Category Archives: Sales

What To Consider When Asking Web Design Agencies To Redesign Your Site

Redesigning a website requires a lot of effort if you want to achieve satisfying results. Because of that, it is very important to know what to ask web design agenciesbefore starting the process.

Take The First Step Yourself Before Starting Working With Web Design Agencies There might be various reasons for changing your web design; updating the company profile, following new trends, the need to improve user experience, and many more. Whatever it is, a business has to choose wisely while picking the best services from numerous web design agencies. In addition, it is crucial knowing what to ask, as even the most qualified professionals cannot offer a solution if you do not know the problem. .

At the very beginning, the proper research should be done. This means that you have to start with testing the existing design to notice crucial problems. This process should be followed by the identification of your target audience, as well as performing market and keyword research. Even if you did that some time ago, it is better to complete these tasks once again as the market is constantly changing. Only after knowing this can you ask web designers to recreate the website and adopt new and functional SEO, as well as other essential solutions. Things To Ask Web Design Agencies For Your Website Redesign

If you want to have a website that is better than your competitors, then pay proper attention to its redesign process. Here are some crucial features to consider for making your virtual home appealing. How to structure the website?The structure is the vital part of every website, so you have to find the best way to organise yours. Pages that provide the most traffic should be easily reached and visible. In addition, the customers’ journey through the website, from the home page to the desired action (purchasing, subscribing etc), has to be without any unnecessary interruption. The web page should also be created in a mobile-friendly version as more and more people are browsing the internet through smartphones or tablets.
How to structure the content? Although it seems that the content does not have anything in common with the design, it does. Only informative and interesting information can attract visitors, so it is important to decide how it will be structured. Is it enough to only have product pages, or should there be a newsfeed, or a company blog? Questions like this help to design the website in a way that provides visitors what they are looking for. What technical solutions should be made? You are not expected to know all the technical terminology, but there are things you can ask web design agencies to do. Firstly, the website should load as quickly as possible – people hate waiting and will leave your page for a faster website. In addition, a proper web page should comply with the international standards, such as W3C or having a cookies policy. Finally, the code has to be written in a way that ensures that search engines will easily identify your website and give it higher results.
Indisputably, when redesigning a website all design solutions like colours, fonts, or the arrangement, are crucial. However, usually businesses only focus on these and forget the features mentioned above. If you think you’ve got to make some changes in your digital space, ask web design agencies to change not only the appearance of it, but also the other important elements mentioned.

Qualified Web Design Agency For Satisfying All Needs If you are looking for a reliable web agency that could offer you quality solutions, Advansys can offer everything you need. With more than 13 years of experience, we help our clients to solve various problems from website structure to multichannel ecommerce. Would you like to have quality services provided by professionals? Contact us now! Telephone: 0845 838 2700 or email:

Why Smartphones Are Popular

Cell phones have gained considerable popularity in the world. It is not surprising that it is the one gadget that accompanies more and more people. While many people still use cell phones as originally designed for making and receiving calls, a greater segment of society is beginning to see it as an instrument for productivity. For this reason, cell phones are constantly evolving to meet the new demands of society

Cell phones have over the years evolved into minicomputers or smartphones. For example, in 2008 for which data was available, out of the 1 billion camera phones shipped, smartphones which currently represent the high-end of the cell phone market, made up about 10% of the market or about 100 million units. Current smartphone brands on the market include BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm, Nokia and Samsung. These products are an- Internet-connected multimedia devices with a multi-touch screen or a sliding keyboard. The phones may function as a camera phone, portable media player, GPS navigator, and an internet client: with text messaging, email, web browsing and local Wi-Fi connectivity.

Interestingly, the rise in sales of smartphones will come at the expense of declining cell phone sales, currently 90% of the market. The bourgeoning of the smartphone market is much about the new technology as it is about the consumer. The smartphone- basically a pocket computer with cell phone capability-allows people to carry information and to access it everywhere they go. Just as portable lap top computers permitted desk-top users freedom of mobility, the smartphone allows its users the function of a desk-top PC with the portability of a laptop, and the utility of a cell phone.

It is to be expected that in every economic down turn people will shy away from luxury consumer spending such as the purchase of a smartphone. Rather, more and more people are opening up their wallets to smartphones. To be sure, the sales of iPhones, Blackberrys and other smartphone models are rising rapidly. It is estimated that smartphones will grow by 25% this year alone. Other new models have either come on the market or are expected to be launched during the course of this year. These new additions will certainly help to fuel the popularity and growth of the smartphone industry.

