Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today

I write about the three topics that I am most passionate about; Sales, Marketing and Social Media. These topics are covered from my experiences in outside sales and marketing. My objective is to use my expertise to help business and the individual.

Why Free Trials & Loss Leaders increase Sales & Customer Loyalty

Free or Low-Cost Trials

When creating a new offering, I would offer a free or low-cost trial of your product to the end-users and industry experts. Consumers look for social proof before they buy a product. Now if the product is new, none exists. To lower buyer resistance, you need to make it low risk and feel safe.

In addition to market research and product testing; the free or low-cost trial is a great way to build trust and get feedback. Surveys can be created to ask potential customers about their experience.

If your product helps to solve a customer’s problem they will be more than happy to share it with others; converting to paying users! The product will earn testimonials and endorsements. Testimonials and endorsements will address product reliability creating: loyalty, brand recognition, and Sales for your product.

Loss Leaders

In place of a free or low-cost trial, a loss leader can be an option. A loss leader is when you offer a product at a loss or break-even point to gain business in the future. Supermarkets do this all of the time when a new product is rolled out.

Another place I saw loss leaders was when I was in Field Sales. I was selling Dental equipment at the time. Certain customers were loyal to certain types of equipment. When I ask why they stated that these were the tools that they had used in school. When I called on Dental schools and Hospitals, I found they were locked up with large contacts. My larger competitors sold the equipment at cost practically giving it away. Why would they do this? My competitors were creating life-long customers who were trained on certain tools and refused to switch.

Connection, trust, and advocacy are essential for customer acquisition. It is your job as a brand to turn your customer base into evangelists.

The decision on developing and implementing offering free, low-cost trials and/or loss leaders will be different for each product.

Free, low-cost trials and loss leaders help to Increase Sales and Customer Loyalty.

How have you used free, low-cost trials and loss leaders to create Sales and Customer Loyalty?

Comment and share.

Posted 232 weeks ago

Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today

I write about the three topics that I am most passionate about; Sales, Marketing and Social Media. These topics are covered from my experiences in outside sales and marketing. My objective is to use my expertise to help business and the individual.

What I Learned from Working in Field Sales in NYC

Sales has taught me to:

1.To go after what I want in life. Ask for the order if you will.

2. To stand tall in the face of rejection and negativity.

3. To look at rejection as a learning experience instead of a defeat.

4. To understand Customer needs. (Objections vs Stalls). (Buyer Motives)

5. To persist through obstacles and not to quit!

6. To examine and understand how a business operates.

Every person should try selling products at least once in their lives. It is a valuable learning experience.

Before my time as a Marketer, I worked as an Outside Sales Rep in the Dental Industry in Manhattan.

Field Sales/Field Marketing has taught me so much about myself.

What did selling teach you?

Comment and share.

Posted 244 weeks ago

Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today

I write about the three topics that I am most passionate about; Sales, Marketing and Social Media. These topics are covered from my experiences in outside sales and marketing. My objective is to use my expertise to help business and the individual.

How to use Marketing to Build a Top Talent & Employer Brand

Brands use Marketing to increase sales, and revenue, and to beat the competition. While this is a great strategy, a brand is only as good as its talent. Yes, brands compete to get and keep customers; but they are also competing to get and keep great talent. For brands to grow, they need great talent in every function of the business.

According to LinkedIn, “the number of global members who changed their jobs on LinkedIn was up 54% year over year. For context, those numbers typically hover between 0 and 5%. “

For brands to be able to attract top talent, they need to be a desired place to work. To be a desired place to work, they need to understand what motivates their employees. While this will vary by industry and company size there are similar things that many employees seek. These include:

1. Feeling valued for their contributions

2. Freedom to do interesting work and solve intriguing problems

3. Fair and competitive compensation including incentive and performance pay, perks, and other employer benefits

4. A fun place to work with activities to bond with co-workers

5. Training and advancement opportunities

6. Work-Life Balance

7. Flexible-working conditions ie work from home, remote work, hybrid work, or onsite for those who want to be in the office

If these things listed above are in place, brands are on the right track to building a great talented brand provided their product offerings are solid.

Getting employees excited about coming to work each day will increase the talent pool by generating word of mouth. When people have something good they tell their friends.

Beyond the offline word of mouth, Brands need to own their identity online by in-sourcing their online and offline assets. This starts with their websites, digital properties, and the collateral used to sell their offerings. With talent branding and employer branding, brands are selling prospective employees the idea of applying and working for their company. This is similar to marketing their commercial offerings to potential customers.

Brands will need to conduct market research to understand who their competitors are and where they stack up in the talent market. Compensation, company culture, intelligence from applicants.

Information from this research can be used to develop a positioning strategy that can be applied to the talent brand and employer brand.

Every brand should have a career page on its website because this will reduce recruiting costs. This page should include the following:

  1. Pictures of employees from each function with a short bio and why they chose to work at the brand
  2. Employer Benefits and Perks offered
  3. Authentic Stories on Company Culture
  4. An application that is easy to fill out. i.e greenhouse.io or a form with a file for a cover letter and resume Greenhouse can be linked with LinkedIn
  5. Social Sharing buttons for job postings

Company LinkedIn pages

In addition to sales, product, and content marketing, brands should use their LinkedIn page for talent and employer branding. Some companies’ talent and employer branding strategy are to post jobs on LinkedIn hoping candidates will apply. This is a missed opportunity to sell active and passive candidates on why they should work for your company. Today, candidates have many places they can work.

Things to include in a LinkedIn page

  1. Pictures of employees from each function with a short bio and why they chose to work at the brand
  2. Employer Benefits and Perks offered
  3. Stories on company culture
  4. An application that is easy to fill out. i.e greenhouse.io Indeed, Glassdoor, or a form with a file for a cover letter and resume Greenhouse can be linked with LinkedIn.
  5. Social Sharing buttons for job postings

Creating Engaging Job descriptions

The function head, Marketing, and HR need to collaborate to write job descriptions that convince applicants to apply, similar to copy-writing for commercial offerings.

Creating a Great Candidate Experience

Providing candidates with a great recruiting experience is key. Everything should be transparent to candidates. At the end of the recruiting process, it is important to solicit candidate feedback to refine and hone your recruiting process.

New Hire Onboarding and Reducing Turnover

Make sure new hires feel welcome and are trained properly coordinating with the managers and functional heads of each department because roles had different needs and requirements for success.

Empowering and providing incentives to employees

Encourage employees to share company content and jobs on LinkedIn. Also, encourage employee referrals with incentives for referrals that are hired.

If you are not happy with the amounts of applications post the jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed to widen the applicant pools. Niche site may work as well.

This is how to use Marketing to build a great Talent Brand.

Who is hiring?

I surveyed my audience of Recruiters and Hiring Managers to which roles are they hiring.

Based on the answers Sales is the highest at 50 %.

Specific data on top jobs in demand can be found here.

How have you used marketing to build your talent and employer brand?

Share your thoughts.

Additional places to find my content and blog

WordPress: https://dangalante.me/

Tumblr: http://www.askdangalante.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/DanGalante

Medium https://medium.com/@DanGalante

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/trendsettingsm

Anchor https://anchor.fm/dangalante

About Me

I’m a Strategic Marketer with Field Sales, Sales Enablement, Content Creation, and, Classroom Teacher/Trainer skill-sets using Marketing to drive Sales/Growth.

As a Marketer, I’ve worked with Start-Ups, a Political Campaign, and a Digital Marketing Conference.

I’m certified in Inbound Marketing with classes in Marketing, Product Management, Product Marketing, SEO, SEM.

Before teaching, I was an Outside Sales and Marketing Rep. selling and marketing dental products to Dentists using consultative selling, trade show marketing, field marketing, and market research.

I publish Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today a blog covering industry events and trends.

I’m seeking a full-time role in:

Inbound Marketing, Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, Product Marketing, Demand Generation, Social Media Marketing, Sales Enablement Enablement, Sales Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Employer Branding, Recruitment Marketing.

Open on title, industry, company, location, and level. Reach out on LinkedIn or at dan@dangalante.com to start a conversation.

Brands use Marketing to increase sales, and revenue, and to beat the competition. While this is a great strategy, a brand is only as good as its talent. Yes, brands compete to get and keep customers; but they are also competing to get and keep great talent. For brands to grow, they need great talent in every function of the business.

According to LinkedIn, “the number of global members who changed their jobs on LinkedIn was up 54% year over year. For context, those numbers typically hover between 0 and 5%. “

For brands to be able to attract top talent, they need to be a desired place to work. To be a desired place to work, they need to understand what motivates their employees. While this will vary by industry and company size there are similar things that many employees seek. These include:

1. Feeling valued for their contributions

2. Freedom to do interesting work and solve intriguing problems

3. Fair and competitive compensation including incentive and performance pay, perks, and other employer benefits

4. A fun place to work with activities to bond with co-workers

5. Training and advancement opportunities

6. Work-Life Balance

7. Flexible-working conditions ie work from home, remote work, hybrid work, or onsite for those who want to be in the office.

