Do you have any suggestions on homemade/ crafty marketing ideas?

Who can help me through the whole marketing and sales process from A-Z: get clients, close deals, sign contract papers?

  • I'm looking for business development firms or individual consultants or marketing or lead generation companies. I started an IT Services, Technology Consulting and Application Development & Maintenance (ADM) firm. I am good and strong at entrepreneurial, technical and team management skill, but I am not experienced in [A to Z] process like lead generation, marketing, getting the clients, closing the deal and signing the contract papers. I would like to know if there are any independent (consultants, Marketers), consulting companies, marketing firms and lead generation firms that complete the A to Z process. Any Ideas, Improvements, Referrals and Suggestions are Welcome! Thanks in advance.

  • Answer:

    Here are two folks I've worked with personally. Perry Marshall could help you. He has books, classes, and mastermind coaching on Adwords, Facebook advertising, and selling consulting services. He's quite good. http://www.perrymarshall.com/ Salesforce4hire builds custom sales teams and are familiar with the IT world. I've also worked with them. And they've brought me sales appointments. http://www.salesforce4hire.com/‎

Tim Dawes at Quora Visit the source

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It sounds like you need an entire sales function. This virtually always needs to be done in house for new companies (it's critical to your success, and being good at sales requires considerable investment in learning about your offering). There are companies that resell IT services (http://www.c3biz.com/ is one example of thousands out there, to see what they look like), but I don't know of any that would provide the entire sales operation for a new IT services company.

Andrew Boysen

I was asked to answer this so I'll try to answer the best I can: Learn it - learn it. learn it. learn it. Sales and new business generation is the most critical part of the business. The obvious reason is that it helps you sell. The less obvious reason is that it gives you constant feedback to help you better build your product or service around what your customers want and need - helping you build a more effective system. On the other side of things, if I'm someone who does the outsourced sales for the company, once I've built the client relationships and the customer base, what's to stop me from poaching the customers to a different operation? not much, because that person now "is" the company in the client's eyes. If it's something you don't like, it's something you can hire out for later. But understanding the process of customer contact and feedback in my opinion is critical to building products that are in the best interests of your clients.

Ed Wheeler

There are WAY too many to list here, so you could just look in the yellow pages/google/etc. under marketing consultants, or advertising agencies and find contact information for lots of companies that would love for a nice fee to take over your business for you, err..., take over your marketing and sales (though truthfully whoever controls the revenue controls the company so you decide which is more correct). Or you could just follow the Simplified Marketing and Sales Processoutlined below to get more than enough clients inexpensively and without too much trouble. This process only goes from A to L though. So if you really want/need M-Z you might want to complicate it and add more steps and letters. ;-) I recommend you do all of these steps yourself in the beginning to make sure you have a firm grasp on the entire process, and so you keep control, then hire others to do the parts you don't like and/or are not good at, or simply don't have time for. Each step is not really that difficult though, and you may find that once you go through the process the first time, you generate more than enough clients to keep you busy for years. If you do ever need more clients, you can just repeat the process again. Start by answering the following questions: A. Who has a problem that you can solve quicker and easier than they can solve themselves or with an alternative solution including doing nothing? (Be as specific as you can about who these people are.) B. Where do those people gather? C. How can you get access to them to tell them your message that you can solve their problem for them? D. What specifically is their problem, and how would they describe it? E. What is it costing them in money, time, and other ways to not have their problem solved? F. What benefits will they gain by hiring you and implementing your solution? G. How can you demonstrate that your solution will work for them? (Hint: many consultants write up and distribute for free a report defining the prospects' immediately pressing problem and showing the steps to take to solve it. The consultant includes in the report an offer to help the prospect implement those steps and/or an offer for a free individual consultation to strategize a solution specific to the prospects situation. Thus, by helping the prospect get a plan of action together, they demonstrate the value of their consultancy. The consultant then charges for implementation and/or helping the client with their bigger problem.) H. What do they need to do to get started working with you? Then simply take the answer you gave to B, and contact the people you described in answer to question A, using your answer to C, tell them D, ask them E just to validate and confirm your own answers (refine your answers if you need to), ask them if they would rather have F, and if they say "Yes" then give them G, and close with H. If you actually do this, you will have done all the marketing and most of the sales you need. Just add: I. Collect their down payment/retainer, J. Process the paperwork, and K. Follow up to see if there is anything else you can help them with. Then: L. Repeat the process as often as you need, and on an ever increasing scale. Of course, if you need help understanding and/or implementing any and/or all of the above you can always contact me directly and I'd be glad to be of service. :-) For additional ideas on how you can really profit from your consulting business, you might want to check out my book "Profit the ExpandoVision Way" which you can download for free at http://expandovision.com I hope this helps. Thanks for the ask to answer, and let me know if you need anything else. Godspeed and may all your days be profitable.

