Matt on Marketing

Want credibility with a set of prospective customers?  Want to be accepted as one of them, as a part of their tribe?

It takes more than just joining their club.  It takes more than just speaking their language, and talking at them.

To be accepted today, you have to participate.

Participation means two-way communication, in an authentic manner, on a regular basis.  It takes more time, more effort, and more investment than what we used to be able to do – buy a list, get some PR, write a letter.  In other words, talk at the prospect.

Today, prospects require and expect more.  If you talk at them (in a letter, a blog post, an article in a trade publication), they expect to be able to talk and comment back.  And then, in turn, they expect you to read their response and engage yet again.

It’s more work.  And as long as your prospects keep responding, it doesn’t really end.  But isn’t that awesome?

The companies you want as your customers aren’t just reading your stuff anymore.  They’re responding, engaging, asking you questions, questioning your opinions.  They’re getting to know you, and by participating back you’re earning their trust and respect.  And if you keep participating, you can earn their business too.

The assumption that a big network – thousands of followers on Twitter, an enormous rolodex, a really big mailing list – directly translates into influence and performance is ridiculous.  Anybody can build a big list of names. 

The more important question is whether those people care about you.  Do they respect you?  Do they trust you?  When called upon, will they help you?  Will they buy from you?

The trick is translating that big list into an army of evangelists, a group of individuals who respect and trust you.

That’s how to measure the value of your network.  Not by sheer volume, but by trust. 

Trust drives influence, and influence enables action. 

Chris knows that building relationships, trust and credibility means talking less about yourself, and more about others – their wants, needs, interests, etc.

In his weekly newsletter yesterday, Chris outlined three simple but important ways to be “them-centric” more often. Here they are:

Always ask about the other person first. In social gatherings, be quick to ask about the other person's interests, what's currently on their mind, whatever turns the conversation to them.

Look at your efforts through others' eyes. Now, in measuring your self-worth, your own eyes are the only ones that matter, but in trying to better understand how well you're serving people's needs, try to see it from their side. Are you quick to pounce? Do you have their interests at heart or yours? The more clarity you can bring to this, the better you'll do.

Accept that you WILL get a turn. I taught this to my daughter over the years, and she seems to really practice this. Sometimes, she is last to take her turn, but she knows that she'll get a chance. This rings true for how we approach our interactions with others. Take a breath. Relax. Know that your story will come out when the pause is just right. It's okay to be assertive if the other person failed their kindergarten lessons on sharing, but otherwise, go slowly.

The steps to building trust & credibility w/ a growing network is relatively straightforward:

1. Engage new contacts somewhere, based on their needs
2. Provide some immediate value, based on the messages/competencies you want to represent
3. Establish a great first impression and initial reputation for those same messages/competencies
4. Continue passively reiterating that value/message through high-volume, high-leverage channels
   

Contacts in, influencers and pipeline out. The more you can start the process by reaching multiple contacts at once, the more efficient the model. If you have to engage people 1:1 at the start of the process, for example, it doesn’t scale well. If you can engage folks via speaking engagements, third-party published articles, attending well-targeted networking events, etc., you get lots of input into the process at once.

How you choose to execute the “passive reiterating” depends on what channels your audience uses most, and which you’re most comfortable with. Blogs, newsletters, Twitter, whatever. Could be just one, could be a couple, definitely doesn’t need to be all.

Thinking about it this way is a bit systematic and perhaps cold, but it works as long as the content and value you’re providing the individuals on the other side of the process is genuine, authentic and truly helpful.

Seth made a compelling argument last week that it’s extremely difficult to maintain quality relationships with more than 150 people.  He postulates that, if we believe Dunbar’s Number and theory to be true, it’s impossible to maintain close, meaningful relationships with the thousands of followers we try to collect via Facebook, Twitter, or blogs, and so forth.

And he’s right.  But Dunbar’s Number goes two ways.

If you’re building a following – for yourself, your brand, your cause, etc. – you’re creating value for your followers.  And although you can’t possibly have close relationships with thousands of followers, you very well may be among the 150 people your followers include in their Number.

Put another way, if you’re creating enough value for your audience, in an authentic and sustainable way, you can earn your way into their 150.  Into their inner circle, the influences they consider most important to their lives.  And if you can do that with enough followers, then scaling your volume into the thousands, tens of thousands and beyond can be an incredibly powerful opportunity.

Seth himself is a great example of this.  Tens of thousands of people worldwide read his blog and books, many on a daily basis.  For those people, he’s in the top-tier of their marketing and general business influencers.  He’s in their 150. 

That’s a position of authority, respect and influence that’s reachable for more of us.

Think about you target audience, your target customer.  What do they care about, think about on a daily basis?  What do you have to offer that can earn your way into their 150?  Then, how are you delivering value every day to keep that position?

