By Barbara Fowler, {grow} Community Member

Moving is never easy, especially when it affects your personal brand and business.  I just moved nearly a thousand miles from New Jersey to Charleston and wanted to share how I used social media and Internet connections before and after the move to get my personal brand off to a fast, productive start!

1) Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest

• Send a note to all of your Linkedin contacts, telling them about your move. Request help in getting new contacts in the new location. An interesting observation — Some people who you are close to don’t respond at all while others who you can’t entirely remember give you great contacts. Don’t judge anyone, just appreciate those who reached out and remember this in the future if you are asked. Pay it forward.
• Join local Linkedin Groups. For example, in this area, there are several local LinkedIn groups like Charleston, South Carolina Professionals and The LowCountry Business Network. Reach out to them to ask for advice and recommendations. Find related groups on Twitter.
• Do a search of your target market in the local area. My target is CMOs of mid-sized companies so you can use Linkedin search to find them.  You can’t find everyone on Linkedin unless you have connections in common but if they are in one of your Linkedin groups, you can reach out and ask to connect.  Again, ask for advice and recommendations, don’t ask for business. Do the same on Twitter.
• Look for Alumni from your University. I happen to have gone to a couple of universities: Wittenberg, Wake Forest and NYU and I looked up local graduates and reached out. Many responded and were willing to meet.

2. Business Organizations

• Look at the organizations you are currently in. Determine if they have a chapter in the new location. If so, reach out. If not, see if one is needed and think about starting it. I belonged to several groups in New Jersey: ACG( Association for Corporate Growth), MENG,(Marketing Executives Networking Group), and Vistage ( An organization designed to help CEOs of mid-size companies grow their businesses). The local Vistage chairperson has asked me to join his group and has given me a lot of valuable counsel.

3. Community Organizations

• What organizations are you involved with now? If you are active with a charity or university, reach out to your contacts there, ask them to send a letter to chapter contacts in the new location. Draft the letter yourself to make it convenient for them to send and to highlight what you want them to share. Look at the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary. Lions Club and groups like that.
• Do members of your target market belong to these groups? If so, join and become active. If not, look for other groups where your target market is active. These could be church groups, volunteer groups, neighborhood groups. Do not join the group unless you are interested. No one wants to meet someone who has only joined a group like this to get business. But when you have interests in common, you can make good friends and connections over time.

4. Events and Publications

• Subscribe to the local business journal and local newspapers. Check their websites for events and activities. Often, people make the mistake of going to events for people just like them and hoping for business. Go to different events targeted for your potential clients. I went to Knoxville and attended Social Slam and met Rosemary O’Neill, who sat down with me, shared her experiences and asked me to write a blog post on the topic. Charleston has a harbor and so had a world trade event recently. There was a technology event last weekend. Go, check out the booths, see if you can volunteer, be there, meet people.
• When you read the periodicals, check for people you want to meet. Keep a list of them and ask others you meet if they can introduce you. For example, if one of your target markets is professional service companies and you are meeting a lawyer, have a list of several accountants, lawyers and other professionals. When you meet your lawyer, share the list, tell him or her you are planning to contact them and ask who they might be able to introduce you to-then ask for people similar who aren’t on your list yet.

 5. People You Meet During Move

• You meet a lot of people when you move, including mortgage brokers, real estate agents, real estate repair people, home inspectors etc.  Make sure everyone knows what business you are in and ask for their help. My real estate agent helped. My mortgage broker added his support. The man renovating our house gave his advice.

Has it all been successful? I have been here two months and am making rapid progress. This is a work in progress. I am meeting people and working hard. However, with this move, I was effectively able to use Social Media and the Internet. It makes a big difference!

Barbara Fowler is a CMO and Partner with Chief Outsiders in the Charleston, S.C. area. Follow Barbara on Twitter at @barbfow50 or on Linkedin

Why is it that elite athletes not only require but pay handsomely for coaching to stay at the top of their game? What do these professionals know about the value of coaching that most sales professionals haven’t figured out?

Interestingly, both in sports and in business, those who excel have figured out that they don’t have all the answers. And even if they did, they sometimes need help organizing them into a reasonable, actionable, execution plan.

In sales, most don’t take advantage of sales coaching because it hasn’t turned out so well in the past. For many, “sales coaching” has not only been ineffective, it’s been painful! It often goes something like this. The sales leader who has good intentions, but is misguided because of the pitfalls of past coaching he or she received, comes to the session on their agenda, not the salesperson’s. They ask questions like: How big is the deal? When is it going to close? What’s it going to take to get it into this quarter? Why haven’t you included cross-sell and up-sell options in your proposal”? And on and on. Whatever value has been created has been one-sided, flowing from the salesperson to the sales leader.

Once the sales leader gets the information he or she needs, the session ends and the salesperson leaves feeling deflated, abused, and hopeless.

There has to be a better way – and there is.

While sales coaching can take many paths utilizing one of several coaching models, the coaching that many salespeople find most helpful focuses on what they care most about – advancing and closing opportunities.

Good sales coaching – focused on advancing and closing deals – needs to help the salesperson answer four key questions.

1. What is the End in Mind for the session? Mutually determine what you as the sales leader and the salesperson should say, do, or decide at the end of the coaching session.

2. What is the status of the opportunity? In other words, what is going on? What do we know? What don’t we know?

3. What options do we have? Explore and discuss alternatives.

4. What is the plan going forward? Together, do the following:

• Identify next steps to take over the next 30-60 days to advance the opportunity.
• Create call plans for the next critical client interactions. Practice key parts of the interaction so they go well in the meeting. (Don’t wait until you’re on the tee box in the big tournament to see if your swing is going to work.)
• Determine the date for the salesperson to report back and agree on expectations for that next meeting.

During the session, the sales leader needs to avoid passing judgment. The goal is to find out where the opportunity is, not question why it isn’t further along. Remember, the sales leader should be on the salesperson’s agenda, working together to understand where the opportunity is and what can be done to grow it and advance it.

To be effective, the sales leader needs to create a container of safety so the salesperson feels safe to open up, share ideas, doubts, and concerns and get real about the status of the deal without the fear of reprisal. After all, if the salesperson, based on fears from past experience, tells the sales leader what he or she wants to hear instead of the truth, the opportunity will sit in the pipeline, the forecast will be inaccurate, and neither the salesperson, sales leader, nor the customer will get the solution they all really want.

Like coaching in sports, good sales coaching can open up potential in salespeople and help them succeed in ways they can’t if left on their own. Good sales coaching, like good sports coaching, is not about the coach dictating to the player exactly what and how to do things. It’s about mutually exploring options and figuring out how to help the salesperson play to his or her strengths in order to advance and close business.

We’re all familiar with it: arrive at work at 8:30, scarf down a quick breakfast before a series of meetings that last from 9-3:30. Arrive back at desk tired, cranky – and staring down a giant pile of e-mail. People have been saying this for awhile, but it bears repeating: it’s a miracle that any of us (or our companies) manages to get anything done at all.

Over at Innovate on Purpose, blogger Jeffrey Phillips makes a crucial point: the busyness of our schedules is a symptom of an overarching drive for efficiency within companies (which I’d add is itself a symptom of narrowing margins and economic pressure). Efficiency, he says, allows us to report that we’re doing a great job, and fuels advancement within organizations. But what it doesn’t allow for is the kind of contemplation necessary to drive true innovation.

But what if we didn’t value efficiency above all? What if we carved out times and spaces in the day to pause, think, and reflect? What if people actually used that cool lounge-type area on your floor?

At the heart of answering this question is the concept of mindfulness. It is a somewhat difficult concept to describe, but a generally agreed-upon academic definition is “bringing one’s complete attention to the present experience on a moment-by-moment basis” (link goes to PDF). It’s a mental and psychological practice, a kind of meditiation of sorts. The skeptics and smart-alecs (I’m kidding! I love you guys!) among you might claim that this is the same thing as “paying attention”, but I’d argue that it’s a very specific kind of paying attention, focused on the appreciation of the minute details of the passage of time. The proponents of mindfulness tell us that practicing at it leads to seeing previously invisible or underappreciated things and connections between things, which is a necessary prerequisite for creativity.

