Closing sales online for production

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all right well in the interest of time i'm respecting everybody's time i'm gonna go ahead and get us started and we have a lot to get through today so um my name is like i said isabelle crom i'm a business consultant at the temple small business development center um for those of you who are new to sdspdc we help small businesses start and grow through free 101 counseling and a variety of webinars like this one uh part we're proud to be part of a nationally accredited network of sbdcs with over a thousand centers across the states and you've joined us today for um one of our manufacturing series webinars on closing your first online sales so i know that our presenter josh will be introducing himself so i will let him do so but we're very excited to have him today he's the ceo partner at protocol 80 which is an inbound marketing agency and hubspot platinum partner and i'll let him uh take us away josh awesome thank you appreciate it and appreciate uh temple and you guys for having us here this is uh a great series of presentations uh that you are putting on and it's awesome to be able to offer this for manufacturing companies so this is closing your first online sale or as you'll see here the title slightly different inbound marketing for leads and sales and i'm going to break this down for you so we tie back to closing more sales whether it's your first or whether it's later on so just a little bit more about me i'm ceo and partner protocol 80 inc our agency primarily works with manufacturing companies about 90 percent of our business is with manufacturers usually they're going to be contract manufacturers that are producing you know smaller parts for other people for other people they might be second or third in the supply chain i'm a hubspot certified trainer i lead the hubspot user group in rochester new york and i'm also a hubspot community champion if you care to know more about me outside of work i love cycling i'm on strava if you're on strava please connect with me and we can check out each other's rides and give each other kudos and also a big fan of craft beer so if you're untapped and also a fan of craft beers i love to hear about new ones see what other people are drinking and let's connect there as well i also want to learn a little bit more about you guys so if you can in the chat please put your business name your industry and any goals that you might have from today's training i'd love to see um and understand a little bit better about you and maybe we can address some of those goals if we don't talk about them specifically in today's presentations so what to expect i'm going to talk about why manufacturers are making this shift and changing and why businesses are making the shift and changing uh so that they're starting to generate more leads and sales online as opposed to kind of the more traditional methods i'm going to talk about elements of a successful strategy how certain manufacturers and businesses are already doing it you're going to notice that there's going to be a few gifts in here probably an office reference maybe two too many bitmojis for sure and we're going to save some time for questions and answers at the end so if you have them please post those questions throughout if it's something super urgent say hey this this is super urgent i want to address it now otherwise we'll address all of those questions at the end all right so when we're launching a new website or when we're moving into a new marketing campaign and our goal is leads and sales our expectation is we started this strategy we kicked off either we're doing it ourselves or we have an agency supporting us on this um we launch it and then leads and orders are going to come start flying in you know we it's like a flip uh of a switch truth be told it doesn't happen like that you know typically we're going to launch a new website or we're going to launch this campaign or effort a strategy and you know we're going to get friends and family they're liking our social post maybe they check out the website maybe they comment on our our linkedin announcement or whatever it may be but unfortunately when it comes to the digital space and any sort of online marketing strategy it's not a if you build it uh they will come a type of environment it takes work it takes effort it takes a cohesive strategy why is that well first of all the online world is more cluttered than it's ever been you know 18 months ago or whenever that was march 2020 it became even more and more cluttered when people were not able to go meet in person tons of businesses made this shift to all right well we know we have to still connect with people and generate leads and close sales we need to be online so the people that were already doing it stepped up their game the people that were not aggressively marketing online started doing it so this is just added to more noise and more clutter which just means unfortunately for businesses it's just harder to break through that noise than it was 20 months ago two years ago four years ago um just makes us think about our strategies a little bit more and put a little bit more effort into implementation one of the other things that we've seen is most websites just don't suck as bad as they used to i've been doing this for 14 years something like that and in the past you know so many people had websites that were just really mediocre you know you had some that stood out you had some that were just either mediocre or just downright awful so by having a pretty good website you could stand out but today there's so many tools that allow us to have a pretty good website um and most people do most people have an seo friendly website that they're managing and adding content to and changing it wasn't like that in the past now i will add to this and say most websites now this is a website that is still live today and it's got an awesome awesome domain name like something that people would pay thousands and thousands of dollars for but this is what we see uh from a