[wdvltalk] Re: Marketing Your Business

[Dave Navarro]

Another thing that took our business to the next level was when we hired 
our first sales person.  I am pretty good at sales, but my expertise is in 
programming.  And the more time I spent working on sales, the less time I 
had to earn money by writing code.  And the more time I spent programming, 
the less time I had to get new business.

We didn't have enough money to provide any kind of salary for a sales 
person, so I found a retired salesman who was looking for part time work 
and set them up on a commission.  We offered him 20% of every contract he 
brought to us and he could work from home.

You really have to find the RIGHT person for this to work and the first 
couple of people we tried didn't work out, but we did find someone who was 
able to make it work and he brought in quite a bit of new business for 
us.  Eventually this turned into a full-time salaried position with a lower 
commission.

We needed someone who had the time and was willing to follow up on all the 
mailings.  And what a difference that makes.  We pay a low hourly wage as a 
base and our sales guy makes his money on selling our services.

Our original guy who worked for us was a retired car salesman from New 
York.  So he was used to the pressure of living off of commission 
sales.  The key was the first two weeks he and I spent together creating 
marketing material together and going over each and every web site we had 
created to discuss technical terms and what could and couldn't be done.

We also offer incentives to our customers for referring new business to 
us.  Since we host all of our own web sites in-house, we give away hosting 
when we get referrals.  If it's a "big" contract, I'll buy some movie 
tickets and send them to the client along with a thank you letter.  On one 
occasion where we got a really big contract referral, I bought a $99 
digital camera and sent that as a thank-you gift.

Suffice to say that we get a LOT of business from referrals.

--Dave

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