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Author Archive for Gene Gerwin

Active Listening Training – Feeling Feedback (Reflecting)

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)
Monday, August 16th, 2010

Reflecting – Using Emotions To Your Advantage

This is a supplementary post to this one on Active Listening.

Feeling Feedback or Reflecting is a more advanced form of Active Listening. It incorporates Paraphrasing with a psychological dimension in that you must now assess and “reflect” the mental state of your dialog partner.

With Reflecting you don’t necessarily take on the prospect’s demeanor to show solidarity- that’s a technique called Mirroring which I will discuss in another post. Instead, you verbalize your prospect’s emotions for them.

For example:

Prospect: “We just acquired a new PACS system and will need to digitize thousands of X-rays. Guess who’s job that will be?”

You: “Wow, I imagine you must hate the idea of hand-feeding those in to the scanner and coding them one by one.”

Special Challenges

In psychotherapy, after the client/patient has made a statement, the therapist has the luxury of asking an exploratory question such as, “how does that make you feel?” In sales, we don’t often have sufficient rapport to ask so intimate a question and must resort to interpretation and guesswork.

Furthermore, the opportunities to use Feeling Feedback in a sales situation are harder to spot. You have to stay vigilant.

And finally, before you head down the rabbit hole with Feeling Feedback, you need to know in advance that you’re furthering your cause in some way by exploring the emotions attached to your prospect’s statements.

Just because you detected an opportunity for Reflection, doesn’t mean you must take it.

For example:

Prospect: “I really like that 57″ model. The colors are really vibrant and it’s got great contrast- if only the Warriors could break their #!*@ losing streak, then I”d really enjoy watching them on this TV.”

You: “It must be really upsetting that your favorite basketball team keeps losing.”

What possible purpose could it serve to aggravate you’re prospect’s emotions about a tangential issue?

A more logical response might be: “It sounds like you’re very much into watching sports.” It confirms and reflects the emotional intensity but shifts the conversation in to a more neutral direction from where it will be easier to get back on track.

Practice, Practice, Practice

When you first start out with practicing this technique, you’re bound to get some cross-eyed looks, silences, and responses such as, “huh?” or “whatever gave you that idea?”

Don’t be discouraged, but make a mental note of what transpired and do better next time.

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Categories : Telemarketing Skills, Telemarketing Training
Tags : , ,

Active Listening Training – Paraphrasing

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (1)
Saturday, August 14th, 2010

Paraphrasing – Your Key To Engaging Dialog and Sales Success

This is a supplementary post to this one on Active Listening.

According to Wikipedia, paraphrasing is a “restatement of a text or passages, using other words.” To restate: keep the meaning intact but say it how you would say it.

Incorporating this skill in to your repertoire requires constant practice. But the effort will pay dividends in spades. People you talk to will feel that you truly understand and empathize with them and they will open up to you with new information and confidences you would otherwise never have had access to.

In fact, an entire school of psychotherapy known as “Rogerian Psychotherapy” relies on the artful application of paraphrasing during therapy sessions. They call it “Reflection” and it covers both paraphrasing and feeling feedback which I discuss in a separate post.

As you develop this skill, you’ll start to hear your prospects say things like, “you’ve hit the nail on the head” and “that’s what I meant to say.”

How To Use Paraphrasing Techniques

You have just seconds after your dialog partner (prospect) has completed his or her thought to distill the meaning to its bare bones and repeat it back in a way that shows you’ve internalized it and made it your own. This means using your own words- words that show you have a nuanced understanding of what was said.

To have this ability, you need to engage the active listening thought process as soon as your conversation begins. While you can paraphrasing for just single sentences, like:

Prospect: “I just bought a house and most of my income goes towards paying the mortgage.”

You: “I see. You have substantial recurring financial obligations.”

The above example is an example of paraphrasing just one sentence. However, to really become a master of this active listening skill, you want to get to the point where you can sum up not just one sentence, but entire strings of thought that may have been expressed over the course of many minutes of conversation.

I’m a paint by the numbers kind of guy and I learn best when a process is laid out clearly for me. Maybe you’re the same way.  So, here is the process of paraphrasing broken down step-by-step:

  1. Pay attention – take notes: If you’re making a sales call, make it a practice to jot down notes by hand. Underline, circle, and asterisk key points as you go. THIS IS KEY. While using your keyboard might be tempting, if you’re working at a computer, you won’t have these annotation options to help you quickly make sense of your notes. Besides, the clickity-clack of a keyboard can be highly irritating to listen to (and the sound does carry- even over noise-cancelling headsets).
  2. Create a narrative using the key points: Connect the dots. Review the key points you highlighted and connect them. What is your prospect telling you? Sometimes, you’ll be able to cut through minutes of smoke and mirrors and get right to the heart of the matter.
  3. Verbalize: Don’t just repeat what the prospect said (parroting), but use your own words. This should come naturally if you’ve followed steps 1 and 2.