website and um i don't know what uh spot your guy you guys are in today but there's no excuse uh with the tools that we have today with wordpress with with wix with shopify with squarespace that we would have a website that looks like it was built in 1995. so what can we do inbound ultimately is is what i like to see or what what a lot of people are turning to as the answer to digital one of the things about inbound or i guess the key factor of inbound is it makes sure that you are there to help prospects find you instead of you interrupting whatever else it is that they're doing you know if our sales reps in the past we're going and taking road trips and knocking on doors and hoping to get a meeting that's interruption people aren't taking those meetings you know even before covet people weren't taking those meetings and as we see uh more and more like engineers and buyers and purchasers and whoever it may be execs coming from that younger generation the less and less they're going to take those unexpected visits you know you have to be doing something that allows them to find you as opposed to you interrupting them now one thing about inbound that's really important is it must be strategic this isn't taking one tactic it's not taking hey i just want to be on linkedin and i'm going to just going to be on linkedin and try to be successful that way inbound is about all of these different tactics social media search engine optimization paid advertising content marketing it's about all of those things moving in the right direction aimed at the same strategic objectives that's what makes it so powerful it's because we're taking everything and we're working all of these parts together including sales to achieve those those goals that we're trying to achieve now another thing about inbound is inbound is really customer-centric marketing the old way of marketing or sales um was that the person the prospect the lead they had to rely on that salesperson to give them all of the information whereas today's buyers are more empowered they can find everything online my favorite example or or one of the examples that almost everyone can relate to when it comes to being customer centric marketing and the buyers having the power is purchasing a vehicle if you purchased a vehicle 10 years ago 15 years ago or even longer you probably remember the process of maybe having a rough idea of what you were looking for maybe having a rough price range and then you'd have to go to the dealership you'd have to talk to one of those aggressive sales reps salesmen and they'd tell you about the car they tell you about the features you know why you should go this model versus this model how much it costs whatever it may be today before we step foot on the dealer's floor we already know what we want we've done all of that research we know what that dealership's probably selling it for we know what the dealership down the road is selling it for what the fair uh price should be we're empowered as buyers because we can find all of this information through simple research online it's very different so inbound takes that understanding and the strategies that are built are built around the buyer they're built around those prospects so when someone's making a buying decision especially one that is a considered purchase meaning you know i'm not going to the store and buying a pack of gum i'm buying something that takes a little bit longer to decide you know typical in the b2b space we go through these stages the awareness stage in the awareness stage we're looking for symptoms of a problem that we might be having in our business or we might be looking for ways to take advantage of an opportunity that we have when we're in the awareness stage we're looking at websites we're searching on google searching on bing and we're using social media as we kind of progress down into the next stage that's a consideration stage in this case we've defined our problem or we've defined or or have said we're going to take advantage of this opportunity now how do we do it now we're comparing those different types of ways to either solve the problem or take advantage of that opportunity again we're looking at websites we're accessing social media searching maybe we're even looking at directories thomasnet for example and we might even be looking at e-commerce if this is something that we can purchase right online or your customers can purchase right online they're going to be looking at stores that offer that online whether it's your website or standalone website or whether it's something like uh an ebay or an etsy or an amazon our problems to find finally we enter the decision stage the decision stage is when we take all of those different possibilities that we identified in the consideration stage now we have a short list now we're going to say all right well what are we going to actually do who's going to be our supplier where are we going to purchase this again we're looking at websites we're checking social media we're looking at search engines so on and so forth now we're also probably looking at user user-generated content meaning reviews we want to know what the experience was like for someone else and working with that company so if we think about the considered purchases that we've made as as consumers whether it's in the b to c or b to b space we could probably envision ourselves going through this now when we're doing that we're not only looking at these different mediums but we're also engaging with different types of content now inbound marketing is very very content driven pretty much uh everything that we're doing ties back to uh content of some sort now i'm gonna explain that a little bit further so we have uh things like one sheets or research reports ebooks blogs articles those are the types of things that we are going to access and read and consume when when we're in that awareness stage you know we're not ready to talk to a salesperson we're not ready to see a business's um you know dossier or whatever that may be we're just trying to learn say hey is this a real problem