Revolutionary Marketing and Sales Strategies

Upcoming "Boosting Executive Level Relationships Across Verticals" Webcast

As many of you know, I host a webcast every so often (whenever it tickles my fancy), around the theme of "Boosting Executive Level Relationships Across Verticals".

On October 13th from 2-3pm Eastern Time, I will have, as my special guest, David Nour, Managing Partner of The Nour Group.  David is THE absolute authority on the subject of Relationship Economics™, The Art and Science of Relationships. Below is an event flyer with more details:

Download NourAppearance101305.pdf

This should prove to be a well-attended webcast as it has relevance across-the-board.  My guess is that we'll have more attendees than we have room for on the webcast.  As a result, this is an event that requires an RSVP to confirm your attendance.  RSVP by emailing me at sjones@executive-link.com.  Once you confirm, within 48 business hours you'll receive the web and audio access codes needed to participate.

Stay tuned as we are going to be having some absolutely incredible guests on the webcast in the near future.

Selling to Multiple Decision Makers

Article contributed by Renee Walkup, CEO of SalesPEAK and author of her recently released book Selling To Anyone Over The Phone 
 

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In this article, you will learn how to:

1. Have a strategy for selling to multiple decision-makers
2. Identify those who are your internal "coaches"
3. Use hints, tips, and ideas that will help you close more business!

Would you ever consider purchasing a new car without asking a family member or a friend to look at it with you? Probably not. Now think for a moment about your buyers. Most buyers today don't make decisions by themselves even when they have the authority, the need, and the money to buy.

Why not? The reason is risk-adverse buyers want to insure that they are making the right decision for their companies. Sometimes your customers may even worry that a wrong buying decision may cost them their job! So to close more sales, become an expert in selling to multiple decision makers-reducing the customers risk and increasing your likelihood of closing the sale. Here's how to go about it, using the acronym CLOSE.

C = Contact all of the possible decision makers involved. First, find out who you need to contact. Ask this specific question.  "Who else is going to get involved in the decision and what is the decision process?"  Then be quiet, while the customer talks.  Now go and contact everyone who is involved and focus on what is important to them, as individuals.  It's OK to contact the buyers using  personal appointments, telephone, e-mail, fax, and snail mail.
L = Learn as much about the buyers as possible. Begin building relationships with each of the buyers immediately.  Use your skills as an interpersonal relationship-building expert and match their personalities to generate trust and a desire to do business with you.  Uncover their wants, needs, and goals, so that you can put the best spin on your product with each buyer.  This will help you create a trusting relationship with them so that you'll have the support that you need to close the sale.
O = Organize your sales strategy. Once you have uncovered each individual's needs and goals, start tailoring your presentation.  For example, if you have an analytical person on the buying committee, provide him/her with back up statistics, testimonial letters, white papers, and more.  They may need to use or see a demo, visit one of your customer's sites, or conduct research on their own.  They need detail, so be prepared!
S = Set up success. Rally your supporters behind you.  Make sure that those who are most vocal will speak for you when you aren't in the room.  You want the most outgoing decision makers your advocates so that they'll sell your product to their colleagues.  The quieter people on the committee may support you, but they won't speak up for you.
E = Energize your buyers. Motivate the decision-makers by being consistent and congruent with exceptional follow up.  People do business with people they like and trust, so share your enthusiasm and desire to work with the buyers.  Keep in mind the 80/20 rule.  People like to hear themselves talk, so encourage your buyers to talk while you listen 80% of the time.  If they like you, believe me, you'll get your turn!

Finally, to close business with multiple decision makers, just remember the last time you bought a car and brought someone with you to check out the car's sound system, sink into the seats, and offer their opinion on the color. Your customers are going through the same process, so make it easy and enjoyable for them to buy from YOU!
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©Renee P. Walkup, 2005.  Renee Walkup is a nationally recognized professional executive coach, speaker, and author. She is President of SalesPEAK, Inc., and works with Fortune 500’s, such as The Coca-Cola Company, Charles Schwab, and CNN, as well as those companies in smaller and mid-sized markets. Renee’s monthly sales newsletters are available by registering through her website, www.salespeak.com and she can be contacted at: walkup@salespeak.com or 678 587-9911.

New look and feel for Revolutionary Marketing and Sales Strategies

Dear Valued Subscribers,

I heard from many of you about the readability of the template used previously.  Plus I had gotten into more complex HTML coding than my capabilities allow.

Today is the start of a new look and feel for Revolutionary Marketing and Sales Strategies.

Don't forget to do your part and voice your opinion in our latest poll.  Results will be interpreted and posted in about a month, whenever we get a large enough sample size.

Enjoy,

Scott

Poll Results - Executive Suite Access

Months ago we began a poll where we asked the readership a simple multiple-choice question.  The question was:

What is the #1 reason top-level executives give for the reason they grant a salesperson access?

Here are the results:

• 15% said "Reputation of selling organization"
• 82% said "Ability of salesperson to demonstrate they understand their issues"
• 3% said "Executive understands the features and functionality of the offering"

Thanks to everyone who participated. 

My hope is that this is of tremendous value to those organizations that are trying to adopt a consultative sales approach and sell at the executive level. 

