Access – It’s an uglier issue than you think

February 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Getting access to the decision maker is an age-old sales challenge.  It hasn’t gone away.  It won’t go away.  In fact, the access challenge has gotten – and will continue to get – substantially more formidable.  In the old days we only needed access to the decision-maker.

Today we have to gain access to everyone in the decision network.

And it’s NOT simply a matter of more contacts to make.  It’s also:

  • More repetitions of the value proposition.  …and of your solution’s details.  …and of answers to common objections.  …and of…
  • More value propositions (and solution details, and common objections, and…)  each slanted to emphasize the particular perspective of the individual
  • More complex solutions and proposals because they must reflect the interests and biases of each node in the decision network.
  • Vastly more complex political considerations.  While it’s not politically correct to acknowledge, you must work within and coordinate the political considerations of each individual in the decision network; they are there; they are real and they all have deal-complicating effects – sometimes deal-killing power.
  • More people from your own company involved due to the above.  …all of whom contribute even more ingredients to the political soup.
  • More people from more business partners involved due to the above.  …all of whom contribute even more ingredients to the political soup.

And you’ll find the time to deal with all this where???

If you’ve followed this blog in even the most cursory manner, you already know that a big piece of the answer is e-Rep.  You simply MUST have a digital extension of yourself – endowed with all your amazing knowledge, experience and skills – to help out with all the communicating you need to get done.

…or you could just get your boss to hire 3 or 4 sales assistants and assign them to you.

Think about it.

Filed Under: E-Rep Tagged With: , , , ,

“I Don’t Do Content Marketing,” Said The Blind Sales Rep

February 16, 2012 By 10 Comments

“No Todd,” said the sales guy I was talking to. “I just don’t do content marketing. The people I sell to don’t respond to it.”

Todd leaned back, furrowed his brow, thought for a moment, and then leaned back forward. “Can I see the latest full-size, six-page brochure you are passing out?”

“Oh! Yes,” exclaimed the sales guy. “Would be glad too!” He reached into his briefcase to pull out a shrink-wrapped package which contained 100 fresh brochures. He pulled out a pen to tear open the shrink-wrap, when I stopped him.

“Wait, don’t open that on my account,” I said.

“No. It is ok,” he responded, smiling. “I don’t get to give this beauty out very often.” By now, he had pushed through the point of his pen into the wrap, but accidentally left a two-inch ink streak along the front of the glossy masterpiece. He glanced up at me, and uttered, “Sorry.”

But instead of handing me the brochure, he turned it over and started to hand write something on the back of it.

“Um, what’s that,” I asked?

“Well, I need to write my cell phone on here,” he explained. “When we printed these, we thought the prospects would just need the main company switchboard.”

“Yeah,” I sheepishly said, “turns out they like to call on you direct, huh?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “They always have questions about things, so it is easier to just jot down my personal number on the brochure.”

“No doubt,” I nodded. “I…uh, um…” Turns out I didn’t know how to respond. But then I queried “So, actually you do content marketing, but you are just putting content into this print brochure, right?”

He looked back at me and thought for a moment, “Well, yeah. Wait. No. This is a print brochure. This is how we’ve always done it.”

I went on, “Well, you could take that content and put it on your blog. I mean, really, with that six-page, full-size brochure, you’ve got a dozen blog posts at least just with the content you got there! Think about it! Your first dozen blog posts are already written,” I explained. “How many other brochures have you got stacked over there on your book shelf? All that content could be turned into digital content…”

We both stared for a minute at the eleven unopened shrink-wrapped stacks on the floor next to the bookcase. A stress ball from their 2006 trade show was resting on top of the stack.

But then I noticed he was writing again, scribbling a website URL onto the same brochure.

“Forgot to put the website on the brochure too,” I asked?

“No no, this is our YouTube channel,” he explained. “For some reason, more and more of my prospects prefer to watch videos of the systems we sell, rather than read this thing,” he explained waving dry the fresh ink on the brochure.

I leaned back in my chair, then pretended to carefully file away the brochure that he finally handed to me, paying careful attention not to smudge the YouTube address, which I was actually curious to view.