We hosted a breakfast roundtable event this morning with several B2B sales & marketing executives, focused on sharing best practices for how best to keep sales and customer demand high during the holiday months.

The handout at this link summarizes many of the points made and discussed during the event.

A couple excerpts:

Focus On Demos: So maybe your customers don’t want to make a purchase decision until January. Even if that’s true, you can focus November and December on getting your prospects as far down the purchase cycle as possible. Focus on doing as many demos as you can. Answer objections, get executive sponsors involved, send out proposals and begin negotiations on terms. Move prospects forward so that you’re set up for a big beginning of Q1.

Help Them Kick-Start Their Own New Year Goals & Results: If what you’re selling can benefit your customers and their own goals & objectives, isn’t it better to have that in place on January 1, vs. waiting to buy and onboard later in the month, quarter or year? Build a sense of urgency that this is exactly the time to make a move and get a head start on next year’s goals.

Get the full one-page PDF here.

Guest post by Terry Miller, managing partner, CRM Group

It’s a familiar refrain among B2B marketers – “We’re generating all kinds of leads but our sales team doesn’t have the resources to follow up on them in a timely manner.”

Problem: Finding an efficient way to further qualify leads in order to help prioritize sales’ follow up activities.

Solution: Create a nurture campaign utilizing email to get prospects to further self-qualify themselves as they respond to a series of calls-to-action featuring differing bars to entry.

The benefits of an effective nurture customer contact strategy are many:

• Develop more qualified leads
• Drive increased revenues
• Reduce the sales cycle
• Improve the ROI of your marketing programs
• Improve the efficiency of your sales team
• Expand the awareness and usage of your products and services

Developing an email nurture program is easier than you think.

Step 1: Evaluation – take a look at your current communication stream that leads receive and evaluate based on objectives, form and frequency

Step 2: Analysis – engage in a data mining exercise aimed at understanding sales cycle duration, conversion rate and value

Step 3: Implementation – develop a new, multi-part lead contact strategy that delivers your unique value propositions while further qualifying leads based on the commitment required by the call-to-action (click through vs. white paper vs. webinar attendance, etc.). Be sure to take into consideration the length and complexity of the sales cycle when determining number and frequency of contacts (shorter sales cycle, fewer contacts and less time between them).

Terry Miller is the Managing Partner of CRM Group, which helps companies acquire new customers, retain existing customers and improve their customer service. He can be reached at terry@crmgroupusa.com .

Special thanks to the team at TechFlash for giving me an opportunity to share these ideas over the weekend.

There’s no question the economy has softened buyer demand and sales cycle velocity, but in the majority of buying & selling environments, there’s far more at play creating weakness in sales pipelines.

Take a read and let me know what you think.  Let me know especially what I may have missed, and what you may have already discovered (and overcome) this year.

Your prospects don’t care what you do.  They don’t care how it works.

They’re only thinking of themselves.  And can you blame them?  Their butt is on the line if they don’t deliver results, cut costs, delight their own customers.  They have their own problems, their own pain, their own priorities.

Your prospects don’t care what you do.  They will only care about you if you can solve their problem.  Ease their pain.  Make their job easier.  Make them look like a hero.

Your prospects don’t care what you do.  They care deeply about what you can do for them.

There is only demand for your product is there’s more demand for the solution it represents.

Sell that way.

Guest post by Norman Behar, CEO, Sales Readiness Group

Last month, I attended the Sales 2.0 Conference in Chicago and took note of two major trends to improve sales.

1. Aligning your sales process with your customer’s purchase process
2. Collaborating with customers to solve their needs

While aligning your sales process with your customers purchase process seems pretty straight forward, it is easier said than done. Customers have complex and often competing priorities and do not always make their decisions in a linear fashion.

By doing some very basic research upfront, sales professionals can more effectively plan for sales calls and get a sense for overall company priorities. Sales professionals also need to gain a clear understanding of the approval process and who they should be selling to. Budgets have been severely constrained, and more decisions are requiring “C level” approval. As an example, we heard from one senior executive whose approval authority had been reduced from $1 million to $10,000.

It is also essential to realize that customers have access to more information than ever before. They can quickly search the web and gain a clear understanding of both your and your competitors’ offerings. They can also check a variety of sources to get a sense for how well your “solutions” are working. As a result, sales professionals need to bring more that just “solutions” to the table. They need to engage in collaborative conversations that allow the customer to serve as the co-architect of solutions that addresses their specific priorities.

By engaging in this dialogue, sales professionals will forge a deeper understanding of their customers needs and co-create differentiated solutions that are based on value as opposed to being driven by price. Most importantly, they will develop a trusted relationship that will allow them ongoing access to the customer and position them to earn more business as the economy recovers.