Marketing - it's your job to ensure that your messaging will resonate to reflect this finding and that you do everything in your power to get your Sales team prepared for what they need.

Sales - this will require more focused work than you're accustomed to but productivity will shoot through the roof

A new poll has just been started addressing sales training gaps.  Look in the right-hand toolbar.  I'd like to encourage maximum participation.

Chris Selland's Musings on Oracle / Siebel

As always I am anxious to hear Chris Selland's take on anything enterprise software related, but especially CRM.  Here is a piece he wrote on Oracle's acquisition of Siebel the other day:

Chris Selland's Weblog - Advice, opinion and perspective on customers, technology and the evolution of social technology, enterprise software and CRM (as well as anything else I feel like writing about).

Selling With Stories

Article Contributed by Mark Satterfield, CEO of Gentle Rain Marketing, LLC
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Let me tell you a quick story. Perhaps you will find it relevant.

In the early 1990s Fortune magazine decided to do an article on selling. The question they set out to answer was:

Why were some people so good at selling while others so blatantly bad?

To find out the answer the writers interviewed 24 top sales performers across a broad spectrum of fields. Among those who were interviewed were financial advisors, insurance producers, executive recruiters and a wide variety of consultants and high-value services providers. Here is what they learned:

• The most successful sales people sell without it ever being apparent that they are in fact, selling. There was nothing obvious or obnoxious about their presentation. No Trial Close or Ben Franklin Close. They sold, but they sold invisibly.
• Moreover the Fortune article concluded that the more you are marketing and selling high-value services the more important it is to be able to sell invisibly.

So what exactly does this mean? How did the top performers go about building trust and credibility? How did they overcome often deep-seated skepticism? How did they persuade others to their point of view?

The one thing in common was, they all told stories.

Lots of stories. Stories that demonstrated how others had successfully achieved results by using their services. Stories that preemptively addressed objections or concerns. Stories that made it easy for others to refer them to their friends and colleagues. Stories that built credibility and reduced skepticism.

So, what is your marketing story? If you have not yet developed one, or think that what you are using now could use some punch, perhaps I can help.

Visit Marketing With Stories website @ http://www.marketingwithstories.com for more information.

Oracle Swallows Siebel

The long awaited event has finally occured.

The Siebel acquisition probably makes more sense for Oracle than, for instance, Salesforce.com.

Why?  You have to understand Oracle's business model.

If you've ever been a technology solution provider and looking to partner with the likes of an Oracle, SAP, IBM, most of the Big 4, you are flat out told that if your solution is easy and inexpensive to implement they will not partner with you, no matter how much value could be delivered to their clients.  A fast, seamless implementation is not in their best interest ... they want service revenue dollars.  Oracle would never acquire a Salesforce.com, for instance, because their implementations have a reputation for being fairly quick, seamless and don't require a substantial services investment.  On the other hand Siebel has a reputation for long, expensive, never-ending, CFOs- getting-fired implementations ... hey, that sounds like Oracle too. 

I will say that the lone exception to this rule that I have experienced is Accenture (proud to say my old firm too).  Accenture used to have this same philosophy, and I'm sure to a certain degree this is still true ... hey, it's a business with stockholders.  However, knowing many of the top Partners over there that philosophy is changing ... changing for the better.  The philosophy that I see them adopting is that there are some cases where providing the best, most effective solution for the client is more important than the short-term revenue.  Boiling it down ... happy clients equal retained clients and the cost of acquiring new ones is high.

Financially this has to be a good deal for Siebel shareholders though. Oracle seems to be much better at making and managing money.  Siebel has about $2 billion in cash.  Based on past performance I'd rather have Oracle manage my money, with operating margins of 37%, than Siebel, whose operating margins are a paltry 7%.

Ebay Buys Skype - now the hard part for sellers

Article Contributed by Adam Shapiro of Customer-Centric Selling

In case you haven’t heard, EBay is buying Skype, a provider of voice over IP technology – basically, placing phone calls over the internet. The public statements from EBay have focused on the need to deepen conversations on a per-transaction basis which they say would help some long-cycle complex sales a great deal.

So, how do you deepen complex sales conversations? Let’s start with who those EBay sellers will be talking to. Geoffrey Moore, in Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, describes the market of potential buyers for most products as made up of early adopters (20%) and the Mainstream Market (80%).

Early adopters are largely enthusiasts who either love to buy the latest, hottest thing because 1) they want to be seen as “cool” or because it makes them feel good or 2) they intuitively understand how to use products to meet their goals or overcome some issue or problem.

The Mainstream market, however, needs to understand methodically how to use an item, they want proof that it performs as promised, and they want to know that the benefits ($ or Intrinsic) they will see outweigh the costs. Why do most browsers - real life ones, not Explorer or Mozilla – look, but not bid or buy? They don’t buy often because sellers inundate them with features that the buyer can’t map to usage. The unifying theme for these buyers needs to be USAGE. Consistently successful sellers are those that can lead buyers to understand, “How can I use this item to improve my life – reach goals, overcome issues, solve problems?”

