Not long ago we described the new opportunities for businesses to lead their sales with Inbound Marketing. In Content Led Selling in My Front Office we explained our own thinking, as it’s developed over the last several months.

As is quite often the case we’d understood but not properly described the reason it works.

Just a couple of days ago we came across Why Content is No Longer King. As usual the guys at Copyblogger do a fantastic job of explaining things.

Larry Brooks sums it up with:

Context as strategy

Effective context doesn’t happen by accident. We need to consciously create it.

Context comes from the writer’s clarity about her goals, juxtaposed against the expectations and tolerances of the audience.

In the context of content marketing, first we deliver valuable content, free and clear. As a gift. As a solution. As narrative bricks and mortar. And in doing so we earn the reader’s trust.

Once we’re trusted, we are now able to expand on our own agenda. We get to talk more about the intended outcome of the piece. That outcome might be a sale, a subscription, or even conversion to a new idea.

In a blog, we set out to deliver value. In an ad, we pitch solutions and overcome objections. In fiction, we infuse scenes with anticipation and emotion.

And in each case, when we understand the context we’re working in, we achieve our goal.

And so, too, does the reader. Because their context isn’t what you’re selling, but what they’re seeking to take away from what you’ve written.

Long live the new king.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Inbound Marketing Is For You (chrisbrogan.com)
• 5 more fresh articles...

 

You Might Also Enjoy

• Small Business Goes Global
• Do Prospects Know Who You Are
• Free Front Office Software
• Software in the Digital Economy

Have You Got Your Front Office Box? Register for a Free Personal CRM at the top of the page.

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

• 

   

October 29th, 2009 - Posted in Business Internet  |  Add a Comment Business Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

n the Front Office Box blog this morning we posted Not Google Social CRM referring to the announcement of Google’s Social Search. Google has also announced an agreement with Twitter to incorporate tweets in it’s Search results.

Now our Google profile will be connected to Twitter and Friendfeed activity (Friendfeed brings in just about everything including Facebook). When we Search Google we’ll also be searching our email contacts, “following” lists and “friends” plus the Twitter Firehose. Somehow our Google Profile will be like our Facebook Wall, plus the usual Search results.

It seems to me this is great news for those of us feeding Google’s content library, and bad news for the SEO types who’ve spent years trying to blindside the Search engine. Spammers don’t survive long in social media space. Quality contributions get recognised and promoted. Google gets to add a new level of quality control, real time news and trending topics to results for searchers. Anybody contributing to the good stuff will get more visibility to the same. And because Microhoo is chasing the game, Bing will offer the same.

To an extent it will also answer the “content” versus “engagement” debate.

With gurus like Gary Vaynerchuck and Mari Smith favouring the Facebook, Twitter engagement side and Chris Brogan, John Jantsch and Jason Falls leaning toward the content side, novices like me have been torn between the two.

Personally I’ve tended to concentrate on content, whilst maintaining a lower level of activity with engagement. That seems to suit our needs. But I can see lots of reasons for others to do the reverse, especially when their interest is consumer rather than business focused.

Now with Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and a bunch of others offering search across all the places we might contribute ideas, or opinion, or news the argument is less relevant.

As long as we’re there, the guys will have us covered.

The phrase “close the deal” took on whole new relevance during the Presidential campaign last year. This year the UK have media have picked up the phrase and keep suggesting the Conservative Party hasn’t yet won the argument.

But guys like us use the phrase in it’s traditional sense – Asking for the Order . So how, and when, do you close deals?

Sales is full of macho concepts like “cold calling”, “door stepping”, “pitching”, “punters” and “closing” – none of which attribute much intelligence to the customer. Of these “closing” is probably the one with the most mythology around it.

I’ll be honest first. Having been selling stuff for more than thirty years, and some of it very expensive, I still find the thought of a flat out “will you give me an order” intimidating.

In my case that’s less because I’m scared to ask the question. More like I’m scared I’ve missed a trick somewhere along the way. And of course right there, at the death, all my cost of sale has been spent. It’s hero or zero time, and we’d all rather have a live prospect than go door knocking again. A long time ago I figured the best, and easiest, time to close any deal is as early in the sales process as possible.

Closing early requires some techniques we’ll explain in a minute, but first we need to understand why “early” is better.

