Sales Laundry

Archive for the ‘Corporate Sales Strategy’ Category

I heard an interesting quote today on a CIO Magazine webcast from Steven John, Strategic CIO of Workday, speaking about “The Cloud.”

“If you are doing what someone else can do then what only you can do is not getting done.”

Steven John, Strategic CIO, Workday

Steven’s point, that if another organization is more capable of doing what you are doing, give or take some due diligence, push the work out and focus your efforts on what you are uniquely skilled to do as an individual or a company, makes sense.

So much sense, in fact, corporations in this country have been following the strategy of pushing out jobs to the other side of the border and the other side of the world because the skill is there, the pay is low and they work while we sleep.  In short it does not make sense or cents to do the work here.

C-level executives are wrestling with this “Cloud” problem figuring out answers to “Cloud 101″ questions today like how to best deploy their human capital.  Tomorrow they will also be fighting upstart competitors in “Cloud 201: How not to get eaten by the little guy that has a lower cost basis than you and no legacy gear to work around.”

OK, so what does this have to do with you?

It is time for you to take stock and figure out what “only you can do” and get busy getting good at it before the Cloud comes and rains on your parade.

If you are an IT executive, look for opportunities to free up your IT resources.  Create an internal cloud; use a public provider or some hybrid model pitched by VMware and Citrix to push the things you don’t need to be doing, the commodities, to the line of business or a strategic partner.

Consultant?  Find and focus on your niche and push off everything else including and mowing the grass on those days you work from home to specialists if your revenue stream permits.

There are real live schools contemplating replacing teachers with computers in some specific test cases, how far could behind could a sales or consulting job be that is built on the model of being paid to educate others and demonstrate expertise?

As I build up the territory I am in, I am facing a similar problem today.  To hit my self-imposed targets for the year the math tells me I need to do more research and make more new contacts than it is practical for me to make in a day and still work on the rest of what I do.

I spent four hours building a nine page spreadsheet detailing every aspect of my business and defining the ratios I need to monitor to stay on track.  (in retrospect, probably should have farmed that task out)  Now I am faced with three choices.

1.  Keep doing what I was doing, and go look for my Ignorance is Bliss T-shirt.

2.  Focus on where I am strongest, building my community of customers and growing those relationships, pawn off low level client research and paperwork tasks, and follow my plan.

3.  Try to straddle the fence and will myself to do it all, not let anything fall through the cracks, maintain exceptional customer service, toss a hand grenade into my personal life and get “We miss you” cards from my kids at work because I am never home.

The quote I led off with and my spreadsheet exercise really opened my eyes.  This morning I would have said I was on track to have a great year.  Now I realize to hit my personal stretch-goal I need an assistant to help me find and research 2200 prospect firms with at least one of ten pain points, with a certain organizational structure and head count so I can have 200 meetings to earn 43 net new clients.

And I need to streamline my process so that this activity level will be practical and my own best intentions do not blow up in my face.

Can you make the changes that will let you find and focus in on what only you can do?

I’m ready.  Are you?  To the Cloud!

“We are very excited about working with efm Events to bring an event like this to Austin.  We are committed to do everything we can to make this event successful for the Austin technology community.” said Tom Moreno, President and CEO of ThinOps Consulting, Inc.

The Inaugural Austin IT Symposium is designed specifically for CIO’s and their executive management teams. This event will provide an unprecedented opportunity for the region’s IT leadership to gather and explore new ways to maintain a competitive advantage in a global economy, and allow collaboration across the region’s Information Technology population.

“The focus of this event is to connect IT executives together, provide an opportunity to meet their peers, and expand their depth of knowledge so ultimately they can be more effective at delivering value for the organizations they serve.  It is a natural extension of goals we strive for in our Business Advisory practice.”

The Symposium will feature interactive breakout sessions with regional executives and industry leaders addressing the convergence of IT with other business imperatives. Exceptional keynote speakers and a CIO panel discussion on the latest IT trends will also be featured.

About ThinOps Consulting, Inc.

ThinOps Consulting specializes in assisting organizations streamline costs and manage risk associated with IT expenditures with two business units.  Business Advisory serves C-level management by assessing where the company is, where the company wants to be, and developing a roadmap to help executive management reach those objectives.  Technology Consulting serves IT organizations primarily through virtualization and remote access technologies designed to improve efficiency, lower support costs and ultimately deliver IT as a service.

