It’s good to find that, actually, there are still some other sources of UK traffic than Google.

Certainly, for local and regionally based keywords, both WebFinder (those nice people at ThomsonLocal) and Yell.com are capable of delivering reasonable volumes of good quality traffic.

If WebFinder could just cut out a few of its, shall we say, less high quality partners (like PrimoSearch, whatever that is), then they would find more of our advertising budget being pushed their way.

So, how about it, WebFinder…let me exclude certain of your partners from sending us traffic and I promise I’ll double our spend with you over the next quarter.

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For years I found the kind of web contact forms that had 4 separate boxes  - each for 2 or 3 digits of my telephone number - extremely irritating.

You know, this kind of thing :

Now, particularly with enquiries for our Just Accountants website, I am more and more inclined to implement the same thing here.

You wouldn’t believe the number of people who mis-type their phone number. Then, again, maybe you would.

However, my concern is that implementing something like this will negatively affect conversions. Time for an A/B test methinks.

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As the director of an online lead generation company, I’m well aware of how many hours one can spend on the internet every day.

Much of my online time is spent on these two basic tasks :

• Things that will deliver more leads for our clients.
• Things that will generate more clients.

I do, however, spend some time reading blogs, websites, checking on the football scores, downloading software that I’ll never actually use and obscure music that I’ll never actually listen to.

I expect most of us are like that to a greater or lesser extent.

However, in the time I spend reading blogs, etc. I’ve come across what I consider to be a slightly strange phenomenon. That is: ‘the expert’.

The expert is someone (usually an online marketer, an SEO or one of those types) who, no matter where you find yourself on the web, always has a presence there.

All the major internet marketing forums : check - there he is.

Facebook - yup, he’s there. MySpace - he’s there.

LinkedIn - yup.

Twitter - all over it with important messages about riding his bicycle to the office and how, like, really cool it is to be able to mini-blog.

Blog ? Did someone say blog? This particular type of expert has several : his personal blog, his corporate blog, his blog for his dog and maybe a couple more.

In between all this, our expert is Digg-ing stuff on Digg, adding bookmarks to his del.icio.us page and generally making a nuisance of himself on some social networking website you and I have never heard of.

My point is this : if these individuals (if you want names, I’ll supply them) are such major players in the internet marketing space, then surely, honestly, they can’t possibly have the time to be so active at all the social networking and media sites ?

My increasing suspicion is that many of these types are..shock, um, horror…not really the experts they claim to be. If they were, they’d be far too busy to be posting on Twitter, sending MySpace bulletins, adding del.icio.us bookmarks, commenting on Digg, etc…ad nauseam.

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One of the 10 commandments of B2B marketing - handed down over, well, a couple of years at least - is that you should give away free reports and guides. This, apparently, is a way of capturing potential clients or something.

The idea is this: offer a free guide/report - capture a name and email address - follow up with, um, stuff - convert that person into a client. Something like that, anyway.

And you still see bunches of sites with PPC landing pages that are geared around getting a prospect to download a ‘free, impartial’ guide. And, hey, I’m sure their download numbers are great.

It’s just a shame that these free reports and guides are very, very far from impartial. In fact, they can often be damaging to the credibility of the company that produces them.

That presumes, of course, that the person downloading the report ever reads the damn thing.

My view is that - more often than not - this kind of stuff is a pretty poor way to engage a potential client.

OK. I accept that the B2B sales process can be a long one. But I certainly don’t see giving away ‘free’ guides and reports as an effective method of communicating with prospects in the 21st Century.

After all, if you endeavour to produce a genuinely impartial guide, then you are not going to be able to pitch the unique values of your company properly. Conversely, if you produce an guide that is really designed to promote your services, then people will see through it in a flash.

We’re all media and marketing savvy these days. Such transparent ploys as ‘free reports’ and ‘free guides’ should be left back in the last century where they belong.

Instead, you should persuade visitors that you can help at each stage of the buying cycle. At the very least, your visitors should feel that you will give your expert advice freely and with no obligation. However, that requires more than just allowing visitors to download some PDF report that may - or, more likely, not - address their specific needs.

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One of the most difficult things to do on a website is to establish your credibility and build trust with your audience.

After all, many of your visitors will have never heard of you, won’t be impressed by testimonials (after all, these can be faked) and may only visit one or two pages of your site.