Studies beginning in 1988 have mostly proven this true. Mindfulness has been linked to creativity in business, social work, teaching; companies like Google, Target, and General Mills have instituted mindfulness practices designed to pull employees out of the day-to-day bustle and get them thinking at a deeper level.

But, let’s be honest. Formal meditation programs aren’t likely to come to your office anytime soon. In the meantime, check out the Mayo Clinic’s list of ways to get started.

What are you doing to stimulate creativity? Let us know in comments.

 

For the past year, I’ve been participating in a variety of white paper oriented discussions on Quora, a Q&A focused social media website. Most of the participants have posted many interesting questions about white paper structure, marketing, strategy, tactics, etc, all of which I have been happy to submit my two-cents worth.

One post from Elisa D. Coleman, who identifies herself as a Gamer and Bon Vivant, Know-it-all, submitted this answer to the question, “What is the Future of White Papers”, which I found interesting:

“Yes, I expect it (white papers) to become obsolete, very soon, if you take into consideration the usage of smartphones which allow for video streaming of shorter pieces of information and of course video is the replacement for .pdf documents because they’re live and provide so much more value than a static piece of lengthy content.”

While I don’t share Elisa’s pessimistic prediction for the future of the traditional white paper medium, her opinion does reflect a new reality for today’s social media generation, namely that the business document format will eventually be replaced by video. I guess her utopian vision of business communications would be to have video on your smartphone, video on your computer, video on your social media site, video everywhere.

Her argument is that, as compared with .pdf documents, video is live and as such, provides “much more value that a static piece of lengthy content”. This is a sad commentary on the state of today’s business reader, and it supports a point that I have been making for some time. Today’s Generation X and Millennia Generation really doesn’t read a lot of text, whether in books, magazines, newspapers, or documents such as white papers. Instead they prefer to watch a video of the same material. Think YouTube or Facebook.

What’s the repercussion if Elisa’s predictions come true, especially for  business communications and business marketing? A lot.

It’s much easier and less costly to write a white paper as compared to a video. Outside of an editor, the average business writer can sit down, conduct research, interviews, and investigation, and given an appropriate amount of time, produce a decent 6-8 page white paper all on their own.

In comparison, other than sitting in front of a smartphone or notebook camera and producing a “talking heads” style video, most professionally produced business videos require the use of sophisticated tools or outside specialists, dramatically raising the total cost of the final product. The cost of producing a white paper is about one tenth the cost of a professional business video.

Development cycle is another factor. A business can produce a white paper in about one month. Most videos take several months given production cycles, reviews, edits and conventional (non-online) distribution methods such as burning and packaging DVDs.

Longevity is the third factor. The shelf life of most white papers is about 1/2 to 1 year. In most cases, updating a white paper requires modifying a small portion of its content. In comparison, the shelf life of a video is much shorter and much more costly to update.

The only businesses that I am aware of that produce a significant number of videos are large, enterprise-sized organizations with the budget to do so. Any business, from individual entrepreneur, SMB, or large organization produces white papers due to the low cost and fast turnaround.

What’s the bottom line? White papers may transition from paper-based or PDF-format to online and iPads, but their low cost and fast development cycle ensures that they will be around for some time to come.

The topic of Return on Investment (ROI) is a frequent issue on the minds of business marketers today, especially in light of today’s soft economy. Since the cost associated with white paper development is not cheap, many marketing executives would like to know whether their investment in a white paper is going to pay off in the long run in the form of incremental sales.

This is the issue that was posted in Quora.com, an online social media discussion site that I have posted answers to white paper related questions. Here was the original question that was posted to the site:

“Are there any examples/case-studies of white papers generating significant ROI for companies, particularly in the information services/market intelligence sector?”

This is a difficult question to answer, especially if one is looking for a simple yes or no response. With over 20 years of writing white papers, I find it almost impossible to provide an example of a white paper that I can point to which has generated a specific dollar amount of revenue as a direct result.

Why?

Think about all the factors that go into closing a typical business sale:

Exposure – How did they first become exposed to the company/solution?

Education – What tools did they read/see which provided them with the in-depth knowledge to determine if the solution was best suited for their needs?

Personal Contact – The person(s) with whom they communicated that furthered the sales process.

Demo –  The ability for the prospect to analyze the specific solution that will best meet their needs

Trial/Test – A trial run of the solution on a limited scale

Financing Options – The monetary issues associated with acquiring and implementing the solution.

So which area on this list has the greatest relationship to ROI? All of them.

While white papers may be one part of this process (probably the education part), a very limited number of organizations ask customers when they make a purchase where they found about about a company and the factors that prompted them to make the purchase. An even smaller number have the tools enabling marketing managers to drill down and measure the various factor(s) associated with a specific sale. This makes it almost impossible to measure the success of a white paper on a traditional ROI basis.

If you need to substantiate ROI, the best way would be to use web analytics that would capture measurable statistics such as the number of downloads, click throughs, views, or webpage hits. Another way would be to setup a landing page that would require registration. While it isn’t always a direct relationship, one can assume that the greater the number in any one or combination of these areas, the higher the probability of prospective business readers, leads, and closed sales.

Unfortunately, no organizations that I am aware of would share such statistics with the outside world, making it nearly impossible to point to an example of a white paper that could use revenue as a measurement of its success via ROI.

Here’s the bottom line: look to your white papers as an education tool rather than a sales tool. Measure success based on the number of individuals that furthered their awareness of your organization and the featured solution.

Let me first establish that there is a Mount Rushmore-sized mountain of evidence pointing to the substantial impact on performance associated with institutionalizing sales process, but yet, this same research shows, the vast majority of sales organizations fail to do so. When it comes to defining a sales process, what we often see is that companies tend to fall at one extreme of the sales process maturity curve or the other. They either have no process or have over-engineered it. Both positions are dangerous and bear out the same result: no one follows process, either because it doesn’t exist or because it’s overwhelmingly complicated and perhaps inefficient to do so.

No process might be a slight exaggeration if you call using the default pipeline stages in your CRM a sales process, which is more often the rule than the exception. You’d be surprised at the number of brand name companies that have no documented sales process (although they acknowledge they need to).

Since the wild majority of cases fall into the “no/low process” bucket as evidenced by research from CSO Insights and others, the central point of this post is to examine the barriers that are preventing the formalization of sales process from becoming more commonplace, and what we might be able to do to remove or minimize these.

So, why the hesitancy? A few reasons come to mind.

• Process? We don’t need no stinkin’ process! Firstly, it might be that the VP of Sales just doesn’t believe it is important. Often times a Sales VP has worked their way up to sales management because they were a top performer and exhibited strong leadership skills. If they were not exposed to a sales process or mentored by someone who had a process-orientation, they might place greater value on other interventions like hiring as the vital factor for sales success. Or they take a cavalier attitude about this and believe that winning in sales is more a function of persuasion and persistence than the other dreaded p-word.

• Spinning too many plates. Another all-too-common barrier is that despite best intentions Sales VPs are simply too busy. They know this is something they should do, but just have too many other items on their to-do lists. They’re on the road constantly. They have board presentations they scramble to prepare for on a monthly basis, which is a huge time-drain for any poor soul that has to endure this. Their span of control is widening – more people to manage means more pipeline reviews, more at-risk deals to analyze and coach, and more personnel issues to contend with.

• How are the numbers looking? They have a short-term bias. Spending time defining your sales process will not help you make your number this quarter. The amount of pressure VPs of Sales are under to hit their quarterly (and in some cases, monthly) numbers, especially in this economy, is colossal. It rolls down hill and sideways. It avalanches from the board to the CEO and then to the VP of Sales. And then it comes at them from their peers in Marketing, Engineering, and Finance. Even their spouses ask them about how the pipeline is looking. It’s happened (to me). Tough to think about process when you’re under the gun to deliver every quarter. Also, when you consider that the average tenure of a VP of Sales is something like 18 months, why invest in something that won’t provide immediate impact and whose benefit they might not be around to enjoy?

