Marketing Interactions

The Elements of Persuasion

The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster & Win More Business is a handy book for anyone who sells, leads or, well, talks. Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman define story as, "...a fact, wrapped in an emotion that compels us to take an action that transforms our world."

Isn't that the goal of every good marketing communication? And, let's face it, every word that gets spoken about your company could be considered some form of marketing. So shaping the "stories" you use to have the successful impact you envision should be a focus of any company that wants to grow.

The authors share a number of interesting stories and facts to illustrate what a successful story is, and the one thing they all have in common are the elements of persuasion.

These 5 elements are:

1. Passion - how a story is told
2. They have a Hero - who leads us through the story so we can step in and see it too (think customer)
3. The antagonist or obstacle they must overcome (think problem, need, challenge or issue your customer is trying to solve)
4. The moment of awareness that allows the hero to prevail (the outcome of whatever you're proposing - product, service - the difference it will make)
5. The transformation in the hero and the world that follows (purchase and outcomes)

You get the idea. This is a powerful little book that reads fast and offers a tremendous amount of insight into how to tell a successful story. I definitely recommend this book!

And, when you do, don't be surprised if you have an entirely different perspective on your company's communications.

The One Piece Of Advice You Can’t Generate Leads Without

You've read a lot of advice about B2B lead generation, and there are a lot of people who claim to know it all. But when you boil it all down — what's really important? What do you need to know? What is the one piece of advice you simply cannot generate leads without?

This complimentary new report is hot off the presses at Rain Today—and an article by me just happens to be in it. But, take a look at the other terrific experts who've offered their wisdom and insights. There's a lot of valuable information included that you'll want to know about, first hand.

This special, 36-page report includes 10 all-new articles written by B2B lead generation experts answering this question.

The expert authors and advice includes:

1. Trash Talk And Delete Buttons: A Candid Letter From Your Prospective Client
   - Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies
2. More Is Not Better If You Don't Know How To Nurture
   - Brian Carroll,  CEO of InTouch Inc and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale
3. Find Out What Your Sales Team Considers A Lead
   - Stefan Tornquist, Research Director & Sean Donahue, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
4. If You Can't Measure It, Don't Do It
   - Suzanne Lowe, President of Expertise Marketing and author of Marketplace Masters - How Professional Services Firms Compete to Win
5. Automate Lead Nurturing To Increase Lead Generation Effectiveness
   - Laura Ramos, Vice President of Forrester's Marketing Strategy and Technology Team
6. Generating Leads By Finding Buyers In Trouble
   - Larry Bodine, Owner-Operator of LawMarketing Portal and Larry Bodine Marketing
7. Tales To Keep Them Talking
   - Ardath Albee, B2B Marketing Strategist, Marketing Interactions
8. Promising Prospect - Or Dead End? Start By Defining A Lead
   - Roy Young, President with Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
9. All Sound And Fury, Signifying Nothing: Executing Your Lead Generation Plan
   - Mike Schultz, Publisher, RainToday.com and Principal, Wellesley Hills Group
10. B2B Sales Lead Success Checklist
    - M.H. (Mac) McIntosh, B2B Marketing Consultant, The B2B Sales Lead Experts

Go download a copy and pass on the link below to everyone you know who can benefit from better insights about generating leads.

Download this free report today - http://www.raintoday.com/leadgenadvice.cfm

The Sales & Marketing Relationship

Yesterday's post highlighted the importance of content and nurturing in the marketing process.  I've talked a lot about how Selling is a Team Sport and how Set It and Forget It Marketing is not the way to go, as an example.

This month, I'm conducting an informal survey about the sales & marketing relationship. You can take it at my website here. It's 16 questions and most of them are yes/no. At the end of September, I'll compile the results add a lot of additional information and send the report out to my newsletter subscribers. You can subscribe to the newsletter when you go take the survey, if you'd like.

You may have taken my last survey on Customer Profiles and Personalization. If you're a newsletter subscriber, you received a link to the PDF results report in the newsletter on Monday. If not, you'll get a link to that report after taking the survey.

It would be most appreciated if you'd participate. It's all anonymous, so have at it!

Connecting to Buyers with Content

A series of reports done jointly by Marketing Sherpa and KnowledgeStorm asked technology buyers their experiences with marketers. There are some interesting insights, but this statistic should tell you how important quality content is to your marketing efforts:

"...72% of technology buyers claimed that up to 75% of their knowledge of technology comes from vendor-sponsored content."

