Oct 8, 2012 | Customers, Sales, Social Media
Sales is a tough job, you win or you lose, with no middle option. Understanding those you lost is the key to improving future performance.
Over 30 years of engageing with sales people, managing sales forces, and doing sales training, it seems to me there are just 5 reasons that seem to be recurrent in a failed B2B sale.
- Failure to understand that a potential customer in not interested in what your product can do, or has done, just what it may do for them. Trying to sell the features of a product, rather than the benefit it delivers, tailored to the circumstances of the buyer is sales death.
- The power of incumbency is huge, vastly underrated in most cases. When getting a sale means someone else is missing out, the risks to an organisation, and the reputation of the one who makes the change can be significant, so failure to remove the risk usually leads to failure. The old adage “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” still holds.
- Failure to communicate and convince the decision-maker. I have seen huge efforts go into making sales, and as the effort drifts, it becomes apparent that the one who makes the decision, the Yes/No person, is not engaged, and often not even known.
- Lack of up front resources, or content that serves as an alternative to the traditional sales effort. In this day of the net being used as a primary information source, it is often the case the specifications of a purchase have been determined, and a purchase decision made, before a potential supplier is aware of the process. The processes of qualifying a lead, supplying information that contributes to a specification, building relationships, and determining price and delivery requirements, previously the function of sales has moved on line, the only variable left is the “who will supply” question.
- Price. This is almost always the reason that gets cited as the one that broke the deal, but usually it is just a convenient excuse when any of the other four above have kicked in, and the explanations just get too complicated. It is the “Dear John” of the purchasing officer.
Oct 5, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Social Media
My 28 year old son recently tried to get a mobile phone on a plan, and couldn’t, he did not have a credit rating. A bit unusual perhaps, but this is a young bloke who has been a self-funded student for a long time, always paid his bills, always met all his commitments, financial and otherwise, a far better bet than most that his mobile bill would be paid. Now graduated, he wanted to start being “normal” as he put it.
“Personal brand” is a term increasingly bandied around as we build an identity underpinned by on-line behavior. Headhunters are increasingly using it as they seek to find the best fit for roles they are filling, so are looking to social media as a behavioral metaphor for actual behavior in a workplace.
But it is going much further, much quicker than anyone anticipated.
The reputation you build in one place will be increasingly transferrable to another. Why shouldn’t your hard earned EBay and Amazon rating be considered when you want to rent a car or flat, borrow some money, or even take on a simple phone plan?
Collaborative consumption is a term coined by Rachael Botsman to describe the evolution of behavior made possible by the removal of the transactional friction we are used to by the collaborative capacity of the internet. We can now rent someone’s home on airbnb, raise venture capital on Kickstarter, share a car on GoGet, get the chores done by taskrabbit, and find thousands of other potential partners in peer to peer transactions that were impossible just a few years ago. In these circumstances, your reputation, your brand, is as good as money, just different, it has a value that others will consider in an exchange, and decide if they will proceed.
In this emerging digital economy trust is everything, trust between strangers a necessity for these types of collaborative consumption transactions. It follows then that we need a mechanism to replace the face to face interaction that through human history has built trust because you can see the whites of the other parties eyes, and make a very personal judgement about them.
Your reputation, the sum of all your behavior, will increasingly become manageable and transferable across platforms, and act as currency.
Oct 2, 2012 | Communication, Social Media
SME’s cannot afford to spend money on traditional media, and after all, it is now far from the only option, so why would they?
Facebook is the first stop of most, predictable I guess with almost a billion users, but the environment is all wrong for many, as it enables a social digi-conversation not a commercial one.
If you need a commercial conversation, Linkedin is way better, with 150 million users, 50% of whom are businesses. So, if you have a B2B service, Linkedin is a real option, often overlooked.
In this terrific post, Shelley Kramer gives some very useful “how to” tips.
Oct 1, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Social Media
Just because two things correlate, does not necessarily mean that there is cause and effect at work.
Imagine you have just launched a new product backed by a great TV ad, and sales exceed forecast by a factor of 5. Obviously the ad agency is going to be delirious, putting your ad on all their show reels, but did the advertising cause the sales, or were there other success factors working for you?
Emergence of digital media has complicated the lives of communication agencies and marketers enormously. By offering real ROI measurement opportunities, web-tools have made marketers accountable for results as never before. This does not mean it is easy, just possible.
Google analytics offers a range of tools by which to generate a host of metrics, but two challenges remain:
- Which are the few metrics that really get to the heart of marketing ROI
- What is the cause of something, and what is the effect.
Avinash Kaushik’s great blog addresses these issues, in this one, examining the complications of the ROI of Facebook advertising, something that has stumped lesser minds for a while now, and cost early facebook investors a heap in the IPO.
Reading the post, I was reminded of Seth Godins musing about the relationship between rain and umbrellas. Every time it rained, he saw umbrellas everywhere, so did the presence of umbrellas cause rain, or did rain cause the presence of umbrellas?
Sep 25, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Big Brother is watching where you are, if you have a smartphone. The GPS capabilities of the newer smartphones opens up an extraordinary Pandora’s box of opportunities to market to those in immediate reach, alternatively to deluge them with SPAM, as illustrated by Tom Fishburnes cartoon . (make sure you click through to his Google keynote)
You are a smart young thing, with a purchase history in a chain of fashion stores. As you walk into the orbit of a store, your phone tells them who you are, and that you are close, which offers the chance to mine your database, and come up with tailored specials, available for the next 20 minutes, just for you. Or perhaps as you move towards the cinema complex in George Street, the movie about to start that sits in your preferred genre, offers you a preferred location, and a coffee. The opportunities are endless, the potential to annoy by filling your phone with Spam almost as endless.
This evolution will require a rethink of the customer acquisition process. Aiming messages at consumers with the laser-like accuracy to avoid being a Spammer will require a sophisticated data mining capability, as well as a sensitivity to consumer preferences that will be hard to translate into an algorithm.
The downside for those who do it poorly is that potentially loyal consumers will move elsewhere, and block your messages, the emerging equivalent of retail purgatory.
Sep 24, 2012 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Social Media
So, the Gruen team is down a member as Russell Howcroft moves on to take over running the ailing Channel 10. There must be a sense of irony here, he moves from career as a “Madman” moonlighting in a successful public subscription TV channel where he has pontificated on the merits and foibles of various advertising, to a struggling channel with an eroding advertising revenue base at a time when TV’s are turning off (my assumption) in favor of alternatives.
There are still plenty of TV’s out there, but are they being used as TV’s the way they were a decade ago? Probably not, they are playing recorded shows, either downloaded, bought via a subscription service or in a boxed set, and played when, and where it suits the viewer, on a whole range of devices, not when the “prime time” usage model of a fixed set and time table dictates.
How will an old school advertising guru perform in this environment of rapid and disruptive change? Even the disrupter, Google, who made a fortune out of placing ads in the way of what you are searching for has recognised that where you are is as important, and so are investing in Maps as a representation of the interface between the real world and the virtual one, seeing the next wave of innovation coming.
Good luck Russell, but my instinct is that a 30 year old social media whiz Kid may have been a better choice.
