Google Penguin 4.0 Live - What You Need To Know

Earlier today, Google announced the launch of Penguin 4.0 as a core part of their algorithm. We've been on the lookout for this release for most of this year. The rumors and news from Google about launch dates, how it might work, and other details have been like reading a tabloid. 

We have done a lot of prep work, including Penguin Awareness Month, evolving our product, and bundling tools like the Link Audit feature into our product for no charge. Read on for more information about Penguin 4.0 and frequently asked questions.

Key features:

• Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the Internet, many of Google's algorithms would take that into consideration quickly, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin's data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we're not going to comment on future refreshes.


• Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

What Is The Penguin Algorithm?

First introduced in April 2012, the Penguin update was created to target sites that used “spammy” tactics and manipulative practices that violate the Google webmaster guidelines.

The last update was in the Fall of 2014 and sites impacted by that update have been waiting two years for another update.

Is It Still Rolling Out?

Yes, and it is expected to be fully rolled out in a couple weeks.

It is now a real-time part of Google’s core search algorithm, which means that once it fully rolls out, it will be a constant process rather than periodic updates, as it's been previously.

Google:

• With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page.

If rankings are fine now, do we think there will be any more changes?

No one will know the impact until it has fully rolled out.

Once it rolls out, it will be a real-time part of the core algorithm.

Keep in mind that Google is constantly making changes to its algorithm to improve the user experience, so with Penguin now as part of the core algorithm, it is more important than ever to ensure that your links are following quality guidelines.

If rankings have gone down, what should we do?

Don’t panic. It will still be rolling out for the next couple weeks. We have already seen some client’s ranking bounce around and then settle back into their previous position.

Identify and Remove Clogs in Your Sales Pipeline

Lead nurturing is essential for moving dentists through the sales pipeline. With targeted emails, relevant content, and social media interaction, you can encourage dentists to take the next step in the buying process. There's a lot that can go wrong with the sales pipeline, so it's important to find the source of the problem rather than trying to fix its leaks with band-aids. Dental Lab Sales pipeline management isn't a perfect system. Even with a great strategy, your pipeline will get clogged from time to time. When this happens, it's important to identify the cause, find a solution, and prevent the same problem from happening again. In the end, you'll find that you have to do regular maintenance to keep your sales pipeline healthy. 

Keep a healthy pipeline with relevant leads 

The single most important factor in regard to sales pipeline management is lead quality. To attract new customers to your business and move them along through the sales process, you need to market exclusively to your target audience. 

Irrelevant leads are the most common source of sales pipeline clogs. Because these dentists aren't interested in your products, they just sit at the beginning of your pipeline until you remove them. 

This Business 2 Community article explains the process of qualifying prospects. According to the article, it's essential to first identify your target audience:

"Qualifying prospects is at the heart of a healthy lead generation system. First, you need to paint a clear picture of the types of prospects that fit with each of your solutions. Doing so establishes the types of buyers that could flow through your pipeline in the most efficient way. When you know who to target, you qualify by asking questions that allow you to detect whether a buyer fits well into your pipeline."

Lead nurturing tactics won't be effective if you're trying to convert irrelevant leads. In this respect, the first step of the journey is the most important one. 

Align your marketing and sales teams 

It's well-known that marketing and sales teams don't exactly mesh well together. Each team sees itself as the more important counterpart and is therefore unwilling to compromise. 

It's up to lab management to get these teams to understand that they're part of a dynamic duo. A marketing campaign would be ineffective without a sales team, and sales representatives would never have any opportunities without a solid marketing campaign. 

In this light, aligning your marketing and sales teams should be your first priority. According to this Forbes article, you can do this by creating a service level agreement between the two departments: 

"If you haven’t noticed yet, integrating your marketing and sales departments is vital if you want a contribution from your marketers in the sales pipeline. You can encourage these departments by drafting a service level agreement (SLA). The SLA should describe the lead requirements like the target market and interest, the marketing contribution to the sales pipeline, support options, and how data and content will be shared."

It's a give and take. Don't expect perfect coordination overnight, but you also want to nip bad habits from the very start. 

Move Dentists along with lead nurturing 

Once you refocus your lead generation strategy and align your marketing and sales teams, you can move on to other matters in relation to the sales pipeline. At this point, you should at least have a steady stream of dentists coming in. 

While some businesses have a knack for generating leads, it's rare to see a company naturally good at converting them. If you fall into this category, then you should concentrate on lead nurturing. 

For more information visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099.

Improve Customer Retention with Personalization, Content & Surveys

It's impossible to understate the importance of customer retention. Not only are returning dentists cheaper than new ones, but they also represent long-term success in regard to your dental lab. Building customer loyalty isn't easy, but you can get started with these techniques:

Send personalized emails 

Email is the most effective platform when it comes to improving customer retention. Unlike social media, you can send personalized messages to individual users based on their order history and preferences. 