is it solvable or is this an opportunity that's legit we should pursue it we're just trying to educate ourselves once we move into the consideration stage we start to change a little bit of what we're consuming and we start to look at you know comparisons white papers expert guides we might interact with chat at that point which we might not do in the awareness stage but we're changing the types of content that we're consuming as we move along then again as we move even further along this is when we're looking at um the provider of whoever we're thinking about doing business with you know in the manufacturing space that might be understanding the capabilities and the machinery and the tolerances it might be understanding you know something about a specific product comparing vendor a to vendor b we're looking at case studies and maybe we're even talking to other customers or reading testimonials but now we're consuming different types of content as it relates to that stage that we're in in the buying process now the only way to be able to create content create a strategy that follows this is to really understand your buyers ideally your best buyers you know you want more of those people that you really like to do business with as opposed to the people where it's like you do business with them but you cringe every time the phone rings we don't want more of those people we want our best buyers that are profitable easy to work with fun to work with that you have a good relationship with so to do that we do or recommend a buyer persona strategy or a buyer persona buyer's journey outline and what these are is a fictional representation of your best buyers it tells pretty much everything that you can think about or that you can define about these buyers now you don't want to hone in on one specific of your best customers you want to find the trends amongst all of them now as a business you might actually have multiple types of best buyers you might have for example an engineer an engineer technically if they're consuming the content and maybe directing the purchasing department in that case the engineer's actually your buyer but you also might have to convince the purchaser or the buyer or you might have to convince the ceo if the trends are different amongst those different types of roles and different types of job titles and people you probably have more than one buyer persona it's also recommended to not just rely on your sales team and your customer service team to tell you about them but go and interview and talk to your best buyers themselves ask them the questions because you're going to be so much more informed than rely on that one-sided piece of information so when we look at a strategy regardless of what industry you're in we need to first make sure that we have that brand awareness from people that don't know us and we're re-engaging the people that already do know us our customers and um in the digital space or in the the online marketing world we call this traffic you know people that are visiting your website visiting your social media pages uh so on and so forth you know that's the first area that we want to focus on because if you don't have enough website traffic you're not going to get enough conversions which is that next level conversions are what we would consider leads now we have different types of conversions these are people that might be downloading an ebook as i mentioned or a white paper or even chatting and leaving their email address or something as simple as signing up for an email newsletter these are our conversions if we don't have enough traffic we're not going to get enough conversions to make the strategy sustainable after we start to generate conversions and leads that's when we are looking at more of the sales path right we need to sell to these people that are leads if we're just getting leads and we can't sell any of them they're not good enough for us right ultimately any business needs to look at their bottom line and say this needs to be profitable we need to have a return on our investment of either time or or money so once we have enough conversions that's when we can start handing these leads over to sales and ideally closing them at a sustainable and predictable level now obviously when you're first starting and you're starting to get those small volumes of leads through obviously you're going to hand those over to sales and they can probably work and talk to everyone but at some point in time we're going to have to understand which leads are sales ready leads which leads are not sales ready leads and [Music] further nurture them but at a high level these are ultimately our goals traffic conversions in sales you might be saying yeah you know that sounds good well how do we do it how can you take that or what are uh current manufacturers and b2b companies doing to be able to be success successful with inbound and closing those online sales one thing that they're doing is they aren't thinking in a silo again this ties back to my comment about being tactical if we think too much in a silo and we say hey you know i only want to be on uh alibaba right and that's going to be my entire marketing strategy you might get some wins here and there but ultimately you have to think back to that buyer and say where is my buyer my my prospects my leads where are they spending time are they spending time on etsy are they spending time on google are they on amazon are they on thomas you know whatever that may be for your business you need to understand where they're spending their time and then that's where you need to be in some capacity now i know that's not feasible for absolutely everyone if you're a contract manufacturer and you're producing a small part for someone else and it's you know very specific to whatever that end use is or whatever the oem needs you're probably not going to be on amazon right but in that case your buyers probably not looking for your part on amazon either they may be there as consumers looking for things for their personal life but um as you're deeper and deeper into the supply