• It’s hard. Defining a well-thought-out sales process that is scalable, repeatable, and that will be adopted by the sales organization is hard work and requires a degree of expertise that many VPs of Sales may not have because they haven’t previously undertaken or been exposed to a sales process definition initiative. It’s not just about creating a PowerPoint slide with five block-arrows. Layer on top of this the need to define and build the requisite tools and tweak your CRM to put a process into effect and suddenly swimming across the English Channel in the middle of winter looks less daunting and far more pleasant.

• CRM is not sales process’ BFF. Speaking of technology, CRM systems are data-management not process-management centric and have not been optimized to make it easy for someone to build a sales process that goes beyond defining a few pipeline stages. On the other end of the spectrum, because some of these systems are so flexible there is the danger of the overly zealous CRM admin building a monstrous workflow system that requires a PhD in Quantum Physics to understand and follow.

So, what to do about this?

• Bite the bullet. For the folks with the “we don’t need no stinkin’ process” mentality let me rebut with the adage “what got you here won’t get you there”. Maybe you’ve been able to hit your numbers so far but you’re not going to be able to hit them two quarters out. Admit the need and do something about it. You need to define and lay a foundation for continued success and the only way to do this is by getting clarity and commitment around your process.
• Ask for help. Being too busy and short-term bias both talk to the issue of time constraints. Ask for help. Make the case to your CEO to invest in sales process development. Hire a senior sales ops person. Bring in someone from the outside. Get your top performers involved. Get input and participation from peers across other functions. You would be surprised to learn how willing they are to help and, you might not like this, how they have been secretly complaining that you’re not sufficiently process-oriented.
• Preach and teach. If your board and CEO have a short-term bias, point them to CSO Insight’s research that makes a very compelling case for the need to build sales process prowess. Their research shows that those companies that do the best job of defining, implementing, and reinforcing their sales process outperform those that don’t by a considerable margin across key performance metrics like win rates and quota attainment.
• It doesn’t have to be hard. Don’t over-think or over-engineer it. Too little or too much process are both ineffectual. It doesn’t have to be Six-Sigma. We advocate an “agile sales development” process, which is akin to the “agile software development” process in that both promote a methodology that is lean and flexible. We’ve developed an “agile selling” framework for our clients that serves as a template we can use to accelerate process ramp up and facilitate adoption. You can too.
• Pimp your CRM. There are a number of applications that integrate with your CRM from companies like TAS Group (Dealmaker), Qvidian’s sales playbook application, and Playboox (our company, in January, is introducing a sales playbook publishing application for Salesforce.com called Playmaker) that can help you optimize your CRM to make it easier to define and execute a more defined sales process.

So, here’s a clip of a recent call we made on a VP of Sales, where we asked them if they had a documented sales process and if we could see it.

We think the times call for a shift in thinking about the need for formalizing your sales process and, hopefully, we just gave you a few insights to help you consider moving in that direction.

Lately I've been getting a lot more requests from to conduct LinkedIn Networking Workshops for B2B sales teams. It seems companies and organizations are finally waking up to the fact that LinkedIn is so much more than an online resume collection. At the same time I'm seeing an uptick in really bad LinkedIn networking attempts. So today I wanted to take a few minutes to share three simple tips that I usually reserve for our LinkedIn Workshops. If you'd like to hear more tips, you can always request a LinkedIn Workshop for your company. In the meantime, enjoy these simple starters. How Not To Network On LinkedIn For the love of God please stop sending the standard, LinkedIn connection requests....

I’ve talked about the idea of Intrigue Marketing before… using intrigue to engage your prospects. I believe that intrigue is one of the most powerful and under-used marketing tactics around. It’s powerful because it sparks people’s curiosity and, done well, makes them smile.

It might be that making people smile doesn’t fit your brand image (really?), but what better way to start a relationship with a prospect who doesn’t yet know you.

Here’s an amazing bit done at TED by Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere. Technically, it has nothing to do with marketing or startups… but it has everything to do with intrigue, and I think it’ll make you smile.

The post Breaking through with Intrigue appeared first on Feed The Beast.

While B2B organizations have embraced the idea of customer-centricity, many have yet to adapt to the reality of customer behavior. That’s resulted in millions of marketing dollars being misspent and potential sales lost at a time when companies can ill afford it. In fact, our work with more than 30 marquee B2B organizations around the [...]

Retailers and consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) companies have long had access to vast amounts of transaction data: every day, companies capture information about every SKU sold to every customer at every store. In addition, companies regularly use sophisticated market-research techniques to answer a variety of questions: what products should we develop and sell? How much is the [...]

Starting under the radar to build up social media “Our initial goals for social media were to raise brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, improve employee engagement, develop customer insights, and control news flow. It was the softer side of things. At first we didn’t expect to sell shipping containers through social, though we’re learning now [...]

Using the cloud to create a complete picture of the customer “In September at Dreamforce, we launched the Marketing Cloud as the world’s first unified, cloud-based social marketing suite. Marketers want the ability to do all of their social marketing through a single platform. Marketing Cloud combines Radian 6 — the number-one social listening product [...]

Creating functional business referral networks is likely not as difficult as it sounds. In order to gain a better understanding of how to do so, it can be critical to understand some very general do’s and don’ts when it comes to how best to act and react to a variety of networking situations and common issues. An effective client base can support your business and make you more money. Effective networking requires far more than passing out business cards or sending out newsletters to prospective partners.

12 Tips for the Best Business Referral Networks

With a few helpful tips and suggestions you should be able to build an impressive network, even if you are without extensive contacts currently.

1. DO be worth talking about. You can’t expect networkers to want to mention your products and services if your products and services are subpar, or even worse, embarrassing.

2. DON’T put people on the spot. You may ask for an introduction or reference, but find a balanced way to do so that doesn’t sound pushy or aggressive.

3. DO remain visible and be well liked. It is easier to refer a business that has a kind and understanding representative than it is to promote even great offerings where individuals will have to deal with a cold, elusive networker.

4. DON’T use inappropriate practices to build your lists.

5. DO contribute to and join in with as many worthwhile groups, causes or charities that you have time for.

6. DON’T hog the spotlight at every committee or business meeting. While it is okay to share ideas, and to share positions of leadership, make sure you aren’t overselling your business, or yourself, with aggressive communication standards.

7. DO show up when you RSVP in the positive or tell your business or consumer network that you will be there.

8. DON’T expect those in your industry or individuals with similar expertise as yours to be willing to be a referral source for you. These individuals will have their own objectives and businesses and are already unlikely to want to share that with another business in direct competition with theirs.

9. DO reach beyond your own professional scope to locate business connections. Managers, educators, salespersons and business owners who aren’t in direct competition may have a need for your offerings and be willing to share that with their own colleagues.

10. DON’T rush into any new business relationships. Take the time to look into those businesses and see what they represent, how well their brand is accepted and exactly how much business they do.

11. DO make sure that business connections run both ways. If your business referral networks are extending themselves to you at their cost, make sure you at some point, in the near future, reply in kind.

12. Perhaps most importantly, DON’T rush or panic. Your business isn’t going to collapse immediately without the foundation of good business referral networks to support it. Take your time to selectively cultivate them and your business is certain to benefit.

Christian Fea is CEO of Synertegic, Inc. A Joint Venture and Referral Marketing firm. He exemplifies how to profit from Joint Venture and Referral relationships by creating profit centers with minimal risk and maximum profitability.

Click here for more Referral Program Strategies to help you increase your profits.

Imagine for a minute you sold everything you should be selling across all of your firm’s capabilities to your existing clients. If all the buying centers bought all of the capabilities they should be buying, how much would your key account sales increase?

When people spend time analyzing this carefully, they find the potential to expand sales to existing clients is huge.

Given the great potential for growth, many companies give proactive key account sales quite the effort, but few achieve the results they should. The problem is they can’t, or for some reason simply don’t, create their own opportunities.

When looking through a jobs-to-be-done lens, it is easy to see that the goal of innovation is to create products and services that help customers get their jobs done better. Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) is a product strategy and innovation process that was designed from the ground up with this end in mind.

