The Invisible Marketing Blog » selling

Can humanizing your brand increase sales?

Christie Turner — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:04:37 +0000

It’s easy to simply dismiss all branding as a constructed image, no relationship with reality. Most people with power to spend money do know that brands are constructed with an agenda: influence people to spend money. At least intellectually, we know that brands intend to produce a rather specific outcome, and it isn’t the greater good.

Now, the most powerful brands tap into a reality we want to believe. The human brain has a tough time resisting an offer which appeals to beliefs we already hold about the world, how the world should be, or ourselves.

We want the NYPD and the US Army to be like Iron Man: efficiently killing off the bad guys, inerrantly knowing who they are, and sparing everyone else — all with beautiful technological accuracy that’s much more surgical and correct than mere human judgment. Such desires are common among post-9-11 Americans, and this zeitgeist is a secret of the power of all three of these brands.

All 3 brands have also been humanized for us to some degree. NYPD by stark and heroic images related to 9-11 and the defense of the city since. The US Army by our proximity to many of its faces through our family, friends, school or work colleagues, fellow travelers in our airports, and extensive news coverage. Iron Man by Robert Downey, Jr., and the famous movies.

Even brands that should take what they do seriously and exert a vibe of trustworthiness and confidence (the NYPD, my accountant, the NSA) don’t seem credible without a human side.

Yet many executives believe that humanizing their brands will actually cost them credibility.

We won’t seem as big. (You also won’t seem as distant.)
We won’t seem competent. (A fake, constructed image of competence will seem more competent than you guys actually are?)
They’ll notice that we’re not invincible. (Most brands are expected to recover well. Perfection is a nice but optional extra.)

What really matters, of course, is whether humanizing the brand can increase sales.

Many fashion/consumer brands know that the answer is yes. Celebrity endorsements, done correctly, are one of the clearest proofs of this.

Is it also true B2B? Yes. How do I know? Because business to business buyers value word of mouth referrals, video testimonials, live customer references. They also know that such things aren’t foolproof (past results don’t guarantee future performance) and can even be faked. But how many of you hired your corporate lawyers or accountants from the Yellow Pages? Heck, no, you got referrals from people you trust. Even a Google or LinkedIn search result comes with more credibility than an ad.

Why? It’s a lot harder to get real human beings to stake their reputations on my company’s performance (by lending face and name to a reference) than to design a pretty image and make it say all the right things.

Content marketing is another part of humanizing the B2B brand. Let’s say I give you a preview of a company’s problem solving insights and approach as it tackles a problem similar to the one you face. Maybe it’s a Slideshare presentation or a conference breakout session or a blog post – doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can much better envision what it’s like to work with me based on that preview. No ad can accomplish this. Ads tell, which means they are self conscious messages. Content marketing shows what I understand about a problem, and how I approach solving it. It puts a real face on a real solution. This increases trust. It’s humanizing.

Muppets Selling for IBM – would it work today?

Christie Turner — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 17:25:25 +0000

This is laugh-out-loud funny. Especially love Kermit selling under pressure.

Nominal business observation: do you think this would work at your company’s meetings today? Many corporate executives want both the company’s and their own personal brands to have gravitas. The Muppets don’t bring gravitas to a brand, but they make it accessible.

More about brands, selling, and buyer influence on the blog. More of the IBM Muppets online at http://technologizer.com/2010/05/31/ibm-muppets/

Happy summer!

The one big problem that kills lead scoring programs

Christie Turner — Mon, 17 May 2010 20:21:29 +0000

I love lead scoring. When done right, it lets you think like a customer.

The problem is that it’s just too easy for marketers to think inside the box, instead of like customers.

Lead scoring programs are rather complex to set up. Certainly more so than a garden-variety email campaign. They require weighted averages, multiple decision criteria, campaign tools of some sophistication.

None of that is a reason not to do lead scoring.

But here’s the killer.

The predictive value of your scoring criteria.

Do you really, in fact, know why customers buy from you?

Or do you just think you know?

A lead scoring problem is an expensive, time consuming way to find out that what you really need to do is go find some customers and listen to them for a while and figure out how to have an intelligent conversation with them.

Here’s the dirty little secret. Many marketers want to score leads based on publicly available data which can be bought in bulk. Industry. Company size, revenue, # of employees. Public/private ownership status. Etc.