chain it's going to change where they're looking now those users are probably on thomas looking for suppliers successful manufacturers are also focusing on ongoing search engine optimization almost everything we do today in the b2b or b to c world is going to start with a search you know that's going to be a search on google or potentially even a search on one of the social media platforms youtube linkedin facebook but all of these are are starting with search and there is zero excuse today in 2021 and 2022 to not optimize your website all of the platforms have made it so easy to do if you're selling online you're using something like shopify they're giving you the tools to be able to at least do the bare minimum of search engine optimization now i also don't mean to make seo sound like it's just a trivial thing and anyone can do it because that's not the truth you know there is a lot of strategy and and understanding behind it but every business should be at least doing the bare minimum because the tools are defining what we need to enter from an seo perspective for the bare minimum right we have to enter a page title we have to enter a description this is another example of a woocommerce wordpress website you know yoast is the most common seo plugin that wordpress users are using on their website they're basically telling you exactly what you have to do at the bare minimum that'll get you started now obviously at some point you should talk to a an seo professional they're the ones that can really help guide strategy and and help you go a little bit further but you can at least get to that starting point by doing the bare minimum successful b2b companies are also prioritizing content content is super important you know when we are searching and when we're finding things that that support our education and what we're trying to understand whether it's you know an article from kelly blue book about cars or whether it's something about the types of materials we should use in a specific metal application everything that we're looking at website pages videos social media posts blog articles white papers that's all content so to be successful with online marketing you need to make sure content is prioritized and google is smart enough now to understand hey this is a website this is a marketer that's just throwing content out there to throw content out there versus a marketer that's actually creating great content um well-written content google's crazy smart they can understand that now as i mentioned we work with manufacturers um and they aren't oems in most cases some of them are but most of them aren't producing anything that we use as consumers on on a day-to-day basis so when they think about that they're like gosh everything we could write about is super boring nobody wants to read about you know uh when to use um a specific type of steel versus you know a different type of alloy or whatever it may be right that's what they think well that's not true there are people there are engineers out there that need to know this information because while they are really good at what they do in most cases they're not good at what you do right you do something different you help them through a problem you help them take advantage of an opportunity those same people are consuming content and they're your prospects they're your customers they're your best buyers so we need to be prioritizing content to write for them and help them through so that you again are showing up when they're looking for this stuff online now um when you're starting out it's really important that we focus on on this funnel i'm gonna explain this funnel uh for you because you're probably like i don't know what tofu mofu and bofu are tofu would be top of funnel top of funnel would be that that really high level stuff people that are consuming this really high level stuff you're going to have a mix of people that are your best buyers you're going to have a mix of people that are like yeah we'll take them if they come along and you're going to have a mix of people that are terrible buyers college students are going to be consuming top of funnel it's the most high level aspect of what you guys do in your industry and what you provide that would be top of funnel now it's really important to focus on top of funnel especially if you're just starting out because we want to have that broad focused content in order to get enough traffic so that we can get enough conversions again so that we can get enough leads middle of funnel or mofu that's where we're a little bit more specific into the type of content that we're doing so like this might be more specific to the types of uh products that you specifically produce as opposed to the industry uh focused articles in general and then bofu faux food would be bottom of funnel uh manufacturing companies b2b organizations have historically lived here they're really good about talking about themselves right here's our product guide here's our capabilities here's everything that we have to offer here's our mission statement our leaders right that's all bottom of funnel stuff nobody cares about that until they're ready to buy so if you focus on bottom of funnel content you're going to get such a small small portion of traffic that it's not going to be able to be impactful to the conversions and ultimately the sales that are really going to drive that bottom line and help you achieve your goals so here's some real life examples soft magnetic composites someone enters that into a search engine right they're probably someone that knows something about soft magnetic composites but they're probably not like doctorates of metallurgy or maybe they are what we see here when someone searches for soft magnetic composites is horizon technology and this is a blog post this is one of our clients and it's basically talking about what is a soft magnetic composite this is top of funnel this isn't you know specifically why you should use a soft magnetic composite for whatever this application is um this is just base level information about soft magnetic