Since the large majority of the market is in the latter Mainstream group, it would be smart for EBay’s sellers to try to guide their inevitable (if you listen to EBay) Skype powered, internet-based, sales conversations along the lines of how the Mainstream Market buys. They will need to accomplish three things on these calls:

1. Build a Vision of Use in the buyer’s mind
2. Distill the value the buyer will derive from the item or the financial hardship that will occur if they fail to use the item, and
3. Show how the buyer can implement the SOLUTION, without significantly impacting the derived value of the item.

If the EBay sellers know their products, they should be able to build usage-based conversation models ahead of time and practice before getting on that internet phone. If they fail to, they may have a lot of bits going back and forth about what they are selling, but no BITES.

Outdated Sales Training

I have many, many friends in the sales training business, who I think perform a great service for their clients.  I'm not sure who amoung sales training organizations are teaching people to use the prospect's name often because people like hearing their name.  This tactic a) gives professional sales folks a bad rap, b) is based on incorrect and/or outdated studies, c) in general pisses consumers off.

Whoever is teaching this please STOP.

Last night I got a call from a company selling water purification systems (Rainbird I think) ... probably a fine product.  However, this guy went on and on and on and on, etc..  He must have said Mr. Jones 20 freakin' times during the conversation.  Say it one time at the introduction and NEVER again.  I get it that you know who I am.

Cold callers are infamous for this tactic and as a consumer I just can't bear any more.  So if you're a Sprint, MCI, Verizon, BellSouth, AT&T, the local newspaper (at least on their B2C side) ... anyone who cares about the reputation of your company or one of the schmucks that teaches this stuff ... STOP!!! Learn something new, please.

Sorry ... that's what only 1-hour of sleep will do. 

Great White Paper - Rule Three

Article contributed by: Laurie Hood, VP of Marketing @ KnowledgeStorm

White papers are one of the most misunderstood, miswritten and misused marketing tools available. As I mentioned in my last post, there are several ways to ensure that a white paper delivers the results you expect. This post will cover Rule Three - "Follow the 3-30-3 Rule."  Upcoming posts will present other straightforward techniques that will turn your next white paper into a valuable competitive differentiator that supports and augments the sales process.

RULE Three - Follow the 3-30-3 Rule

Effective “short form” writing –- that is, writing that can’t take a novel’s worth of time to make an impression and accomplish an objective –- follows the 3-30-3 rule. This applies to great magazine articles, advertisements, brochures, press releases, business letters, web sites and hundreds of other short form formats, including your white paper.

It works like this: You must earn a browsing prospect’s interest within the first three seconds of glancing at your piece. In his bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell cites the latest research in neuroscience and psychology in support of how and why most people make “snap decisions” within the first few seconds of observing something. Decisions are made through a series of thought subsets, or “thin slicing,” and often the most important information leading to the best decisions comes from the very first “slice” of thinking. In three seconds of glancing at your white paper, a prospect will make the first “snap”judgment about your company: do you have something meaningful to say, and are you a credible source?

If you use your three seconds well, readers will move on to the next thinslice of their decision, and grant you 30 more seconds. In that time they will decide whether or not your message deserves more calculated consideration. Here, the first few paragraphs are key. A powerfully written introduction that speaks to the reader about his or her business need, and delivers the payoff of opportunity or improvement that can be gained through manageable and well-defined action, is absolutely necessary to win the next slice of the prospect’s time. Remember, you must do this quickly. You have only 30 seconds of reading time.

Assuming you’ve written a succinct, on-target introduction, your prospect now will grant you three more minutes to make your point. Here’s where many white papers fall apart. No matter how complex your product or service, no matter how challenging the business issue is, you need to build your case in the first three minutes. If you get more time, great. But don’t create a white paper that needs ten minutes’ time to make its point.

How do you make a complex point in three minutes?

• Remember to talk about business problems from the reader’s perspective, not products from your perspective.
• Honor the old adage that people who buy shovels don’t want shovels; they want to make holes or fill in holes as quickly and easily as possible.
• Make key points with devices other than body copy. Use illustrations showing the cycle from problem to solution.
• Graph statistics on the problem and the benefit of solving it.
• Use “display type” to showcase quotes from industry analysts, scientific experts or research studies.
• Segment your body copy with subheads that make the main point of the paragraphs to follow.

This information was created by The Content Factor and KnowledgeStorm to help companies better understand the importance of white papers and how they can be a more effective marketing tool. You can read the full paper on KnowledgeStorm (registration required).

Relationships Are King

Most of my writings revolve around executive level relationships.  My experience has been that whoever owns the executive/decision-maker relationship will win in most cases, or at minimum, be given the inside track to win or lose the deal.  While product and service differentiation are important, all things equal, it is the relationship with the right person that is the biggest determinant of outcome. 

That said, "no" you cannot have a bad quality product and poor service ... nothing will overcome that.  If that's a situation someone finds themselve's in, it's time to make a move ... fast, as your reputation will quickly follow where you plant your feet.

The relationship I'm talking about here is not golf buddies or lunch partners.  In order to establish this type of relationship with a senior-level exec, you must add value to that person.  Maybe in the old days, golf and lunch used to work ... not anymore.