Most companies underestimate the power of doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). As a result, their businesses are failing to capture the opportunity to drive online sales leads to their company. Many CEO’s and top marketing people don’t understand that you no longer have to be in the e-commerce business to care about search engine optimization. Why? Over 90% of all business buyers go to Google, Yahoo, or MSN to search for a vendor. Our own company has benefited enormously from its SEO and PPC efforts. Today, we’ve evolved from being a local practice providing sales and marketing recruiting & consulting, to having a national clientele with a regular stream of inquiries coming from companies throughout the United States who are interested in using our services.

If you’re a business owner or marketing manager and thinking about how to generate more sales leads for the lowest possible cost, consider investing in SEO and PPC advertising now. But only do it after your website gets fresh messaging, a compelling value proposition and strong offers with lead conversion mechanisms, so that when your prospects come to your website, they like what they see and want to engage with you.

Cube Management helps companies accelerate their sales, by providing the Sales & Marketing talent they need to grow their business. Cube is a leading recruiting and consulting partner to mid-market and emerging growth companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. We work across the spectrum of Sales, Marketing and Business Development, providing holistic solutions that drive revenue and profit success. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process and People, to produce great results. Download the Cube Management Recruiting Guide and the Cube Management Inside Sales Guide.

With the proliferation of the Internet, it’s become quite common now for people to use online testing or profiling tools in order to further test the skills and abilities of potential sales candidates as they go through the hiring process. Many people ask me whether or not these tools are valid, and what they’re utility is.

Here are my thoughts: First of all, there are lots of different tools out there and we’ve experimented with several of them. Some of them work and some of them don’t, so you need to be careful when you’re evaluating online sales tools. What you’ll find is that not all of them are up to snuff. Generally, using an online sales test or profiling tool is a best practice for recruiting sales professionals. Many people go through the interview process solo and fail to diversify the sources of information they are obtaining as they interview sales candidates. The online sales profile or test is a great way to counteract this, by bringing another source of info the picture, as you evaluate a person’s sales capabilities.

What do online sales tasks and profiles typically accomplish? My feeling is that they should accomplish three things: First, they should tell you whether the salesperson can sell. “Can” really refers to whether or not they have the ability or skill necessary in order to perform a sales job. Second, will the person sell? “Will” is really an issue of whether or not they’re motivated. There are a lot of people out there who actually can sell, but won’t. It has nothing to do with their ability or skills, but everything to do with their motivation. A good sales test will tell you not only whether the person can sell, but whether are they motivated to sell for your company, e.g. that they have they possess the key traits, skills and motivations in order to be able to sell. The third and equally important element which good online sales tests measure, is whether or not a candidate’s sales skills, style, and system of selling matches up with your company needs. This relates to the kind of market you’re in, the number of competitors you have, the type of the sales cycle, whether or not the salesperson is going to maintain current accounts, only hunt for new business, or both. All of the different attributes of your particular job should get profiled by the tool, and then match experience and skills of the person against your particular requirements and selection criteria.

When do sales tests work? The people who sell them would advocate that you should use them as a screening tool prior to ever considering a candidate. I advise against that. I typically use the tool if I suspect that a candidate is viable and I’ve interviewed them and developed my own sense of their profile and achievement history. Wait until you have enough evidence to justify investing in the online sales test.

Is a sales test a panacea? Absolutely not. Oftentimes we’ve overruled the conclusion of the sales test and made a different decision than the conclusion that was given to us. What the sales test does do, is give you another set of objective information and another view of the candidate. Typically what I do, is use it to catch any blind spots or expose other issues that we may have missed as a team through the sales interview process.

If you’re thinking about using online sales profiling tools or tests, my suggestion is that it should become an integral part of your sales hiring process. The one that we like the most is the Express Screens from the Objective Management Group at www.objectivemanagement.com. It’s not the only one…there certainly are others, but it’s the one that we’ve used with good results.

I hear many people moaning that they are not earning enough money from their websites online. They had hoped that they would be obtaining more online sales or a lot more money from programs such as Google adsense after all of the online promotion that they had been doing over the previous months. In this article, I write about the bigger picture, the long term value of each site.

I have a lot of friends who are attempting to make money via the internet. Most of these people have invested in a number of websites which they are hoping will earn them a decent monthly income via adsense. They have spent a lot of time in attempting to drive traffic to these sites by way of writing articles and by other forms of website promotion. What I am finding however is that they are hoping for instant results and have a lack of patience. This time of the year (the summer), there are a lot less people who are willing to spend long periods on their computers due to the heat and the fact that a lot of them are going away on their summer vacation. Earnings from adsense are always likely to be reduced during these periods for these obvious reasons.

My friends do not seem to accept or understand this however and see all of the hours spent in promoting their sites as a waste of their precious time. Another aspect which has greatly annoyed and frustrated a lot of my friends is the fact that they are seeing no movement in the page rank of their sites. In the last two page rank updates Google has seemingly only updated the page rank of new sites, and my friends were hoping that all of their hard work would be rewarded with an increase in the visible page rank of some of their sites. This again is a lack of patience and is very short sighted. The backward links that they have obtained should have already resulted in an increase in traffic to their sites and they should not be so obsessed with this page rank issue. No doubt in time Google will update the rank of all of the sites and to stop promoting each site now would be foolish.

I also see each of my own websites as an investment. I would of course love to be able to earn quite a lot of money from them today but I am seeing it as a long term project. If I continue to work hard the traffic will steadily increase and within a few years the search engine position of each of my sites should be a lot higher than they are today.

The portfolio of sites that I own, also have a market value. If I wanted to, I could sell them and surely the more work I put in to promote each site, the higher this market value should be.

I got an email the other day from a student of mine who wanted to know why his online sales letters were bombing. When I took a look at his strategy, the answer was obvious.

You see, what he was doing was sending a long-winded sales email that then sent them to a website with a long copy sales letter.

And I told him to take his email, chop it down into one or two sentences and then send them to his website.

In other words, send out a short email briefly describing the benefit of what you are selling in an enticing and teasing way...and let that send them to your long sales letter.

Reason why this works so well is because if your short copy does its job -- gets them interested and wanting to know more -- it will be much easier for them to take the time to read your long copy letter without clicking away or getting distracted.

In fact, people who make it to your letter with this strategy will be more likely to stay. They will be interested. And when you're talking to people interested in what you're saying there is no such thing as "too long" of copy.

It's true.

We know this because studies have shown time and again that with a long copy message readership falls off dramatically after 50 words. But between 50 words and 1,000 words there’s hardly any drop off at all.

The people who don’t care will weed themselves off. The people who do care will want to learn everything they can.

So really, when it comes to selling online, it's all about how much information a person needs to buy and getting that information to them in a way that is easy for them to read, digest and respond to. In fact, one person I read put it this way: