Using Social Media to Design New Products

Archive for the ‘trust’ Category

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. 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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Tags: acStream, b2b, Bob Leonard, business to business marketing, content strategy, custom publishers, LinkedIn, multimedia graphics, proof of concept
Posted in acSellerant, acStream, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, information technology providers, marketing strategy, new product launch, sales enablement, trust | No Comments »

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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Tags: b2b sales, formal agreements, product launch, product management, quota, selling software, Twitter
Posted in acSellerant, business to business, execution, marketing strategy, new product launch, sales enablement, trust | 1 Comment »

The Content, Connection, Conversation, Conversion Continuum

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

I am officially retiring acSellerant’s tagline – “Relevant and useful information builds trust. Trust sells.” When I first came up with that slogan, I was on a mission to convince B2B companies that:

traditional, interruptive advertising was no longer effective, and
traditional presales activities (educating prospects about your solutions) had been replaced by Google.

Largely due to the efforts of others, like Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett; and to the overwhelming evidence in the market place, my prospects now understand #1 and 2 above. So what’s next?

The Content, Connection, Conversation, Conversion Continuum

We all agree that to engage prospects we need to produce and publish relevant, useful, interesting and valuable content. You can’t just put it out there anymore, though. There’s too much competition for peoples’ attention.

We need to connect the content to our prospects. That means we have to deliver it to the online places where they hang out. That might be at industry-related websites like MSPmentor, or on special interest groups within Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Once you’ve set your content at the feet of the people it was developed for, if you’ve made the content compelling enough, your prospects connect with you. You’ve piqued their interest and they want to learn more… or they want to voice their opinion. They will comment on a blog post, in your online discussion, or they’ll email you.

Conversation ensues. When a dialogue is created between you and your prospects, ideas are exchanged. This is the time to listen carefully. It’s a golden opportunity to find out exactly what prospects want. Let them tell you. If they feel they’ve been heard, trust is built.

Once they understand that you truly have their best interest at heart, the conversation will move from online to phone, and then face to face, as the topics move from features and benefits, to pricing, and to terms and conditions. The prospect converts into a customer. You close a profitable deal without selling anything.

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Tags: b2b, Bob Leonard, business to business marketing, LinkedIn, MSP, return on influence, trusted advisor
Posted in Bob Leonard, acSellerant, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, sales enablement, trust | 2 Comments »

The Most Important Factor in Business Success

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Social media guru (and my neighbor here on Florida’s Gulf coast), Bernie Borges released his business predictions for this new decade. One of those predictions is the continuing growth and strength of Marketing as a critical business success factor. Not surprisingly, I’m in agreement. Here’s an excerpt:

Marketing
The 00’ decade began the transition to the mantra “marketing is the enterprise.” In the 10’ decade, marketing will be the most important factor in business success. No offense to sales-driven companies, but marketing is the central nervous system of the enterprise in the new decade. And, the cardiovascular system is communications. The marketing strategy is now all about the experience. Customers live in a digitally connected world at home, in the car, on the bus, at work, even at their kid’s soccer games. Brands who give their customers opportunities to experience their value proposition will win loyalty. Some B2B brands that do this already include Cisco, Indium Corp. and HubSpot. The secret sauce to creating an experience is to experiment with different communications that touch people through more than one sense including sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Yes, even B2B brands can do this.

I’m not so sure about smell, taste and touch; but it’s apparent that multimedia (graphics, images, and sounds along with short bits of text) will increasingly become the lingua franca of the web. As for Marketing’s ascendancy, I think most everybody in the business world realizes that ‘order taker’ salespeople have been disintermediated by the internet. But for complex B2B products and services, sales people are still very much needed. Their roles, though, should be upgraded and focused. ‘Beating the bushes’, ‘cold calling’, ‘hunting’… whatever you call it, is less and less effective. Marketing’s role is growing through the addition of what I call ’sales enablement’ activities. These are primarily online pull tactics (including inbound marketing, content marketing, SEO and social media). The upside for professional B2B sales executives is that they get to focus their time and attention on building relationships and closing profitable deals.

You can read the rest of Bernie’s Predictions here.

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Tags: b2b products, effective marketing, multimedia graphics
Posted in acSellerant, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, sales enablement, trust | 2 Comments »

100 Content Marketing and Social Media Predictions for 2010

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Joe Pulizzi, the de facto worldwide thought leader for ‘content marketing’, has included me (along with Seth Godin, Mike Volpe, David Meerman Scott, John Jantsch, and 55 others) in his list of contributors. I’ll give you the link (I’m about half way down the list), but first here’s my prediction:

Bob Leonard

In the B2B world, it’s going to require what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “simplicity on the other side of complexity”.