Donald Kubelka

I was asked to answer this -Without some form of specific information on your target market, your unique skills, capabilities and selling proposition, it is impossible to provide a clear answer to your question. If you know your target market, your target geography and the type and size of contracts you are looking for, you'll be able to focus and find business development firms/consultants. Sales and marketing are the core of any entrepreneurial venture and outsourcing that capability is not a sustainable strategy. The truly good salesmen in any specialized area will never really work as consultants on call for a fee, they'll expect more than that - You should network, pitch and look for a co-founder or a partner willing to do the selling for your product. If you want to get started with the process of establishing a sales and marketing team for your firm, you can start with training from sales consultancies and books ( Miller Heiman/ David Maister). Whatever you do, you should work towards developing a strong understanding of the fundamentals of the sales and marketing process; there can be no excuse or explanation for an entrepreneur not knowing the A to Z of selling. You may not have the skills of a salesperson or you may not have the presence/bandwidth for selling; You can build a team and partner with a good salesperson for that, but you must be deeply involved in designing and constantly reviewing your sales ecosystem and sales model( consultative/solutions based etc). You will benefit from lead generation companies only if you have a strong ecosystem that can efficiently funnel, filter, follow-up and close on leads ; And that is a tough thing to coordinate if you are depending on different consultants/organizations to do each of those things. Someone who is doing business development for multiple firms is unlikely to ever be able to make a strong case for your capabilities.

Deepak Alse

I can help you with that. I work with startups for their entire lifecycle for the marketing, sales and growth strategies. Please inbox me and I'll be in touch to arrange a skype/call.

Khuram Malik

Check out Stride's free eBook called "30-Day Lean Generation Plan for Complex Sales" - http://www.stridenyc.com/30-day-lead-generation-plan-for-complex-sales-ebook It's a great place to start, it gives you - Actionable tactics you can use today to increase lead generation for your business A list of common lead generation mistakes to avoid A week-by-week plan that you can use solo or with a team An offer for 20% off a personalized, customized facilitated workshop for your team If you have any questions about the tactics in the eBook just let me know. I ran a tech company for 10 years, recently sold it and now and focusing on helping others with lead gen, specifically in tech.

Debbie Madden

Everything is available for a price... Now, you'll have to forgive the large list of assumptions about to follow; hopefully it'll make sense by the end. Firstly, I'm going to assume that you understand your core offering better than any other person. I'll also assume that you started this venture having seen a gap in the market which you are filling. Hopefully this means that you should have a pretty good idea who your potential customers are and what your strongest potential verticals are. Being an entrepreneur you are probably a people person; having strong team management skills almost guarantees that you have the required skills to motivate, incentivise, cajole, even manipulate (I prefer the term "hacker of intrinsic motivators", although it is a little wordy) your team to extract the very best performance out of them. If the above is relatively true of you, then you already have all the skills you'll need to go from A to Y. I'd go further and say that there probably isn't anyone better than you available anywhere that could do the job better. Selling yourself to your customers isn't that different than selling yourself to your team. The only thing you are missing, it would seem, is the necessary skills to create a watertight contract once you have convinced your prospect to do business with you. I offer a full A to Z service, and there are no doubt others that do the same. However, it's extremely rare to find an entrepreneur with a brilliant startup that isn't able to meet most of their needs themselves. I've only come across two that needed that much help (over the last 25 years), and I bought into both of them. My advise? Find out everything you are cr@p at, and outsource it. For everything else, you are the best evangelist for your business. Get a good lawyer for your contracts; read plenty of books on the sales process (but ignore as much of the advise as you want); refuse to give away any of your power because of fear or lack of knowledge.

Jason Catterall

Some tips to get the clients : 1. B2B marketplace,such as : alibaba , http://en.ofweek.com ,made-in-china and so on 2. Build company website and marketing,make sure your company website is well optimized 3. Company blog :write the high quality content in your field 4. Newsletters :get the consumer's email 5. Paid Search (capture marketplace demand) PPC ad campaigns on Google , Facebook and bing. 6. Phone (stimulate demand). Even the most successful inbound marketing companies rely on cold calling to generate new business. 7. Forums and Blogs : Actively participate and interaction 8. Create content.  Tons and tons of content 9. Growth hacking. Where applicable to build incentive based campaigns for referral, increased retention and overall internal growth. 10. Social media : share your content on social networking sites like linkedin and google plus,join the groups and engage with others 11. Posting videos :post videos on YouTube and Daily Motion 12.Emails are the fastest way to generate leads too 13. Organizing seminars and webinars (this can shake loose latent demand). 14. Exhibition : some trade shows in your industry 15. Buy leads from lead generation companies,Customs data 16. Word-of-mouth- Customer support has been crucial for B2B lead generation as happy and satisfied customers often refer their friends which will boost lead generation.

Sophie Turner

Take a look at how http://www.mspu.us is structured to support MSPs' go-to-market needs, the materials they produce and what they seek to cover should be a great resource for ideas and structure. Though you need to balance reality, you can't do it all - outsource your weaknesses at your earliest opportunity.

Ed Daniel

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