Marketing Interactions

Pricing vs. Value in Complex Sales

If what you're selling is not a commodity, but a complex sale, price should not be the determining factor.  I mean, think about it, do your customers spend their time looking to spend their budget dollars just because they can?  No.  I didn't think so.  It's all about value.

Jill Konrath, Selling to Big Companies, told one of her Teleseminar classes recently that sometimes it's best to turn away business that's not right for your company because it doesn't further your strategic goals.  Sounds crazy, huh?  But this saavy lady knows what she's talking about.

My company has done that several times.  Sure, we could've taken the job at a reduced price, but we would've been sorry.  Once you discount your way in, you have one heck of a time getting your pricing back in line.  Then you end up spending money just to keep that customer happy.  And, those customers tend to stay.  Hey, why shouldn't they?  They're getting the best deal around.  Plus, if you're a small company, you can't afford not to keep your promises.  Business is a small world and a bad rep is a killer. 

Here's an example of the best possible outcome:  One of the companies we turned down came back around a year later, still not having solved their problems. The client came on board knowing that the price they paid us would deliver what they needed.  Pretty cool, huh?

That makes it doubly important to make sure that all communications, including your Web communications are stressing value, difference and problem solving.  Jim Logan talks about the role of Marketing and Sales in pricing over on his blog today and says, "Price can rise in importance though when value, benefits, difference, and reason to believe are left from the discussion."

Don't forget the value of interaction in building the value of what you deliver either.  More coming on Web tools that make a big difference to marketing and sales interactions.  Because one of marketing's most important customers is the sales department.  Stay tuned.

Can Content Forecast Company Viability?

My last post Commitment, Consistency and Reputation Determine Brand talked about content in context, and mentioned the fact that a lot of the content on the web these days is dismissed as marketing hype.

This morning, I noticed a post over on Fast Company, Invaluable, that talks about the words used in corporate value statements and compares the words used in successful companies vs., well, not so successful companies. 

If you believe this kind of thing, and it makes sense to me when you really consider it, content is something that marketing needs to pay a lot more attention to.  Interestingly enough, the failing companies stated customer service as one of their core values.  What does this tell you about walking the talk? 

In my opinion, companies need to make sure they have the tools that allow them to pay attention to their content.  To be able to update it ALL THE TIME.  Make sure that "You" is used a whole lot more than "Us" or "We" or "The company" and take an extra look at what the words you are posting on your site really mean.  Is your focus on the customer or on your products?

Do they tell the customer and/or prospect what difference your company will make for them?  Do the words distinguish the value your customers get from your products and services?  Better yet, are they true? 

In case you haven't gotten this point yet, your communications, Web in particular, need to be all about them.  Give them a reason to stay at your site and get the value your company can deliver. 

Do your customer testimonials back that up?  Can you demonstrate it?  Over on Duct Tape Marketing, John gives a great idea about how to get those testimonials.  As an additional idea, you might try writing what you'd like to have your customer say -- based on actual experience, of course -- and then ask them to sign off.  If it reflects their experience with you and you make them sound intelligent and wonderful, they'll be thrilled that your testimonial doesn't become another thing on their To Do list. 

Commitment, Consistency and Reputation Define Your Brand

Over on Duct Tape Marketing, the words of the day are commitment and consistency.

John says "I could cite dozens of examples of small business owners who have shown me that all they have done is put out their story and stuck to it.

It may not be that glamorous but few things build trust like consistency."

This is true for your company's web presence and marketing interactions as well.  This gets me to the content in context issue.  Many websites make their users search high and low to find related information about a product, service or topic.  It's frustrating and doesn't generate the kind of WOW experience that you should be focused on delivering.  The thing to remember is that everything about your web presence is branding your company.  The hardest thing to do is remain committed to it.  But with easy-to-update web sites (and the ability to group related content), keeping your content fresh, and using interactive tools to deliver a great experience, there's no reason why you can't WOW them.

A great example of consistency as expressed through ensuring that your web presence and in-person presence match up can be read here: Introducing the Customer Centric Worldview

On The Brand Builder Blog, Oliver Blanchard says, "Brand = Reputation."