What I mean is that marketers are going to have to work hard to distill product and service information (features and benefits, competitive positioning, value propositions, etc.) into easily consumed, and quickly digested morsels. I’m not referring to slogans or tag lines. Marketers have moved beyond sales messages to delivering relevant and useful information. As the sheer volume of this information grows exponentially, marketers must learn to communicate to target prospects not only in a meaningful, concise way; but also using multimedia to engage more of the targets’ senses. To teach and to entertain simultaneously.

I happened to have a prediction ready for Joe because it’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit.

As a content developer, my primary communication vehicle has been the written word. As technology advances, and the amount of information available to people explodes, text on a page or a screen is becoming less and less capable of competing for peoples’ attention. So, I decided to work on something new. I was looking for something I could do largely by myself with just a PC, some software and an internet connection. I’ve found that thing. I call it ‘storyboarding’.

It’s a mashup of PowerPoint, video and podcasting (voice over).

I’ll be evolving this blog to that format within the next few weeks. And will be using it to help clients communicate to their customers and prospects.

Meanwhile take a look at Joe’s 100 Content Marketing and Social Media Predictions for 2010.

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Tags: b2b, Bob Leonard, business to business marketing, content strategy, joe pulizzi, trusted advisor, useful and relevant information
Posted in Bob Leonard, acSellerant, business to business, content marketing, trust | 1 Comment »

How Do You Communicate Value in a Digital World?

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

A client said something to me last week that I want to share with you. He asked me, “How do we communicate value in a digital world?” I asked him what he meant.

He said, “Our services are virtual. We remotely monitor our customers’ systems and applications, and we fix things before they break. We used to get to play the hero now and then… swooping in when there was trouble and saving the day. How can we communicate that kind of value when we’re invisible?”

I know the answer, and I’ll share it with you in a minute.

On an earlier visit to that same office, I was asked to wait in the reception area for a few minutes until my client (the VP of Sales) was finished with a con call. So I sat and checked my phone, etc. I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation coming through the open door of their Help Desk area. One of the technician’s was busy relating how he had ‘helped’ a recent caller. She had phoned with a question that this technician considered “stupid”. He recounted (to the amusement of his peers) the conversation during which he solved the problem… and humiliated the caller.

At the time, I decided it wasn’t my place to mention this to my client; but his question was the perfect opening.

How do you communicate value in a digital world?

You make damn sure that every customer touch point is pleasant and reassuring. That Help Desk call was an opportunity for the technician to establish rapport, help the woman with her problem, and make her feel important. She is important. Her company is paying that technician’s salary.

I can divide my clients into two categories. Those who realize that so-called ‘soft skills’ are just as important as technical skills, and those who don’t. Guess who’s more successful?

If you’re remote, and your customer touch points are limited to an occasional phone call, an email now and then, and your website; make the phone conversations, emails and website as high quality as you can. Make them the Ritz-Carlton of phone conversations, emails and websites. If they’re the Holiday Inn Express of phone conversations, emails and websites, that’s how your clients will perceive your business, no matter how sophisticated and skilled your people are.

Evaluate your entire business. Look at every customer touch point and make sure that the employee (or digital entity) involved is not only technically competent, but is delivering Ritz-Carlton level service.

When that’s fixed, start (and maintain) a social media campaign. That’s how you develop digital relationships. More on that in future posts.

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Tags: b2b, business to business marketing, execution, trusted advisor
Posted in acSellerant, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, marketing strategy, trust | No Comments »

Business to Business Lead Qualification

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Getting to ‘No’

I remember my boss at Digital Equipment Corp. once awarded me the “bulldog”. It was a bronze casting of a bulldog meant to be proudly displayed on my desktop. It was recognition for sinking my teeth into an unqualified prospect and holding on until the prospect submitted to my will and bought.

That was then. This is now. Today that kind of behavior should be punished, not rewarded. Maybe even back then. We made the sale, but at what cost?

Once I had committed to that deal, I spent tons of time booking appointments, preparing proposals, building presentations, and making customer visits. Very time consuming and expensive. I’ve since decided that this is work that should be done only if there’s a real need and a good chance of winning a profitable deal.

Everything you do to generate leads and close deals is hard work. Don’t waste it. Get to ‘No’.

There’s a substantial difference in your mental attitude when you’re going for a ‘Yes’ versus when you’re going for a ‘No’.

When you go for a ‘Yes’:

You’re trying to get an appointment.
You’re trying to get approval for your proposal.
You’re trying to close the deal or close for the next step.
Your posture is one of a supplicant.