They "rate the educational quality of the information, writing and presentation most important." They want content focused on their industries and job roles, i.e. content that's meaningful and relevant to them. What they are looking for changes with buying stages...

You've heard all this a lot. Now you've heard it from prospective customers, as gathered by trusted companies who do this type of research. Another distressing detail was that timeliness of response is important, yet what marketers think and the buyer's reported experiences were not matching up. It appears that part of this is due to marketing's tendency to toss leads into the CRM and to sales before they've got reason to do so.

Nurturing is a good thing. A buyer's perception of you will be calibrated by the way you interact with them. If you promise response, then do so and be timely.

The other thing buyer's prefer is email, instead of a phone call. They want to be in control of the process and decide when or if to engage your company. In fact, 53% said they don't want a phone call as an initial form of contact. Of course, only 38% submit their real phone number, so good luck with that option.

Almost half of them search online for content weekly. They use search phrases of three or more words, too, so make sure you tag your content appropriately.

This is further justification that a solid content marketing strategy can deliver results that can have a major impact your sales cycle and customer acquisition.

Further insights from the paper can be found on Tom Pick's WebMarket Central Blog, and you can download the series here. There's a lot more information in them than I've given you here. Thanks for the head's up on the third in the series, Tom!

Measuring Communications

One of the things I've been working on with my clients is measurement. Let's face it, if you don't benchmark before you begin, measure during and afterwards, how do you know whatever it is you did worked?

David Meerman Scott has written a free eBook, Align Corporate Communications to Achieve Business Goals, which is all about how your communications team can create a strategy, drive results and measure their effectiveness. (Kudos to Factiva for sponsoring) He presents a 6-step plan with a really slick graphic chart that lays out the path for how to get there. Better yet, he ties it all to corporate business goals and uses a Gap Analysis to show how far the company has to go to get there. And, he gives you a theoretical situation so you know how to use the chart.

Of course, I took the chart and the theories and started applying the methodology to work I do, such as closing the gap between marketing and sales. I began applying aspects of content platforms into the strategy and tactics boxes. If you think about it, the way he's developed his measurement process is useful for a variety of things beyond a communications strategy.

One comment I have for David is that the plan doesn't take into account the efforts marketing and sales may be undertaking to meet the same goal. In the eBook, the situation is a bicycle manufacturer who wants to double revenue in the recreational cycle product category.

But, the PR efforts and communications should tie in with the marketing campaigns going on for recreational bikes, the website content for that product category and the promotions the company is running. Likewise, the thought leadership for healthcare benefits from cycling could be used by sales to help retailers promote more sales of recreational bikes. There are more things, but let's stop there, as I think I've made my point.

What I see in the eBook is a terrific plan to measure strategy and tactics against outcomes tied to corporate goals, but it's also crucial not to create more silos, to remain consistent in all communications, not just PR. And, yes, it's only an eBook on a specific topic, so I'm not picking on David, whom I really like and respect, but simply raising thought about the across-the-enterprise complications that new strategies can create.

Go get your copy! It's definitely a must read.

Off topic - Response to tag - 8 Random Things About Me

Daniel Sitter, over on Idea Sellers, tagged me for 8 random things about me. Eight? Geez, I have no idea. Okay, deep breath, random, right? Here goes:

1. I'm Italian by marriage.
2. I love Australian Shepherds and have had 3 of them, so far. My current one is the daughter of my last one and her name is Paisano. See #1 above.
3. I love the desert heat - good thing, since I live there.
4. Blue is my favorite color. All shades and hues, pretty much.
5. I want to write a business book and get all the current marketing ideas out of my head and make space for new ones. Otherwise I'm afraid I'll lose them.
6. I enjoy water aerobics.
   
7. I wish I was good at golf.
8. I'm a recipe junky and love to cook.

There you have it. That's about as random as they come. Daniel, thanks for tagging me! Although this is probably way too much information about me...

Now, to drive other people crazy. You know, I hate to hog all the fun, so I'm tagging:

Jill Konrath - sales expert extraordinaire

Brian Carroll - the authority on lead generation

Adele Revella - the wizardess of buyer personas

Jon Burg - a guy who writes cool posts, but doesn't have a bio up. So, come on, Jon, dish!

Tom Asacker - because I like reading his little eBooks. They always give me lots to think about.