Stay In The Moment

To gain the full benefit of paraphrasing and active listening in general, you need to be able to track the thread of the conversation with your notes and mental summations, while still reacting in real time to your dialog partner.

If your prospect cracks a joke, asks a question, or says something remarkable, you need to react to it right away. Don’t become so preoccupied with your note taking that you break rapport. However, the great thing is that after you’ve dealt with the new conversational development, you can use paraphrasing to quickly retrain his or her focus on the business at hand without seeming abrupt.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Like any skill, practice makes master. As you progress from deliberate use and practice to second nature, you free up brain cycles for developing other skills and tracking other information that is relevant to your sales process.

While you won’t necessarily use the product knowledge and situation-specific information you learn from project to project or from job to job, mastery of basic active listening skills will give you a head start in any situation requiring communication and persuasion.

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Categories : Telemarketing Skills, Telemarketing Training
Tags : , ,

Is Affiliate Marketing Dead On Google AdWords?

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)
Friday, July 30th, 2010

***Update: I found a couple of videos on this topic just put out by Clickbank a couple of days ago. I’ve added them to the bottom of this post

I had a successful ad/landing page combination running on AdWords for the better part of two years only to have my landing page’s Quality Score (QS) lowered to 1 last week.

Your landing page’s QualityScore determine’s in large part where your AdWords ad will display relative to your competitors and how much Google will charge per click. The higher your QualityScore the better (it ranges from 1 to 10). If your QS drops to 2 or below, your ad may not show at all.

When I emailed AdWords support to find out what was going on, they replied that my landing page was deemed to be a “bridging page” and as such, was not allowed.

The format for my page was the following:

  • Headline and Offer
  • Product Image
  • Testimonial
  • Product Options (with links)
  • Included Bonuses (with purchase)
  • Opt-in box with more bonuses for opting in and some copy

As you can see, my page had little by way of text- maybe about 350 words total. The keywords selected for my AdWords account were “buyer” keywords- so there was no need for a review or any persuasion on my landing pages.

According to Google, this was a bridging page because its sole purpose was to get the visitor to click through to the vendor.

I re-designed the landing page- updated the look and feel and published it as a WordPress blog post. The landing page was now part of a site with links to product reviews and competing products- even purchase options such as Amazon instead of just my affiliate links. I kept the landing page format the same otherwise.

This is what Google told me next:

Thank you for your continued patience. I understand you made a few changes to your landing page per our suggestions. However, I checked your website with our Specialist and confirmed that your website continues to serve as a bridge page. Upon clicking on certain links on your website, the user still needs to go to another website to buy your product. Please understand that in order to be compliant per our landing page guidelines, you need to promote your product on your website and the user need not go to another website to buy the product.

Is That It? The End Of Affiliate Landing Pages For AdWords?

Determined to get my little cashcow back into production, I transitioned my landing page to a review page with the new addition of a video and about 500 words of text. The affiliate links were changed from buttons to lessobvious text links.

I recontacted AdWords support for a re-evaluation of my landing page.

This is what they said:

Thank you for your email. I have checked with our specialist team regarding your new URL, and would like to inform you that it is still bridging. This means that you need to ensure that users do not go to other sites from your website.

Excuse me? I need to “ensure that users do not go to other sites?”

Is it just me, or is this a ridiculous requirement?

I just had to get input from other PPC warriors so I posted my experience in a well known forum.

Suffice it to say, there’s plenty of controversy on the topic. My post has garnered over 2,000 views and 50 responses in just a few days. It seems I’m not the only one grappling with Google’s deliberately obfuscated landing page policies.

You see, they can’t disclose the full details of how they calculate your landing page’s quality score for fear clever marketers will find loopholes to game their system. This has everyone guessing how best to deal with the situation.

With Bridging Pages Out And Even Review Pages Being Knocked Down By Google, What Can The Affiliate Marketer Do?

Here are just some of the ideas put forth in the discussion forum:

  • Move to other traffic sources such as FaceBook, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
  • Place more emphasis on SEO and linkbuilding
  • Place more emphasis on list building
  • Build deep sites with lots of content and value and maybe, just maybe Google will overlook your affiliate links (and you might want to cloak them)
  • Build an e-commerce site so you manage the purchases and the customers never leave your site

Perry Marshall received a communique from Glenn Livingston recently about lots of affiliates having their AdWords campaigns shut down by the “Google Slap” recently (QS being lowered to 1). Perry and Glenn are two of the best known PPC gurus in the Internet marketing industry. You can read about it on Perry’s blog post.

