Revolutionary Marketing and Sales Strategies

Putting Technology In Perspective

Technology has certainly done wonders for all of us in the Sales and Marketing professions.  Personally I love technology and using the latest and greatest tools.  I use many of them and have extracted a ton of value from them.  In fact. I've written about the underutilization of great sales and marketing tools.

At some point though, we (including me) need to get back to a more balanced approach.  Balanced between people, process and technology ... almost on a 1/3 : 1/3 : 1/3 basis.

I was watching a 60 Minutes segment with Prince Charles this past Sunday and something he said struck a chord with me.  He made a statement along that lines that in many regards technology has destroyed our socialization skills, our sense of human-ness.  My thought was that technology didn't do this but the way in which we use, and rely upon, technology has.

In the people/process/technology triad, my experience is that the people part of that equation is the most important part AND it has been the first-to-go as we become more technology reliant.  This applies equally, if not more so, at the management level than at the individual contributor level. Additionally, people skills are the most difficult to master and improve upon.  Whenever I don't feel like trying to work on "people" guess what I do?  I play around with technology.  So much so that my 1/3:1/3:1/3 balance is tilted way too much toward technology.

The challenge is getting us back to a state of equilibrium.

A good friend of mine, Kevin Ashworth, sent this to me the other day.  It talks a little bit about how relationships and friends used to be such an integral part of our lives:
Download TO_ALL_THE_KIDS_WHO_SURVIVED.doc (24.5K)

When Meeting Customer Needs is Not Enough - Part B

Article contributed by Barry Rosen, President of The Pursuit Group
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When it comes to “meeting customer needs,” top performers implement a structured and consistent program for identifying customer needs, then use this insight to generate solutions.   We call such a program Solutioneering.

Please note:  Solutioneering is not market research, where marketplace intelligence is gathered to identify new products and services for development.  Rather, Solutioneering is the organized practice of understanding an individual customer’s business issues – including those issues that don’t directly relate to your product or service – and aggregating a set of solutions that will make a difference for that customer and others with like needs.

 

An example:  ABC, Inc. has a network of service locations and couriers across the country.  Its insurance carrier provides an array of driver safety training that can reduce ABC’s accident rate and lower its insurance cost.  But, ABC is challenged to communicate the details, and manage compliance, for this training among its widely dispersed staff.  Through its Solutioneering effort, XYZ Insurance offers to create and administer a simple follow-up and testing program to ABC’s drivers that will increase compliance and identify additional training needs.  XYZ also creates a reporting form that it will review monthly with ABC to document progress.

In this example, Solutioneering works for XYZ on several levels.  For one, it demonstrates a clear understanding of the customer’s needs.  Secondly, it creates a meaningful differentiation between XYZ and other providers, even when the product – insurance in this case – is exactly the same.  And thirdly, it changes the comparative value proposition, forcing the buyer to evaluate purchase options on value received, rather than on price paid.

Starting an effective Solutioneering program at your organization will require a multi-discipline team that can think creatively about the customer’s needs and the solutions you could provide.  And, if your focus has traditionally been more “pushing product” than truly “meeting customer needs” you’ll need to address that first.   But it’s worth the effort.  Not only can it lead to a more loyal and profitable customer base, but effective Solutioneering may be the closest you can get to a sustainable competitive selling advantage. 

When Meeting Customer Needs is Not Enough - Part A

Article contributed by Barry Rosen, President of The Pursuit Group
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Using Solutioneering to Improve Sales Performance

Today’s sales managers typically agree that “meeting customer needs” is one of their team’s highest priorities. (In case they don’t agree, use this:  In a recent poll conducted by Revolutionary Marketing and Sales Strategies, 82% of top-level executives cited “Ability to demonstrate they understand my issues” as the number one reason for sales success.)

But what does “meeting customer needs” really mean?  And how can we do it better?

In our work with business-to-business sales organizations, we come across a wide range of perspectives for “meeting customer needs”.  Unfortunately, these perspectives are often observed in practice as “persuading customers that our product will meet their needs”. 

Highly successful sales organizations are clearly different ....

Find out how in Part B of this article which will be released on October 19th, 2005.

New, High-Powered Guest Authors

I am proud and honored to announce four incredible new guest authors to the Revolutionary Marketing and Sales Strategies weblog.  We're all looking forward to current, relevant and actionable content from these folks.  Enjoy, learn and grow:

Keith Eades - Chairman of Sales Performance International and author of two recently published books, "The New Solution Selling" and "The Solution Selling Fieldbook" 

Naras Eechambadi - CEO of Quaero, author of the soon to be released book, High Performance Marketing and on the Board of Advisors at CRMguru.com.

Renee Walkup - CEO of Salespeak and author of Selling to Anyone Over the Phone

Oreste "Rusty" D'Aversa - CEO and author of Sell More Technology NOW

Always trying to add value to my marketing and sales sisters and brethren :)

Planning your 2006 Marketing Strategy

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

As the summer ends - while many of us are still figuring out how to fill sales pipelines for Q4 - technology marketers are beginning their planning cycles for 2006. Even if your company does not do any "official" planning or budgeting, now is a great time to reflect on your 2005 programs, benchmark your performance against others in your market, educate yourself on new tactics and techniques as well as revisit the basics to begin thinking about how you will spend your time and money next year. One way to benchmark your performance is by taking a look at MarketingSherpa's IT Marketing Executive Outlook: Key Tactics to Improve Your Marketing Results Webcast to learn how other IT marketers are planning to spend their budgets in 2006. Based on what I am reading and hearing I wanted to point out some key trends in the market that you might want to consider as you start your planning.