About efm Events

efm Events, a division of Executive Functions Management, Inc. www.efminc.com is an information technology-focused event management and production company with 18 IT Symposiums across the Midwest and Rocky Mountain Region.

In twelve minutes, John Nese, owner of Galco’s Soda Pop Stop, is going to make you want a bottle of soda pop.  John is also going to teach you something that will change the way you look at soda pop from this day forward, and make you want to buy that bottle of soda from him.

A business focused on a niche makes for focused sales people.  Focused sales people become niche experts and niche experts, in many cases, sell circles around sales generalists without really trying that hard.

I like the way John said it better.

Ready for that soda pop?  Head on over to the Soda Pop Stop and say hello to John for me.

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of. If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  How do I convince a prospective customer to switch from using a competitors product to using mine?  He likes my product but is content with the product he is using.

A:  There has to be a compelling reason to get them to switch.  If there is no compelling reason, you are probably better off spending your time on better prospects.

With that said, here are a few strategies to try and help you find that differentiator.

Strategy 1: The laziest solution is to cut your price to the point you still make money but have undercut the incumbent significantly enough to convince his customers to move.  This, of course, will eventually be followed up by someone else undercutting you.

Strategy 2: Analyze the prospective customer’s product, learn it, and look for significant feature/function/benefit advantages your product provides to justify the change.

Strategy 3: Analyze the competitors business looking for weaknesses that you can exploit to facilitate a change.  Better yet, just be better than your competition at every turn.  Better still, look past your competitor and give your customers more than what than they want, give them what they dream of and let them do your selling for you.

Strategy 4: Help the prospective customer so they can help you.  Per Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone, you could try a strategy of helping the prospective customers solve some of their personal/business problems, if you can identify them, with contacts from your network of people.  Providing legitimate answers to their problems without looking for direct compensation might give the prospective customer just the compelling reason they need to switch.

Strategy 5: Look for a way to change how the game is played, like what Amazon did to Barnes & Noble/Borders; Netflix is doing to Blockbuster, what Napster/iTunes did to CD sales for the record labels, etc.  A good book on this topic would be Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

Strategy 6: Tie your product to something bigger that makes switching to you a more compelling proposition.  Kellogg’s cereals tied Mini-Wheats to bigger issue of improving education of our children; Microsoft has tied themselves to Jack Welch of GE fame and a video interaction series to help teach businesses executives, or what Lance Armstrong did by tying his story, celebrity, athletic ability, and even the color yellow from the famous Tour De France winners jersey to his foundation and cancer research with a simple yellow Live Strong bracelet that became the “cool” thing to have and cause to support.

Strategy 7: Bundle your product with a product or service that is compelling to your prospective customer that your competitor can’t offer.

Strategy 8: Be attentive to your prospective customer and take care of them and keep an eye out for an opportunity to sweep in when your competitor ignores their customer or makes a major misstep.

Strategy 9: While not a full strategy, per se, find the leaders or first movers in the industry of the prospective customers you want to reach and focus your efforts on winning one or all of them.  Getting the respected thought leaders of any group using your product will make future sales easier as their followers will be more easily convinced.

Where do you find these thought leaders?

Here is a hint:  They are often the people quoted in the Business Journal, the newspaper or the trade magazines on the hot industry topics of the day.

Good luck.  It can be a very daunting task to get a happy customer to change from a vendor/product that is a known quantity to a vendor/product that is an unknown quantity, even if it is a significantly better product.  However if they are willing to take that jump with you, then they were probably not that happy to begin with.

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of.  If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  What is the single greatest obstacle that would prevent a new CRM implementation from being successfully adopted by the users (sales team)?

A:  The biggest adoption challenge to achieving successful CRM adoption is getting the willing support of the sales team and their commitment to use the CRM tool as intended.

There are a few underlying issues that perpetuate this problem.

1. CRM deployments are often designed and customized to serve the group paying for the CRM solution (management) vs. the people who actually use the CRM tool day to day (sales)

2. In many cases, few attempts are made to legitimately get the sales team on board by showing them how using the CRM package is going to help them do their jobs better/make their lives easier thus inspiring them to increase the depth and quality of data input.

3. Failing to get the sales team to willingly use the CRM package, use of the CRM package is typically mandated leaving the front line sales team feeling the CRM tool has been forced down their throats, taking up their time while not doing anything appreciable to help them close more sales.

4. Real, or perceived, there is a concern by a segment of the sales professional population that keying all of the information they know about an account and contacts diminishes their value as an individual to the company and makes them more expendable.