He elaborates about web interactions: "Whether a customer is looking for information about one of your products online or needs to call in, his experience has to be swift, painless, and pleasant. Information on the website(s) and your catalogs has to be easy to find and work with."

Blanchard adds, "...from the moment they access your welcome page to the moment they complete their transaction, they have to be thinking "WOW, I wish every company I deal with were THAT good."

There is also the point made that web content is now seen as mostly advertising copy and not valid information, by many.  We've spent so much time the last few years trying to harness the Internet to expand our reach to all potential customers, that we're not focused on building relationships with the customers we do have.  With the personalization tools available today and the ease for updating content, there really is no reason not to be working keeping your commitment and consistently promoting your story in fresh ways. 

I think one of the keys in building a reputation is to use your web presence as one tool to keep your promises.  If a customer makes a request or fills out a feedback form and is auto-emailed a message that says he'll get a response in 4 hours - then you'd better live up to that.  If your implied promise is to update your content on a monthly or weekly basis, then you should do that.  Being able to schedule content publishing out into the future is a helpful tool that allows you to plan for keeping your promise.  If you promise real-time pricing in your quote tool, then it should be there.

These experiences that delight your customers will help them spread WOM - Word of Mouth - referrals about your company.  What could be better than a delighted customer telling a peer about the terrific interaction he had with your company?  I'd definitely remember it, and I'd probably go look, too.  If the subject came up in conversation, I'd probably share the story I'd been told.

Wouldn't you?

Effective Marketing IT Projects with Limited Expertise

There's a lot being said about the management that needs to be in place in order for IT projects to deliver results.  Well, yes...and, er, maybe not.

Here's the thing that gets me:  What's an SMB to do if they just don't have the cycles or the budget to undertake high-profile marketing IT projects?  In my opinion, this dilemma can be solved by finding an  All-in-One vendor to deliver the promise...and do so on a fixed budget.  Yes, it's true.

I'm behind the idea that buying software is meaningless without a plan, but I also know that many companies need the expertise they don't necessarily need on staff, full-time, to pull off IT projects with traction.  By All-in-One vendor, I mean a vendor who can deliver the IT implementation mixed with management practices to deliver projects an SMB might otherwise forego.

An All-in-One vendor should be able to provide:

• The software to deliver the project (best if it's theirs and they know it inside, outside and sideways -- including how to integrate with other systems)
• The consulting to ensure and deliver the appropriate implementation that interfaces with the way the client's staff works today.  Change is hard - try to keep it simple.
• And to deliver the strategy and training to get user's enthusiastically involved.

What I see a lot with our new clients is that marketing has a lot of need for web software.  Their IT departments are usually overburdened and focused on the company's networks and infrastructure applications, not launching the latest web tool.  Quite often their web expertise is also limited, unless the company has focused on web deployments.  But more often than not, it's that overburdened aspect that's the bane of marketing's existence.  Marketing wants fast.  Marketing needs easy to use.  Marketing needs to be able to change it at the speed of business, not wait in a queue for someone in IT to get to it.

What I'm saying simply is different priorities.  There are reasons for this.  So I'm all for working around them.  Business is business and doesn't stop because there's a backlog.

The beauty of a lot of web applications is that they can be hosted (or delivered on premise) which means IT might not even need to spend any time at all with the project.  They can also be delivered in an incremental, as needed, fashion, so the marketing department only implements a few things at a time, masters them, moves on to add more.  The benefits of this can't be over emphasized.  No need for the big plan that will be obsolete by the time it's implemented anyway.  No need to stick your neck way out on a limb only to find out you spent a ton and the darned thing didn't deliver.  An incremental approach allows you to refine and refocus, as applicable.  No big deal.

Okay, back to the All-in-One vendor.  These guys can provide the foundation to get you what I was talking about above.  A great foundation.  Their expertise can be tapped to develop critical supporting processes and deliver training to produce an online offering that builds meaningful marketing interactions.  And they can help you strategize how to expand the web offering in a way that makes a difference.

To read more about it, see Does IT Improve Business Performance, that discusses a new McKinsey study.

