Ken Krogue

I just got back this afternoon from a great workshop on SEO techniques by one of our favorite partners on the topic, www.SEO.com.  I have tweeted a bunch of the epiphanies I gathered but one that came up that I get asked a lot about is the topic of this post:

How to get the most for your money with a SEO-optimized press release.

You may not know about how frugal InsideSales.com is; we have built our company without ever taking venture capital and we were recently ranked by Utah Business as #10 in Utah for growth (See September Issue of Utah Business).  I bring this up because we did it organically by scrimping and saving yet keeping one foot on the gas pedal when everyone else in our industry is just trying to find ways to spend their venture money (rather than their own earnings.) Not us, this is our money and we are very careful with it.  Or, to put it another way; we are very “fiscally efficient,” and proud of it.

Why is SEO important?  The best leads that close into the biggest deals.

Why is PR important? The 2nd or 3rd best way to improve SEO.

The players in the market for SEO optimized press releases seem to be:

• BusinessWire.com
• PRWeb.com
• PRNewswire.com
• Marketwire.com

We shopped all of them and tested some of them.  Who do we use for press release distribution? Marketwire.

Marketwire was by far the most cost effective while bringing lots of great tools for SEO.  If there is a more effective news wire, we haven’t found it yet (please bring it on!)  Marketwire also has a cool now SEO auditing tool that you run on the draft of your press release before you send it and it tells you everything you ought to do to increase the power of SEO within the release.  Of course, a few things look like they are trying to upsell additional addons that cost more money like images and video.  But hey, that is to be expected.

We send most of our ads through the state distribution model that they offer instead of the national distribution and it is one-fourth of the price, yet we get about two-thirds of the distribution.

Recently we have tried the Tech Hot Spots distribution that they offer which costs 2.5 times what the state distribution offers and we seem to get about twice the distribution.  So when we do product specific press releases we stick with this, otherwise we go through the state distribution.

Even though Inside Sales is becoming noticed more and more as a primary method of lead generation and sales, many people are unaware of the potential leverage they can bring to bear to dramatically increase productivity.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has become commonplace in almost every sales department, whether tradition face-to-face, or a remote selling model like inside sales. Salesforce is the leading provider of on-demand CRM software on the planet. I get asked a lot why saleforce.com users should consider on-demand power dialer solutions. Here are 6 reasons:

1- More Revenue: In 2005 a landmark study was done by CSO Insights that showed companies that use CRM software have 17% more revenue.  That is notable, but not overly compelling. Dialers coupled wth CRM software often increase overall revenue by 200%, 300%, or more by significantly increasing dials, contacts, appointments, and talk time, while lowering costs and wasted time.

2- More Dials: Our internal lead generation department department and many of our clients make 300 calls per rep per day.  Most internal lead generation departments in companies we come across fall between 20 and 70 calls a day.  Most outsourced lead generation companies we are familiar with make between 70 and 110 calls a day.

3- More Contacts: By combining immediate response (web-form callback technology) with consistent response (power dialer technology) we have documented 700% increases in contacts on the first call and increases from 45% of all leads contacted to 92% of contactable leads contacted.  It becomes obvious that the most basic, but overlooked practice of lead management and sales is just making contact with more leads.  Our research is showing that as much as 45.1% of leads NEVER get contacted at all (see Omniture ’08 Study.)

4- More Appointments: It becomes obvious if you make 300 calls a day versus 40 or 50, you will make a LOT more appointments.  Besides the power dialer for Salesforce technology that is becoming popular as an integrated tool within salesforce.com, immediate response technology that calls a web lead back in 8-10 seconds from a visitor inputting their information on a website shows the odds increasing by 21 times according to the groundbreaking MIT Study by Dr. James Oldroyd of qualifying the lead or setting the first appointment.

5- More Phone Time: While Lead-Gen reps in an inside sales department make a lot more dials, Closers who take the appointments set by Lead-Gen are able to do eight hours of work in two or two and a half hours. This is in the form of talking to a lot more prospects through the entire sales process.  A dialer increases quality time as well as quantity of time.

6- Lower Capital Outlays: Whether it comes in the fact that sales reps can cover three to four times as much ground in the same time, or in the incredible savings in lessened time wasters (see 15 Time Wasters), money and time are saved in large increments by using the power of dialer technology that is now integrated natively within salesforce.com and other CRM solutions.

As you can see, sales is still about numbers.  And while CRM helps salespeople bring order to the sales process, a dialer offers the leverage to dramatically impact the numbers.  That is important, especially in todays economic adventures.

Top 20 Articles on www.KenKrogue.com

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One of my favorite trainers that used to come teach us when I worked at Franklin Quest (now FranklinCovey) was Joel Weldon. He tells the story of a high school teacher who found this illustration in a cattlemans publication and would share it at the first of his social studies classes every year:

• In socialism, if you have two cows, the government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
• In communism, the government takes both cows and gives you the milk.
• In fascism, you keep both cows, the government takes the milk and sells it back to you.
• In New Dealism, the government shoots one cow and pours the others milk down the drain.
• In nazism, the government takes both cows and shoots you.
• In capitalism, you sell one cow and buy a bull.

What do we call what is going on now?

I still receive requests to share again the 17 most effective lead generation methods that I gave in November of 2008 at a breakfast seminar at Novell from research first published in the 2008 Lead Generation issue BtoBOnline Magazine. 

I will share the 17 methods ranked first by effectiveness, then by popularity, then by the points of variance up or down. 

Popular isn’t necessarily good, it just means everyone else is doing it (email for example is ranked 1st as most popular, but ranked 7th in actual effectiveness.)  Take especial note of the degree of variance and whether it is positive or negative.  High positive variance shows extreme effectiveness that is relatively unused or unknown by your competition.

I believe that the best methods are those that are most Effective, but least Popular.  So look for a low number on Effective, and a high number on Variance:

At my company, InsideSales.com, we combine the first five (Executive Seminars, Inside Sales, Search Marketing, Webinars, and Trade Shows) to bring us the best results.

My personal background with founding the original inside sales division at Franklin Quest as the largest time management seminar company in the world (my team used to fill up 200+ seminars every month) gives me a pre-disposition towards seminars, so I love Executive Seminars and of course, Inside Sales is the best way to put “butts in seats.” 

Having the name InsideSales.com has ensured we appear at the top of the search engines for the industry we are named after, so search marketing has been a never-ending source of leads for us.  And every single sales demonstration we give is a custom webinar to prospective clients and we are busy trying to expand this offering to larger groups in live and on-demand venues.

One of my personal favorites is trade shows.  I will write my next post about some of the fun strategies we use for this. 

Especially interesting is the effectiveness of TV advertising and Radio, though these two are difficult to target to specific B2B niches, I have found.

Notably absent (this study was early last year) are the social medias like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  The jury is still out for me on these three, I’m seeing the buzz, still questioning actual research that demonstrates any sales being made for all the time that is spent.

If you are finding results out there in these areas, please let me know.

I hope this is helpful.