Thankfully, there are a number of things you can do to establish your company as one that can be trusted. Rather than reproduce the whole thing here, I found an excellent list of credibility building tips over at AffiliateKB.com.

While the article itself focuses on sales copy…the 17 tips provided apply equally well to those of us in the business to business sphere.  The points about ‘proving your claims’ are particularly salient for business to business marketing as you only have a short time to impress your visitors that you are the service provider they are really looking for.

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Sometimes, I’m annoyed by the simplest things. Like using the on-site search at a particular website and not finding a product I know they have. That irritates me beyond all reason.

So, typing ‘fruited tea cakes’ into Tesco.com’s own search engine and getting results for tea bags has inspired this blog post.

You see, I know Tesco sells tea cakes with bits of fruit in them. I buy them often. What I didn’t expect was that I would have to match the exact spelling Tesco themselves use (which turns out to be ‘fruit teacakes’) in order to find the product. Surely, they have a web team that looks at how people use their on-site search engine and adapt it accordingly? No? I guess not.

Poorly designed on-site search engines have been a bugbear of mine for years. It is up to the website themselves to understand the language real people might use to search for their products. That way, if I search for ‘fruited tea cakes’ and get no results, I’m not going to go to one of their competitors for my teacake related needs.

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg over at GrokDotCom have long suggested that, if you can’t get your on-site search to function in accordance with the needs of your visitors, you would be better off scrapping it altogether. I can see their point, but done right, it is a useful tool for visitors.

However, website owners must be able to get access to a list of the queries users are typing in and must be able to adapt the results to shown to take into account the language their visitors actually use. Otherwise, frankly, what’s the point?

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It’s a fact of life that not all business leads are created equal. Most businesses buying leads would very much like all the enquiries they get to be looking to make a purchase there and then.

And, obviously, I can understand that mentality. Nevertheless, enquiries come in for all stages of the purchasing process. It is your job, as a businessman, to address the needs of all prospects so that when they reach the end of the buying cycle, it is your name that is foremost in their mind.

As someone who is involved in selling leads in the business to business sector, this is one of the most difficult things to get across to clients. After all, they are paying us for leads and some of the leads we provide are from companies who are six months away from making a purchasing decision.

Companies at the beginning of their buying cycle need to be nurtured and coaxed towards the ‘right’ decision. At the earliest stages, an introductory phone call and email or literature introducing your company should be sufficient. However, as someone looking for business, you need to offer hand-holding and make yourself available as the prospect moves through the decision making stages.

Maybe your prospect has a directors meeting scheduled to discuss how to move forward. You need to be aware of such stations on the road to a purchasing decision and offer impartial advice (yes, for free) that can assist in that process. Real, practical advice and problem solving is what companies who are early on in the buying cycle need - not hard sell.

If you can keep in casual but useful contact with your prospect over the time it takes their company to come to a decision, then you will be well placed to convert that client when the time comes.

In some cases, of course, it may be your own business process that is causing a problem.

For example, we offer leads for accountants as one of our services. Inevitably, we receive a fairly high number of enquiries from brand new companies who want an accountant. Some of these have only just started trading and, so, their end of financial year is up to 12 months away.

The problem from our client accountants point of view is that this can mean they receive no income from acquiring these new companies as clients until the following year. To my mind, however, this is a flaw in the accountants’ own business. Surely, there are enough value added accountancy services (bookkeeping, paye, payroll, etc.) that the accountant can monetise these newly formed businesses quickly.

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Our own business at Reach24 is all about generating sales leads for our business to business clients but along the way we’ve picked up a few good tips for converting leads into sales.

Here’s one we use ourselves and I would rate this as the single most important thing you can do to convince a prospect that they want to engage your services.

Put simply, talk to your prospect as if the deal is already done. Tell them what they are going to get when - not if - the contract is signed. Explain the benefits that you are going to help them achieve.

Remember that you’re not trying to stiff your clients - you are providing a service they want and so their goals and ambitions are linked in with yours. You and your clients are, in many ways, a team.

Personally, I always ignore the ‘we offer this…it costs this’ part of the process and start with the ‘you will benefit this way, your business can achieve this with our help, together we are going to do great things for you’ side of things.

The costs, contract terms and so on are just mechanisms for achieving a positive working relationship with a prospect and should be treated as such.

If you get to the stage of the conversation where the prospect says “that all sounds great, I’m really interested…what’s it going to cost me”, then you are way more than halfway home.