Perry’s recommendation is to:

  1. Build a deep site with lots of value
  2. Get newsletter opt-ins
  3. Use autoresponder messages to sell
  4. Promote a webinar and close sales there

Uhm, OK. I’ll get right on that.

All facetiousness aside, I may actually go to all that trouble for a product with a high payout and lots of traffic; However, the amount of labor required for affiliate marketing following this model effectively shuts out not just many affiliate marketers with limited time or expertise, but also many vendors with low- margin products or slow markets that used to have hordes of “free” labor at their disposal in the form of affiliate marketers.

The Future

What the market needs now is healthy competition for Google from Yahoo and Bing. With their more affiliate friendly landing page policies, Google would have to reconsider it’s heavy-handed approach.

I’m sure a reasonable compromise will eventually be reached that ensures quality experiences for customers searching the web while still allowing part-time marketers to participate in the virtual economy.

Epilogue – Clickbank Videos on Google Slap For Affiliates


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Categories : Google AdWords, Internet Marketing

Is Google Fleecing You?

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)
Monday, July 5th, 2010

One of the biggest frustrations with using Google AdWords is not being able to track exactly which keywords are converting for you if you aren’t using exact match.

For example, if you bid on the phrase match keyword “marketing system,” you could get clicks from people searching for “buy marketing system” or “marketing system reviews.” However, your Google Analytics reports will only show that you got clicks from your bidded keyword, “marketing system.”

This is great for Google but horrible for you because if you can’t optimize your campaign by eliminating keywords that don’t convert, Google gets paid for more clicks and you make less money.

Some have tried to fix this problem with scripts and Google Analytics hacks, but most of these solutions don’t work (haven’t found any that work so far) , partly because Google keeps changing the way it’s system works. So, a script that might work today will likely stop working very soon.

Expensive third-party solutions such as Split Test Accelerator do a very nice job of breaking down your traffic sources for you. You can read my Split Test Accelerator review here. But, not everyone has $900 or the advanced technical skills needed for a solution like that.

After looking at many hosted options that even an Internet neophyte could learn how to use, I chose to test W3ROI.

After 30 days of testing, I’m confident W3ROI resolves the keyword search problem and provides a lot more value besides.

W3ROI – Analytics Made Simple

The W3ROI user interface is very slick and Web 2.0.

When you first log in, you’re presented with an easy to interpret control panel with just the essential data:

This is a welcome relief compared to the confusing dashboards you will find with some other services.

The graph shows, at a glance, how your campaigns are performing. The statistics aren’t just bare numbers, but give you some historical context (trending up or down).

Quickly See What’s Working And What’s Not

Here’s a screenshot of their report options:

w3roi

Here’s a screenshot of their day parting report:

dayparting

And, of course, here’s the much needed Searched Keyword Report (some data blacked-out for client confidentiality):

By assigning a value to each conversion, W3ROI will calculate your ROI for you at:

  1. The campaign level: If you have multiple campaigns, see at a glance which ones are performing and which aren’t.
  2. The ad group level: If you’ve structured your PPC campaign correctly, you should have created separate ad groups for your semantically related keywords. See at a glance which ad groups need to be optimized.
  3. The ad level: See which of your ads are generating clicks and which ones are damaging your account quality score history.
  4. The keyword level: Stop paying Google for undperforming keywords. W3ROI shows you what keywords your prospects are really using. Use this information to create more targeted campaigns.
  5. The landing page level: Test your creative and copy with simple A/B split tests. W3ROI makes split testing easy with a few JavaScript code snippets.

The only thing to keep in mind is that your cost per click (CPC) is not actual but whatever you say it is. In other words, W3ROI does not connect to your AdWords account and extract your cost per click data, so you have to enter an average.

Split Testing Made Easy

Speaking of split testing, the type provided by W3ROI is simple, A/B split testing- not multivariate. You need to create separate landing pages for your split tests and a W3ROI JavaScript code snippet will manage redirects from your primary landing page.

If you combine basic statistics tracking such as what W3ROI provides with simple A/B split testing, you will be miles ahead of 99% of your competition.

Additional Features That Affiliate Marketers and Consultants Will Love

You can create and manage multiple logins with access to only the campaign reports that you specify. As a consultant managing PPC campaigns for multiple clients, this is a great value-added service for your customers.

If you do affiliate marketing, you will be glad to know you can import sales reports for in-depth performance analysis. Try doing that with Google Analytics!