Then I add in a few other fill-in-the-blank data points like “how many widgets do you already own?” or “what brand of product/service X are you using today?”

Once I buy enough lists and add a couple of data points like this (the belief goes), I can score my leads, and voila! Qualified Leads, ready for eager consumption by my sales team.

Except that they’re not.

What IS a qualified lead is a much more complex and nuanced conversation than can be had with objective criteria like this. My job title may make me an interesting contact, but it doesn’t make me a warm lead or interested prospect.

Worthwhile lead scoring requires more. Until I understand how or why my buyer decides to buy, or at least what prompts them to look for a solution, I have no idea how to influence that buying decision or overcome buyer resistance. This knowledge is prerequisite for a credible lead scoring program.

Relationships vs. Markets: 5 differences between sales and marketing

Christie Turner — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:53:38 +0000

At one time, the demarcation between sales and marketing was simpler.

Relationships were what sales needed:

One to one, person to person,
company by target account company,
highly situational, mano a mano.

That’s the world of selling.

Markets are what marketing tried to influence.

Given enough time and money, you could drive statistically measurable movements of trends and beliefs through populations, groups, industries.
As measurement tools & processes got better, revenue was attributed to the process as a whole, but most of the activities tended to lack accountability.

Well, if Marketing is on the hook to help drive this year’s revenue, it’s not quite so tidy as this. The problem is that moving trends and beliefs through populations is expensive to measure and takes a long time. It can’t be tracked very well to this year’s revenue at most companies.

Marketing increasingly gets involved in relationships. We identify prospective customers who may one day enter a buying process. We nurture early relationships with those prospects. We score prospects’ behaviors to determine who’s getting closer to that buying process. We look for ways to influence individual prospect relationships.

These activities do not make marketing more useful or accountable. To sales and marketing alike, this increasing convergence of focus can feel like a fight for data, control, and ownership. It may get harder to assign credit for results.

What makes the difference? Getting marketing people out of their ivory towers. Building internal relationships. And learning how to talk with customers.

5 reasons why sales & marketing processes aren’t a silver bullet

Christie Turner — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:11:27 +0000

I’m a process person. I like setting up things that can be repeated, sustained. I like processes that can automate all the drudgery out of getting something done.

However, as much as process thinking can help you ask the right questions in a company, having processes isn’t a silver bullet.

Here are some of the reasons why you won’t find a foolproof, set-it-and-forget-it solution to marketing automation, salesforce automation, revenue generation.

Things change. Processes have to be updated. Groups of people (corporate and otherwise) don’t tend to update things they’ve automated as fast as the world changes. Some portion of a complex process is nearly always inefficent or out of date.

Human diversity. As soon as I say, “It’s best practice for email subject lines to be short, with the most important words first,” someone else will show you an email campaign with a humongous long subject line that performed beautifully. Kara Balmer points out this phenomenon in an entertaining post about best practices in marketing automation.

Human irrationality. People are predictably irrational in many ways. But that irrationality isn’t easy to translate into marketing and sales processes.

Human complexity. Processes aren’t so great at adapting to complex emotional drivers, organizational politics, macroeconomic conditions, cultural differences…

People aren’t machines. How they interact with other people and make decisions… inherently unpredictable. Processes require predictability.

What to do about it?

Set “interrupt processes” like peer review, annual review (or some other timetable), sales feedback sessions, customer summits. Assume there will be process breakage in time, and build routines to help you go look for it.

Increase the pressure and see what breaks. Include a process review in the runup to anticipated big releases. Where are the stress points that will break if we try to scale up the load factor or speed? Or, if you’re that kind of organization, simply jump on some of those extra projects you want to get around to, and see what breaks. That’s one way to break through inertia to start figuring out how to fix those gaps.

Postmortems. Include process review in campaign postmortems, post event evaluations.

Hire an outsider. Get the viewpoint of an expert who isn’t invested in your daily routine or impending deadlines or internal assumptions. Find out what team members and other departments are thinking but not saying in meetings. Get hands on help to do something about it, so you can keep meeting those deadlines while finally getting someone focused on making things better.

Next steps? Pick up the phone. Call a counterpart in sales; ask where they think things could be better in the marketing-sales handoff. Call your finance team and find out what it would take to get a better view of revenue trends and your team’s impact on them. Call someone on your own team and ask them to bring you some solutions for that manual workaround you all know is there, but never make the time to deal with. If you’re not sure where to start, you could always call us.