If this all sounds a little vague and ill-defined, let me give you an example that you may be able to adapt for your own business.

We recently picked up an ansaphone message from a web designer looking for leads for his web design agency.

So, even before calling him back, we already had some useful information about this prospect.

1. That there was a genuine level of interest (otherwise he wouldn’t have taken the time to leave the message).
2. His initial concern was the price of the leads (he had said in his message that he saw that our leads cost FROM £18 each but he wanted to know the exact cost of web design leads).

Calling the guy back, the conversation went thus :

Me: Hi, it’s Mark from Reach24. You’d left a message on voicemail yesterday. You’re potentially looking for a source of good web design leads, I understand.

Web Designer: Yeah, that’s right. I was just trying to get an idea of cost and how it all works.

Me: Oh, that’s good ‘cos I was just calling to give you an idea of cost and how it all works…can I just ask where you’re located in the, um, real world.

[this is my first attempt at establishing a rapport with the client and showing that he’s talking to yer actual, real human being not just a representative of a company that wants his money]

Him: I’m in London.

Me: Right. So you’re just looking for leads from the London area? I only ask because a lot of the enquiries that we can bring you are from all around the UK and they don’t seem to mind where their web designers are located.

[note the ‘that we can bring you‘ - I’m already generating an association between his business and the end result of our service. IE: We can bring him leads from all over the UK.]

Him: We’re happy to have leads from wherever. We don’t want to get enquiries from Sunderland or somewhere a long way away that only wants a local designer though. I don’t want to pay for those…

Me: No, absolutely. Look, it’s not in our interest to bring you enquiries you don’t want. We do speak to all the enquiries first, so if you don’t want leads from businesses who want a local web designer, you won’t get them. It’s not a problem…we can pretty much do anything you want in terms of focusing the leads we’re going to get you.

For instance…well, let me ask you this…is there any particular areas you specialise in. Are you ASP guys or PHP/MySQL or do you mainly do ecommerce sites ?

[I’m showing him some of the benefits here….he’ll get the type of leads he wants, it’s in our interest to help him get those…and I still haven’t answered his question about costs and how it works !]

Him: Let me explain about us. We’ve only been going as a company for a year and we don’t do Windows, ASP.net, ColdFusion or any of that stuff. We are PHP and MySQL developers mainly and we have some great graphics people.

We’ve done a bunch of different stuff, but recently we’ve been involved in developing a couple of small social networking sites. That’s the kind of stuff we’re really into doing.

Me: Really ? We got a social networking enquiry fairly recently. It was for an upgrade of a niche dating site but they wanted members profile pages, blogs, the chance to add music. The whole MySpace type thing, in fact.

I’m just wondering if that lead might still be good…I could send that to you to start you off. It’s a few days old, but you can have it for nothing. Ya never know.

The reason I asked about whether you specialise is we can create some extra pages just to target your particular area of expertise. That works well for our other clients.

[Again, I’m showing the client the benefits as if we’ve already done the deal…I’m offering to send a free lead to ’start him off’. I’ve talked about ‘our other clients’. Everything is from the perspective of ‘the contract is a good as signed…let’s work out how to get the best leads possible’]

Him: OK. But how much does it cost. What’s the upfront cost.

Me: We don’t charge anything upfront. You just get invoiced for the leads we deliver. Web design leads are £19.00 each and we just invoice you at the beginning of each month for the leads we’ve delivered the month before.

[We’re getting to the ‘close’ now. If we’re going to convert this lead into a client, the next questions should be about the mechanism of how it works rather than whether it works]

Him: So, we just pay for the leads we get. How many leads can we get per month.

Me: Up to you. We’d like you to have 100 per month, but you can have from 10 up to whatever you think you can realistically handle. So, I guess the real question is : how many leads per month can you honestly cope with?

[That’s it. I’ve closed this lead…we’re now negotiating based on the size of his business and their capacity to convert the leads we will be providing. From here on in, we’re actually talking about clauses in the contract…ie: number of leads per month and so on.

The point is and I personally think it’s a valuable and useful one: at no point in the conversation did I try to sell him on the service. The assumption was always that he was going to sign. Believe me…this works for all businesses]

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My younger brother, Alex, believes that the most time-consuming and labour intensive parts of any job can and should be automated in some way.