Norman Behar is a proven sales leader with over 20 years of CEO, COO and senior sales management experience. Prior to co-founding Sales Readiness Group, Norman served as a Managing Partner at Linear Partners, a boutique sales consulting firm focused on providing sales effectiveness solutions to emerging growth companies.

I recently asked several business and executive coaches what they do for their clients.  I wanted to know more about their process, their approach, and generally how they create value for the people and organizations they engage.

Although each had a slightly different take, it all boiled down to one thing – focus.  Each successful coach produced results for their clients by helping them get the most out of themselves and their teams, in every case by focusing time, talents, resources and values.

What I heard generally fell into five distinct areas of focus:

1.       Focus on what’s important.   It’s easy to feel successful in a day that’s busy.  Filled with putting out fires.  Getting things done.  But often, we don’t get the right things done.  By stepping back and focusing on what’s most important (not necessarily what’s in front of us, or what’s easiest, or what’s screaming the loudest), we make far better forward progress (and often in less time).

2.       Focus on what you’re good at.  Know your strengths, and lean into them.  Compare that to what your organization needs, and ensure that others are doing everything else for you.  Yes, there’s a cost to delegating, but the results will far outweigh the investment when you have more time for your strengths, and others are accelerating your cause by leveraging theirs.

3.       Focus on fewer things.  Most of us take on far too much.  Even if those are all things that are both important and speak to our strengths, there’s not enough time in the day to get it all done.  Make the hard trade-offs for what’s going to drive the most value, and make the hard decisions to put other projects on the back-burner.

4.       Focus on the basics.  What’s most important to your business?  What’s fundamental?  What got you where you are now?  What are your values?  Getting back to the basics of your business can oftentimes be the simplest and most effective way to accelerate growth and productivity again.

5.       Focus on what you want.  It’s amazing to me how many people let the day and its myriad influences direct not just day-to-day, but larger directional decisions that affect personal and professional success.  When’s the last time you took 30 minutes to reflect on what’s most important to you?  What will make you happiest and fulfilled?  How do you map those priorities back to your life & your business?

Of course, achieving one or many of these areas of focus is far easier said than done.  If you have the discipline to address and stick to these on your own, you’re in the minority.  For the rest of us, finding a coach (or even just a mentor) to keep us accountable and help unlock the full potential of our focus can reap significant dividends personally and professionally.

Let’s face it, the term “social media” doesn’t mean much.  It’s passive, and speaks more to the channel vs. the intent or objective of what’s actually happening there.

Your customers are talking to each other.  They always have.  Only now, they have tools to do it faster, in real-time, and in front of everybody else.  That’s social media.

But social media, as we know it now, is really the new PR.  It’s your best channel to reach prospective customers in their current environment.  You have less control than you used to, sure, but make no mistake – social media is at the top of your sales funnel.

So let’s stop calling it social media, and start calling it social lead generation.  At least amongst ourselves.

Today’s buyers are presenting themselves to you like never before.   They’re sharing their interests, their needs, their feelings, their pain.  They’re telling you, in front of everybody else (including your competitors), exactly what they want.

It’s a perfect opportunity to meet them, engage them, earn their trust and respect, and give them exactly what they’re asking for.

That’s social lead generation.

Don’t treat it like lead generation.  That runs the risk of ruining its authenticity.  But as a core component of building credibility, attention and respect for your products and services, know that – in the end – what you do with this opportunity is measured by its value in engaging and creating new customers.

Want to help your sales team successfully and quickly migrate to a customer-centric sales approach?

Eliminate the term “sales process” from your vernacular.  It doesn’t exist as you once knew it anyway.

What we have today is a buying process.

As sales and marketing professionals, we may still define sales stages, generate leads, cold call, and work prospects through our pipelines and processes.  But make no mistake, the buyer is in charge. 

They’ve always been in charge of how and when they buy, but in a 2.0 world with unprecedented access to other buyers, peer reviews, competitive information and more, your sales process needs to be completely buyer-centric.

The right prospects for your product or service want to buy what you’re selling.  They need it.  The easier you make it for them to discover, learn, research and decide on their own, the more buyers you’ll win to your side.

You’re not selling.  You’re helping customers to buy. 

Guest post by Steve Richard, co-founder, Vorsight

Salespeople grease the wheels of the economy.  Having a person to person conversation dramatically improves the likelihood of a business transaction.  Cold calling matters because you cannot possibly know all of your potential clients.  You need the ability to reach out and connect with more prospects that don’t yet know they want to be talking to you.  Add value with each interaction.  Marketing leads begin the process in many cases, but you still need a quasi-cold or warm call to advance the sales process.

Most people hate the idea of cold calling, not the actual activity.  Salespeople tend to be a gregarious bunch by nature.  They love meeting new people, telling stories, socializing – so long as it’s done face to face.  What’s so different about making these introductions and building these relationships via the phone?  It’s really not different at all when you stop and think about it.  Cold calling, quasi-cold calling, and warm calling are all essentially the same thing: approaching someone who doesn’t currently know you and saying hello.  Once you get good at it, you have a fantastic new channel to find potential buyers.

