Sales Machine

Here’s a post you can share with your customers… if you’re brave enough.

I recently had a conversation with a professional buyer who deals with millions of dollars of B2B contracts.  I asked him what advice he’d give to other buyers. He answered, providing I’d keep his name a secret.  I agreed.

Here’s what he had to say:

• LAW #1: DON’T hire a vendor just because they give good presentations. It’s a myth that a vendor’s ability to help you can be gauged by how well the firm can sell. Unless you’re planning to learn from their style, a vendor’s ability to sell is completely irrelevant.
• LAW #2. DON’T hire a vendor just because they’ve helped you in the past. It’s a mistake to choose based purely upon a positive experience in the past. While the vendor’s products may have been useful once, they’re not necessarily the products that will serve you best today.
• LAW #3. DON’T hire a vendor just because you’re impressed by their CEO. CEOs are often dynamic, charismatic individuals that can wow a crowd at a conference or webinar. However, that doesn’t mean that the vendor has a product that’s useful for your company.
• LAW #4. DON’T hire a vendor because they’ve worked with your competition. If the vendor is responsible for your competitor being successful, then there’s a good chance they’ll try to clone what they did before. Imitating competitors is a go-out-of-business strategy.
• LAW #5. DON’T hire a vendor because they’ve got “best practices.” “Best practices” inside one industry may be nonsensical inside another. Even within one industry, the “best practices” that work for one firm may not work for a firm with a different strategy.
• LAW #6. DON’T hire a vendor just because they’ve got a good brand name. Going with a top vendor just because of their reputation is like buying a car just because it has a familiar name. Common sense says to decide what you really need before you pull out your checkbook.
• LAW #7. DON’T EVER hire a vendor who exaggerates or misrepresents. If your drill-down reveals that the vendor is not being entirely straightforward, remove that vendor from the short list.  This is one case where “zero-tolerance” must always be the rule.

READERS: Do you think he’s right?  Or are these laws getting in the way of buying the right products and services?

Apple computer just invented the planet’s dumbest marketing idea.  It’s a  patented form of online advertising that FORCES you to pay attention.  It locks up your computer or phone until you take some action (like correctly answering a question about the ad) that proves you’re paying mental attention to the ad.

It’s not just SPAM.   It’s Nazi-SPAM.  Achtung! You vill read zis ad or else!

The New York Times article decribing the method says that Apple thinks this marketing technique would “enable computers and other consumer products to be offered to customers free or at a reduced price.”

Here’s why this is a seriously dumb idea.

First, the free-if-you’ll-accept-intrusive-ads concept has bombed every time it’s been attempted.  (E.g. the “Free PC” in the U.S., the “Henphone” in China.)

Second, Nazi-SPAM is a great way to make prospects and customers hate your guts.  When ads go beyond what’s normal on broadcast TV or radio, I think that most people start to actively avoid the product being advertised.

I’ll say this much: if an ad EVER hung my device until I asked answered some jackass question, I would NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER buy whatever was being advertised. NEVER.  And I would badmouth that product and that company every chance I got, to anyone who’d be willing to listen to me.

I don’t care if I got the device for “free.”  I would deeply resent ANY advertiser who interrupted what I was doing in order to FORCE me to pay attention the ad.

And I believe that would be true for any product sold in any environment.  Take B2B for instance.

Imagine doing sales for a company that was creating “brand awareness” using Nazi-SPAM. The only way you’d get a prospect to talk with you would be to claim you worked for somebody else.  You’d have to a fake a coughing fit every time the customer asked for your firm’s name.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Nazi-SPAM is the greatest idea since the Ipod.

READERS: What do YOU think? Feel free to leave a comment.

Microsoft just gave its Xbox customer base a major spanking.  Turns out that about million Xbox users had modified their game consoles so that they could play pirated software.  Apparently Microsoft finally got sick of being ripped off and yanked out the Xbox Live accounts, so that the game consoles won’t work online any more.

Needless to say, it takes a fair amount of corporate cojones to completely alienate a million customers, even if those customers were acting in a questionable manner.  I understand the logic; Microsoft loses money on the Xbox hardware, which it regains through license fees for (non-pirated) gaming software.

Microsoft’s willingness to spank away is, in my view, part of a larger tendency that’s developing in the B2B world, of separating customers into two piles: good (i.e. profitable) and bad (i.e. not profitable).  Once that takes place, the “good” customers get all the attention and perks, while the bad ones are told to take a hike.

There are two problems with that approach.

First, today’s bad customer could become tomorrow’s good customer, either because their business changes to make them a better customer, or your business changes so that what was bad is now good.  For example, if Microsoft started making money downloading movies to Xboxes, it might be better off with a million more units in the field.

Second, when you spank a customer, that customer generally spends the next ten years telling his friends, family and colleague that your company sucks.  Now, in Microsoft’s case, they’re probably so thick-skinned by this time that nobody in Redmond cares all that much.

Anyway, I’m curious what you think. Here’s a poll:

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If you want to build business by word of mouth, you’ve got to have the kind of story that customers and prospects tell each other.  You need to give them something called a “useful, compelling narrative.”  Let me explain.

A narrative is a simple story (i.e. something with a plot, a protagonist, and an antagonist) that’s easy to for one person to tell another.  A compelling narrative is one that has an emotional component that inspires people to tell that story to others, thereby creating word of mouth.  A useful compelling narrative is one that drives desirable behavior — like convincing prospects to give you a call.