Oh, one more thing - it wouldn't hurt to consider that the best possible outcome might be a project that creates partnership between the marketing and sales departments and generates a synthesis in productivity that drives those marketing interactions all the way to closed sales.  Now, that's an idea we can all get behind...right?

Pre-sale Marketing Interaction Helps Close Sales

As I've said in previous posts, online interactions help build relationships and people buy from people they trust.  Last post I talked about some of the online marketing tools that help you do this.  Getting the prospect involved is the key.

John Jantsch validates this in Get Your Prospects Involved and You Won't Need To Sell Them, where he says, "It's kind of like the car test drive. Get them in the car, take it out for spin, heck, take it home and show it to your spouse. Once they touch the goods, they will be hooked. So put the product in their hands."

To take that a step further, let's put this into an online-benefits perspective.  John uses the option of sending a prospect evaluation forms and other things once you've scheduled an appointment, which is a truly smart idea and one I've used to achieve great results.  I mean, think about it for a second - how much better can it get than to go into the appointment knowing that your messaging is on point? 

For my purposes today, I'd like to back this up to look at what you do to GET the prospect to ask for an appointment. 

It begins by focusing on What's In It For Them.  This can be accomplished in many ways, but to make it interactive, you might think about a Survey that asks key questions and then delivers feedback based on the answers.  Suggesting a product and then explaining how the product delivers on what they said was important to them, not how it works.  Or a comparison matrix that doesn't focus on product specs but on deliverables the client will reap by using your product or service.  And yes, there are easy-to-use internet software tools that non-techies can utilize to make this happen.  (More on that later this week.)

To put a twist on it, thinking about "prospect" as a sales rep trying to figure out how to get the interest of a potential client as the target, focus the content around success stories from other sales that had similar components.  This means the rep doesn't have to search the database, wasting valuable time, but can input some parameters and see specific relevant examples they can draw inspiration from or utilize successes to validate a pitch. 

Content in context is a valuable tool.  I'll be talking more about that, but one of the keys in online marketing interactions is to make sure that they all build toward the same goal.  Content should be interrelated and displayed in a way that serves a need, not just the company's need to push info out, but the goal of pulling interest back from prospects truly interested in solving the problems your products and services address.

Marketing Touchpoints Accrue into Sales

With all the software tools available for doing online business, have you ever noticed how many websites remain brochures that only push information at users but don't interact in any way?

Web-based applications are changing all that.  In his post The Internet Changes Everything, he says,
"The web access to these applications is a boon for modern companies that are geographically diverse. Without the headache of setting up a VPN and remote PC access, employees all over the state, country, or world can be sharing the same data "on demand."

The possibilities are endless, but here are a few of the most common ones:

• Webinar, seminar and workshop event posting, registration and management
• Discussion Forums that can be moderated or not, and allow you to engage specific users in conversations that give you the information and feedback you need to be successful
• Non-technical content tools that allow anyone you authorize to be able to keep content fresh and updated in real time
• Instant websites that launch with a few clicks to promote a new product launch or begin a new internal project
• One question polls or surveys that let prospects and customers tell you what they think

You may be sitting there thinking, How does that help me sell?  Here's the thing - the more interactions you have with people, the faster you can build a relationship with people.  And, let's face it.  People buy from people they trust. 

Let me ask you this - If you have two prospects and one has interacted with your company in various ways--whether it's attending a Teleseminar that he signed up for on the web, or is an e-newsletter subscriber or used your comparison tool to see how your product/service features and benefits compare to the competition--which one is more likely to close quickly?

Implementation is fast and easy, the learning curve is almost flat and the benefits can be tremendous.  The pricing for web apps has become very reasonable too, allowing even smaller companies to level the playing field.  Which, is really what the Web's all about, right?

Are your marketing communications hitting the wall?

Sales groups are notorious for doing their own thing.  Heck, most of the time the sales department is autonomous to the rest of the company.  They are charged with closing sales.  Arguably the most important initiative in a company’s strategy for financial success. 

But how are they doing it?  What are they communicating?  Is the branding that marketing is promoting the same brand that’s on the street?  Are the marketing folks irritated that their messaging is hitting the wall?