composites now my favorite thing about this screenshot is you've got this pretty broad search and you've got this blog post ranking first in organic search and then you look down here hoganos is a very large supplier of soft magnetic composites gkm one of the largest powder metal companies in the world if not the largest and we've got horizon here small company um small to mid-sized company manufacturer out of st mary's pa ranking above them it's awesome now when someone clicks that link and they go to the page what is a soft magnetic composite it really talks about that it's giving them the education that they need to understand what is a soft magnetic composite they don't flip the script and say hey here's what horizon can do from a soft magnetic composite standpoint it's truly giving them the information now the nice thing is is this person that's educating themselves they're they're seeing the brand they're engaging and we can help to do things to engage them even further but it's important that these top of funnel article-based contents are about what that person is looking for what the people are looking for when they're engaging with that type of content not flipping the script and talking about you or other middle or bottom of funnel types of things so does this work well here's an example of a manufacturing company supply chain or a a contract manufacturer that has prioritized content right we see as they started small little jumps here and there but the more and more that they do right we see now that they're generating over 5 000 visitors a month most of that's coming from organic search or google the other cool thing about this is you might say you know our content's boring we're not going to do much with blogs these are the top uh six pages that are driving all of this traffic number one blog post two blog posts three blog posts four blog posts or four uh five their homepage and then another blog post so the majority of this traffic is coming from blog posts which to most people honestly is going to be super boring but to people that it's written for it's going to be super helpful here's another example another contract manufacturer in this case uh back in april 2020 almost 15 000 visitors mostly from organic search right this is pretty steady you know they're averaging over 10 000 visitors a month and it's even higher if i were to update this this slide today now we look here at the types of blog posts or types of content driving all this traffic all of them are blog posts right how many of you guys can say you know last year or whatever one blog post drove 35 000 visitors to our website it's pretty powerful so another way that manufacturers are getting more traffic especially early on when they're just starting is they're using sponsored advertising now you might be saying well sponsored advertising that's not inbound that's like traditional types of ad of advertising sure kind of but you can use sponsored advertising um in a way where um it makes sense it helps to target people when they're looking for something specific where they're looking for something so here's an example of how some manufacturers and other b2b companies are using sponsored advertising to target their best buyers they might use google ads and say hey we work in the specific geography i want to i want my website to show every time someone searches for this keyword and you only pay on a cost per click basis you can do the same thing with linkedin with thomasnet with alibaba you can say i want to target this group of people now when you're first starting and you're just like getting your feet wet with blog post writing and search engine optimization you're honestly you're not going to get a ton of traffic from that so using sponsored advertising is a way to kind of kick start that so you can start to get traffic while your content starts to be produced while your search engine optimization starts to be impactful so when we dive into the next portion leads we need leads you know just getting traffic isn't enough ultimately if we're not getting conversions then our sales team doesn't have people to sell to so successful companies successful manufacturers are thinking about all right if if my best buyer is reading this article what's the next next logical thing that they would um they would read or or consume or engage with by understanding that we can help to guide our website visitors in the path that sure it's where we want them to go but it's also helpful for them because it makes sense it's logical so when we're looking at examples these are what are called calls to action our calls to action would exist on a blog post and allow someone to click to take that next step so you'll see how these are also broken out into more top of funnel and middle of funnel this call to action would be on a top of funnel blog post because it's really just an intro to motion control and counter balancing for this organization right they'd click that and then they'd be taken to a landing page that looks something like this where in this case they're going to be able to download this intro to motion control and counter balancing free you know they're not paying anything for this you know when they click on these ones these are more middle of funnel this is like engaging with an actual engineer or a motion control expert the middle of funnel here probably middle maybe bottle bottom of funnel here when they click these these are probably going to exist on more middle of funnel type of articles you know more in the weeds where in this case the person's probably decided on using counterbalance hinge as opposed to a different type of hinge so then they would see this call to action versus this top of funnel one which is just a general information guide okay now when they click one of these other ones it would take them to a different type of landing page right in this case this one's about asking questions specific to the engineer the engineer would get this and be able to answer the question but now the engineer or buyer knows this is someone that's researching counterbalance