Happy Birthday Sophia Zhao!

Our Half Chinese, Half French (haha, well she is studying French now!) colleague Sophia Zhao had her birthday today (on the Solar Calendar)

We celebrated with some flowers and photos, she was very happy and it brightened her day! Go Sophia, enjoy French classes and your trip to France!

Day 2 of the Internet Marketing Trade Show in Shenzhen China

Been a busy couple days here in Shenzhen, China office! We have been preparing for the Internet Trade show for a while now. We have a large saleslion logo and other items here to proudly display our product.

The sales and marketing department has been here each day, while our technology department Tommy Tang and Bas Sluitman paid a visit yesterday, Bas will also be here later this afternoon. They have a big deadline coming after the weekend and have been working late and harder then ever.

The majority of the companies showing here are b2c Chinese domestic companies. During the open forum they discussed the big opportunity in China will be B2C vertical markets. Niche product sites selling unique and focused goods, covering all industries and further extending the development of the chinese internet environment. I have also seens dating websites, C2c “outsourcing” connnecting freelancers to small businesses, and b2b

More pictures coming soon, cameraphones havebeen flashing from staff and friends for days.

B2C Trade Merchant - Using Sales Lion

How would a b2c trade merchant company use saleslion?

First, whats a b2c trade merchant? I define this as a financial retail shop that is targeting consumers (households and high net worth individuals). They are usually known for cold calling and trying to set up appointments and meetings to teach potential clients the value of investing, saving, and having a strategy for their retirement.

Ok, so how would Sales Lion get them more business?

1) define what they want more of? Leads, phone numbers, emails, seminar attendees? How does this business currently handle its incoming inquiries. This will then be what they target, a page to get more leads, or emails, or seminar attendees.

2) landing page creation - working together, we’ll create a page to convert visitors, get them to understand what you’re selling, and how to get involved.

3) drive traffic to this page - obviously this is important step, but we work with keywords, online advertising, and social media. Targetting the traffic you want.

4) incoming leads go to the saleslion lead management platform. Incoming leads are sent to the queue at the admin level. As an admin, they would assign the incoming leads to select sales reps.

The sales rep logs into their account and sees the new leads. they follow up via phone, email, or any other communication medium they prefer. As they move through the sales funnel, they assign these leads to different statuses. Once a lead closes, he/she (sales rep) closes it for the amount it went down for.

Development, Coding, Management and Cultures

After three months of super fast development to get our product up and running it is now time to do major bug tracking organizing code and documenting the system.

We have been working hard to get where we are but also see still some bugs in the technology and we need to reorganize and do a spring cleaning of the servers. The type of rapid development we do has advantages and also its disadvantages. In order to develop fast we have implemented a couple of  “Gung Ho” tactics. These allow us to speed things up but also means we need to control things pretty tight. QC is key in this part of the development process and this is one of the reasons  why Marco joined our team.

Being a very talented and experienced programmer Marco is doing an audit of the code and assisting Tommy and me to clean and reorganize.

Working with people in different places all over the world is always interesting especially to see different programming methods. An advantage of this is that we can see the positives and negatives of both cultures and learn how to manage these in different ways. Learning to develop fast and hard in China to get our system ready for sales, using the expertise and knowledge of an experienced programmer like Marco to identify key pieces of our code and database will tweak our system and make it more efficient and scalable for the future.

So now we have people working in Finland, The Netherlands and China with people offering to help us sell in Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and the US. And with people working in the Philippines is is starting to become an interesting and complex project to manage.

This means we have to start implementing methods all creative minds and technical talents hate. Standard Operating Procedures, Workflows and strict project management!! We have been working on this for several weeks now and processes are starting to get more organized.

Especially for the people working outside of the China office it is sometimes hard to know who to contact and what the right procedure is etc…

Anyway we are implementing new methods and learning every day.

Thanks to everybody in the DBRShenzhen Team ! Keep up the good work !!

Saleslion Online Marketing Seminar

DBRshenzhen had its first seminar on June 5, 2009 at Intercontinental Hotel Shenzhen to officially introduce Saleslion into China. The event was also set up with the goal to give more online marketing information, about how the trendy internet goes, how to improve online marketing promotion, how the social media impact the commercial business, etc.

There were about 60 guests attended our event. Everyone was quite active and raised up lots of question about online marketing and Saleslion product, how it helped them. Saleslion team was very active as well, which gave a deep impression to the audience.    

new online offer network opened - bizual

Today I received an email that Bizual.com was taken out of private beta and now available to all for its public beta.

This system is pretty cool, and best of all, its free!

Create an account that will be your personal as well as business profile.
You can then talk a bit about yourself, but mainly your company and your product or service.
Upload images of yourself and the company
make an offer!

usually offer some sort of special incentive or offer for people to take you up on.

The userbase can then “take up your offer” and you receive their request in your profile inbox to follow up later.

The system has feedback and points as well, to self-serve the winners and losers.

check our saleslion offer there!

What I feel is interesting here is the fact that again, FACE, a person, is the driver here. People on the internet, more and more, want a human being behind the product or service they are looking for. They want to know it is someone they feel they can trust.

Just more on the trending social media.

New Interface

We have been working hard to get the new dashboard interface ready for the Finnish website. There where some issues we did not expect because of the language. But the dashboard if going live today.

Keep you posted on the tech side of things

Sales Lion received funding from Finnish government!

Good news!

Sales Lion got funding from Finnish government, Tekes. Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation is the main government financing and expert organisation for research and technological development in Finland. More on http://www.tekes.fi/eng/tekes/

4th Shenzhen Internet Summit

The 4th Chinese, Shenzhen Internet Summit was held in Holiday Inn on May 26, 2009. There were lots of internet technology and IT related companies attended.

CEO of Saleslion, Michael Michelini spoke about “social media today”, twitter, facebook, blog, linkedin. Internet has been developing fast in China these years, but somehow is still a bit lower than USA or Europe. Social Media has been playing a key role on how to help you marketing and branding your service and products.

Here are some pics:

Why YOU need Facebook!

Does your business have a BRAND? duh, of course it does. There are millions of eyeballs on facebook, all day, surfing, chatting, looking for friends and dates - then you should get some of that “eye time”

While there may not be many direct clicks and inquiries coming immediately from this channel of facebook, it does drive branding. You can use your company logo on the site, and target demographics.

looking for 25 year old males in Canada who like hockey?
No problem - facebook can get your ads to that market. and those impressions!

Pay only for clicks, you’ll get your money’s worth.

Facebook is worth a look, and a try. so we advise using some of your budget there.

Want to advertise on facebook, and have the connection with your other online media advertisement channels? SalesLion understands your needs. We will build your marketing message and drive traffic to your landing page , then talk to one of our specialists today.