If these things listed above are in place, brands are on the right track to building a great talented brand provided their product offerings are solid.

Getting employees excited about coming to work each day will increase the talent pool by generating word of mouth. When people have something good they tell their friends.

Beyond the offline word of mouth, Brands need to own their identity online by in-sourcing their online and offline assets. This starts with their websites, digital properties, and the collateral used to sell their offerings. With talent branding and employer branding, brands are selling prospective employees the idea of applying and working for their company. This is similar to marketing their commercial offerings to potential customers.

Brands will need to conduct market research to understand who their competitors are and where they stack up in the talent market. Compensation, company culture, intelligence from applicants.

Information from this research can be used to develop a positioning strategy that can be applied to the talent brand and employer brand.

Every brand should have a career page on its website because this will reduce recruiting costs. This page should include the following:

  1. Pictures of employees from each function with a short bio and why they chose to work at the brand
  2. Employer Benefits and Perks offered
  3. Authentic Stories on Company Culture
  4. An application that is easy to fill out. i.e greenhouse.io or a form with a file for a cover letter and resume Greenhouse can be linked with LinkedIn.
  5. Social Sharing buttons for job postings

Company LinkedIn pages

In addition to sales, product, and content marketing, brands should use their LinkedIn page for talent and employer branding. Some companies’ talent and employer branding strategy are to post jobs on LinkedIn hoping candidates will apply. This is a missed opportunity to sell active and passive candidates on why they should work for your company. Today, candidates have many places they can work.

Things to include in a LinkedIn page

  1. Pictures of employees from each function with a short bio and why they chose to work at the brand
  2. Employer Benefits and Perks offered
  3. Stories on company culture
  4. An application that is easy to fill out. i.e greenhouse.io Indeed, Glassdoor, or a form with a file for a cover letter and resume Greenhouse can be linked with LinkedIn.
  5. Social Sharing buttons for job postings

Creating Engaging Job descriptions

The function head, Marketing, and HR need to collaborate to write job descriptions that convince applicants to apply, similar to copy-writing for commercial offerings.

Creating a Great Candidate Experience

Providing candidates with a great recruiting experience is key. Everything should be transparent to candidates. At the end of the recruiting process, it is important to solicit candidate feedback to refine and hone your recruiting process.

New Hire Onboarding and Reducing Turnover.

Make sure new hires feel welcome and are trained properly coordinating with the managers and functional heads of each department because roles had different needs and requirements for success.

Empowering and providing incentives to employees

Encourage employees to share company content and jobs on LinkedIn. Also, encourage employee referrals with incentives for referrals that are hired.

If you are not happy with the amounts of applications post the jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed to widen the applicant pools. Niche site may work as well.

This is how to use Marketing to build a great Talent Brand.

Who is hiring?

I surveyed my audience of Recruiters and Hiring Managers to which roles are they hiring.

Based on the answers Sales is the highest at 50 %.

Specific data on top jobs in demand can be found here.

How have you used marketing to build your talent and employer brand?

Share your thoughts.

Additional places to find my content and blog

WordPress: https://dangalante.me/

Tumblr: http://www.askdangalante.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/DanGalante

Medium https://medium.com/@DanGalante

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/trendsettingsm

Anchor https://anchor.fm/dangalante

About Me

I’m a Strategic Marketer with Field Sales, Sales Enablement, Content Creation, and, Classroom Teacher/Trainer skill-sets using Marketing to drive Sales/Growth.

As a Marketer, I’ve worked with Start-Ups, a Political Campaign, and a Digital Marketing Conference.

I’m certified in Inbound Marketing with classes in Marketing, Product Management, Product Marketing, SEO, SEM.

Before teaching, I was an Outside Sales and Marketing Rep. selling and marketing dental products to Dentists using consultative selling, trade show marketing, field marketing, and market research.

I publish Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today a blog covering industry events and trends.

I’m seeking a full-time role in:

Inbound Marketing, Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, Product Marketing, Demand Generation, Social Media Marketing, Sales Enablement Enablement, Sales Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Employer Branding, Recruitment Marketing.

Open on title, industry, company, location, and level. Reach out on LinkedIn or at dan@dangalante.com to start a conversation.

Posted 134 weeks ago