hinges this is a lead it's a valuable lead we know whether they work we know their first name their last name and we know this you know the general idea of the problem that they're trying to solve or whatever they're trying to design and we can continue the conversation from there now does this work these are three examples again from contract manufacturers that are using inbound to generate leads so you'll see this says new contacts right so when they start they're generating almost none i mean this is typical for a b2b organization or manufacturer they're almost generating zero leads from their website but as you continue to add more and more content do more and more from search have more and more white papers ebooks guides we're going to see more and more contacts coming through so in this case you know we're seeing over 60 contacts on a monthly basis uh over here between 75 and 100 on a monthly basis and most of this is driven from organic search you see the other colors here these are the other mediums that they're coming from paid search email marketing social so on and so forth it works if you understand what your best buyers are looking for you can generate leads on your website now this is a kind of another example again from a contract manufacturer that's showing where the contacts are coming from and you'll see that the vast majority are coming from online mediums all of these are online this one offline this is what their sales reps are able to to generate from new contacts which sure that it's pretty good and they'll continue to be able to do that but if we can also backlog their pipeline of let's even say a third of these or even less than a third of these are qualified leads that's still a significant number of new sales ready leads or qualified leads that your sales teams can communicate with and engage with right now when we're looking in the in the bds b space i also understand that these sales processes can be very complex you know a sale doesn't happen overnight for pretty much any considered purchase sure every once in a while it's going to happen but most of these considered purchases are going to be fairly complex and lengthy we have some clients that have two plus years uh sales process so their teams have to engage with them over time so people that are successful at this understand where their buyers are in the buying process and use tools to help nurture them along the way in this case this is a screenshot of marketing automation workflow where someone engages with the brand you know they download an ebook they do a demo whatever it may be right and then based on whatever the criteria is or whatever um that that person's qualified you know um aspects are right they're in a specific country or they downloaded a specific ebook or they filled out a specific form we would then have them pass through this workflow in some cases it's going to go directly to a sales rep sales reps should call them today because they're sales ready right in other cases we understand that these people are just educating themselves still they're not ready to talk to a sales rep in which case they're going to get what you might consider or think of as a drip campaign they're going to get another email that automatically goes out because the tools that they're using are smart enough to do that that continue to educate them right and this can happen over two months three months three years but by understanding what that buying process is for your best buyers we can build something that supports you in the background other successful companies that are are actually selling online and using inbound they have a crm and when i say crm i don't mean you have an excel spreadsheet of all of your leads and your prospects yes people still do that outlook is also not a crm a crm is a customer relationship management tool it's a central repository where all of our contacts live all these leads that are coming in from our website or all these leads that we're generating or getting at trade shows they should all be going into one spot and we should be storing all of our information as it relates to those leads in our crm our crm can help us understand what the history is what the conversations have been it can under help us understand our pipeline forecast it can even help us prioritize which leads our sales reps are spending their time with which ones they're not and it can help us understand from a marketing perspective uh what are our better performing channels what are our worst performing channels and what can we do to fix it successful manufacturers successful b2b companies are also using sales enablement tools by sales enablement i mean they are using tools to make them work more efficiently there's a stat out there that like the average sales rep only spends 33 of their time actually selling the rest of the time they're writing emails they're reporting they're entering data into places right we can make them more efficient by you know using the content that our marketing is producing and creating emails that are easy for the sales reps to pass along their blog articles where they know hey we already talked about this check out this blog post read about it they understand it they're using automation so that they don't have to remember in three weeks i need to email this person again the automating automation tools can automatically send that email to that person in three weeks and as a one that i really like they're sending one-to-one personalized videos meaning hey instead of just sending a text email i'm gonna send a video to that person on the other end that's like hey i'm josh it was great chatting with you the other day or i appreciate you downloading our ebook on whatever i noticed that your company does xyz and i also wanted to send this along if you have any other questions reach out email me this is a one-to-one video made specifically for that person on the other end now these two things here a crm free you can get hubspot free so there's no excuse salesforce i don't think has a free version zoho i believe does have a free version