1. It changes the point of power in the conversation. The customer wants to get all the facts, make a decision and then hold back the order for negotiation. We need to rebalance the point of power, by changing the rules.
2. The longer the sale goes on the more cost of sale we have invested, and therefore the more we have to lose.
3. Closing the deal reveals any weaknesses in our case, and doing it early gives us a chance to fix them.
4. The customer might actually agree, in which case we all save a bunch of time.

So closing early isn’t macho, it’s common sense.

But we can’t walk in off the street and ask “give me the order”. That would be too aggressive (for me at least). In which case we need to cloak our close in terms which allow the customer to feel as if he/she has a way out.

My favourite techniques are:

* The Assumptive Close – where we act as if we’re assuming we’ll win the order.
* The Trial Balloon – where we float a seemingly innocuous hypothetical proposition.
* The Conditional Close – where we offer a deal based on the customer doing something.

There are times when these just don’t work. If our prospect genuinely isn’t the decision maker, and we can’t talk to the person who is, then we can bring out the:

* Coach Close – where we commit the prospect to helping us get it right for the boss.

And when we can be really imaginative, we can roll out the secret weapon, the :

* Reverse Coach Close – whereby we help the prospect get the best deal out of our boss – the Bad Guy in Back.

We’ll discuss each of these in later posts, with examples of where each might be suitable.

In the meantime – do you prefer early or late closes, and which techniques are your favourites?

 

October 8th, 2009 - Posted in Sales Coach, Sales Strategies and Tactics  |  Add a Comment Sales Coach, Sales Strategies and Tactics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Just what is the right price?

If we’re going to Learn to Love Our Price we’d better have a good idea of what the right price is.

In my experience there are a more right prices than might seem obvious:

• Marketing will set a price according to their analysis of the market, relative strengths of the product against the competition. An exercise in ticking boxes.
• Finance will have a target gross margin – costs plus the margin equals price.
• Sales Management will want to win the deal. Price will get softer as quarter end nears.

That’s dealt with our management. The customer is entirely different matter.  Customers understandably want to buy the best product, at a lower price than worst.

So, what’s the poor sales guy supposed to do? In lots of cases he/she ends up fighting with everybody – management and customer – to get agreement to any price which will make the deal work.

When it comes to order time, all the cost of sale is spent. Losing the deal consigns that investment to the loss column. Winning the deal brings in margin to help fund the overhead. Any deal that’s $1 more than the cost of the product is better than nothing

So now we have five “right” prices.

But the real “right price” is the maximum the customer will pay, and that’s the “emotional limit”. Sales guys who understand about price are much better placed to make deals happen, and usually make more money for themselves and their employers. They don’t need to fight everybody. They just need to be able to explain. They need to lead their business and the customer into a deal which works for everybody.  When Closing Time comes the sales professional leads from behind

So what determines the maximum the customer will pay?

1. The relative strength of competitors and their price.
2. The value perceived by the customer – in B2B this might be ROI, in B2C it’ll be what the purchase “says” about the customer.
3. The emotional limit – the point beyond which the customer won’t go, regardless of perceived value
Regardless of what sets the emotional limit, that’s where our deal should be. Finding out where that emotional limit sits is a much bigger subject we’ll discuss later.

For the moment here’s a couple of examples illustrating the point.

• Working for a supply chain optimisation company I got involved in a project with a major pharma company. With modelling we proved savings of at least $10 million/year. The company wanted a price of $1million but the prospects emotional limit was $150k. Regardless of the benefit he just wasn’t going to pay more, and he didn’t. We lost the deal when we could have had $150k and an opportunity to grow the relationship way beyond that.

• Working with an ERP company and selling to another pharma company I managed to sell a $3 million support package when the cost to us was virtually nothing. This prospect’s emotional limit was set very high, because his entire business in the USA was threatened – $8 billion at the time.

Bottom line is? In the first example I didn’t take a leadership role with my management, and should have done. In the second example I spent time persuading my management. They allowed me to push to the prospects’ emotional limit.

When it comes to Closing Time the sales professional knows where the deal is and leads customer and management to the table where the cards have already been dealt.

These are just my ideas.  How do you find the right price?

October 20th, 2009 - Posted in Selling Price  |  Add a Comment Selling Price. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Or they don’t for me at least! My ToDo list is a bit like the laundry basket – we never quite get to the bottom

It’s a combination of things:

* Over ambitious expectations of myself – I’m not as diligent as I make out.
* Events – as Macmillan said about politics “events change plans”.
* Procrastination – there are days when I’d just rather not do certain things.
* Interruptions – are great excuses
* No context – writing something on a list is only a piece of the picture, context explains the “why”.