ODI reinvents the entire innovation process around the jobs-to-be-done theory. This includes the way customers, markets, and needs are defined, the way markets are segmented and sized, and the way ideas are construct and tested. It has a success rate that is five times the industry average – and this is no accident. There are 3 good reasons why it works:

First, we built ODI on an interdependent architecture that ensures all the pieces of the innovation process fit and work together. It works because we use the same set of metrics that customers use to define the successful execution of the job-to-be-done to guide the entire innovation process. These metrics are the customer’s needs. In this sense, ODI brings discipline to innovation in much the same way Six Sigma practices brought discipline to operational improvement. In contrast, most companies today cobble together tools and methods that were never designed to work together; such as VoC, lead users, open innovation, failing fast, conjoint analysis, etc.

Second, ODI is a comprehensive system. It enables us to address all the steps that comprise the innovation process, including market definition and selection, ideation, concept testing, and messaging. Consequently, Outcome-Driven Innovation replaces nearly all the incomplete, incompatible, overlapping, and unnecessary practices that companies commonly use today.

Lastly, since all products and services are designed to help customers get their jobs done better, ODI can be used successfully to accelerate growth in nearly every industry. The process is industry agnostic.

Most companies struggle at innovation because they execute the process backwards. We figured out why and fixed it. In doing so, we debunked many myths about innovation that still derail innovation efforts in most companies today. We’ve proven, for example, that innovation doesn’t begin with an idea, that customers don’t have latent needs and that failing fast is not a strategy for success.

To learn more about Outcome-Driven Innovation, download my latest ODI white paper here.

Nest took the thermostat market by storm this year as they capitalized on the fact that long-time players were focused on creating value for the wrong customer. While leading thermostat makers continued to strengthen their alliances with the contractors that sell and install their products, Nest bypassed that channel and focused on creating value for the customers that really matter: the homeowner.

So why didn’t the incumbent companies do this first? Their alliances are tied to the past, not the future. This is not uncommon. When companies do not sell directly to consumers, yet their products are used by consumers, there is often confusion over just who the customer is. And when new technologies become available that facilitate the disruption of the channel, they hesitate to do so, and pay a big price as a result. This is why you must ask yourself: just who is your customer?

Of course, you could make the argument that your company has many customers; distributors, buyers, installers, users, influencers, administrators, and so one. But let’s not be confused. Markets exist for only one reason: to help someone get a functional job done, not so someone can distribute, buy, or install a product. Of course, companies have to make sure the needs of its distributors, buyers, contractors, and so on are also addressed, but they are not the reason the company, the market or the product exists.

I first saw this issue in my early days at IBM’s PC division where management thought ComputerLand was its primary customer, not the computer user. But then Dell created offerings that took the distributor out of the equation. The result? ComputerLand went the way of the dinosaur, and IBM eventually got out of the PC business. But computer users didn’t disappear. They were, and are still today, the true customer.

Here is the way we see it: to be successful at innovation and to sustain growth, a company must be aligned along two fronts. First, it must know precisely who it is in the business of creating value for. In other words, it must know its customer: the person who is using its product to get a job done. Second, it must know what job that person hired the product to perform. These two insights give a company unique perspective into its market, because a market is not defined by a product; it is defined by the job executor and the job that executor is trying to get done. (See market selection and definition.)

Defining a market from this perspective opens the door to new types of analysis. Looking at innovation through a jobs-to-be-done lens brings better ways for a company to understand its customer’s needs, identify and prioritize growth opportunities, segment markets around the job-to-be-done and size markets and price products. These methods are embodied in our innovation process, Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI). The first step in profiting from the customer is knowing who they are. This is something that Nest did right.

 

The goal of the innovation process is to come up with breakthrough ideas that address unmet customer needs. To execute this process, many companies have adopted a “failing fast” approach to innovation. Using this approach, companies generate lots of ideas and then work to quickly and inexpensively determine which ideas customers like best.

Unfortunately, failing fast is a high-risk guessing game that cannot be won. It is built around a gambling mentality that is doomed to failure. First off, the chances of randomly coming up with an idea that addresses all the customers’ unmet needs significantly better than competing solutions is near zero. The new product success rate is less than 2 percent. Given these low odds, companies have reached a flawed conclusion: just like spinning the roulette wheel more frequently doesn’t change the odds of winning, neither does generating more ideas and failing fast. Thinking that it does defies the logic of probability and statistics. The good news is, companies do not have to keep gambling away their future.

Over the past 21 years we have reinvented the innovation process. We did it by looking at the problem through a jobs-to-be-done lens. From this perspective we discovered a systematic method for creating breakthrough product and service concepts. It is called Outcome-Driven Innovation. This process is designed from the ground up to mitigate the risks that cause new products to fail. To start, the process does not begin with an idea. It begins with a series of steps that are designed to acquire the inputs (the insights and information) that are needed to systematically construct a breakthrough solution in an attractive market.

Here are the innovation process steps associated with Outcome-Driven Innovation and the order in which we execute them to dramatically improve the innovation success rate:

1. Select the customer: define who it is that will use the product or service you want to create.
2. Define the job you want to help that customer get done: after all, people buy products and services to get jobs done.
3. Uncover all the customers’ needs: these are the metrics customers use to measure success when executing the functional job-to-be-done.
4. Determine which needs are unmet: uncover market opportunities by discovering where customers struggle to get the “job” done.
5. Discover the most attractive segment to target: this is often the segment of customers that struggle most to get the job done. They have the greatest need and will often pay more.
6. Evaluate the market potential: size the market based on the number of underserved job executors in the target segment and what they will pay to get the job done perfectly.
7. Identify your competitor’s weaknesses: evaluate competitive products against the customer needs to see where they fail to get the job done well.
8. Formulate the product strategy: decide what segments and unmet needs to target and decide whether to pursue a disruptive, breakthrough, sustaining, or product improvement strategy.
9. Target a price: determine what price the target customers are willing to pay to get the job done perfectly.
10. Construct the product or service concept: systematically construct a solution that will best address the customer’s unmet needs, helping the customer get the job done significantly better.
11. Test the concept: test it against all the customer metrics to ensure it gets the job done well enough to justify the price point and win in the market.
12. Position the concept: do it in a way that appeals to the customer’s unmet needs and emotional jobs.

This innovation process works because it links a set of customer-defined metrics to every step in the process and enables the systematic creation of valued products and services that help customers get their jobs done better. The Outcome-Driven Innovation process is a breakthrough in innovation.

 

In Clayton Christensen’s well-publicized milkshake marketing video and HBR article “Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure,” he proposes doing market segmentation differently: around the job-to-be-done.

We have the utmost respect for Christensen, who has been a steadfast advocate of jobs-to-be-done thinking for nigh on a decade. However, our own two decades of experience with jobs-to-be-done thinking compel us to point out that his milkshake marketing example is fundamentally flawed. The flaws show just how hard it is to apply jobs-to-be-done thinking correctly and to launch successful innovations as a result.

In the video and article, Christensen ponders why, at the beginning of a working day, commuters go into a fast-food establishment and buy a milkshake. “What job are they hiring the milkshake for?” he asks. He concludes that this segment of milkshake consumers are hiring the milkshake because “they face a long, boring commute and need something to keep that extra hand busy and to make the commute more interesting.” In other words, the job-to-be-done is “to face a long, boring commute.” Or perhaps it is “to keep that extra hand busy” or “to make the commute more interesting.”

The end result of any market insight should be innovation, but to our knowledge, no restaurant or fast-food establishment has capitalized on Christensen’s insight and introduced a breakthrough breakfast milkshake that garnered skyrocketing sales. Why not? In our view, it is because both Christensen’s view of what the job-to-be-done is in this case and his starting point for the market segmentation analysis are incorrect. Consequently, he ends up reaching the wrong conclusions about what the restaurant should do to innovate and grow its revenues.