The mistake most dental labs make is sending cookie cutter messages out to the entire subscriber list. Dentists can spot these emails from a mile away, and most won't even open them.  

This recent Iamwire article talks about the strategy of personalizing emails. According to the article, just sending a simple birthday message can lay the foundation for customer loyalty: 

"Most marketing emails begin with the standard robotic messages that don’t involve any amount of personalization. Starting emails by addressing the person with his/her name not only creates a higher recall value for the customer but also shows them how much the brand cares about/ remembers them. Wishing customers on special occasions such as their birthdays or gently reminding them when they have not checked out from their cart and the likes is a great way to keep them engaged with an eCommerce platform."

Personalization makes all the difference in regard to email marketing. While robotic messages will inspire users to unsubscribe from your campaign, individualized ones will stand out to users and increase engagement. 

Create content that doesn't directly promote your dental lab

Promotion usually does more harm than good in the context of online marketing. The general rule of thumb is that if it's not on your website, then the content shouldn't directly promote your business. 

In regard to customer retention, you shouldn't even come close to promoting your products. Instead, you should create content with the goal of engaging and informing your customers. This Forbes article explains how relevant content balances your marketing efforts and build customer retention: 

"On our blog, we share content that reflects what our values are as a brand. This gives us credibility on a range of topics that goes beyond our product. New product announcements, employee features, and event recaps aren’t enough. That’s still relevant content to share, but to build retention and bring balance, it’s important that we publish articles that go beyond promoting our company directly."

This is the type of content you should share on social media and in your marketing emails. It should educate customers about your industry so they can get more out of their products and services. The better their understanding, the more likely they'll return to your business. 

Create customer surveys 

Customer surveys serve two important purposes in regard to customer retention. For one, they remind customers of your business relationship. If nothing else, they'll at least keep you in contact with your target audience. 

In addition, customer surveys also demonstrate that you're serious about your brand experience. You're asking customers for feedback with the intention of improving your business operations. If you actually take the steps to incorporate their suggestions in your strategy, then they'll see your dedication to customers first-hand. 

Creating customer surveys is fast and easy. You can include a link in your emails and on your social media profiles. The more exposure you give your surveys the better, since you want to get as many responses as possible. 

Improving customer retention takes years of patience, practice, and planning. You won't build customer loyalty overnight, but you can make great progress by executing the techniques mentioned here. To talk more about customer retention, or anything else, contact us today 1.888.715.9099 or visit DentalLabSupport.com 

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What’s A Sales Pipeline Anyway? (And How It Impacts Sales Results)

Sales pipeline — a term that gets thrown around so much, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s an empty catchphrase that simply makes salespeople who use it look like sales professionals. But your sales management operations can benefit from using a sales pipeline, and it could make a significant difference to your bottom line.

“It’s not a matter of whether you’ll get improvements. It’s just a matter of how much,” said Mark McInnes, who was recognized by LinkedIn as Australia’s No. 1 social seller and serves as an execution coaching partner at Sydney-based SalesITV.

A sales pipeline is a visual and systematic approach to selling a product or service. It allows salespeople to get a grasp of exactly where their money, deals, and other sales efforts are at all times (we’ll dive more into the pipeline below).

McInnes spoke about a client who wasn’t using a sales pipeline, and as a result, they had “little or no stats at all” about how effective their sales process was and whether their business was headed in the right direction.

But, once he implemented a sales pipeline into his business, McInnes recalled:

“Just having that level of visibility and accountability helped manage everyone’s deals and quotas. That was their best year ever.”

Sales experts explain the sales pipeline

A sales pipeline can be compared to your doctor doing a blood test.

“You can read a lot into what’s wrong and what’s right about you, and it enables the management to apply the right fixes to make a ‘sick’ company healthy,” said David P. Wallace, who has more than 30 years of sales and marketing experience and serves as the principal and founding partner of the New York-based Sales Management Group.

A sales pipeline can also be seen as a funnel that contains a set of opportunities the salesperson has identified. As more and more of those opportunities, or leads, move throughout the funnel, the salesperson is able to determine which ones will close.

“Leads and opportunities go to the top of the pipe and move down the pipe as the deal gets closer to closing,” McInnes said. A great way to store these deals is to allocate different sections. You might have a ‘lead’ or ‘opportunity’ or ‘discovery phase’ or ‘negotiations’, and the last one would be ‘close’ or ‘follow-up.’ You put your deals on the left side of the pipeline, and you slowly move them through the pipeline as you interact with customers, until they close.”