Top 3 gaps between marketing leaders

Christie Turner — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:12:34 +0000

In a discussion of brand and marketing on David Friedman’s blog, Kevin Liebl observed the appearance of a generation gap in marketing executives.

Amid seismic shifts in technology and the macro economy, it’s my view that at least 3 other gaps are emerging between marketing leaders.

Accountability gap. Possibly the most important gap among marketers. Marketers increasingly get to test, tinker, and directly associate their work with customer acquisition, revenue, and profitability. Now, I’ve had more than one ad agency veteran tell me it’s not OK for an ad, event, or website to be judged on direct revenue it generates. This thinking is common among marketers. But those who are proficient with metrics, analysis, and accountability for ROI are increasingly prized.

Technology gap. New technologies enable a right-now measurement discipline which was formerly the domain of direct response advertising. Not just social media, but mobile marketing, search engine marketing, internet analytics, marketing automation. Tactical savvy in these technologies can be game changing. A haves and have-nots gap is increasing between those who learn the new tools of the trade and those who don’t.

Mindset gap. Old mindset: do I think I can control the message in a one-way brainwashing effort toward my audience? New mindset: can I engage markets and individuals in 2-way conversations that I influence but cannot control? This also includes the relationship between marketing and sales, not just marketing and the customer. The new mindset doesn’t win in every market, but it’s becoming more important to be flexible in thinking about the role of the marketing messenger.

Marketing has always been about revenue generation. More & more, marketers get to drive activities that actually can be proven to generate revenue. It’s a good place to be.

Lead nature vs lead nurture: which is it?

Christie Turner — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:36:34 +0000

Is lead nature — who the prospect is — that matters in B2B marketing?

Or what I do to keep in touch and build a relationship — lead nurture — that predicts lead value and conversion to sales opportunity?

Well, it’s both.

Most companies fail to define lead Nature in any but the most basic terms, rendering their efforts at connection stilted at best. Without an ability to carry on an intelligent conversation with your prospects through the various media of your outreach, it doesn’t matter how often you call on them. Your buyers will avoid, reject, and resent your intrusion if you talk at them like you don’t know (or listen to) them.

Many of us also do a perfunctory job (at best) in reaching out to these leads — lead nurture. And with nurture, compelling value helps but even simple consistency (just showing up) makes a notable difference.

This means more homework for marketing projects and plans upfront. And more detailed follow through.

B2B complex sale = influencing a community.

Christie Turner — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:18:47 +0000

To get anything done in a B2B complex sale, you’re not just Selling to The Senior Executive Wo/Man.

That’s why it’s complex.

It’s tempting, especially for salespeople, to depend on just a single contact, champion, or coach inside the client company. Giving in to this temptation? Watch for l-o-n-n-n-g sales cycles, clients who won’t make decisions, endless RFPs, and surprise announcements that you won’t be getting the business.

What do you need when your business depends on successfully influencing communities?

In addition to great sales people and great sales infrastructure, marketing processes that are…

Patient. Sales isn’t supposed to be patient — there’s a qualified deal on the table. Marketing has to find potential and study it, monitor it, listen for cues, compare what’s happening in this deal with others. Its processes (and the technology infrastructure behind them) need to enforce and support patience.
Iterative. Does your team do something more than once? On purpose? That’s the mentality necessary to learn. If you’re trying to influence a complex ecosystem (multiple people, teams, business units), then launch a program or tactic assuming that you’re going to learn something new, which will necessitate additional change to the program. Which brings us to…
Listening. Only the customer really knows what influence them. Not always can (or will) they tell you. Marketing processes in a complex sale enforce and support the effort to listen for customer cues.

If your marketing processes (and by extension your technology infrastructure) don’t support test-listen-measure-repeat, then let’s not kid ourselves — you won’t do it. You don’t have time.

Add these distractions to Marketing’s not-to-do list

Christie Turner — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:47:17 +0000

In a world of limited time, finite means, and pressure for results, what not to do?

When marketing is under-resourced, it tends to stop listening to the customer (if it ever did), because listening requires a cessation of action. What happens next? Recycling whatever you said and did in the last campaign. Talking to all customers as if they’re all the same.