So if that’s the case why do so many people still struggle with it?  Simple – because they were never given the right tools and shown how.  If you are a plumber trying to fix a sink you need wrenches, right?  Most organizations teach their salespeople everything about their products and services and tell them to get on the phones.  But what about the sales skills training, the tools, tips, tricks, tactics, and techniques?  It’s like trying to fix a sink without a wrench.  

Bottom line = cold calling matters for your business.

Steve is the Co-Founder and Head of Training at Vorsight.  Over the past 2 years he has provided sales training workshops to over 1,000 attendees.

When I think about procrastination, I think first of bigger projects.  I have a column to write, a proposal to finish, a report to publish. 

The real time-suckers are the much smaller projects.  If you read an email and don’t take action right away, you’re procrastinating.  If you see an interesting article or blog post and don’t do something with it right away, you’re delaying action – and you’re procrastinating.

I fight this type of mini-procrastination all the time.  It doesn’t mean I have to actually do everything right then and there.  It just means I need to decide what to do, and move on. 

But if the task takes two minutes or less (respond to an email, set up a meeting, quickly scan an article), I try to do it right away.  With such a short time period required for action, delaying that activity (and reviewing the request or task again later) is pure wasted time.  Add that time up across a day of emails, blog posts, phone calls, etc.  and it’s a ton of wasted time.

Simply acting on those two-minutes-or-less tasks right away will work wonders to clear your inbox, get things done, and keep you moving more productively throughout the day.

Leads alone mean nothing. 

Leads don’t equal revenue.  By definition, leads are just prospective buyers who haven’t yet bought a thing.

Marketers get upset when their executives think of them, and their budgets, as a cost center.  But those same marketers often focus on generating leads, and that’s it.  They don’t hold themselves accountable for the sale.

What happens after the lead is what’s really important.  So you have someone who qualifies as a prospective buyer.  Maybe that prospect has even shown interest, shared a pain that you can ease.

They still need to buy.  They will still have objections.  Some may buy on their own, but most need to be walked through the sale.

Smart marketers know that leads are just the beginning.  They know that their job isn’t really done until leads buy.

Successful marketers go beyond setting a common definition for qualified leads with their sales counterparts.  They also work with sales to define stages of the sales process, and develop tools to help sales reps sell, and make it easier for buyers to buy.

The best B2B marketers think, work and execute like they’re in sales, not marketing.   Because your sales reps know that generating the lead is at the top of their funnel, not the bottom.

If you’ve decided to get started with a Twitter strategy, here are a few simple steps to start adding content and followers to your Twitter feed. These require a little work, but don’t require a single piece of new content. This isn’t a long-term plan. But if you want to get started and build a strong, relevant foundation for a longer-term Twitter execution, this is a great place to start.

Adding Content

• Start doing searches by hashtag for keywords relative to your business, brand and/or industry; save these searches with TweetDeck, Tweetie or similar
• Review these search results a couple times a day, retweet articles and links that are interesting related to your target keywords
• This will start to associate the right keywords and content with your Twitter stream, and will start to accelerate organic followers of your Twitter account directly
• By doing this, you’ll be publishing and associating yourself with relevant content without having to publish any of our own primary content (at least not yet)

Adding Followers

• Easiest way is to start following others
• Use the search results above to see who's writing about the same topics and keywords you care above (check their bio, etc.)
• Add them to your followers; most will follow you back
• There are automated tools that can seek even more Twitter users with either the right keywords in their bio, or in their streams

(Relatively) Easy Next Steps

• Design a quick custom background as a JPG to reflect your logo and brand (see www.twitter.com/heinzmarketing as an example)
• Let your employees know you’re getting active, and ask them to follow the feed (they'll likely start retweeting stuff from your account, which will also increase followers)

Should one of your company, department or individual core values be a bias for action? 

What does that mean?  It means you take action.  Get projects, products and campaigns to market quickly.  You test.  You spend more time executing, learning and improving.

You let the market help you make decisions vs. doing it in isolation.  You test quickly instead of debating via PowerPoint, email or endless meetings.

You’re OK with constructive failure, as long as you can learn, improve and avoid the same mistake twice.

You encourage, demand and/or require those around you (peers, direct reports and superiors) to think strategically, but act quickly.

Bias for action does not mean acting without forethought.  Execution without strategy is just guessing, and prone to high error and failure rates.

Instead, bias for action means having an idea or premise, and understanding quickly what that market thinks of it.  The faster you take action, the faster you execute, the more quickly you will deliver innovation, results and growth.

How important is a bias for action to you individually?  How about for your department and/or company?

More importantly, how do you put that into practice on a regular basis?