For a growing segment of the population, the social expectation is that one must stay connected and be reachable almost instantly by voice or email. The smartphone gives people that dual ability to stay connected, and therefore they can justify the cost of buying a smartphone. Smartphones are also seen as a status symbol. Just as it became socially unacceptable in the late 1990s not to have an email address, it will become increasingly unforgivable in the next several years not to communicate via smartphone.

The demand for smartphones can be attributed to the fact that they are perceived as being tools to enhance productivity in a society which is constantly on the move. Indeed smartphones were introduced to address a given market segment. For example, the RIM BlackBerry initially focused on enterprise/corporate customer email. Interestingly, it was the introduction of less business-oriented phones first by Blackberry that scored a hit with the general public and led to the widespread use of Blackberry which doubled its customer base from last year to 25 million. The smartphone wave is continuing to gain momentum, and although sales are rising fast, smart phone sales still account for only 25% of the total cell phone shipments this year in the US. However, the launching of new smartphones together with software offerings from companies such as RIM , Nokia, Apple, Microsoft, Google and others this year, smartphones will continue to make considerable inroads into the cell phone market.

Currently, smartphones are not cheap by any long shot. The handsets even with discounts from the wireless carriers typically cost a few hundred dollars, with the high-end going for several hundreds of dollars. Their data and calling service plans are typically up to a hundred dollars per month. One of the keys to lowering prices in the long-term is the breeding of vigorous competition among the brands. But considering that the market for smartphones is large, new entrants may find it expedient to identify a niche in the market rather than compete with the more established brands. However, the best avenue to making smart phones affordable to consumers is through innovation in smartphone technology that allows users to call and to connect to the internet no matter where they are at very reasonable cost.

It cannot be denied that even regular cell phones are getting smarter, and it’s only a matter of time before all cell phones have the advanced levels of functionality associated with today’s smartphones.

Sales Funneling – A Marketers Guide

Sales people often feel that all marketing needs to do is to drive loads of leads their way. If this is the approach in your organisation, then you are missing sales and lowering potential profitability. Careful management of the tone and quantity of your marketing content across a planned sales funnel can deliver pre-qualified leads to a sales person, significantly improving the chances of conversion.

Many of us will have experienced a sense of ‘information overload’ where we simply switch off, or the frustration of wanting to know more about a product or service before we commit and not being able to find it. Both happen regularly, and when they do – you’ve lost a sale.

For almost every purchase we make, we run through a broadly similar decision-making process (I say almost, as the impulse bar of chocolate at the supermarket counter is quite a different process). Typically, and particularly for more complex purchases, our thinking will go something like this: ‘My laptop is heavy – I saw that ad for really light weight ones, who was it again?’ (Latent need); ‘There’s that ad, it’s X-brand’ (Awareness); ‘I’ll just check out their site’ (Interest); ‘Hmm, well the weight certainly compares well, but can I afford it, what are the other options?’ (Evaluation); ‘I’ll pop into Y-shop to see what it feels like and ask a little more about it’ (Trial); ‘I’ve researched the best price, I’ll get it from there’ (Purchase). Kotler and others have spelt out various different versions of this process, there’s bound to have been one modelled for most markets. By understanding the way people make buying decisions, you can map your sales funnel: 1. Awareness, 2. Interest, 3. Evaluation, 4. Trial, 5. Purchase.

Against this process you should map and measure your sales funnel, you’ll steadily whittle down your audience at each step, with interested parties moving through the funnel and those who either don’t want what you offer or who are turned off by your messaging going elsewhere. To maximise the conversion at each stage, marketers should consider two key elements; tone and quantity.

What do I mean by tone? As short-hand, think emotion. Against the sales funnel, there is an appropriate tone at each step. If you imagine a continuum from emotional to rational, typically your marketing material will need to start at emotional and move to rational through the funnel. To really get noticed, you need to appeal to our most human side, our emotions. If you hit a nerve, they notice you. However rational you are, e.g. ‘we’re cheap’, if they don’t feel a need for what you’re offering they’re unlikely to notice your communications in the first place. Successful emotional appeals, in marketing terms, usually hit on a negative feeling and say that you can take it away. This is called finding the point of pain. Once you’ve established that emotional appeal, your communications need to move into more rational territory, where proof is needed. As a sanity check on the tone of your marketing materials, map out each stage of the sales funnel and look at the material (offline, online, sales person, in-store, etc.) and then judge the emotional appeal – are you delivering rational messages too soon? Is your material providing further emotional messaging, when your buyer is looking for rational proof?