You can even track offline actions such as call-ins. For instance, say you place a telephone number on your landing page. Instead of opting in to your newsletter, your prospect decides to pick up the telephone and call you. By clicking on a link provided by W3ROI, you can count that call as a conversion in your reports.

offlinestats

Some Minor Gripes

After about a month of use, I’ve found no reason to fault them except for three, minor details:

  1. They need a one-screen view of your complete account structure with one-click access to any level. As it stands now, you only see 2 levels at a time. For instance, you can see your campaign name and how many ad groups it has. But, you don’t see how many ads or split tests you have running until you drill down.
  2. They need more consistent use of breadcrumb navigation. In some setup steps, you will find yourself having to start at the top to work yourself back down to the level you’re making
  3. They need to add a split-testing report page to their report menu. For now, you have to navigate down your campaign levels from campaign to ad groups and then to ads to access your split test reports.

These are only minor annoyances and easy to cope with. Over time, W3ROI will continue to enhance their user interface.

W3ROI – Should You Try It?

  • Their pricing scheme is very affordable. $24 a month has you covered for 2,500 clicks- more than enough for most B2B campaigns. The subscription plan is month to month. You can cancel anytime. They don’t lock you in to long-term service agreements like some other providers do.
  • W3ROI is designed to be easy to use. You can be up and running in under an hour. Their help videos show you the step-by-step process of getting your campaign set up correctly.
  • Not only do their reports show you exactly which keywords generated your clicks, but they also do day and hour parting for you (which days and hours of the week are converting best for you). Stop giving Google more money than you need to.

If you’ve found yourself struggling to integrate Google AdWords and Analytics, if you’re put off by high-priced Analytics services or overly-complex reports, then you owe it to yourself to give W3ROI a try. If you decide it isn’t for you, then you don’t pay a dime (30-day money back guarantee).

See for yourself what W3ROI (affiliate link) has to offer.

Comments (0)
Categories : Google AdWords, Internet Marketing, Marketing Software Review

Why Aren’t My AdWords Ads Showing?

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (1)
Monday, June 7th, 2010

After several weeks of planning, designing, setting up, and testing I finally got a client of mine’s Google AdWords campaign up and running.

We were both eager to see how our click-thru rate (CTR) and conversion rates (CR) would look. After several days, however, nada. Zip. Zilch.

0 impressions. 0 clicks.

Searching for some of the keywords in Google showed no ads:

Missing AdWords Ads

This was especially frustrating for my client as he had put together a campaign some time ago (all keywords in one big group, broad match, landing page with no call to action, etc.) that was up and running right away.

I went over the the campaign settings, ad groups, keywords, billing information,  etc. again and again, but could find no flaws.

I emailed their support department.

Fortunately, they’re usually pretty responsive. I got a reply withing 15 minutes.

My client’s account had been selected for manual review. The process can take 3 to 5 business days. No further explanation.

The email made it sound like it was a fairly random thing (being selected for manual review). However, I wonder if they have some way to automatically flag accounts for review? My quesses:

  • New accounts
  • Low quality scores
  • Multiple IP addresses used to access the account

Whatever the cause, we’ll have to wait a few more days before Google gives us the green light.

Posible Reasons Why Your AdWords Ads Aren’t Showing

If your ads aren’t showing up for your AdWords campaign, here are some possible reasons:

  • You’ve exceeded your daily budget
  • Your campaign or ad groups are paused
  • You activated position preference and Google cannot display your ad because of quality score problems and bids that are too low.
  • You have activated scheduled delivery and you’re checking during a time that your ads are turned off
  • Your account is under review (see above)
  • You forgot to enter your payment details
  • Your ads are geo-targeted to an area other than where you are!
  • Your delivery method setting is to distribute display evenly throughout the day but your budget is inadequate and Google is throttling your ad display rate

Go through this list yourself to make sure you didn’t overlook a possible reason your AdWords ads aren’t showing. Remember to try checking your landing page to make sure it is loading and that you entered the right address in the destination URL for your ads.

If all else fails, call Google directly and / or send them an email.

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Categories : Google AdWords
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Increase Prospect Engagement And Reduce Your Cost Per Lead – The New Face Of Telemarketing

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)
Saturday, May 29th, 2010

Managers of business-to-business telemarketing services are finding it harder than ever to realize positive ROIs.

While those with business-to-consumer offerings have had recourse to outsourcing to far-shore providers for cost savings, B2B marketers have had mixed results- at best- with that strategy. For most companies with complex B2B offerings, it is not even a viable option.

Unless you have a very high allowable cost per lead acquisition, the days of cold-calling large prospect lists profitably are gone.