All of them write great blogs that you should check out, if you don't read them already.

Innovation, Observable Facts & The Unexpected

In reading my blog list today, I came across a variety of posts I'd like to share. They all got me thinking in different ways. So today is a grab bag of fun stuff that should get you thinking.

First, let's start with the Innovation discussion going on over on Future Visions. Through a poll, a collection of statements defining innovation were collected and discussed. It's amazing and thought provoking to see what this word, that's bandied about so often, means to different people. Here are a few of my favorites:

Monty Python said it best: "And now for something completely different ..." – Tom Field

Innovation begins as providing a solution to a problem you didn't know you had and evolves into something you can't imagine living without. – Jen Brown

A combination of the ideas, done by Jon - Innovation means being two steps ahead of the game, anticipating problems we are not yet aware of, and crafting solutions that make today's norm tomorrow's problem to be overcome.

Now, let's move on to a post by Michael Webb on the Six Sigma Selling blog, What it Means to Measure a Sales Process. This is something I've been thinking a lot about although in more of a marketing process orientation. A few of the things Michael says have spawned some ideas to brew:

"...the most important facts are those that drive customer’s actions. And the most important measurement system is the one that tracks whether customers are taking actions that lead toward a transaction with your company."

A weak approach to the sales process does not get down to observable facts. "Instead of identifying what observable facts are meant by words such as “lead” or “qualified opportunity,” they make assumptions. Instead of setting up a mechanism for counting and analyzing these observable facts, weak sales processes rely on more guesses and more assumptions."

Doesn't this make you want to compile a list of your "observable" facts and skim off all the assumptions? Do we really know the difference? Or, are we so used to what we think that they've become one and the same for us?

Finally, I'd like to share this outstanding video from Katie Konrath's blog. It's amazing and totally unexpected. When you watch it, notice what you're thinking at the beginning, how you transition and what you feel/think at the end. Now, apply that to what you think about your customers' behavior. Kind of puts a new spin on predictability, doesn't it?

Selling is a Team Sport

Companies collect a lot of data about their market, competitors and customers. I've written tons about converting that data to actionable intelligence, eliminating silos, and coordinating efforts between marketing and sales. But, what's critical beyond anything else for an organization is getting to, and staying on, one version of the truth.

Dennis Pombriant, of Beagle Research Group, says it very well in his blog post Sales effectiveness through Knowledge:

"More than simply providing a central repository for all of this information, the knowledgebase provides the checks and balances needed to maintain a single version of the truth. There can only be one current corporate presentation, for example, and it serves no one if a sales representative must compare multiple to figure out which is right, that’s the power of a repository."

What the blog post doesn't address is how, through an interactive knowledgebase, sales and marketing can effectively join forces and play on the same team. I've attended a lot of webinars lately where salespeople are discussing lead generation and nurturing. Which seems like a waste of valuable face-to-face time they could be spending with prospects and customers.

Thankfully, I'm also getting calls from clients who want to move the nurturing process back to marketing and re-align their sales force to optimize the amount of time they spend with sales-ready prospects they can close.

The beauty of an interactive knowledgebase is that marketing can learn from sales input and provide conversational versions of the truth for use by sales reps, tuned by sales reps. They can learn which collateral works and make more of it. They can yank out the stuff that leaves sales hanging. This continual process of refinement can become a coordinated effort, rather than a big production that sales waits six months to get all the pieces, only to find out they're already outdated on the street.

If marketing takes the leap beyond lead generation to nurturing, they're also going to learn what's working on the street. Their "street sense" will be up-to-speed and the materials, messaging and communications they give to sales will increase in effectiveness.

The challenge is to move the hand-off line further into the sales cycle and split the effort to optimize what each skill set is best at. If marketing takes on more interactive conversational nurturing efforts, they'll be giving opportunities to sales who are ready for an honest-to-god sales effort. The whole process will streamline and efforts won't be wasted. Working at cross purposes can become a thing of the past.

The extension of "one version of the truth" has to cross more than just marketing and sales. It has to extend to the entire organization.

This takes coordination. Spreadsheets, email, partial automation and people spending more time doing administrative tasks than performing the roles they were hired for is not going to cut it. It's certainly not something that's going to be fixed overnight, but there's hope.

And, there are systems that make this happen. I've seen and worked with some of them. The ability for a salesperson to select a prospect in the CRM and see their profile, activity history and product interest and then see related value propositions, collateral, case study and conversational knowledge can be very powerful. Not to mention time saving.