there are plenty of crms out there just choose one that works well for you that you can actually adopt and everyone in the organization can use soapbox vidyard free just a chrome extension very very easy to use you don't have to pay a dime for that loom slightly more functionality still it's not free but very very cost effective and easy to provide a return successful manufacturers are also reducing friction in whatever sales process um they're looking at right they're making it as easy as possible for their prospects to engage with their brand and find the things that they're looking for so here's an example of dolls from roll form they also do metal moldings and they know that architects and designers need drawing files right so they have this huge catalog that they've digitized put online and made it easy for any art architect or designer to go and download the drawings or they can download a bunch of drawings and request a quote for these types of things but essentially they've turned their what used to be a physical catalog into an online catalog most of you can probably do something like that if you have products they're also using chat one thing that the pandemic has shown us is that b2b buyers are more apt to engage with chat than they are with forms they want to find an answer as quickly as possible and typically they can get that answer if they chat with someone on the other end so if you're not using chat again you can do this and you can do it for free so again no excuses to not be using chat they use social proof so whenever we buy something now we want to know what the experience was for someone else so if you can if it makes sense for your business and you have reviews you have other people that are doing this and they're legit people can read through reviews right if they're legit put them on your website share them most people aren't going to buy something without talking to someone else and understand hey what was your experience like with this organization now i know i've been talking a lot about content and blog posts i don't mean to take away from the importance of a website as well websites are still very important so as a buyer is going from awareness to consideration to decision at some point they're going to look at your business and say can this business do whatever we need them to do right are they going to be the right supplier for us are we going to have a good relationship with them are they capable can we trust their on-time delivery all of that stuff right so you have to also make sure that your website is in the best shape it can be and it and it shows your uh your experience and that you instill confidence in these prospects so make it look nice have content that shows how you're helping people not confusing content that speaks over the heads of these prospects and these readers help them have a great web presence from start to finish all right so just to sum everything up if you're looking to close sales you're looking to sell online and move away from more of the traditional offline types of selling or you're a brand new business and you know that online is the way that you're looking to go be modern be customer-centric you need to start with with traffic meaning you have to be where your customers are you have to be doing seo and you really have to prioritize content if you are very very new and you have the budget and allows it start with sponsored advertising because it can kick start that the next thing we have to look at is what are the types of things that our prospects are going to consume and we need to look at conversions offer them those conversions on the content that you're writing or offer those conversions on the social media posts what are the guides the checklist the ebooks those are the types of things that are very low committal so people will engage with them but yet it's someone that is raising their hand and saying hey i'm researching this finally um just because we're getting traffic just beginning because we're getting conversions we also have to set up our sales team or e-commerce for success reduce friction make selling easy and again instill confidence that you are the right supplier that you are the right company to help them both short-term and long term so that's what i have for today i do want to go and talk through any questions that we might have hopefully we do have some in the chat pane and i'm also going to be joining in office hours immediately after this so isabel do we have any questions in the chat it doesn't look like we do have any questions in either the qa or the chat yeah i am not seeing either um questions in either um everybody if you um have any questions uh you're welcome to drop them into the q a or put them in the chat this is um if you haven't been on zamatan i'm just putting a message into the chat so you can find it easily um if there aren't uh any questions i can go ahead and also drop in the link to the survey we always have a survey for every webinar and training event that we do so please our funders require us to uh collect your feedback and we truly do look at and value it so here is the link to that while you're thinking of your questions i'm going to take a minute to go ahead and complete that and definitely feel free to ask any questions that you'd like i am not seeing any um well josh if you if we don't have any questions um do you want to um uh jump over to the office hours early how do you wanna yeah i'd be happy to jump over early okay great so everybody um just so you know we are gonna do um office hours after this um at the end of this session so we'll hang around to take any questions that you might have that you want to take one-on-one and i will get let me grab the um the link to that real quick um and that's going to be meeting styles so you'll be on camera you'll be on video we can if you'd like to be we can um we'll be able to uh see everybody here is the link to those office hours um and if there are no questions we'll just see everybody over there awesome okay thanks everybody for joining us thanks josh appreciate it bye