Increase in online spend - for public relations, lead generation, branding, search engine marketing and search engine optimization. A lot of dollars are moving online with the biggest complaint being that is it hard to stand-out above all of the noise. Online marketing has grown into a multi-faceted discipline requiring a lot of specific skill sets. It is important to choose your partners wisely, leverage all of the capabilities that online brings (such as immediate feedback and access to extensive data) and view online marketing as an equal to the more traditional marketing tactics. Online is about having the reach to be where the buyers are going and deploying programs to put the right information in front of them when they get there.

Web events become as prevalent (if not more) than in-person events. Companies are leveraging the cost effectiveness of Web events. More importantly, a Web event does not have to be a one time thing. Once conducted and recorded, they can continue to be used as a lead generation vehicle and as a standard part of an organization's marketing materials.

Lead management continues to be the battleground between sales and marketing. Regardless of where you stand, all indications show marketing taking more responsibility of how leads are managed and nurtured within the sales pipeline. KnowledgeStorm has had the opportunity to do some research in this area, and we have the following resources for companies focusing on improving their lead management process: KnowledgeNote: The Fine Art of Lead Follow-Up, The Fine Art of Lead Qualification: Best Practices for Lead Responsiveness white paper and Best Practices in Lead Development, a Webcast presented by SiriusDecisions.

Key success factors will include:

• An understood and accepted definition of lead levels across the organization.
• A team (in-house, outsourced, wherever you can find the resources) to do some type of lead screening or qualification after the lead is generated and before it is passed to sales.
• Solid processes and reporting that help you identify and understand problem areas and provide you ideas with ways to fix them.
• Lead nurturing programs that support your investment in developing a lead until that company is ready to buy.
• Working as a team with sales to address this issue.

Lead generation and management is critical to your success as a company and it will take both organizations working together to make it an effective process. Networking with peers is one way to better understand what other groups are doing in this area and how you might be able to apply some of their processes within your organization. There is also a lot of research available in this area. In the end you will need to make the decisions that fit your organization the best. This is a difficult and iterative process, but one that is essential to an organization.

While there are many other challenges that marketers face, I wanted to call out a few of them and offer some suggestions on how to begin to address them.

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.

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.

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).

Deepen Your Prospect Knowledge

Exactly how well do you really know the very people you are trying to sell to?  If you can't put yourself in their shoes, you don't know them well enough.  It's called empathy.  It's hard for sales people to be empathic when they've never played the role of the person they are expected to interact with.  No ... we don't want to turn sales folks into CFO's, for instance, but if the CFO is the decision-maker, they must be able to have an intelligent conversation with them addressing their issues in a language that they understand.  Here's a link to a potential solution for B2B sales people:

Executive Link - Vertical-Specific, Role-Specific Intelligence

How To Get Motivated Buyers To Call You First (Part 2 of 2)

Becoming The Emotional Favorite

So, if being the emotional favorite means being the person the buyer want to see succeed, how do you create this relationship?

Start by asking questions about the buyer when you meet for the very first time and at the end of EVERY sales call.

Think about the last time you encountered a ‘stereotypical’ sales person, the one who immediately launches into a sales pitch. How did you react? After a minute or two, did your eyes glaze over? As the sales person drones on, you stop listening waiting for an opportunity to end the conversation. Ultimately, that sales person falls to the bottom of the list of people you call when you need something. Not where you want to be if you’re looking to become the Emotional Favorite.

Asking The Right Questions

Obviously, you’re not going to start with ‘Hi, I’m Craig. What’s your greatest challenge?’

Start with open-ended questions: Ask about how the latest government policy changes, or shifts in technology has impacted their business. Relate their business to your other industry contacts and share some of your own insights. Then you can ask about their greatest challenges and you will likely get the answers you are looking for.

Frame your questions outside your existing sales professional to prospect relationship because by default, your customer will answer in terms of your products or services. Start with “Let’s forget about what I do for ABC Company for a minute” and ask:

• What is the biggest issue you have that you just can’t get to? or,
• What is the one thing you are looking for but can’t seem to find? or,
• What issue have you tried to solve but can’t find a satisfactory solution to?

Now shut up and listen! When the buyer stops talking, wait 6 seconds and listen to what they tell you next. First they’ll tell you about the problem. If you don’t interrupt them, they will tell you how the problem impacts them and the rest of their organization.

Now you have the enough information to connect the buyer with a solution and if it’s not available through you perhaps you know a colleague who can solve the problem. If you don’t know a colleague who can solve the problem, connect the buyer with a trusted seller using a lead exchange that has a rating system for the vendors in the exchange.

What Are The Benefits Of Asking The Right Questions?

• You gain a better understanding of buyers and their organization.
• You will improve your customer relationships while buyers do not need what you sell.
• You will get more time with buyers
• You may learn of opportunities to sell
• You can become the person buyers want to see succeed, by connecting them with trusted vendors who can provide the solution they are looking for

Most customers don’t tell you of needs they think are unrelated to what you sell. When you ask the right questions, you learn of opportunities to add value to buyers, become the person they want to see succeed, and get called first when they want what you sell.

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Craig Elias is a 15-year sales veteran, noted speaker and author on sales and networking, and the Founder of InnerSell - an online sales tool used by sales professionals so that no matter what their customer needs they can get it through them. Learn more by contacting Craig by phone (866.744.7904), email ([email protected]), or visiting www.InnerSell.com.