Email is just as bad. Messages pour in all day. In one way they’re great interruptions, but also a pain in the rear.

I try to Star them so as not to forget to handle something when I’ve finished what I’m doing. But if they drop out of the top half of the Inbox they’ve had it. Every so often I’ll call up my Star items only to find a dozen things I’d meant to do last week, but never did.

The fact I’m inclined to admit my failure to live up to standards I set shows at least a partial recognition of my failings – a sort of self flagellation.

But the bottom line is the ToDo list is entirely the wrong way to organize and schedule, because things we don’t do eventually go away. They don’t come back and stare us in the face everyday, forcing us to revise the plan, or forget the thing, or perhaps even get it done.

Most of all ToDo items don’t arrive in a package, with an explanation of the context (how it fits in with everything else) and the information we need – correspondence, documents, notes – so we don’t have to spend more time remembering why we listed them in the first place.

Actions in Front Office Box are different. They’re assigned to a person, scheduled for a day/time, presented with easy access to our Relationships and Plans, and associated information. And if we don’t mark them as complete they’ll be there, staring us in the face, tomorrow, and the next day.

October 22nd, 2009 - Posted in Management Built In  |  Add a Comment Management Built In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

Everyday we’re seeing news from Mashable and The Next Web about a new entrant, each of which tries to add more value than those preceding it.

I try every one I come across – wanting to keep up with other people’s ideas and maybe find the answer to my problem, saving time whilst staying in touch. In another post I refer to Seth Godin’s post about apples and what I learnt from it. But this particular stream relates to my own experience. And, not surprisingly, it backs up what Seth said. I just want stuff that “does” and stays out of my way.

Of all the software I’ve tried, three services stand head and shoulders above the rest:

* In third place comes Posterous. Everything about this software works beautifully as a way of capturing content and sharing it.

* In second place comes Evernote. The desk top client is almost ideal for just capturing stuff. The iPhone version lets me take it with me, and the web client lets me share it with others.

* In first place comes Google Reader. I use just about all of Google’s software, and never really like any of it. On balance it’s better than the alternatives. The exception is Reader. It’s functional, it’s clean, it’s light (even working over a regular GPRS line), it works everywhere I go. Whichever feed aggregation service I try, nothing ever comes close to Reader.
Am I surprised? No I’m not, because the very basis of our strategy for Front Office Box is it has to make complex stuff simple, and stay out of the way.

And I didn’t include Front Office Box in the list because that would seem a shameless self promotion. It does a different job but, at what it does, it’s every bit as good as reader.

A few weeks ago we explained how Social Media is More Threat Than Opportunity

In that particular post we focused on opportunities people have for publishing complaints about bad customer experience. But there’s another dimension to the threat – what happens when people Search for you or your business. Do you have an on-line presence, a social reputation – somewhere Google can find out about you? What does it say?

Here’s a major reason for making sure you’re represented wherever anybody might look and at least you’ve had some influence over what it says about you, your company and products. Nowadays when a sales guy asks for a meeting the first thing most prospects will do is Search.

There’s an excellent video at Business Marketing Association demonstrating how this happens. Take a look, it’s well worth the few minutes it takes.

And to prove we “walk the talk” you can find Front Office Box Wherever You Hang Out

Related articles by Zemanta

• Managing your reputation through search results (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com)
• 5 more fresh articles...

 

October 16th, 2009 - Posted in Business Internet, Social Media Marketing  |  Add a Comment Business Internet, Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->

It takes a lot of work, making sure people can find you where ever they look and it's hard to measure any sort of return on the investment. But it makes sense.

Ultimately it's an act of faith.

Extrapolating other results to infer performance has to be a mugs game, because nothing makes sense. Nothing that is except REACH.

By REACH I don't mean the Feedburner description. For us it's who's using Front Office Box.

It's a long time since I knew who was logging on everyday. Now I don't have the faintest idea.

But I do look at countries :-) (ok this is me being smart ass!)

When I see logins in China, Australia, India, Africa, Finland, Sweden, Spain, France, UK, and across the USA, I know something's working right.

Just wish I knew why and how.

It's like my golf swing. Sometimes the ball goes where it's supposed to and others it doesn't.

Should know by now - That's Life