When you go for a ‘No’:

You cross prospects off your list faster.
You never do proposals that have no chance of leading to a sale.
You’re looking for reasons not to waste time with loser deals.
Your posture is one of confidence that what you sell is of value.

This doesn’t mean you throw out every lead that isn’t perfect and ready to decide today.

What it does mean is that you prioritize your efforts, and you make prospects show you why they deserve your sales time and sales resources.

It’s so much better to deal only with qualified prospects. Prospects who have pain and are actively seeking help.

Most companies don’t qualify leads well enough. In B2B, prospects are professional buyers, with budgets and business problems to solve. If you can help them, chances are good they’ll buy. You have a right to ask questions to determine if the opportunity is appropriate for your organization.

When you embark on a demand generation program, you need to qualify the leads that come in. Initially, they should be qualified to determine whether they belong in the sales funnel at all. Criteria to determine this:

the prospect is the decision maker, a strong influencer, or has access to the decision maker or influencer
the company is doing well and can make money available for the purchase (or, in some cases, is doing poorly and may go to great lengths to get funding for the right project)
pain has been detected, and your product may solve their pain
they have expressed interest in your product, and
they project a purchase within a year.

If they don’t qualify at this point, discard them. On average, you’ll lose about 20% of the leads generated. You’ll save a lot of time and effort by not pursuing leads that will never close.

Then it’s time to qualify for “sales-ready” leads. It’s imperative that Marketing, Sales and the C-suite all agree on the criteria that must be met to qualify a lead as “sales-ready”. Here’s an example of sales-ready lead criteria:

the prospect is the decision maker, or is a strong influencer and can get you access to the decision maker
budget is available, or the person can make budget available
pain has been verified, and your product can genuinely solve their pain
they have expressed interest in a sales meeting to explore a solution to their need, and
they project a purchase within three months.

You can loosen or tighten the scoring criteria based on whether you want more or fewer leads to hand to your salesforce. On average, 20% of the leads generated will be qualified as sales-ready. Hand them off to the appropriate sales contacts immediately.

You’ve discarded 20% and handed 20% off to your salesforce. That means you have 60% of the leads generated still in the sales funnel. They’re qualified as leads, but they’re not sales-ready. They need to be nurtured.

The way to build a relationship with these prospects is to let them educate themselves. B2B lead nurturing consists of making informative content (some subset of whitepapers, seminars, case studies, podcasts, webinars, demos, etc.) available to the prospect. The goal is to earn their permission to stay in touch and progressively deepen the relationship so that when the prospect does become sales-ready, they’ll want to engage with your firm. You’re top of mind when they’re ready to buy, and the conversation won’t be centered on price, because you’ve become a trusted advisor.

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Tags: content strategy, return on influence, trusted advisor, useful and relevant information
Posted in business to business, content marketing, trust | No Comments »

B2B Marketing Has Always Been Content Marketing

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Two purposes for this post. One to show you a video from the Business Marketing Association’s conference currently being held in Chicago, and the other to introduce you to my buddy, Joe Pulizzi. Joe has the video posted to his site. It’s short. It’s entertaining. And it tells a story that will resonate with you.

You should register to receive Joe’s blog. Content Marketing is the only thing that’s working today for B2B, and Joe is one of the world’s top experts. As the video illustrates, it has always worked for B2B, it’s just that we didn’t call it ‘Content Marketing’.

The way it worked was a salesperson knocked on doors and built relationships over time. Eventually he or she built trust and prospects began to believe what he or she told them. Very difficult and too expensive to do today. Much more effective and much cheaper to do it online.

Complex technology sales can’t be closed online, but trust and relationships can be built that way. Then, prospects will contact you when they’re ready to talk price and Ts & Cs. You still need smart, hard working salespeople, but you can deploy them more strategically.

That’s the way it works today. You have to build the content. Relevant and useful information. Added fresh at least three times a week. A blog is a good way to do that. Case studies, podcasts, surveys, videos, whitepapers and other types of content work too.

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Tags: b2b, business marketing association, joe pulizzi
Posted in business to business, content marketing, trust | No Comments »

Digital Relationships

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Business to Business Moves Online

It isn’t news to you that the nature of your relationships with your clients and prospects has changed. Existing relationships are more difficult to maintain as the people you used to deal with leave their posts, and their replacements (if there are any) are much less inclined to engage with IT providers. Cultivating new relationships is more difficult because prospects don’t feel the need to interact with IT providers until they’re ready to buy. They do their research online. If they contact you, the conversation will be about price.