Now that Marketing has to justify what they do and squeeze ROI from budgets that are getting pared back to a nub, the right communication is an imperative.

In Doug Sundheim’s latest entry on the Fast Company Weblog, he says, “What passes as "communication" in most organizations is nothing more than people talking at each other. Firing different opinions around a room with little structure to productively move any action forward.”

Surprisingly, a lot of companies do not exchange effective communications between departments or across the enterprise.  The obvious reason is time.  Or the sheer lack of it to deal with information overload. The creation of the “public” brand is generated by the marketing department.  Then it’s pushed out – usually via email – to the rest of the staff, if at all.

No one really knows what people are thinking or saying about the company or what prospects and customers are hearing and being told.  If a customer comes to your website, is he reading the same thing that his sales rep told him last week?  Or is the sales rep out of date?  Maybe it’s the other way around and the sales rep is current, but the web site is out of date…or maybe what the website says doesn’t work in conversation with the customers and industries that the organization is doing business with today.

In his guest column, The Rising Tide of Customer Defection, Laurence Haughton recounts a story he uncovered when researching his book, It's Not What You Say...It's What You Do : How Following Through At Every Level Can Make Or Break Your Company.”

It goes like this:

“A lot of customers just don't like their suppliers!
40% of Yellow's clients didn't like them
When Bill Zollars took charge at Yellow Trucking he asked the folks at headquarters, "What do our customers think of us?"
"They like us," Yellow's top managers assured him.”

But Zollars wasn’t taking his manager’s word for it and charged his executive team with finding out.

“Needless to say the results of this simple study were like a cold slap in the face. In 4 out of ten cases Yellow had failed to follow through on one or more of the fundamental things their customers expect.”

Which gets me back to today’s topic about the effectiveness of marketing communications and the point that how well your team is interacting with each other will dictate how well your customers are interacting with you…which means more sales.

Marketing Interactions that make a difference:
What if your company has a sales portal that allows the sales guys to rate the collateral and information that’s posted in real time?  How valuable would it be if they can share success stories about what presentations and processes worked to help them close their last big sale – with the rest of the staff?  And even better, what if Marketing drew from the sales reps’ comments to create materials that really made a difference in helping them close more sales?

Let’s face it – Sales guys are on the street.  They know what prospects and customers are saying.  More importantly, the sales staff knows what their customers are NOT saying.  At the speed of business today, isn’t it time that sales and marketing interacted in a way that produces more closed sales AND builds loyalty with existing customers?

Welcome to Marketing Interactions

When I think about the topics I want to write about, it's the user experience.  Both administrative and task user(sales rep, channel partner) but more than that, too.  Like how to use your website to create effective interactions.

So, I keep asking myself, what is the big thing for the people who use our stuff?  They can do things faster.  They get some kind of response that puts them on the road to building a relationship.

But it's more than that. It's the process of creating something quickly, posting it to the site and getting interaction back because of it.  Kind of like a blog does.  But interactions that have the promise of building relationships that will produce a goal-oriented result.  Like closing a sale.  Upselling or cross-selling products and services...

There are other powerful things - like turning a record-keeping tool(CRM), that does nothing for a sales guy, into a productive process that updates what the execs want and delivers what the sales rep needs. 

It's about how to capture your channel/reseller market's attention and give them a valid reason for selling your stuff.  A reason more than other vendors whose products they sell.  It's about capturing mindshare because the tools are delivering productivity and results that help them meet their goals and build successful companies.

It's also about cutting the time it takes to do something or get the latest info out there where it makes a difference.  Which is product launches, pricing changes, cutting admin time to keep feet on the street so they have more selling time.  It's about keeping everyone on the same page, using the same messaging and branding, because they can put their fingers on the most effective presentations, white papers, value propositions and learn from past successes.  It's about connecting sales with marketing so marketing isn't lobbing stuff over the wall and the sales guys aren't burying it and ignoring it and doing it their way, and yet not being as successful as they could be.

It's about taking ideas and automating/facilitating them to the point that change happens that make things better or time to do something is shortened so something else can get done.  It's about helping companies be more effective in their communications and informational exchanges - for both internal and external users.

So, huh.  I guess I'll be writing about that.