Let’s start with the first problem. The jobs Christensen identifies are not jobs-to-be-done. Specifically, they are not outcome-driven jobs, which means they are not jobs that can be addressed with products. Nor are they markets. In order to be considered a market, a job-to-be-done needs to be the key task or goal the customer is trying to accomplish. Facing a long, boring commute, by contrast, is not a key task or goal. It is a context within which you execute a job. Put another way, if the commute is long and boring, then it might be nice to make it more interesting, but the commute itself is not a goal you set for yourself, it is only a situation you find yourself in. To define the job-to-be-done correctly, the first thing we must ask is, “What job are people trying to get done when they stop at the quick-service restaurant in the morning?”

Using our proprietary techniques and rules to define the customer’s job-to-be-done, we researched this market and concluded that morning commuters are not buying milkshakes to make the commute more interesting or to keep their extra hand busy. Instead, morning commuters are trying to “get breakfast on the go.” This is the job-to-be-done. They want to get and eat breakfast in their cars while driving to work.

Identifying the job correctly is critical because everything else in the innovation process (identifying the customer needs, segmenting the market, sizing the growth opportunity, generating feature ideas, creating messages, etc.) depends upon that first step.

Now for the second problem: market segmentation. After identifying the job-to-be-done, we segment the market based on differing ways in which customers (the job executors) struggle to execute the job. We segment markets to identify under- and overserved customers and new opportunities to pursue. So we always start with the job-to-be-done and then segment the customers (the job executors) to determine if and how they struggle differently when executing the job.

Christensen’s does the opposite, and this is a mistake. Instead of asking, “What job are people trying to get done when they stop at the quick-service restaurant in the morning?” he asks, “What job are people hiring a milkshake to do for them?” He then calls the different jobs he discovers, such as making the morning commute more pleasant or keeping the kids quiet, “segments.” But these are not segments of customers that are struggling in different ways to get a job done. These are customers that are engaging in altogether different jobs. Christensen fell into the product-centric trap that most companies fall into: making the goal of innovation to sell more of an existing product (milkshakes) instead of creating the best product (which may not be a milkshake). The customer-centric goal of innovation should only ever be to create the best product to get a job done, without reference to particular solutions.

If the focus is on morning commuters trying to get breakfast on the go, here’s how jobs-to-be-done market segmentation should be executed:

Once we define the job correctly (getting breakfast on the go), we uncover all the metrics customers use to measure the successful execution of the job. These metrics are the customer’s needs or desired outcomes. They are uncovered by first creating the job map (defining the steps in the job) and then uncovering the metrics in each step. In this market, more than 100 needs exist, including needs related to ordering, receiving, organizing, eating and disposing of the meal.

With all the needs uncovered, we then quantify with hundreds of customers which needs are most important to them, but poorly satisfied with the current solutions (biscuits, milkshakes, eggs, etc.) they choose today. It is with this data that we segment the market. Using factor and cluster analysis, we uncover groups of morning commuters that struggle differently when executing the job-to-be-done. These different groups of commuters are our segments.

Using this approach, we may find a segment that has underserved needs related to ordering and eating the meal, while another segment may have underserved needs related to receiving, organizing, and disposing of the meal. Many possibilities exist. Different products and services may be required to address the different unmet needs of each segment. With this insight, new opportunities for growth are revealed: opportunities that milkshakes cannot address.

This is exactly what we discovered when we helped Bosch create the CS20 circular saw. We studied carpenters (the job executor) who needed to cut wood in a straight line (the job-to-be-done). Using the segmentation methods described above, we discovered one segment of carpenters who struggled because they had to make very complicated cuts. They had 14 unmet needs. We also found a segment of carpenters that make simple cuts and were overserved. The CS20 saw didn’t address the overserved segment, but it did address the 14 unmet needs in the segment that had to make complicated cuts. Eight years after its introduction, this award-winning saw is still very successful for Bosch. This is how we intended jobs-to-be-done market segmentation to be performed.

The way we apply jobs-to-be-done theory not only offers a fruitful new approach to market segmentation, it also opens the door to new ways of thinking about market sizing, ideation, concepting testing, product positioning, and other aspects of innovation. All this thinking is embodied in our innovation process, Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI).

Ron Johnson was recently ousted as the CEO of JC Penney after a series of failed experiments to drastically alter the consumer’s shopping experience. John Gruber (who we usually agree with completely) and others have commented that perhaps Johnson wasn’t given enough time to turn around JC Penney.

But we have a different view. We think Ron Johnson actually didn’t understand what makes Apple successful. This may seem difficult to believe given Apple’s retail success. But let’s look at what Ron Johnson has said and contrast it to what Steve Jobs has said. We believe most people, including Ron Johnson, take away the wrong lessons from some famous Steve Jobs quotes.

Johnson’s tenure at JC Penney was clearly a disaster. Sales dropped 25% in 2012. Johnson decided JC Penney customers didn’t want the hassle of dealing with coupons and sales and would prefer an upscale atmosphere in lieu of bargain racks.

Johnson rejected testing any of his radical changes because he claimed, “just like at Apple, customers don’t always know what they want.”

This myth, that “customers don’t know what they want” has frequently been attributed to Steve Jobs. So what was Steve Jobs really saying? And how does Apple really innovate?

The key to answering these questions is using precise language to describe the innovation process. If you look at two quotes from Jobs, you can see how he could be misinterpreted, even by someone like Johnson who worked for Jobs.

First, Steve Jobs said: “you can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” And second he said, “you‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”

So what do these two statements mean? And how could Ron Johnson misinterpret them? In our view, the key to these statements are two missing words: “products” and “jobs-to-be-done”.

If you combine these two statements and add the missing words, you can clearly see what Steve Jobs was saying: “customers don’t know what products (i.e. solutions and technologies) they want, but they certainly know what job-to-be-done (i.e. customer experience) they need to accomplish.”

This is profoundly different than saying “customers don’t know what they want,” meaning that they don’t know what needs they have. Companies make this mistake all the time. Here is a simple example. If you asked a thousand cooks what products they wanted, they would almost certainly never come up with the microwave, which would require extensive technical knowledge and expertise.

But if you asked the same cooks about preparing food (the job-to-be-done), they could tell you absolutely everything about the difficulty and frustrations of preparing food quickly, predictably, and successfully. These metrics related to speed, stability, and output of executing the jobs-to-be-done are the customer needs. They are knowable, measurable, and actionable. Understanding the “experience” of cooks (i.e. their jobs-to-be-done) is critical to increasing the innovation success rate and mitigating the risk of investing in a failed product.

Ron Johnson took away the wrong message from Apple and decided not to analyze the jobs-to-be-done for JC Penney customers. Like almost every innovation effort that fails to analyze the customer’s job-to-be-done first, Johnson’s effort was a failure. But his biggest failure may be learning the wrong lesson from Apple and his former boss.

Many of the projects I do for companies start with buyer personas. After all, it's a logical place to start as it's next to impossible to develop a content strategy without a keen understanding of the people involved in buying complex B2B product offerings. But I'm noticing a trend I hadn't foreseen.

Marketers are keeping buyer personas in the closet. Yep, it's true.

I talk with a lot of marketers who insist they have buyer personas and some who have no clue that they do, but find them lurking in a file somewhere once they start looking. In the latter case, it's usually because a past marketer had them created.

What's curious to me is that the personas aren't being used. At all. I even had one marketer admit to me that she had no idea what to do with them, but she'd checked the box since she'd heard all the gurus telling her she needed them.

That's a plain disservice, in my opinion.

But here's the real kicker. In nearly every case, once I saw the personas in question, I understood why they were in the closet. They were simply unusable in a B2B complex sale situation.

A perfect example of this is found in a blog post by Vince Giorgi that I've been thinking about since I read it. In the post, Confessions of a Buyer Persona Skeptic, he writes:

"Ever worked through a persona exercise and found your team spending inordinate amounts of time arguing over whether to name the primary persona Jane or Joanne? Have you seen examples of buyer personas and wondered how somebody decided Jim owns the Jack Russell terrier, but Jasmine has the three cats and two kids (or was it two cats, three kids)? I have this nagging sense that, when personas do get developed, many end up being more suitable as backstory for an actor preparing for a movie role than as firm footings on which to base strategy and creative work."

Which is my point about unsuitable personas in a nutshell.

