Posted in Entrepreneurship, Lead generation, Marketing vs Sales on January 11th, 2011
Why is there so much confusion around what is marketing and what is sales? On one hand, the true answer is “who cares?” On the other hand, though, I see entrepreneurs make assumptions about sales and marketing that cause them early, costly mistakes. The most common assumption we make is that we need to get our messaging right very early. That assumption causes us to spend too much time worrying about ‘messaging’ (surveys, blogging, website development, materials) and not enough on making direct, one on one contact with buyers. Direct, one on one contact with buyers gives you the information you need to design a message that works, not the other way around.
A rule of thumb you can use to determine if you are reaching all the way to the buyer is whether you are getting objections. Yes, objections. This happens when a buyer says; “Craig, this is really cool, but I just don’t have budget right now.” Or “Man, I’m so busy that this may be something I think about in six months.” But you’re an entrepreneur…you need to make payroll right now. You need to grow your business now. Not in six months. Success is determined by how you handle these objections. This requires direct contact with buyers, not messaging. It’s too easy these days for us to hide behind websites and blog posts and surveys. Sales is the gritty stuff that happens when the message meets the market.
Posted in Marketing vs Sales, Sales on December 28th, 2010
A ‘renaissance’ person, or ‘polymath,’ is described as “a person who excels in multiple fields.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_man). According to the wiki, these terms describe someone who continues to develop skills, capabilities, and knowledge far beyond one specific domain. In an age of increasing specialization, this whole notion of someone excelling across multiple domains is refreshing.
One of the trends I’m tracking right now involves the convergence of marketing and sales. These two formerly distinct disciplines are being drawn together by a force that over the past 50 years has been drawing the whole world together. That ‘force’ is technology. Many people like me who live and work amongst the marketing and sales disciplines have been commenting on how these two critical functions are transforming from ‘art’ into ‘science.’ Technology allows us more visibility than ever before into buying behaviors, social groupings, information-sharing, lead tracking, and sales ‘touches.’ As it does that, it breaks off pieces of art and organizes them into science.
It’s that phenomenon that is pushing all of us to become renaissance resources. We have to be comfortable across art and science, marketing and sales, in front of customers and behind computer screens.
Posted in Art of conversation, Lead generation, Marketing vs Sales, Sales, Targeting on October 27th, 2009
A “sales trailer” is to a business what a “movie trailer” is to a movie. It’s the short, 30-second piece that draws you in and generates interest. Every business and every sales (and marketing) person should be able to rattle off the company’s sales trailer at a moment’s notice. There’s no excuse for not being able to do this.
The sales trailer answers the question; what problem do you solve? But it doesn’t give the boring technical reasons why this is so. Too often the sales trailer ends up filled with jargon that just clogs and confuses. A mistake that almost all entrepreneurs and sales people make is that we know our product or service too well, and so instead of being concise we toss jargon around like a child in a tantrum.
Here’s a great way to take a time out and stop using jargon in creating your sales trailer: use a magnetic poetry kit to create it. That way, there will be no risk of “phosphate-free” or “API-enabled” leeching into your sales trailer. Just sit down with the kit and a handy refrigerator and go to work.
Sales people need to trust that simple is better and that less is more. If you draw in a prospect with your sales trailer, you will get to the next step. Really. My sales trailer? “We tune your sales engine for high performance.”
Posted in Marketing vs Sales on August 1st, 2009
Just reading an excellent piece in the NYTimes on drones (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17exum.html?_r=1). Written by a counterinsurgency specialist and an Army veteran of Iraq, these two make an insightful point that applies to a dilemma faced by businesses. The point that the two authors make is that our use of drones is counter-productive in quelling terrorism because “the use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic – or, more accurately, a piece of technology – substituting for a strategy.”
Whether you agree with their broader point or not, the lesson for businesses is clear. We are all looking for ways to get the word out..to cut through the noise in the market. And too often, we look to “tactics” in the form of new “technologies” to be our solution. But lacking a larger strategy, the use of social media technologies (like this blog!) to get the word out is like blindly flying a drone into the wilderness. We need to formulate a coherent strategy. And this doesn’t mean years of planning…just an understanding of the strategy, the terrain, and the objectives. Oh, that, and some well-trained pilots.
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Marketing vs Sales, Sales on July 17th, 2009
Every few years, it seems we have to learn something completely new. As CEO’s, we will always have the usual strategy, operations, and growth headaches (and successes). That comes with the territory. But what about when the territory..the terrain..changes? Selling for IBM in the late 80’s, the terrain was flat and clear. I got a briefcase, a handful of brochures, and some zip codes on the south side of Chicago. The process? Get in the car…knock on doors…make the pitch…write a proposal…close the deal (or don’t)…go to the next door. An easy-to-follow map. Why was this so simple? Because the playing field was tilted in my favor. I held all of the information and my customers had effectively none.
Enter the web, and the terrain begins to change.
In the business-to-business market where you and I play, customers are now armed with more information (ammunition?) than we are. They are getting this information online before you and I even have a chance to talk to them. This means we have to be on our game almost before the game begins. Just as you would never intentionally send an unprepared, ill-dressed and under-skilled sales person into your customers, you had better not do this with your web presence. In this new terrain, your web presence is the first third of your sales process. You may not want to believe it (I didn’t), but it’s true. Just as you must routinely optimize your sales team, you must routinely optimize your web presence. None of us would argue that in order to build revenue, we must invest in our sales team. But with every article we read about Google, we sense that the terrain is different and that the definition of “sales team” is changing.
One of our clients serves as a great example of taking advantage of the changing terrain. Over the past two years, this 61-year old company moved from a traditional, B2B sales team to a one-two punch of optimized, dynamic web-driven lead gen with a clean hand-off to a young ‘propose-and-close’ sales team. Why? Because the new CEO realized that he needed a new map and he needed to out-execute his competitors. The results? More leads, better leads, cleaner hand-offs and increased revenue in a time when his competitors are getting crushed. We should all be so smart.
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Marketing vs Sales, Sales, Web design & strategy on June 26th, 2009
As I have been thinking through social media and its impact on our business and our clients’ businesses, it strikes me that there is a useful metaphor that captures the real benefits of using social media tools. Think of all of our marketing and sales efforts as a rushing river where we are constantly flooding the market with activity. Outbound activity like banners, email blasts, cold-calling, event marketing, sales competitions, etc. etc. If our clients – the targets for this activity – have one problem, it’s that they are already SATURATED with information.
Social media tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs, Digg, and Facebook cause us to coalesce around issues of importance to our business and to trade insights and affinities. In essence, social media filters all of the information flowing through the market and allows us to DISTILL all of the activity in the market into a few precious drops of the hard stuff that pack some punch. What are those precious drops? They are the ‘real story’ of a product or service, an insight into a company’s culture, a sense of the ‘how’ not just the ‘what.’ Social media help us distill information down to something that makes sense to us..for us. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have a few drops of the hard stuff than drown in a river of watered-down swill.