A Changing Landscape For B2B Telemarketing

Nowadays, buyers of high-end business products and services turn to Internet search engines, websites, and blogs to begin their research. They amass product information, thought-leader opinions, peer recommendations, technical specifications, prices and more- all online… without ever speaking to anyone.

A call from a hired telemarketing service is an unwelcome intrusion in to their process. Reaching them by phone does not give you the right to leap frog ahead of the pack. If you try to circumvent their buying modality, you will find yourself stonewalled.

B2B Telemarketing Integrated With Internet Marketing

If your prospect has not already placed you on her short list by the time you call her, a good telemarketing service will at least get your horse into the race. Whether you make it to the finish line now depends on how quickly, and persuasively you can drive home your unique value proposition and campaign offers in a communication process driven by your prospect.

This means you need to have:

  • built and maintained your social media presence, showing you’re actively engaging with your market niche
  • have at your disposal a variety of autoresponders for your prospects that match where they are in the buying cycle
  • have prepared optimized landing pages with compelling offers to keep your prospects engaged
  • have good content available for your more analytical prospects that need to feel assured your company is competent
  • …and more…

Tying all this together requires you have telemarketing project managers that are in the loop with your Internet marketing programs so that everyone stays on message. Tracking conversions also becomes a more complex subject as telemarketing will drive online conversions and vice versa.

Despite these challenges and those who would proclaim the demise of cold calling, this is an exciting time for B2B telemarketing- provided you leverage and integrate Internet marketing.

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Categories : Uncategorized

Telemarketers Talk Too Much

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)
Monday, May 17th, 2010

A new study found that using your voice all day while working in a stressful  telemarketing job (read boiler room) will lead to more frequent sick days (due to voice ailments).

Chalk another one up to the “well, duh” category.

The recommended solutions:

  1. Use warm-up vocal exercises
  2. Limit background noise
  3. Encourage staff to drink plenty of water

Vocal warm-up exercises: Unless your agents work from home, this is impractical. Your typical boiler room operation has telemarketing agents coming and going all the time. It just wouldn’t do to have a handful of agents making extremely distracting noises while everyone else is making calls.

The only way to make this work is to have everyone participate in vocal warm ups at specific intervals of the day.

Limit background noise: Say again? What? I can’t hear you.

This is a silly suggestion. Boiler room operations are boiler room operations because they are boiler room operations. The whole point is to churn and burn low-wage agents with minimal overhead. When I had my own 2-floor telemarketing building with 50+ stations, it cost me an arm and a leg to install sound-absorbing carpeting, sound absorbing wall panels, and sound-absorbing cubicle walls. It was a MAJOR expense. No boiler room is going to bother with this.

If you can’t rebuild your call center, at least get noise-cancelling headsets. Professional binaural (over the ear) noise-cancelling headsets cost $150 to $250 each. If you have a large call center, you can negotiate volume discounts.

Drink plenty of water: OK. This one is an easy one. But, how do you make that a policy in your call center? Is your supervisor going to enforce water drinking? Besides, most boiler room call centers do not allow drink or food at the work stations- for a good reason, actually. I don’t know how many keyboards I had to replace in my call center due to spilled coffee.

You can’t very well make all your agents drink water at the same time (or can you?). So, your best bet is to mention the importance of drinking water during the training and placing reminders (posters or stickers)  around the office.

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Categories : Telemarketing Management, Voice Coaching

Getting 2010 Started With A Bang

By Gene Gerwin · Comments (0)
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Normally, the last three weeks of Christmas vacation and new year’s celebrations would have been a good time to relax. Not so this year. Everyone’s scrambling to stay ahead of the game. Take time to smell the roses and get run over by a train, I say.

I used the time to complete new professional certification courses, revamp my corporate website, move my mail server to a new dedicated server, introduce a slew of new services, and move this blog and re-purpose this website.

In a few days, I start a master-level, three-month certification program on conversion optimization led by Bryan Eisenberg, author of “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark.”

Why all this change, you might ask?

Well, I think everyone in the business-to-business telemarketing industry has seen it become more and more challenging over the last few years to generate positive ROIs. The reason, in my opinion, is that business prospects these days expect the conversation to take place over multiple channels; and, all of  these channels had better be persuasive before they’re willing to move to the next step with you.

So, my point is that a telemarketing call alone is no longer enough. Your campaign needs to incorporate well-planned email marketing and dedicated landing pages to succeed.

With all three services delivered by a single provider (CCI), you gain convenience and confidence that your prospects are moved along the conversion process consistently and effectively.

To learn more about how I can help you get started with an integrated marketing campaign, use the contact form on this website. I’d be happy to answer any questions you have.

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Categories : Uncategorized



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