard, write a blog about your niche + monetize with Adsense, then after you develop your own products to sell, replace the Adsense Ads with your own Ads.

I get hit by such calls/emails almost daily. How not to, is often easier than how to and I get fed up of the number cold calls that breach new GDPR regulations. Often they are clearly overseas calls, worse are local calls or number withheld. If I do answer the caller often gets into an argument re GDPR - you won't win. Do not under any circumstances send (spam) emails or scraped from new domain registrations from outlook or gmail saying that you do 1. X 2. Y 3. Y using a made up name that sounds as if from the country you are targeting and offering a call/skype. Such calls/emails instantly go into spam and block. So having started with what not to do, try to reverse the what not, into what TO do. Have a local presence, use real domains for email, use real names/people who KNOW what they are talking about and local issues/regulations..... Have a local website, written in native language, not second language, ideally have a local human presence. Make sure you know about the business you are contacting, rather than generic rubbish. Finally, having used several such companies, they often promise more than they deliver, if so you will never get a second engagement. SO do not under any circumstances just say what you think the listener wants to hear, tell them the truth, even if it means you don't get the business this time. Happy to discuss further... Robin

A little more context would be needed to understand this question but I would simply say you are risk mitigation.

When it comes to marketing it really does need to be personal. I think to recommend the correct strategy one would need to learn a bit more about your business, industry, audience / consumers. With that being said - let me start by answering your questions: 1. Pricing is a loaded question without understand things like your profit margins, purchasing cycle etc. With that being said do not under value your product. There are no winners there. It is easier to price high and then reduce than the other way around. However, if you are looking at pushing volume - introducing a reduced "limited time" price to help get a foothold in your market could work.... but beware, those "discount" customers who do buy are typically lower value from a retention standpoint. 2. To help push conversions you need to think of your brand as a community. Target an audience and relate to them. Consumers look for that connection between them and a brand. Continue to build relationships with the right consumers and don't always make it seem like you are pushing only your narrative (ie. sales). 3. Honestly before you go out and hire thousands of dollars in marketing services, first take a look at what you can do in house. There is a lot you can manage on your own from an organic side that can really help build your brand equity and convert it into sales. To start I would invest into people and content. Leverage things like social (fb, insta, youtube), blogging and events to capture an audience. Place those captures into tools like mailchimp or autopilothq to help nurture them into sales. Rinse / repeat. Now this is of course a real macro perspective of things. If you want to dive in a bit more feel free to schedule a call with me.

Essentially, you need to have clearer opt ins and make it very clear what you want to store and collect the users data for. So, as long as you can get people to opt in, you don't have a problem but if you can't it can affect everything dependent on the data you need.

I have to say that from the hundreds of startups I have work with in one or other way, I have never seen someone "hire" a lead generation solution. Most of the work on the early days is done "manually" or "by hand" and the grow is all worth to mouth (or some inventive growth hacking technique with some network effect). Not sure what you are trying to do, but the number #1 focus of a founder/CEO in the early days is to be the lead generator for his/her business. "Focus on business" = generating the lead and closing the customers.

The internet for vendors in your space and then make phone calls. The internet and then LinkedIn for investors in your space.

Number one way is talk to people in your network, they don't have to be in SV. You might be surprised who actually knows who, once you start asking. Outside of that you can try looking on platforms like gust.com and or use https://angel.co/jobs, hope this helps! Call me for more help!

Hi, Andy Jacob here....I haven't heard you mention that people want the product? I would make sure people actually will replace what they are currently using first..

You could start with my APELA framework. Awareness: The first consideration is the size of your target audience. If your product or service is only relevant to a small number of people, it will be more effective to reach them directly by LinkedIn or email. If on the other hand, they are numerous then indirect will be more effective (E.g. paid search and social, partnership marketing and targetted advertising) If the buying cycle for your product or service is long (e.g a car) then you must create awareness and maintain recall. This is best achieved by capturing contact details via inbound content-based marketing (automated ideally) and sending out a regular newsletter. If on the other hand your product or service has a short sales cycle (e.g. coffee)then you need constant visibility. Either way, you need awareness and recall. For more about APELA and the next 5 stages of the customer engagement chorology: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/meet-apela-chronology-customer-engagement-mark-walmsley/ God luck Mark Walmsley mark@markwalmsley.co.uk

The first question you need to answer is who is your audience? Who are you trying to reach with your advertising? If for example, you were promoting a local restaurant, Facebook may be a good choice. If you are trying to reach business owners, LinkedIn may be a good choice (its more expensive though than the other choices listed). Also you need to determine if you want to narrow or segment your advertising. Google does allow you to target your advertising in multiple ways but Facebook targeting is more granular as its users share more details regarding Likes and Share, which is all tracked and packaged for advertisers (although the data is not tied to any particular user). With all that being said, I like AdWords, Facebook, and Bing. AdWords of course is the most popular so if I had to choose between AdWords and Bing I would gravitate to AdWords (although Bing may be worth you conducting a test). You will probably go through your $1000 budget faster on AdWords than on Facebook so that's something to consider also. I would recommend retargeting but you'll probably need a bigger budget to do the campaign justice. I hope all of this helps. Feel free to give me a call if you would like additional information.