Then, scratching my head, I said “Sorry that you think your customers won’t respond to a content marketing program.”

“Yeah,” he responded, sadly shaking his head. “It’s a real shame…”

###

[sign-up for our content marketing course here]

[drawing by hugh macleod]

Filed Under: Content Marketing

These aren’t your daddy’s sales skills

February 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of great stuff in The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.  I keep going back to sections of it and consistently come away with new, better, deeper insights.  I found their discussion of “Loyalty Drivers,” for example, to be particularly intriguing.  It’s all summarized in the innocuous-looking, yet value-laden chart below.  Stare at it for a while and think about it before reading what your humble blogger thinks are key the points.

Here are three things that strike me as most significant:

  • Two traditional icons of great selling are in the Weak/Weak quadrant.  In other words, they are minimum requirements expected of all – not differentiators.
    • “Excels in diagnosing needs”
    • “Adjusts to our unique needs”
  • “Has widespread support across the organization” is extremely important to both decision makers and decision influencers, i.e., the entire decision network.  The sales rep must earn the respect of everyone throughout the customer organization; not only with the CEO, but also with Finance, Operations, Manufacturing, Engineering, Marketing, etc., etc., etc.
  • “Easy to buy from” is extremely important to both decision makers and decision influencers.  So the sales rep also needs to have credibility with and earn the respect of everyone within his/her own company.

It’s a brave new world out there boys and girls.  Change or die!

How to get and stay in that upper right quadrant?  How to earn bullet-proof customer loyalty?  Learn quickly; share everything you know and learn; share it far and wide.

…or you could just continue to burn customer time unproductively by asking a gazillion questions.

Filed Under: E-Rep Tagged With: , ,

Grow Kids, Inc.

February 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Community Service Tagged With: ,

Podcasting As A Networking Strategy

February 9, 2012 By 8 Comments

Lots of people ask me why I don’t spend more time networking.

By this, they mean going to networking events – coffees, chamber after hours events, association lunches, etc.

Yeah, I am not dissing those kinds of events, but they just take up a lot of my time. And in the end, I end up talking to only one or two people at those events anyway.

So why wouldn’t I make that conversation everlasting? More meaningful? More valuable?

Give your networking everlasting impact!

I do my networking in the podcast studio.

I haven’t attended a networking event in over six months. And yet, our business is growing faster than ever. Why?

Because I am still networking. But doing it in a meaningful, constructive way.

I know who I want to network with. I know the people with which I want to make a meaningful connection – to assist, to serve, to learn from, and yes, to do business with.

[If you don't know and cannot identify these people, you have other issues we need to talk about.]

So instead of hoping I will run into them at some random networking event, I reach out and invite that person to my studio. Then, one of two things happens:

1. They decline the interview for whatever reason. But that doesn’t matter, because the mere act of inviting them to my studio gave me a meaningful excuse to contact them. Now, I’ve got their attention anyway, and can ask them to take some other action.

2. They agree to the interview, and come to my studio. Here, we meet, get to know each other, learn about each other, and determine ways to either help each other, or maybe even do business together.

Sure, that’s no different than if I met them at some coffee and accomplished the same thing. Sure. But here’s the difference:

A. They came to me, which frankly, is very convenient for me.

B. I recorded a cool interview which is great content for me. [learn how to use this content here]

C. They now have an mp3 of their interview which they can use in their own sales and marketing program.

D. They had a cool experience in my studio which they may tell others about — extending the story of me and my guest, and exposing others to my work.

E. And oh, this becomes indexed content on the search engines that will serve both myself and my guest for a long, long time…

[Editor's note: You can achieve the same strategic benefit of networking with podcasts without needing a studio. Plenty of online tools to use. Remember, the goal is to provide a forum for meaningful conversation. Email me to learn more]

I have no doubt I will attend a future networking meeting. But I am not in a hurry to do so.

“But Todd, how will you ever meet NEW people,” I am often asked. To which I respond by asking if they’ve ever heard of Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn…

My new form of business networking is doing me and my business just fine. How can podcasting connect you to the important people in your business life?

###

[subscribe to our FREE updates here]

Filed Under: Podcasting
« Older Posts