Four marketing temptations that are common in a down economy (and ways to avoid them):

Not to do: Try anything once.
Try instead: When results are off (or direct marketing is new to the organization) it can be tempting to churn through new tactics, media, messaging, target industries. Revisit your plan, fine, but spend the energy to first analyze what’s there today. It’s easier, faster, and potentially less risky to incrementally improve an existing program than to chuck everything and start over.

Not to do: Get something out there NOW.
Try instead: Urgency and timeliness are important in marketing. Make the most of them by talking to each of your customers (and prospects) as if their current goals and worries are important to you. Start with the customers you know best and who are most valuable to you. Think about whom you’re trying to reach and what’s important in their world. Just making noise isn’t enough.

Not to do: The Unfunded Mandate.
Try instead: Ruthlessly cut what doesn’t have a budgeted spend, allocated time/project plan, and a revenue stream it’s directly intended to influence. Say no to everything else, regardless of who’s asking. Create a backburner list for nice ideas that need some more time to bake.

Not to do: Abandon everything.
Try instead: Don’t simply stop doing marketing. Establish an ROI objective linked to how your program or tactic will help a salesperson and/or a prospect. Test with a fraction of your sales force and prospects before investing big.

For the concept of the not-to-do list, thanks to @gerhard20 for the post 15 Things Salespeople And Sales Managers Should Put On Their Not-To-Do List.

The Sandler Rules: 49 Timeless Selling Principles and How to Apply Them

Christie Turner — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:38:14 +0000

It’s book review time again. Perhaps you’ve heard that sales people have a rant about marketing people (and others) who don’t understand what sales people do. Today’s book is a nice little vaccine against Complete Sales Ignorance.

The Elevator Summary: Most books about selling are of little use in understanding the psychological world of selling. Sandler is the real deal.

Standout Moments: All of them.

Not so much: Can you learn how to sell from a book? No.

Who should read it: Anyone in sales. Anyone in marketing. Anyone who manages the performance of sales or marketing.

Bottom Line: One of the best, most practical books about buyer behavior at the moment of truth. And a tough, practical book about sales and negotiating. Read this book.

More about the book: The Sandler Rules: 49 Timeless Selling Principles and How to Apply Them

5 Reasons your customers and prospects don’t listen to you

Christie Turner — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:28:24 +0000

Which of these is true for your company? How are you going to fix it?

Your customers are focused on their own issues — and don’t see you as relevant to those concerns. Are you talking to the wrong people or companies? Are you trying to sell too broadly? Do you simply need to better explain the relevance of your work to customers’ problems?
Your company talks about itself, forcing customers to navigate your bureaucracy, jargon, products. How can you put aside your internal bureaucracy and help customers solve their own problems? Can you organize around customers and their problems?
Your company talks about solutions without correctly defining your customers’ problems. Ask existing customers, target customers, and your sales and marketing people what the customers’ problems are. Where are the common threads? Where are the disconnects?
When your company talks, it sounds like a bunch of other companies. What’s the difference?
Your company talks in language they don’t trust. Too tidy. Too pat. Too good to be true. Find out how your customers talk about their problems. And don’t overpromise what you can do about the problem. Respect your audience’s intelligence.
Your company doesn’t admit what it doesn’t do. Draw a line: Here’s what we do well — that is, where a customer gets the most economic value from us. Here’s everything we don’t do so well — can we send customers elsewhere for those things?

Getting customer attention is already hard. Why make it harder?

People won’t buy what they don’t know about. Or will they?

Christie Turner — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:08:11 +0000

As regular readers of my blog know, I have an uneasy relationship with traditional brand advertising. Especially in the B2B space.

I do feel moved to clarify this point regarding corporate brand marketing: “People can’t buy your stuff if they don’t know you exist.”

Now, especially in the B2B world, people CAN buy a product or service from you – and not know you exist. Especially (but not only) if you’re selling commodities.

– They’re buying through a broker or aggregator or auction or distributor.

– They’re buying through a blind or competitive procurement process.

In both of those cases, an influencer had to know who you are and decide to bring you in. Purchases did not materialize through spontaneous generation. Someone still made them happen

Now, here’s where sales and marketing disciplines are inextricably linked, often uncomfortably so in many companies.

In any B2B sale I can think of, and also many consumer purchases, awareness is not enough.