As you move through the different stages of your pipeline or funnel, the chances of a deal closing increase. Maybe they show interest and the chance goes up to 30%, then you do a demo for them and the chance goes up to 60%. By the time the lead reaches the narrowest end of the funnel, when you agree on all the terms of the deal, you’ll have a 100% chance to close it.

Pipeline visibility increases your bottom line

The visibility a sales pipeline provides serves as the foundation to increasing your company’s bottom line.

A sales pipeline is close to most salespeople’s hearts because it’s where all of their money sits.

“But many companies don’t prioritize proper management of that potential money,” said Michelle Seger, executive director and global practice lead at Atlanta-based SalesGlobe, where she helps companies from around the world improve their sales results.

“Companies don’t know what their possibilities are,” Seger said. If you can actually look at your activities, how long they’ve been there and what are your conversion rates, it tells you where you are and what’s not working.”

Setting up your pipeline

The sales pipeline can be constructed in various ways — sticky notes or an Excel spreadsheet. But if you have a complex or long sales cycle, you may want to use a CRM for efficiency. It’ll allow you to link contacts to deals, integrate email correspondence, see data insight in real time, automate tasks that will keep you on top of your game, and more.

1. Set stages: As the sales pipeline is built around your sales cycle, or all of the steps you take to close a deal, the first step would be to sort out the stages in your ideal pipeline so you can get your deals moving properly.

Depending on your industry, those stages may vary, but they might be:

• Idea
• Contact Made
• Needs Discovered
• Proposal Presented
• In Negotiation
• Close

2. Calculate goals: It’s important to have an idea of how many deals you win on average, at any stage, so you’ll know whether you are on track to success — at any given moment. This insight into your conversion rates tests your sales process, evaluates whether your sales team is performing at the level you need them to, and exposes where you have very specific needs, according to Seger. “Salespeople look at it as very daunting, but it’s not. It’s an untapped opportunity of looking at performance and what the needs are, and the data is right there,” she added.

This visibility allows a sales rep to know where they should be spending their time. McInnes explained that it’s especially important due to the diverse activities that happen in a salesperson’s day.

“Salespeople spend 13-20% of their time actually selling, and the rest of the time doing other activities — administration, email, social media,” he said. “You have to make certain activities to make your goals. Knowing how many you need to make for every quarter is very important, and if you can manage it on a daily, you can meet your target.”

Seger agreed, saying it’s easy to get lost in the activities without pipeline visibility.

“A sales pipeline provides an accurate framework for how a sales rep can manage his or her time. It provides a snapshot of all the opportunities they work on, and what‘s taking too long or what they need to do. Pipeline visibility helps your sales reps focus on what’s real,” Seger said. It also helps sales managers understand “where reps are spending their time.”

3. Build momentum: When you’re moving your deals stage-to-stage, it’s important to cite what factors help you advance your deal, so you can focus on performing those activities and continue to keep deals flowing in. It could be sending a written proposal, identifying the stakeholders, or getting a budget approved — there’s an event at each stage that moves the deal along.

You can’t control results, but constantly focusing on these activities will inevitably lead to better results.

“Pipeline visibility gives you the ability to look at statistics — how many calls, emails and meetings you’ve had with prospects,” McInnes said. “You can quickly see if you’re falling behind and need to do more, and that’s what’s going to keep you accountable and help you make your quarter.”

Seger said pipeline visibility will also show you the obstacles that stand in the way of moving forward with a deal. In each stage of the pipeline, there’s a “pivotal decision to make — if we’re going to go the next stage,” she said.

Knowing why a deal is stalling and how long it’s been in your pipeline so far helps you make that pivotal decision.

4. Find a routine: A sales pipeline helps you see where multiple deals stand, so it’s easier to manage them and remember which steps you need to take to close many more deals.  Activities that add new deals to your pipeline need to be part of your routine — daily or weekly, depending on your business.

If you have a three-month sales cycle, for instance, and you’re only working on one deal at a time, you can only sell four times a year. You need to fill the sales pipeline with as many deals as you can, so you’re closing business every day or every week instead of every three months.

“If you fill your pipeline, you can have a regular stream of business that’s closing, which means a regular stream of commission checks,” Wallace said.

Multitask and know where your next deal will come from

Having a sales pipeline will allow you to make smarter business decisions to obtain success throughout your entire company.

“Pipeline visibility is a key management tool primarily because the pipeline is what drives a lot of business decisions across the organization, not just in sales. It has ramifications for production, marketing, HR,” Wallace said.

“If you don’t have the right visibility, you don’t know how many resources to have on board or how much cash you’re going to have,” he said. “Without a pipeline visibility it’s difficult to manage a business.”

McInnes added that sales pipeline visibility is critical to your entire business.

“If you don’t have a clear picture,” he said, “you’re not in control of your business, and that’s pretty crazy.”