Relationships

What may be news is that there’s a more cost effective way to build, nurture and maintain relationships with clients and prospects. You don’t have to be in the same room (or the same country). You can build the trust online that forms the foundation of every sale. With one caveat – the relationships you build must be authentic. Everybody has a well-honed BS detector today. If you aren’t in it for the long haul, if you’re just trying to make your quarterly numbers, resign yourself to competing on price.

Return On Influence

There’s networking and relationship-building for business, and there’s ’sales disguised as networking’. Don’t confuse the two because your prospects won’t. The first one is truly helpful because he wants to make and keep relationships. The second one is interacting only to fill an immediate need.

By being helpful over time, even when there’s no imminent payoff on the horizon, you become a trusted advisor. And you’re able to accomplish this fairly easily, because it’s a one to many relationship. By communicating relevant and useful information through your blog (and commenting on other appropriate blogs), and/or a newsletter, white papers, videos, your website etc., you build a reputation. As long as the content you develop is high quality, people with an interest will find it and disseminate it to others.

Starved for Time, Not Information

It seems counter intuitive. Why develop more content when people don’t have time to consume the information that’s already available to them? If you develop content that resonates, or informs in a way that’s valuable, or entertains (or preferably, all three), people rightly perceive it as a time saver. They didn’t have to hunt down these tidbits, assimilate them and think them through – you did it for them.

Content Strategy

Of course, you can’t deliver useful, relevant, compelling information off the cuff. You must determine what your positioning is. What subject matter do you want to be the trusted advisor for? And who are your target prospects? Once that’s done, you can develop a content strategy that outlines the research you’ll do and the topics you’ll cover. An added bonus is that, as search becomes more contextual (see Bing, Kosmix and Duck Duck Go), your relevant content becomes your search engine optimization (SEO). No need to trick the search engines into driving traffic. The same valuable information that keeps people interested, will also draw the interest of the search engines.

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Tags: content strategy, digital relationships, return on influence
Posted in business to business, content marketing, information technology providers, trust | No Comments »

A Matter of Trust

Friday, June 12th, 2009

This is the core of what acSellerant is about, and what all Marketing should provide. It sounds basic, and it is. Everybody knows that trust has to be established before a sale, especially of complex and high ticket items, can occur. What is new is that it’s become increasingly difficult to establish trust. The internet has distanced buyers from sellers. If you can’t get in to see a prospect, how are you ever going to build trust?

trust

Useful and Relevant Information

Most business to business (B2B) companies use their website as brochureware. Boring, static descriptions of their company, its products and services. So easy for a prospect to click away to a competitor site. You just lost a sale and don’t even know it.

What do you do when you’re meeting with a prospect in person? You pay attention to the prospect. You ask questions to uncover problems that, maybe, your products and services can solve. And then you listen.

When prospects find you online, they already know they have a problem and they’re actively looking for solutions. There’s a whole discipline called search engine optimization (SEO) that’s devoted to getting companies, products and services found online. We’re going to cover that in depth in later blog posts, but for today we’ll focus on after they’ve found your website.

Golden Opportunity

Think about it. This individual is looking for what you’re selling. They’re already qualified, to a degree. How do you persuade them to contact you, to ask for a sales call? In stages.

Remember – your goal is to build trust. Establish rapport. Let the prospect know that they’re in the right place and that you might be able to solve their problem. Give them information that is meaningful and helps them to make an intelligent buying decision.

Above all, you have to tell the truth. You can’t build trust with sleight of hand or half-truths. If a marketing agency even suggests something like that, get rid of them. This is the age of transparency. Remember Hillary Clinton’s story about dodging bullets on the tarmac in the Mideast?

A quality marketing agency will help you build a compelling (yet truthful) story around your products and services.

Layers of Complexity

Odds are your product or service (since this is a blog for IT vendors) is fairly complex. Figure out all the questions your prospect will need to have answered before they buy, and give them the information they need. I’m not suggesting that you reverse engineer your product on your website, but you must give prospects enough information, in bite-sized bits, over time, to get them to the point where they’re ready to make a buy decision and they’re willing to meet with a sales person.

If you do this correctly, a number of things happen. While taking your prospects on this journey of discovery, you’re:

educating them about your company and its products and services;
very gently, almost imperceptibly, persuading them;
proving to them that you’re trustworthy; and
ultimately, becoming a trusted advisor.

Today, your website and other online content (blogs, case studies, email messages, white papers, etc.) are the tools to use to build trust with prospects.

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Tags: useful and relevant information
Posted in business to business, content marketing, trust | No Comments »

Archive for the ‘trust’ Category