And, on the surface, it’s easy to agree. After all, everyone has parts of their job that they don’t enjoy, that take a long time and aren’t necessarily the most creative aspects of the day.

However, it’s very easy to extend my brother’s idea to the whole of an online business. It doesn’t help that many web developers and computer programmers are not the most gregarious, people-orientated individuals and the idea of automating things to a level where there is no client-provider interaction is often appealing to personalities of that type.

The result of this kind of thinking is that you end up with something like Google Adwords. Essentially, the whole of Adwords is completely automated : you create your ads, you choose your keywords, they go live, the bid prices, quality scoring; preferred cost bidding, etc….it is all automated.

From one perspective, this is great. One system can handle thousands of advertisers with only a minimum of staff. The holy grail has been found. Hallelujah. Praise Be. And Stuff.

However, it comes as no surprise to anyone that different people have different requirements; will require different levels of support and, often, just need that human touch.

From our perspective at Reach24, the fully automated lead generation system looked extremely appealing, but in terms of really delivering for our clients, it just doesn’t work the way you might expect.

We have competitors that have almost completely automated systems and, to be fair to them, we have heard positive feedback about how they choose to do business.

Nevertheless, you remove the human element of business at your peril.

There is no long term value in automating parts of your business if - in the process - you are unable to respond quickly to the particular demands of each customer.

Someone a lot smarter than me (OK, it was Gandhi) once said :

“A ‘Customer’ is the most important visitor on our premises.

He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.

He is not an interruption on our work. He is the purpose of it.”

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of dealing with ‘customer service’ (I used that phrase advisedly) from a company that is pretty much completely automated (I give you AOL or Google as prime examples), then you will know that - to really deliver to your clients - it is definitely not always the best policy to automate the time consuming and labour intensive parts of your business.

Those companies that can find the right balance are, ultimately, the ones that will succeed in the 21st Century ‘on demand’ economy.

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Yesterday, for very differing reasons, I visited two UK online retail sites - one selling goth clothing and t-shirts (www.attitude.uk.com) and one who specialises in clothes for the, let’s say, bigger man (www.bigteeshirt.co.uk).

Here’s the thing - I had my credit card out, I was ready to spend the money. In fact, despite the resistance one of these sites put up, I did spend the money.

But I have no doubt that the owners of Attitude Clothing are wondering why, despite their niche market and almost captive audience, they don’t convert that well.

A quick comparison reveals the basic difference between the two sites:

Bigteeshirt.co.uk, despite having a very basic design, does so much right.

Nice big, clear images of the products; a size chart on every page, a very clear call to action (Order Before 2pm and You’ll Receive It The Next Day) - there’s everything you need to know on every product page.

Plus, they let you browse the site in logical ways : you can view by styles of clothing (ie: t-shirts, shirts, belts, etc.); by size (and here they have sizes in inches or xl, xxl, etc - it’s your choice). You can choose new products, sale products, 100% cotton products - and you can browse through these and see what takes your fancy.

This is ecommerce made simple and done right. They might not be a huge brand name site, but it does exactly what it says on the tin and for that, BigTeeShirt.co.uk should be commended.

Compare this with www.attitude.uk.com - it’s a prettier site, for sure, but it does everything wrong.

Here’s just a couple of examples :

1) Well, they use dhtml menus and javascript drop downs as part of their navigation. However, all I did was click the ‘go’ button next to the ‘by product’ drop down list. What I was expecting to see was a range of product types to choose from or a maybe a landing page pushing me towards particular items.

I didn’t expect this, however,

And that wasn’t all. When I wanted to browse the sale section (again not choosing any particular subcategory - I just wanted to see what was on offer), I got taken back to the homepage.

In fact, all of those graphical links on the left hand side of each page will take you back to the homepage unless you select a sub-category from the dhtml pop up menus.

Ugh. Does nobody test these things to see how user-friendly they are?

Sometimes people just like to browse through a website - without any particular rhyme or reason or idea in mind. Attitude.uk.com makes this impossible and frankly, the whole buying experience was extremely frustrating.

There is a lesson here: converting your customers isn’t really about having a pretty website. It’s about providing them with control over their experience on your website and allowing them to use your website in ways that suit them as individuals.

If your website does that right - like Big Tee Shirt.co.uk , then you will reap the rewards. If you fail to do it, as Attitude Clothing clearly do, don’t be surprised if that niche market gravitates towards a competitor who can provide a satisfying online purchasing experience.

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