Let me ask you this: When you develop content for a buyer of a complex B2B solution, how would the knowledge that your buyer had a Jack Russell terrier apply?

Don't strain yourself, it doesn't.

What does apply are insights to the worklife, objectives, orientation and obstacles your buyer faces that could be addressed by whatever you sell. I don't care if he lives in a tent, a sprawling rambler in the suburbs, or a cramped apartment in the city. That's not going to influence how he builds consensus with his team to buy cloud storage, beef up his network to enable mobility or decide to virtualize his company's call center.

The problem with personas is that people don't understand what to do with them, so they create them based on their interpretation of getting to know someone and what you might learn about them as you become acquainted on a personal basis. They may look pretty once completed, but they are utterly useless as a tool to inform content strategy.

For personas to become useful tools, they must be based on interviews gathered from salespeople, customer service interactions and the buyers (customers) themselves.

And not just any kind of interview will do. The conversations must be focused on what the buyer is trying to achieve.

• What's important to them and what's driving the change?
• What's impeding or speeding their need to change?
• How do they go about change?
• What do they need to know to embrace change?
• Who do they turn to for advice or information?
• What's the value they visualize once they make a decision?
• Who do they have to sell change to in order to get it?
• What could cause the need for this change to lose priority?

In essence, personas must help us identify how we can help buyers manage and expedite change. That's really what buying is all about.

If we build personas in this way, then they become instrumental in the development of our content strategies and marketing programs. But there's another bonus to be had from the intentional development of buyer personas as a tool.

They're useful to customer service, to salespeople, to lines of business, to product development and R&D. And, if you involve them in the process, they'll have an investment in helping to apply them to the business in ways that count.

As Vince questioned in his post:

"Is 'personas' one of the buzzwords we toss around to feel and sound like cutting-edge marketers? Or are we cutting to the chase, doing the good and hard work, and making the investments of time and resources necessary to research, refine and buy into meaningful, actionable buyer personas?"

Very good questions, indeed.

Are your personas in the closet? Or are they front and center driving your content strategy and customer-facing business processes?

 

Most marketers know that loyal customers are key to their success, but they still tend to get caught up in filling the top of the funnel instead of enticing repeat buyers to come back for more. A recent study from Silverpop partner Windsor Circle, a retention automation platform, revealed that 55 percent of ecommerce revenue was from 31 percent of customers who were repeat buyers, so this is obviously an audience that marketers should be nurturing to build long-lasting relationships.

I recently co-presented a webinar on this topic titled “10 Most Effective Retention marketing Strategies for Digital Marketers” with Windsor Circle and our joint client, evo. In this Webinar, we discussed 10 real-life examples of brands using marketing technology to keep their loyal customers coming back and how to re-engage those who might have fallen off the radar. Here are a few of my favorite takeaways:

Leverage each customer’s behavioral data to drive personalized, targeted messages.

Your customers’ inboxes are constantly flooded with marketing messages, and it’s easy for them to hit a quick “delete.” Sometimes marketers get caught in a “batch and blast” mentality and forget to incorporate their buyers’ needs and wants into their messaging. By “listening” to a buyer’s behavior and using this data to send uniquely relevant content to that person, you’ll increase the likelihood that he or she will come back to make a purchase.

You don’t have to boil the ocean to see the benefits of this approach. Start by leveraging information you already have, like purchase anniversaries or the geographic area where a buyer lives, to send them meaningful messages. evo, for example, sends emails with winter gear specials to geographic regions that have just had a snowfall.

Also, consider surprising or rewarding your customers – a little “thanks” for making a purchase or sharing a piece of content or rewarding your most loyal buyers with something exclusive can go a long way.

Automation is key for maximizing conversions throughout a customer’s lifecycle.

Whether it’s through email, social or the Web, marketers need to give buyers what they want, when they want it. Automation, though not traditionally associated with retail marketing or content humanization, is an excellent way for businesses to drive more personalized experiences and give your brand the edge when it comes to standing out from the rest of the pack.

Welcome series are probably the most basic automated program to set up, and a great place to start. A friendly “hello” after signing up for your email program or a nice “thank you” after a first purchase gives consumers a positive impression of your brand. It also puts a human touch on your marketing messages, setting them apart from generic inbox clutter.

To go above and beyond, consider expanding your single welcome email into a multi-message format, with each email warming the new subscriber to a different value proposition or call to action based on his or her point of entry, interests or what the new contact needs to do to become an experienced user of your product or service.

Give your customers the content that matters to them.

Delivering content based on past purchases is another way to deliver a more personalized experience. For example, if a customer has purchased a set of plates, send them follow-up content with the matching bowls and a how-to video on caring for their new tableware.

Implementing Web tracking is another smart way to capture data you can use to enhance the customer experience. You can these use this information to automatically send relevant content to customers who have been browsing a particular section of your website, for example. Providing content, advice and tools about which specific product or solution is right for them builds credibility and keeps your brand fresh in your customers’ minds, making them more likely to come back for a purchase.

The key to personalization is actively “listening” to your customers’ needs and wants and then acting on those things. A great way to get to know a customer better is to entice them to provide product reviews. It’s a win-win for both of you – once they’ve made a purchase, use automation technology to trigger an email requesting a review. They are able to provide feedback in the form of a review that can help convert future customers. Further, these customers often make additional purchases once they are back on your site posting or reviewing their live review.

Or, offer fun contests or gifts. evo, for example, recently held a “Vote for your favorite snowboard” promotion. To the consumer, this is a fun way to engage with one of their favorite stores. For you as a marketer, it’s another behavioral data point for you to act on.

Related Resources: 
1) Blog Post: Windsor Circle on 3 Holiday Marketing Tips to Boost Revenue
2) Blog Post: Browse Abandonment Emails: How You Can Use Them to Bring Browsers Back to Buy
3) White Paper: 7 Digital Marketing Strategies Made Better through an Integrated Marketing Platform

Like it or not, your B2B buyer’s beliefs are the basis for their decisions. As a sales professional, you want to fully inform your prospects of your value without bogging them down with information. You want to enable a buyer to make a decision. Easier said than done, right? Not so fast.

Although it may seem difficult at first glance, there is hope. We’ve posted about the book Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play before, and we’ve found more valuable information this week. We pulled out some specific beliefs that your prospective clients need to have in order for you to close a sale. Let’s jump right in.

TYPICAL BELIEFS THAT HELP THE BUYER TRUST THE PROVIDER

1. You are Competent

Every buyer wants to know that their seller has the right expertise. It’s basic, but without the necessary knowledge from the provider’s side, the sale is dead on it’s feet.

2. You are Credible

Your prospects are likely researching you, much in the same way you are trying to learn about them. Use your company’s LinkedIn profile and website to inspire interest. Customize your headline, become engaged in groups, and share thoughtful information. Let your buyer know up front that you will do what you say, and follow through. The outcome? Credibility.

3. You are Compatible

Are you a good fit? It’s so much easier for the buyer to work with someone they get along with. Buyers look for sales representatives they’re comfortable asking questions and confident receiving answers from.

TYPICAL BELIEFS THAT HELP THE BUYER TRUST YOUR SOLUTION

4. It Will Resolve their Problems and Produce Desired Results

Is it actually a solution? The buyer needs to trust that their problems will addressed and eliminated. This should be an initial goal of any sale. You should be able to explain your initial solution in minutes. After that, shut up and listen to your client’s input so you can address any outlying issues.

5. It Can Be Implemented with the Available Resources

Can the prospect run it on their current platform? Do they need to implement three other things just to set up your service? They shouldn’t have to. A good solution is simple and intuitive in terms of interaction.

6. It Meets the Decision Criteria of Key Stakeholders

It has to be tailored specifically to the client’s needs. Particularly, stakeholders who are making a final decision on the product’s value. Identify who the decision makers are so that you have a clear idea of who you need to please.

7. The Economics are Compelling

Is the solution both compelling and financially worthwhile? Be able to justify your pricing, and share exactly what the buyer will get for their money. If you’re priced like a Ferrari, you better drive like one. But not everyone needs something luxurious and flashy. In fact, most people don’t. Make a case for why you’re valuable the way you are.