The big plus is that everyone is on the same page, er, the same team.

Engagement - Just another metric?

With companies turning their sights to customer centricity, lots of work is going into defining the concept of engagement. Let's look at how the thinking has evolved in the past eighteen months, or so.

In an attempt to move "engagement" from buzzword to industry standard, ARF’s Research Officer, Joe Plummer defined engagement as “turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.” [March 2006]

On the Marketing Whims blog, engagement is: “Repeated, satisfied interactions that strengthen the emotional connection a customer has with the brand.” [April 2006]

Eric Peterson's Analytics Weblog defines engagement as: "Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction on the site against a clearly defined set of goals." [December, 2006]

Now, Forrester Research has come out with a definition for engagement: "Engagement is the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time." [August, 2007]

Notice that the definitions started from broad versions and have successively narrowed until the focus is on measurement. In fact, Forrester states that, "companies need to start tying these metrics together to make sense of how engaged their customers actually are—and then make product and marketing decisions based on that knowledge."

Let's look at the four components Forrester has defined:

Involvement: For Forrester, this is using web analytics to gauge "if a person is present." I think they need to look beyond just being preset to what they are choosing to involve themselves with. Which content? Which products? Involvement should also show companies what drives engagement so they can expand the available insights, dialogue, etc. Lack of involvement can also reflect on making choices about what's not working.

Interaction: According to Forrester, this is a measurement of "the more robust actions people take..." like purchase, subscription, posting comments, etc. Which begs for a definition of "robust, " which for me would be to know what drove the interactions? Is there a nurturing pattern emerging from involvement that creates interactions?

Intimacy: This one is really hard to capture with Forrester defining it as the "sentiment or affinity that a person exhibits in the things they say, or the actions they take..." I'm sure there can be different nuances here, for example, who did they say it to? Did they post it on their blog or submit a company feedback form? How is the company assigning their interpretation to "sentiment?" And, it seems to me that this one is a part of Interactions, above. But I do think that "Intimacy" as a category is important. From a B2B perspective, would every customer you have make a good case study? Would they give you a testimonial? And, what does your company do to restore "intimacy" if it's challenged?

Influence: This one appears to be another word for referrals. And it goes hand-in-hand with Intimacy.

In fact, all of these components are related. If you don't have all of them, your level of engagement is limited. Which takes me to thinking about degrees of engagement. It's an interesting topic and I look forward to hearing more about it as more and more stakes are put in the ground.

I agree that it needs to be measurable, but I also think people need to start looking at engagement with contextual content strategies as a component. Without the words, messaging and communication that serve to "engage" people, by enrolling them in taking action, you won't get far...

Definitely more to think about...

Jargon & Buzz Words Still Running Wild!

Back at the end of 2006, I enjoyed reading David Meerman Scott's Gobbledygook eBook. I see it's been posted again, so for all of you who didn't get to read it, here's your chance.

More interesting is that he had Factiva do another analysis of jargon and buzz words used in the last 9 months and not much changed. Really bringing home how far marketing and PR have pushed the edge of creativity!

See for yourself:

As of Sep 30, 2006, the top 6 words were:

1. next generation
2. flexible
3. robust
4. world class
5. scalable
6. easy to use

From Nov 1, 2006 through July 31, 2007 they were:

1. next generation
2. robust
3. flexible
4. world class
5. easy to use
6. scalable

For fun, I decided to put on a customer perspective and think about what these words would mean to me:

• next generation: what was wrong with the last generation? Is this the next generation of "new and improved?" Everything next generation means I have to spend a bunch of time re-orienting myself and relearning how to do something.
• robust: Does this mean powerful? Like you'd tell me if your product was WIMPY?
• flexible: Like it can assume the Lotus position or like it bends just a touch? Would you tell me if it was rigid and forced me to do something in a way I didn't want to?
• world class: Like a 5-star hotel? Who defines this? Are there qualification rules?
• easy-to-use: For Einstein or can my dog use it? Would you tell me if it was going to be the most challenging thing I ever took on?
• scalable: Hmm, so I can climb it?

Okay, I'm making fun, but when you think about it, what do these words really mean in context? Everyone says them, so how do they separate your product from my other choices?

And here's the serious thing I want you to get. All of these words are pretty much about you and your products. Where do I fit in? Why should I care?