Sales industry researchers CSOInsights stated recently that after a “flat” budget year in 2009, marketing budgets are increasing in 2010 and beyond, and that the top three items for additional budget allocations were: Web site design/content (65% stated they were increasing budget allocation) Email marketing (54%) Web search optimization (51%) Great news, right? Good to…

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RockStar-small

I’ve read, heard, and studied lots of talk about the psychology of sales and marketing.

What makes buyers tick.

How decisions are made.

Prestige, Pleasure, Pain (relief), Profits, or Preservation.

But I was reminded today of another key psychological aspect of sales:

Get there first.

“Getting there first” is a simple rule that Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook talks about.

Want to be a budding (sales) rock star?

Get there first.

When it comes to lead management and generating new sales, showing up last is often worse than not showing up at all . . . .

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Click-through rate is one of the most important pay-per-click Web marketing metrics. But be careful not to correlate click-through rates with actual success.

For example, which is better? Getting 1,000 visitors to your Web site, and converting 50, or getting 300 people to your Web site, and converting 30?

The answer is that it depends on how much it cost to get those 1,000 visitors and 50 conversions vs. the 300 and 30, and the total sales each scenario produced.

And in our experience, getting 300 carefully targeted, ready-to-buy, high-value site visitors seems to be the better choice.

In other words, it’s not always about getting visitors to your Web site, it’s about getting the right visitors. During one three- or four-month period a couple of years ago, we were pulling our best SEO and PPC click-through numbers we’ve ever had. An influx in marketing budget dollars . . . .

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I first heard of ‘Web 2.0’ from Chris Knudsen and Dave Beisinger, at a vidcast company called 10SpeedMedia.  They were helping us make micromercials to test web video as a new lead generation media.  They told me enough to get me very interested. As my research about Web 2.0 began on Google in the summer of 2006,…

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