Quantity, in regard to sales funnelling, is a fairly straight forward concept – start ‘short and sweet’ and then provide more information at each step. Where most organisations fall foul of this is on their websites. Home pages are often jam packed with information. In a typical sales funnel, an organisation’s website is the second or third step – this means that people typically reach you looking for an emotional appeal (what’s the benefit for me?) and they are looking for key messages. Again, map out your journey and assess the quantity of information you are serving at each stage, it should start small and increase at each step.

So, if you’re experiencing lots of web traffic, but low numbers of enquiries – or lots of footfall and low sales, think about the sales funnel. An initial assessment against tone and quantity will signpost where your blockage might be and put you on the path to a free flowing sales funnel that has a tangible link to your bottom line.

The Crazy Motto That Doubled My Sales

Do you run a sales team? Have you ever noticed that sales people are brilliant at coming up with excuses for why their promised sales didn’t eventuate. I use a simple strategy on my sales team that stopped the excuses and doubled the sales.

A couple of years ago I read a very interesting piece of research. The business school of a major university was conducting an international study into sales management. One of the amazing things they discovered was that sales people who reported to a sales manager, on average produced less than sales people who did not have a sales manager.

The reason for this was that the sales managers tended to be critical of the shortcomings of their team members and this made the sales people nervous. They became so preoccupied with having to face the music at the sales meeting that their focus was on failure rather than success. If your focus is on failure then failure is what you will get.

This is all very interesting but there is still the practical matter that most sales people are performing well below their potential. So how does a sales manager get his or her team performing without creating the problem of failure focus?

When I first started managing a sales team I discovered that sales people had an incredible talent for coming up with excuses. They seemed to be able to justify any lost sales by giving you a plausible reason why it was not possible to get the sale. While I admired their creativity I also realized that in most cases the sale was getable. The problem I had was how to get the sales person away from the excuse habit and onto the success habit.

I also remembered when I first entered the sales world, and how my sales manager had harassed myself and the other sales people at each sales meeting. I used to dread going to those meetings.

I ended up creating a solution that got rid of excuse behavior, avoided the harassing situation and led to a doubling of my sales team’s output. I made a rule that the only excuse that a salesperson was allowed to offer was an excuse that was so good that if they wrote it on a piece of paper and took it to the manager of the local supermarket that the manager would be happy to give them a week’s groceries in exchange for the excuse.

Here’s how I used the “grocery excuse” strategy. I first explained the rule to each of my sales people. Then if during a sales meeting a sales person started to offer any form of excuse I would interrupt and say “excuse me Bob, can I buy a week’s groceries with this excuse that you’re starting on?” They would say no, and then I would say “then let’s focus on a real way that we can get this sale across the line.”

This crazy “grocery rule” worked like a charm. Within a few meetings it totally eliminated excuse behavior and turned the whole focus of the meetings into positive, success oriented thinking. The result was that the teams sales figures improved dramatically and my sales team didn’t fear the meeting.

If you are having problems with excuse focused sales staff then why not give my crazy motto a try.

The Function Of A Site Manager

No matter where you may be in the world, the building industry has its fluctuations, and that includes the United Kingdom and Europe. Some areas tend to be harder hit than others are, such as the residential markets are, but in spite of those trends, little of the industry declines affect the job of a site manager.

Though there may be some residential areas where a site manager is utilized, such as in new construction of entire areas of homes, the job of a site manager is more visible in the commercial building industry. It is also not a position that is limited to that of new construction, either. So just what is the function of a site manager? Some of the duties that he may be required to perform include the following:

#Ordering new material

#Replacing material that has been exhausted

#Assuring that his site has enough manpower to perform the assigned tasks within contract guidelines

#Preparing reports and status updates for regional and other managers of his company

#Seeing that workers follow all safety procedures and that any accidents are recorded and reported to the proper authorities

#Using his expertise in the building industry as a means of knowing when changes in the original plans or projected completion dates are necessary

#Being on the site to follow the daily operation of the project

Of course, the construction industry is not the only industry that may have a site manager, but they are the most common and usually the one to which advertisements for this position refer. Although the commercial building site manager is more common, that of a residential site manager is just as demanding and in addition may require him to assume the role of a sales agent as well. When new residential construction is in the process, sometimes potential buyers will take the time to look if they like what they see. If there is not sales office they can visit, the site manager may assume the role of a sales manager. This may include a tour of the neighbourhood, review of blueprints and plans, a discussion of the sales price, and answering any questions the potential buyer may have.

For someone who has an interest in a position as a building site manager, be prepared for something very diverse that may something require your expertise and knowledge of the building industry while in other situations, you may need to be a liaison between your company and the potential buyers.