5. There is also an undercurrent of concern that the (Management mandated) data that a sales person puts in the CRM package under the pretense of helping close more business will actually be turned against them and used as a tool to micro manage their sales efforts or bring about their own elimination.

The end result is, when forced, that the sales team provides the minimum amount of data entry necessary to stay in compliance and will continue to use or develop their own tools outside of company purview as needed to assist them in doing their job, only further eroding the likelihood of successful adoption of the CRM implementation.

To avoid all of this, a CRM deployment needs to be developed with the front line sales team engaged from day one so they have input in the process and more importantly, a stake in making sure the implementation is successful.

Last night I saw a small business owner hitch her business to a much larger cause and pull off an absolute rock star marketing strategy.

Forget how Kellogg’s tied breakfast cereal to our kid’s education, pardon the pun, but that is kid stuff by comparison.

I was watching America’s Got Talent (you can slap me later) with my two little girls when Pam Martin’s Top Dog act began.  The act was just as you would imagine; a routine with owner and dog doing tricks to music trying their best to be one of five acts out of twelve on the show to make it to the next round.

In real life Pam Martin runs a small pet obedience training business called Top Dog in what might as well be Dallas, Texas.  Pam branded her act on America’s Got Talent with the same name as her business, so every time Pam is on television her business gets a plug because at the bottom of the screen is “Pam Martin’s Top Dog.”

Now for the Rock Star Marketing Genius part.

By going on the show with her act, appropriately called “Pam Martin’s Top Dog” and showing off her training skills, Pam has successfully created and aired two commercials almost two minutes in length each showcasing her business to a national audience on prime time network television.

If Pam were paying for commercials on America’s Got Talent she would have paid $800,000+/- for that same air time, plus the cost of making the clips, not counting the 30 second human interest pieces that endear the performer (or business woman, in this case) to the audience. No matter the outcome,  Pam has already won $1,000,000 from America’s Got Talent and spent all of it advertising her business.

Consciously or not, Pam has tied her business to the number one television show on network television in its time slot, with 11.2 Million viewers that Tuesday night alone.  Pam has also benefited from NBC’s own marketing spend in all forms of media promoting America’s Got Talent for the price of a couple of costumes and stage props.

That beats the pants off of the marketing strategy and budget of every other pet obedience school in Dallas, TX.

Pam will also get to carry forward a little bit of celebrity to add to her business raising her exposure in her market and raising obedience training as a priority in the minds of her prospects.

Where else are you going to get to spend six weeks with a minor TV star for $100?  Call Pam.

I would bet Pam’s business is booming from the national exposure boosting her efforts to earn her next million on the back of that million+ advertising budget, regardless of what happens to the million the TV show is giving away.

Genius.

Pam tied her small business to a bigger business that could raise her exposure, add celebrity and other elements making her services a higher purchasing priority in her customers minds and managed to squeeze a million+ in free advertising out of the deal.

What can you do to think outside the box to become a top priority in your customers mind and start to work on your own million?

Image courtesy of http://topdogdallas.com

Today something remarkable happened, I got a piece of junk mail that I actually felt compelled to open, and once I read the contents I was even more compelled to give them a call.

This impressed me because 99.99% of the junk mail I get does not make it past my office door where the shredder sits consuming the daily unwanted unopened contents of my mailbox.

I have read that the average American adult receives 40+ pounds of junk mail every year, so what did this company do that was so remarkable to get their one ounce sales message past my shredder?

The small envelope was hand addressed to me with a first class stamp.  Inside was a single page handwritten note off of a mini legal pad with a name, pitch and a phone number.

They made it personal, made me curious, communicated their message quickly, and they got me.

In this world of demographic driven marketing-to-the-masses, could simply sending personal messages to targeted groups of individuals be a successful strategy to improve lead quality/quantity and help your company stand out?

I don’t know, but at 75 cents a lead, I can afford to find out.

How personal is your company’s message?

A good first step is to read your own marketing materials.  Does the text talk about you and how great your company is or does it talk about how your product benefits the person buying it?

It’s easy to write on our websites and press releases that we are “industry leaders,” or talk about our own accomplishments and how many years of combined experience we have, but that is not a very compelling read to a potential buyer trying to answer the age old question “What is this product/service going to do for me?”

No matter the method, make your message personal and a little bit different to get your prospective buyers attention.  Then make the most of that precious attention by delivering a message that does more for the person experiencing it than the marketing department that wrote it.

Image courtesy of zcache.com