A significant goal of marketing in the B2B world is credibility. That comes through many proofs — word of mouth referrals, customer testimonials and references, personal introductions, coverage in some kind of third party analysis (from research houses to blogs), awards, media coverage, peer reviewed journals, technology reviews…

Whether buyers, influencers, or both need to trust your credibility, this must be established before money will change hands. And typically before serious discussions will be entertained.

Credibility implies some openness, respect, trust. It is a source of motivation to proceed with a deal.

What credibility is not? Awareness. (It’s so much more than that!) Awareness is not a meaningful yardstick for measuring any kind of B2B marketing ROI.

How do you know your marketing is building credibility? By measuring the degree to which your marketing gives you influence over the actions your counterparties are taking. Is it easy to measure? No. But it’s what matters.

Enter tension between marketing and sales. In the B2B complex sale, marketing + sales must work hand in glove to deliver the kind of influence that leads to customer action. It’s a highly integrated partnership. It’s hard to peel out what marketing did and what sales did and give them credit as separate functional entities for their specific influential little successes during the course of a sales cycle.

We can steal many good ideas from six sigma, agile, and other manufacturing processes. Sales and marketing people should do more of this. But human influence is much, much more complex and unpredictable than a manufacturing process. What we do can’t be fine-tuned in the same way as a mechanical build operation. Which is already pretty complex and tough to tune.

What’s predictable, though, is this. If the marketing team is focused on writing pretty brochures and running pretty ads in traditional media, it’s going to be a strained partnership. If the sales team is waiting for fully qualified leads to fall from the sky, ready for contract negotiations, it’s going to be a strained partnership. (Hopefully that’s not your company…)

How to think like a customer: step #2

Christie Turner — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:55:49 +0000

Now that we’ve admitted that we aren’t customers, we can progress to step 2: actually talking to a customer.

Ironically, the closest many marketing people come to the sales cycle is the 2-way glass in the focus group facility.

Which is nice. But you’ll learn the most, and fastest, about your customers (in the B2B complex sale) by riding along with your sales people.

Chatting with customers at events is also helpful. But the customer in the wild is the customer who’s trying to buy something. That’s who you want to hear from.

Book Review: Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way

Christie Turner — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:52:24 +0000

Book report time again.

The Elevator Summary: The book isn’t santimonious about Six Sigma or process design. It makes rigorous tools and structured thinking readable, and relevant to complex B2B selling and marketing. He’s also clear that process is not a goal.

Standout Moments: These processes began in manufacturing. What the book does brilliantly is give the process tools a context for use in relationship management. Snippets: “Six Sigma selling focuses on helping customers achieve the business results they seek when they buy a product or service.” “When you bring Six Sigma to customers in this way, they’re not even aware of it. They’re only aware that they are working with people who have their act together.” “Finding good prospects, learning their needs, establishing trust, delivering value, and leading them to the next step are all difficult. However, this approach is easier and more effective than slapdash, unmeasurable, badly designed, push-them-through-the-funnel sales methods.”

Not so much: OK, no book has it all. Key areas to supplement from other sources: iteratively developing and testing these processes, how to bring customer voices into the dialogue, facilitation and change management. You’ll also need to translate the insights into messaging and tactics for your unique situation.

Who should read it: Marketing and sales executives, and their bosses. Executives responsible to deliver service after the sale would also benefit.

Bottom Line: One of my favorite business books.

More about the book: Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way

3 differences between social media & F2F relationships:

Christie Turner — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:22:12 +0000

Social media connections are (arguably)

1. quicker to form…

2. weaker, and…

3. more transparent to observers…

…than offline, face to face (F2F) relationships.

The implications of these differences:

Transparency enables Targeting. I can identify potential customers online with relative ease. It’s easy to see what topics interest a Twitterer and strike up legit conversations about mutual interests.

Speed enables Offline Integration. With appropriate targeting, it’s a pretty short step from a weak online tie to a phone call or even a lunch conversation. Send personal invitations to events you’re hosting or a conference you’re attending. The 1-1 nature of social media helps you here. It’s not a blast email from your company but a DM on Twitter or a note sent to a LinkedIn connection – from you.

Weak ties means transience. It’s a well known statistic: 30% of Twitter users don’t return after a month. The twittering executive may not have time to stay in 1-1 conversation with you when their numbers hit 1,000+. And you may not have that kind of time, either. Choose your prime relationships carefully, nurture them, and spend time crafting offline invitations for those relationships (ideally leading to sales handoff).