8. It Exceeds the Alternatives

Chances are, the buyer has other options. So why is your service better? Make sure and communicate your unique solution to prospects. This is where you can appeal to emotions. If you love your product (and you should), make your buyer love it too. They need to believe it’s the best for them.

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A good sales professional can communicate these eight ideas to their prospect easily. Once you get your customer to trust the provider (you) and the solution, you’ve made a successful sale. Just remember to keep the end goal in mind as you approach each and every sale. Give the buyer the information they need to trust you and your solution, but don’t bog them down with facts and extras.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go close some sales!

Sales Training Article: Being Buyer-Centric from the Beginning

By John Holland, Chief Content Officer, CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company

Ever wonder what goes through a seller's mind just before meeting with a prospect for the first time? Most everyone would agree it's important to have clear objectives for meetings and that's especially true for sales calls. Poor buyer experiences are more likely to occur when a seller's objective is to sell something or even worse sell a particular offering. I believe a seller should earn the right to begin selling by uncovering buyer needs and would like to describe how to do that.

A cornerstone of CustomerCentric Selling® is that B2B buying cycles begin when buyers share goals, problems or needs they're willing to spend money to achieve or address. There will be instances where sellers don't earn the right to begin selling for any of the following reasons:

• The buyer doesn't have needs that your offering can address.
• The buyer has needs, but won't share them because the seller never established the credibility needed to have a conversation. Buyers don't bare their souls to sellers they don't believe are trustworthy (which Steven Covey defined as being perceived as sincere and competent).
• The buyer is price shopping (the seller is not "Column A") and wants to discuss your price and offering. He or she doesn't want to take the time to share the desired outcomes nor submit to a diagnosis.

Before earning an opportunity to sell, the following steps should be completed in the first few minutes of calls starting with the greeting and call introduction:

1. Attempt to have the buyer conclude you are sincere (different from the negative stereotype of salespeople). You can get off on the wrong foot by misreading whether buyers want to initiate small talk or get right down to business.

2. Attempt to have the buyer conclude that you are competent by stating clear objectives for the call and offering a concise company positioning statement (what your company helps customers do). Try to minimize the hype and opinions many sellers can't resist sharing.

3. By doing some pre-call planning and research be prepared to tell a title/industry specific Success Story designed to take the buyer from latent to active need for an issue you believe is likely to be relevant to the buyer.

4. Be prepared with situational questions to engage with the buyer and hopefully have them share a goal that your offering can help them achieve. Be prepared with a menu of goals for the title you are calling on that can be offered if the buyer has not shared a goal.

Once a buyer shares a business goal, an important milestone has been reached. It should allow the seller to do a diagnosis to help a buyer understand the reasons the outcome can't be achieved and realize the potential value in addressing them.

It all begins by earning the respect of the buyer and making the call about his or her issues, not your offerings. A competent seller has the patience to complete the diagnosis before offering their capabilities.

Selling begins once buyers share goals.

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Need some help with your sales performance? Take a look at the sales training workshops available to you and improve sales performance.

Read more sales training articles from CustomerCentric Selling® - The Sales Training Company.

There's nothing as eye-opening about sales as when you're in the buyer's seat. You've been selling your services for years. You know what buyers think and want. You know what to give them so you end up with happy, loyal clients who sing your praises. Right? Not necessarily.

When you're the buyer and see how other providers operate, you realize the gaps in your own sales process. Plus, you start to understand why buyers are skeptical and wary.

"Being a client was a game-changer for me. I now understand the skepticism out there. There are too many 'professionals' who say the right things but don't deliver," writes Vickie K. Sullivan in her article What I Learned from Buying Professional Services.

Online content in the sales and marketing industries is constantly changing. The Marketing Sphere represents recent good reads from our digital circles about B2B marketing selected by PointClear colleagues.

 

B2B Trade Show Marketing Circa 2013: Everything is the Same, Everything is Different

Christopher Ryan shares his observations during a recent technology conference. He noted that booths look the same with little differentiation and are staffed with untrained talent. As usual, giveaways and demos are used to get attention of attendees. Ryan also observed that new attendees aren't just tire-kickers and prospects are armed with more knowledge than ever—asking tough questions for which the best B2B marketers must be prepared. Via GreatB2BMarketing

5 Buyer Behaviors Reshaping B2B Marketing

According to Buyerology founder and principal, Tony Zambito, buyer constantly changes; however, B2B marketers should monitor important trends. Buyers have embraced collaboration with the advent of social and digital technologies, so marketers must consider internal as well as external members of collaborative networks which impact buying desisions. Via iMedia Connection

CMO Council study: Content has significant impact on buying process

According to a study from the Chief Marketing Officer Council, 9 out of 10 B2B buyers ranked online content as having at least a moderate effect on their choice of vendors. Half of those buyers trust professional associations, online communities and industry organizations as important sources for content. The most sought after content are research reports, white papers, case studies and product reviews. Via BtoBMagazine

Only 16 Percent of B2B Consumers Prefer Live Webinars

Live webinars have been a staple marketing tactic for B2B since the decline in trade show marketing. Matthew Cleary cites his research as revealing that most B2B buyers prefer recorded webinars. He suggests using this trend for ongoing long-term lead generation. A teaser video followed by a gated series offer that launches a marketing automation solution can result in building quality leads. Via ClickZ

 

Do you have a resource from your sphere to share? Let us know in the comment section.

by Tim Riesterer

A recent spate of research from big industry analysts found that buyers believe they are at least 60 percent done with their buying process before they seek out a salesperson. At the same time, ironically, there is documented evidence that 60 percent of qualified leads end the sales cycle in “no decision,” sticking with their status quo and buying nothing.

So if your prospects are 60 percent set in their decisions before they talk to salespeople, yet 60 percent of the time they choose to do nothing, are they really that close to making a decision?

Before you discard this research as irrelevant, let’s take a closer look at how the outlined issue impacts the content of your marketing messages, how you view your content marketing programs, and the way you decide to enable your salespeople.

Declared Preference vs. Revealed Preference
First, we need to sort out the reality from the rhetoric. What’s going on here is a classic case of what economists call “declared preference” versus “revealed preference.” They’ve known for years that people will say one thing when nothing is on the line, and then behave completely opposite when money and personal reputation is at stake.

This explains why buyers can be so confident that they don’t need salespeople–that they are guiding themselves through the buying process–yet become confused, concerned, and get cold feet when they actually have to make the decision.

The key takeaway for you as a marketer is this: The majority of buyers who think they are almost done with their purchase decisions are not even ready to change, let alone choose a specific company.

Marketing And Sales As Meaning Makers
Futurist George Dyson said that the most important people in our lives will be the “meaning makers.” They are the ones who can make sense of all the raw information and apply it to help facilitate good and proper decision making.

Your salespeople with their lips moving are your company’s greatest agents of meaning-making. And your ability as a marketer to help them create a buying vision for your prospects–to arm them with the best stories and skills to help potential customers see the need to change and view your offering as a valuable solution–is what will separate you from your competitors.

But these types of value-added sales conversations happen only if you develop the right content that inspires prospects to consider leaving their status quo, gives them the sense of urgency to do something different, and enables your sales reps to deliver that message in a compelling and differentiated dialogue.

For example, you need to develop campaigns based on problems or missed opportunities your prospect may not even realize they have. In the hands of your salespeople, these campaigns will help them with their hardest job–breaking through to get a meeting. Most prospects won’t take a meeting just because you have a new product. But they do want to know whether their objectives are at risk due to unconsidered needs. Helping your salespeople loosen the status quo to help capture that all-important first meeting is an often overlooked marketing step.

Once they get the meeting, your salespeople need to nail it. This doesn’t happen by accident. The winning companies are developing conversation aids, such as whiteboard stories, to drive these dialogues. Most executive buyers prefer conversations, not presentations, so providing your salespeople with provocative stories told with simple, concrete visuals is a great way to position them as consultative sellers with relevant, valuable insight to share. Not to mention that executives tend to participate in the earlier stage, vision-creation meetings, which are much better delivered as a whiteboarding session versus a PowerPoint show.

