Archive for the ‘sales enablement’ Category

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Make Your Sales Calls Naked

Friday, April 30th, 2010

I ran across this blog post by Jill Konrath. She advises sales people to meet with prospects ‘naked’. That is without brochures, or PowerPoint presentations, or anything except a pen and a notebook. Her thinking is that this forces the sales person to focus on the prospect, to listen to their Naked Salesman 150x150 Make Your Sales Calls Nakedproblems, and to have a person to person conversation.

I agree with Jill. That may seem to be an odd stance for a guy who makes his living developing marketing collateral and sales tools, but it isn’t really.

Today people won’t agree to a meeting with a sales person unless:

  1. they feel you have a solution to a business problem they’re experiencing, and
  2. they’ve already checked out your website, read your company blog, and researched your executives on LinkedIn.

I’ve been there, so I know that hard copy collateral can be a crutch for sales people… especially young or inexperienced ones. It used to be that the collateral was necessary. Prospects had no other way to learn about complex B2B products and services. Those days are gone. Make sure your website is filled with high quality content that is relevant and useful to your clients and prospects; and keep adding content so people have a reason to return to your site.

Focus on developing relationships when you meet with clients. You’ll close more business. Don’t go in totally naked, though… I recommend you wear a smile.

Here’s Jill’s blog post Naked Selling.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, marketing strategy, sales enablement, trust | No Comments »

Changing Criteria and Calculations for MSP Valuations

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

A client called me this past week and asked if I could help him ready his Managed Services Provider (MSP) business for sale. His time horizon is two years and, between now and then, he wants to make the business as attractive and as valuable as possible. This request was a bit far afield from the ones I normally get, so I asked him to give me a few days to research before I gave him an answer.

My research opened my eyes. There are several different forces at work that make the valuation ofFinancial Evaluation 150x150 Changing Criteria and Calculations for MSP Valuations an MSP business a dynamic process. How MSPs are valued is changing, and I was able to say, “Yes,” to my client.

Here’s what I found. The preeminent expert in this space is Charles Weaver. He’s the President of the MSP Alliance, and of a consulting group that specializes in MSP mergers and acquisitions. I exchanged a few emails with Charles. His position is that MSP valuations used to focus on annual profits. The purchaser would ask to see the books. They valued the business more if it could show a year over year improvement in net profits, and they would pay a multiple of last year’s net.

This profit metric led to MSPs choking off investment in the business for a couple of years prior to sale to pump up the size of their profits and, therefore, the selling price. Purchasers were paying top dollar for a business in decline, and they had to invest heavily to get it back into growth mode.

So the metrics changed. Instead of looking just at profits, potential acquirers also looked at the book of business. They reviewed the number of current contracts and their future value in order to get a better idea of future profits. So MSPs who were contemplating cashing out focused on signing clients to multi-year contracts. Charles feels that this is also a less than optimal valuation method. He thinks it’s actually unfair to the seller because there are many sources of non-recurring revenue that should be included. His preferred calculation method is to blend top line revenue and EBITDA.

According to Joe Panettieri, the ‘VAR Guy’ and President of MSPmentor, “effective Marketing, Sales and Consulting are the three basic criteria for long-term MSP success and maximum company valuation… the most successful MSPs have processes in place to work on social media, marketing and PR on an ongoing basis.”

What Joe is saying is that having processes in place to handle Marketing and PR functions delivers three positive influences on valuation:

  1. they indicate a willingness on the part of the business’ management to build and deploy infrastructure devoted to demand generation and lead nurturing (critical sales enablement ingredients when selling complex B2B services),
  2. they accrue sales assets, which are tools that accelerate and amplify the sales process, and
  3. they result in company and brand visibility in the geographies served and across the online world.

Marketing is not a one and done kind of thing. Like Sales and Consulting, it’s an ongoing process that needs to be worked on all the time. Especially today when everyone is dealing with ‘short attention span prospects’. Fresh, relevant and useful content is needed on websites and for social media platforms. You have to give prospects a reason to keep coming back (i.e. new information that educates and gently persuades), until they’re ready and willing to sit down with a salesperson.

So how do I help my client pump up the valuation of his business? By doing the same things I do with all my clients… get them to:

  • focus on Marketing as a strategic part of their business;
  • stop doing ‘promotional activities’ on an ad hoc, opportunistic, haphazard basis;
  • plan, budget and execute Marketing functions just as they do with Consulting and Sales functions.
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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, information technology providers, marketing strategy, sales enablement | 6 Comments »

More Hard Evidence that Online B2B Marketing is Much More Cost Effective

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

UK marketing agency, Base One Group, commissioned a new research study in association with B2B Marketing Magazine. The study had a diverse industry profile including manufacturing, business services, financial services, public administration and healthcare. It was heavily weighted toward the purchasers of IT equipment and services in those industries.