Hi there, I think there may be an issue with qualification in your process and these prospects you are targeting may not actually be hot leads but people in a research phase. Any qualification process, even simple ones like BANT could give you a better understanding on which leads are closer to making a decision vs. just looking around. Have these been inbound or outbound leads? How many customers have you closed with the previous 2 month process, and were they inbound or outbound? I may be wrong, but I believe you are trying to close leads that have not been properly qualified. I would need a bit more background to give you a better answer.

There are three main models. Firstly, reciprocity, we recommend clients to your agency to partner with and the agency recommend clients back to buy your service. The value exchange needs to be equal, but when this works it usually forms the strongest of strategic partnerships. Secondly, there is a commission structure. The main challenge for this model is often an agency is developing tens or hundreds of thousands through their sales to clients yet the commissions from products are often only hundreds or thousands and whilst they provides a passive income, by themselves the commissions are not lucrative enough. Also it’s hard to remain front of mind with the Agency account or sales teams. The third model is created by creating a value added partner programme. Where on top of commissions, because the agency, has been trained and certified in your product they can also benefit from an introduction to new clients, from the partner product, where they can sell the their services on top of the commissions they make from integrating the partner. Most CMS, hosting or ecommerce vendors have these types of programs. Happy to pick up more details on these on a call.

Hi, if you are stateside, I recommend a great assurance and tax accounting firm, Elliott Davis. If you need to discuss how to structure your business - call the Greenville,SC office and speak to Charles Duke (this is his wheelhouse). I specialize in identifying new revenue within the categories you have created. I'd appreciate the opportunity to review and strategize on a call. I have worked with several clients in the wedding space successfully.

It sounds like you are on the right track. In today's world, people consume so much content every day that it makes very difficult for businesses to break through that clutter and get their attention. The big takeaway I think you should continue to focus on is making your message more relatable. If you want to get someone's attention you need to perfectly target their interests, pain points, wants, needs, lifestyle etc... and gear the message to where it feels like you are speaking directly to them. Now this isn't always easy when you are dealing with lists because you have to be broad. However, one thing you can try to do is get really niche with your segments. Take that list and try to isolate various groups so that you can hit them with a revised message that is more targeted to them. These "sub" segments could be based off of geographic area, gender, age etc. With a better understanding of your offering and audience I can certainly provide better examples and other tips here if you would like to book a call!

Hi there, My name is Luke, I work for start up and I should be able to give a little more insight from the employee perspective as I am in a similar situation right now! I think what you will find in this particular situation is there is no one right answer. Only you will understand the relationship you have with this individual and how you believe they will want this to be approached. I think the best way to prepare for this it to try and get an idea of their expectations. If you have a rough idea how they see themselves valued, that should help better bridge the gap in your offering. I know from my perspective as an employee I would want to come into that meeting with no bs and have a well though out offer ready for me. For you, I think it is important to base this off not only on what that person has done / their role now but also identify what you expect from them moving forward and give him the opportunity to communicate the same things back! If you have any more questions for me from a "employee perspective", feel free to book a followup call.

Yes, absolutely! You need to activate the GDPR consent forms and then add a form to your site. I'd explain it to you but this guide does a really good job: https://mailchimp.com/help/collect-consent-with-gdpr-forms/ If you need any help do let me know!

I think with most, the challenge is in the expectation. We need to stop treating / valuing SEO in the same way we did 10 years ago. The sad truth is the dynamics of SEO and the role it plays in your marketing has changed a lot over the years but unfortunately most businesses are not realizing this and it is creating a tonne of waste for them. To keep it simple - in today's marketing climate there are far better investments for your time and money. When it comes to SEO (or the end result of organic) you should be focusing on building your social presence and leveraging a relevant blog. With these, it doesn't always take much to get results. I work with a company where blogging was an afterthought. However, even though we invested zero into SEO, by just having a few well written, relevant blog posts, they started generating hundreds of unique visitor a month... and yes they are converting into clients. So lets just say now we are now allocating more money into community and content :). There is no shortage of proof that you do not need to spend a bunch of money on crappy SEO services, hacks, back-linking etc. to get results.

Hi there! You should take a look on bubble.is and also ideable.co, it may definitely fit with what you're looking for!

You should try clickfunnels. You can create entire membership funnel and you can share your funnel with others..This solves your problem.

Here is a website with some additional information: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/study-canada/work/work-off-campus.html If you have further doubts, just email Service Canada and tell them what you plan to do and they'll let you know. David Barnett

Dear Key, Can you please explain a little more? Setting up a a concurrent user system by WooCommerce is possible with normal membership systems. please you add some details about what specific feature you are looking for then probably I can help you better. If you like we can have a fast call meeting about it as well.

I think the question is which is more important to you, the platform or the individual fundraiser? The site will gain attention through each "poll," however, marketing the site alone may not ensure the success of the different polls. But if it were me doing it, I'd market both. The truth is they are one in the same. If people don't care about what is being challenged on the site, you have no website. Vice versus, they won't care about the website, if you don't have exciting challenges.

Likely best to setup some phone conversations with people here you find provide advice which seems to resonate with you. USP may be useful + likely better will be to buy highly targeted traffic (to local area) + also use Meetup + other networking venues. Search for my name + Meetup in Clarity + likely you can take what you find + generate a highly lucrative lead gen system.