Death Of The Salesman?
The research mentioned earlier tries to convince marketers that the role of a salesperson might be slowly dying. Yet there’s even more recent research that contradicts these findings. The IT Sales and Marketing Association (ITSMA) just published findings stating that 70 percent of buyers want to engage with sales reps before they identify their shortlist–suggesting that the earlier research may be exaggerated at best, misleading at worst.

Instead of being relegated to the very last moments of a purchase decision and abdicating the majority of the buying cycle to marketing, ITSMA’s research reveals that salespeople are becoming even more crucial to helping buyers make a decision.

With such conflicting studies, I’ll once again refer you to the actual behavior of the buyers. The majority still need the help of a salesperson to make the decision to change–and make the decision to choose you. And it’s still your job to equip and enable your No. 2 communications channel–which is the spoken words taking place between a buyer and your company’s representative: the salesperson.

 

“This article originally appeared on CMO.com.”

One of the reasons that buyer dissatisfaction is on the rise is the way that organizations approach the discipline of Demand Generation.

Nothing is more frustrating for a salesperson than a potential buyer who, after acknowledging they need your product or service, decides not to buy. Why do they do this, and what can you do about it? Remember that businesses buy products and services, in essence, to solve problems. They may have too much of something that is undesirable, or too little of something that is good.

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Andy Paul, Sales Effectiveness Expert Customers identify more with great service and support than with great features #sales

Cable clutter is the scourge of the modern work desk. Sure, we are trying to go wireless as much as possible, but there are still plenty of cords snaking around. Let’s do some desk cable management to organize them once and for all.

The charging cord for your laptop and phone, USB hubs, mouse, and other odds and ends create mess in any work space. It’s time to learn how to organize and manage computer cables on and under your desk.

5 Steps to Organize Cables on Your Work Desk

People on the internet continue to share several different cable management ideas, tips, and hacks on how they manage cable clutter. Largely, you can group desk cable management into five basic ways.

1. Hide the power strip and plugs.
2. Collect and tie the cables together.
3. Shorten cable length.
4. Hold unused cables in place.
5. Identify the cables.

1. Hide the Power Strip and Plugs

A power strip is designed for functionality, not for looking good. Yes, you should use a surge protector, but the resultant mess of cables is an eyesore. That’s the first place to start your desk cable management.

Make a DIY Shoebox Power Strip

The simplest cable management idea for this is to create a DIY box for the power strip out of a shoebox. The video below has step by step instructions to make a good-looking one. If you’re okay with a basic box, then just cut holes on both sides so that the power strip’s cable, and the cables of connected plugs, can come out from either side.

Buy a BlueLounge Cablebox

Instead of making your own, you can even grab one off the shelf. I’d recommend the BlueLounge Cablebox or the Cablebox Mini, depending on the size of your surge protector.

It looks sharp and comes in a variety of colors. The Mini includes a surge protector too, so you don’t have to buy your own. Computer cable management has never been simpler.

2. Collect and Tie Cables Together

Now that the power strip is out of the way, let’s deal with the myriad loose cords hanging around.

Start by identifying the cords that are going to stay there permanently or for a long time. Collect them together and bunch them up for under-desk cable management. There are two options for this.

Bind Cables With Zip Ties

A pack of 100 zip ties costs only $5 on Amazon, so get one for yourself and start zipping up cables all over your house. Make sure your cables are neatly separated first, then hold them together, and zip tie them. It’s best to add zip ties at multiple points, so they stay neat from the power strip up to the desk or PC. Once you secure a tie, use a pair of scissors to snip off the end. Zip ties are also excellent to organize cables inside desktop PCs.

Zip ties have some pros and cons. Taking a cable out of a zip tie means cutting them all loose, and fastening new ones again. That said, given how cheap zip ties are, you can create multiple bunches of cables.

This way, you can remove and attach a collection of cords at the same time. When you have so many ties, you’ll find that you come up with your own cable management ideas.

Group With Cable Sleeves

Blue Key World Cable Sleeve Blue Key World Cable Sleeve Buy Now On Amazon $10.98

Cable sleeves like the Blue Key World Cable Sleeve are better for desk cable management than zip ties because you can also add semi-permanent cables here. A zippered or velcro cable sleeve holds all your cords together, and you can easily remove or add cords.

And perhaps it’s a personal choice, but I think it looks a lot better than zip ties, since you get a uniform color. Unless cost is a factor, I’d say cable sleeves are better to conceal computer cables.

3. Shorten Cable Length

The power strip box and cable sleeves or zip ties simplify under-desk cable management. But the cables sitting on the desk are still an issue. You need them there, but you don’t need them taking up so much space. The solution is to shorten their length temporarily.

Make a DIY Cablebone

The no-cost DIY solution is the Cablebone from Instructables. You’ll need a rubber mat, a marker pen, a cutter, glue, and a drill. Draw small bone shapes on a rubber mat, cut them out, and glue two together.

The resultant rubber bone should be roughly a quarter of an inch thick. Drill a hole at both ends of the bone, and cut it slightly so a cord slip in. Now just wrap the cord from one end to the other, coiling it around the bone to make it as short as you need. Clean and simple desk cable management!

Learn the Loop Method

If you don’t want to do even that, try the loop method or crochet chain stitch. It’s one of the oldest cable management ideas as a way to reduce the length without damaging it. You’ll need one of the ends of your cable to not be large.

This Instructables guide demonstrates each step of how to loop cables. You can make as many or as few loops as you want depending on desired length, and simply tug on it to release them one by one.

4. Hold Unused Cables in Place

There are many cables that you need off and on, but not always. Your phone or tablet charger, for instance, may not always be plugged into the device. And so it sits on the desk, adding to the clutter, getting tangled with other wires. Good desk cable management would mean you should arrange these unused cables in one place.

Affix With Sugru

The all-purpose moldable silicone putty Sugru has many geeky uses. Desk cable management is right at the top of this. As the video above shows, you need to only stick the Sugru on your desk (or to its side) and make a groove with a toothpick. In a matter of hours, you will have as many custom cord holders as you need.

Sugru Sugru Buy Now On Amazon $15.99 ($49.97 / oz)

Try the ONME Cable Clips Organizer

ONME Cable Clips Organizer ONME Cable Clips Organizer Buy Now On Amazon $6.29

If you don’t want to make your own Sugru pieces, you can buy ready-made products like the ONME Cable Clips Organizer. Stick it on a desk or a wall and run any cables up to 6mm diameter through it. It’s ideal to manage power cords, headphone cables, and other essential cables that run around your desk regularly.

Put Binder Clips on Edges

Similar to the Sugru, you can attach binder clips at the edge of your desk and run the cord through the opening. It’s one of the coolest cable management tips. The only issue with this is that your desk needs a jutting edge, and it should be thin enough to affix a binder clip.

5. Identify The Cables

So you have all your cables neatly arranged. But while you get rid of the mess, this bunching up lost the ability to easily identify which cable does what. Don’t worry, there are simple cable management ideas to help remember that.

Repurpose Bread Clips

The most popular cable management tip is to use bread clips. Attach one to a cable, write out what it’s for. I’m not a fan of this though. Bread clips don’t work for thick cables, and the writing isn’t readable from a distance. Still, it’s free and simple.

Write on Duct Tape

The easiest way to identify cables is to wrap colored duct tape around the line, with a little bit jutting out. On the part that’s jutting out, use a sharpie or marker pen to write what the cable is for. And to ensure that the back doesn’t stick somewhere, put a piece of paper there and write the identification again. It doesn’t look great, but it’s the most functional choice.

Make Your Desk Productive

Now that you’ve mastered desk cable management, it’s time to get to work in your tidy workspace. But simply cleaning up isn’t going to magically make you more productive. Other aspects of your work setup should be looked at as well.

The height of your screen matters, as does the height of your chair and desk. Even the lighting for your desk can affect how much work you get done. Learn all the hacks to make your desk more productive to maximize your work efficiency.

Read the full article: 5 Ways to Clean Up Computer Cable Clutter Under Your Desk