Marketing collage 300x248 More Hard Evidence that Online B2B Marketing is Much More Cost EffectiveWhen B2B purchasers were seeking potential new suppliers, Twitter and blogs were considered  more influential sources of supplier information than any other channel, including word of mouth, seminars and industry press.

However, the most popular sources of information remain web searches and supplier websites. In fact, when asked how their information gathering behavior had changed, procurement professionals cited the greatest increased use of web searches (up 64%) and supplier websites (up 61%). Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter experienced 6% and 10% net increases respectively, and LinkedIn saw growth of 19%. Online videos/webinars/podcasts were also a strong source of information with an increase in usage of 36% – that coming off a small base, though.

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Posted in acSellerant, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, sales enablement | No Comments »

Cisco Enables VAR Marketing / Social Media

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Revealing video from Cisco outlining how they make corporate marketing assets available to their resellers, MSPs, SIs, etc. and encourage customization for their specific target prospects. I have to believe that HP, IBM, Microsoft, SAP et al will follow suit… if they haven’t already.

I’ve been on  the other side of the fence at DEC and EMC, and it was blasphemy to allow the channel to mess with our collateral. “They might go off message!” That was then, and this is now. You can’t protect the marketing assets anymore (and after all, the whole point is to spread the word). Much better to assist resellers in leveraging all those expensive white papers, case studies, etc.

I wrote a post about how those corporate assets miss the mark when you get down to street level. They can’t address local environments and competition. I call the process of customizing corporate vendor collateral, ‘Sales Enablement‘.

This is a great opportunity to cost effectively add useful and relevant content (which Google LOVES) to your website. btw - acSellerant specializes in customizing generic vendor content for your market and distributing it via social media. View this well reasoned video from Cisco here…

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, content marketing, execution, information technology providers, sales enablement | 1 Comment »

Using Social Media to Design New Products

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

I know that my clients (SMB B2B IT providers), amongst many others, need a better way to communicate to their prospects. acSellerant’s tag line is “Relevant and useful information builds trust. Trust sells.” While that still holds true, it’s not enough.Innovation Group 150x150 Using Social Media to Design New Products Not when it’s delivered primarily via text. The vast majority of B2B marketing messages are delivered online. People have a short attention span online

Relevant, useful, interesting… even entertaining copy is no longer enough to hold the interest of harried, starved for time, inundated with information business prospects. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort researching and building a process to develop multimedia storyboards that can deliver a significant amount of information in a short amount of time. The idea is to use sight and sound simultaneously to compress the amount of time, and increase the ease, in which information is communicated.

You’re thinking, “Wow, Bob. Alert the media. Ever hear of television or the movies?”

This process might include video, but it doesn’t have to, and it’s designed to be deliverable at less cost, with less equipment, and less prep time than video. It’s designed to fit the budgets of my clients. It’s untried, though.

So, I’ve been thinking about how to launch it. I first vetted the idea with friends, colleagues and clients over the holidays. Then I submitted discussions to a half dozen groups on LinkedIn. I was surprised at the response. Many smart, talented, creative professionals joined in the discussions. The consensus was, if I can pull it off, it’s a winner.

Then I went to three online custom publishers I have a relationship with. They were positive. They all said the same thing, they can sell it, IF I can pull it off. So now it’s time to develop a proof of concept and get feedback.

I’ve built a prototype with a voice over script, some on screen text, and a story told in cartoon format (with my crude stick figure drawings). I realized I needed a professional cartoonist to do the eight or nine frames necessary to tell the visual part of the story. So I’m using iFreelance and contacting other cartoonists I found on LinkedIn and through graphic designers I know.

So stay tuned. I’m going to blog about the process as I reveal the proof of concept online, try to build buzz via social media, and crowdsource tweaks to the process/product to improve it. By the way, one of the outcomes of the discussions on LinkedIn is a name for the product: acStream.

Should be interesting.

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Posted in acSellerant, acStream, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, information technology providers, marketing strategy, new product launch, sales enablement, trust | 1 Comment »

Product Launch SWAT Team

Monday, February 15th, 2010

My last blog post introduced this series focused on launching a new product or service totally online. Product Launch SWAT teams are essential whether the launch is online, offline, or a combination of the two.

If a new product or service is important enough to build a launch, give the launch the resources it needs to be successful. SWAT team members should include people from Marketing, Product Management, Sales and Service/Support. Expect that these people will be devoting significant time to the launch effort, so make sure that they aren’t encumbered with too many other deliverables in the same time frame. Assume that half of their time will be devoted to the launch for approximately three months.

It’s essential that Sales be involved in every product launch in a meaningful way. That means at least one sales person will have to split time between roles. Reduce their quota for the duration of the launch. If you don’t, they’ll be busy making their number. The launch process will suffer and the ROI of the launch will be compromised.

You’re going to be tempted to put a junior sales person on the team to minimize the revenue loss. Don’t do it. Put the sales exec who’s going to be most affected by the new product on the team. Typically that will be somebody more senior, and somebody who will whole-heartedly contribute to the success of the launch.

Bruce Seidel is a B2B sales coach with a long history of success selling software. He wrote an excellent blog post regarding formal agreements between Marketing and Sales to ensure a successful new product launch. Read it. Copy it. Keep it someplace safe where you can access it when you need it. I did.

My next post will be about using social media (your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) to crowdsource the features, benefits, delivery model – even the name and branding of your new product or service (and to start a whisper campaign about it).

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Posted in acSellerant, business to business, execution, marketing strategy, new product launch, sales enablement, trust | 1 Comment »

Why Online Product Launches are Different, Better, Cheaper

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

As it happens, I’m in the midst of strategizing and planning new product launches for two clients and a new service launch for acSellerant. I’ve done several launches over the years, but this is the first time I’m doing them exclusively online. Traditional launches keep things a secret until the big launch day, then ‘Kaboom!’, a media blitz… and it’s over. Unless it’s Apple. Then people will continue to buzz about the product for months.

Alas, you’re not Apple, and I’m not Steve Jobs. That doesn’t mean we can’t pull off highly successful product launches, though.

Due to the tools we have available today, the research phase (which is an absolute must) can be combined with test marketing and some early promotion of the product.

The problem in developing successful new products is not a shortage of ideas, but the expense of bringing a new product to market without any guarantee of success. How much better to continually seek feedback from prospects along the way, and fine tune the product so you know it’s going to be a winner.

Research, Research, Research

Social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter constitute mind-boggling tools for accomplishing research on the fly with built-in feedback loops, and rock bottom pricing. Five years ago you’d have to pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for the information you can get at virtually zero cost today. Here’s the process:

  1. Determine who your best target customers are. “Everybody” is not an acceptable answer. Be as specific as possible. The better you know who you’re selling to, the better you can custom fit your product, and the more persuasive your marketing messages can be.
  2. Determine how you want to go to market. Are you going to produce the product in-house or outsource the production? Will you sell the product yourself or through resellers? If you’re going the partner route, thoroughly research potential partners to determine best fit.
  3. Market Research Phase:
    a. Research market size and potential.
    b. Interview end users, resellers and sales reps (you can do this via online polls on LinkedIn and Twitter, although you should also conduct some qualitative, in-depth interviews in person or over the phone).
  4. Analysis and Development of the Marketing Plan:
    a. Competitive Analysis – review competing products and how they stack up against your proposed product. If there aren’t any closely competing products, research how else people are solving the problem. If they aren’t solving the problem and they’re not suffering any pain, pull the plug. If they are suffering, but don’t realize they have a problem, you need to add in the overhead cost required to educate them.
    b. Evaluate the product’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). Develop a Proof of Concept so people can understand what it is and what it does. It’s OK to use smoke and mirrors, as long as you can build the real functionality when the time comes.
    c. Develop an Online Marketing Plan that leverages the unique capabilities of the Net. Successful online launches create a series of interactions with current customers, employees, prospects, suppliers, trade media, resellers and any other appropriate audiences.
  5. Execute the Plan and Launch the Product:
    a. Develop online (easily and inexpensively edited) collateral materials.
    b. Begin placement dialogues with the first step in the preferred channel.
    c. Have enough dialogues with enough different entities to uncover any previously undiscovered objections.
    d. Review and revise the Plan as necessary with the new information.
    e. Repeat until you’re satisfied you have market acceptance.
    f. Explore relationship extensions with partners.

I’ll come out with more details in shorter blog posts over the next several days.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, information technology providers, marketing strategy, sales enablement | 2 Comments »

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