Every successful word of mouth campaign has a useful compelling narrative.  Here are two classic examples:

• Basic Narrative: Apple computer (the protagonist) wins hearts and minds (the plot) from IBM (the antagonist).
• Why It Was Compelling: It’s a classic underdog story that makes the “little people” feel powerful.
• Why It Was Useful: It established Apple Computers as a niche product category.

• Basic Narrative: Media outsider Matt Drudge (the protagonist) reveals secrets (the plot) missed by mainstream media (the antagonist).
• Why It Was Compelling: Some people distrust mainstream journalism.
• Why It Was Useful: It established Drudge as a marketable alternative, creating a site with ad revenue.

Although the two examples are very different, in both cases, the narrative was easy to tell, with easily grasped emotions, and drove towards a clear business model.

In sales, your narrative almost always has the same plot: how the customer (the protagonist) worked with you (the plot) to overcome a problem (the antagonist.)  Note that you are NOT the protagonist, but part of the plot line.

Remember: the word of mouth that builds your business is the story that your CUSTOMER tells about himself.  It’s not about how wonderful you were at helping them, but how smart the customer was to work with you in order to solve the problem.

The reason that the recipient of the story calls you (creating the all-important referral) is because the recipient wants to be able to tell the same narrative (i.e. success story) to his or her chums.  And that’s what builds word of mouth.

Here’s another way of looking at it.  Which of the following customer remarks do you think are likely to go viral?

1. Joe is a great guy and easy to work with.  You should call him if you’ve got inventory problems.
2. We just saved $10 million by getting rid of excess inventory.  How?  I worked with Joe.

Obviously, it’s the second message that’s going to resonate (i.e. is compelling) and, more importantly, is more likely to be useful and drive some business your way.

Once you understand your “useful, compelling narrative,” you can create word-of-mouth sales by helping your existing customers to tell that story, either by asking them to act as reference accounts, asking that they call potential prospects, setting them up with speaking opportunities, and so forth.

Using sex to sell is probably the oldest trick in the advertising book.  And such ads continue to be popular — presumably because they work.  I’ve just trolled through about a hundred of these ads (in other words, I kissed a perfectly good morning goodbye), and came up with the ten best.  None of them are outright lewd, but most of them are pretty darn close to the edge.   As usual, I’ve added polls so you can vote on your favorites.

CLICK HERE for the first almost-too-sexy TV ad »

It’s amazing how clueless some people are when it comes to selling things.  I recently received the following email:

We sell employee benefit group insurance.  We have purchased the Judy Diamond List and the latest and greatest email list from Dunn and Bradstreet. I have two licensed, educated, marketing employees calling to set interviews for insurance analysis.  The most common negatives we receive are “just renewed” (even though we call 3 months before renewal so its a lie), “have a broker” (we understand that but we are pretty great) and “don’t have time, call next year.”   What can we say or do to get to the next level and arrange an interview?

Let’s start with what you’ve done right.  You’ve managed to get real leads, because the people you call aren’t just hanging up.  The fact that you’re actually getting to some objections (they’re not “negatives” — more on this later) means that you’re playing the right ballpark.

Here’s what you’re doing wrong.

First, you hired marketers to do a sales job.  You don’t need somebody who’s licensed (whatever that means) or educated (whatever that means) to set appointments.  Most marketing professionals can’t sell; you need to hire people who can sell.

Second, your marketers don’t know how to answer objections.  Like most professionals who lack sales experience and training, they think an objection is a “negative” — a firm no.

As any sales pro will tell you, a deal isn’t real until you hit your first objection.  People don’t bother to come up with reasons not to buy things if, at some level, they don’t want to buy them.  People who aren’t interested (for real) just hang up.

So what you really have is a tactical problem of answering objections and moving the sale forward. Fortunately, all three objections are easy to overcome:

• “We just renewed.” Kill this objection before it comes up by saying, in the opening statement, that you understand they’ll be coming up for renewal in three months.  Problem solved.
• “We already have a broker.” The correct response is: “No problem! Just out of curiosity, what could he be doing better?” (Or some other leading questions)  Then you can do better.  Problem solved.
• “I don’t have time.” The correct response is: “I understand completely.  I’m not calling to sell you anything.  I’m calling to set up an appointment…”  Problem solved.

Those are pretty standard objections, BTW.  I suspect that if you had hired the right people in the first place, they’d already know this kind of Sales 101 stuff.

READERS: Any more suggestions?

I just received an email from the editor of St. Louis Small Business Monthly asking: “Is cold calling dead?”  Apparently, he’s polling sales experts to fill out a debate-style article.  I’m fortunate in that I have you guys to answer these kind of questions for me.  So, how about it?

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CLICK HERE for the correct answer »

This brilliant bit of satire from comedian Kevin Nalts tells you everything you need to know about “strategic marketing” and “brand marketing.”

For my take on these issues, see:

• Top 10 Reasons Sales Hates Marketing
• Why Pay for Lousy Marketing?

Next week, I’m going to tell you about a marketing group that’s worth its weight in gold.  Needless to say, they’re the EXACT OPPOSITE of the kind of marketer parodied in the video.  Stay tuned.

Last week’s post “Top 10 Reasons Sales Hates Marketing” documented the complaints that I’ve heard from sales reps about their marketing groups.  As I expected, I got some email flak complaining that I wasn’t being fair to marketing. Here’s a typical comment:

All of it, really. The existence of this entire series of nit-picking, to me, is more indicative of a poorly run sales/marketing operation than it is a useful exchange of feedback. It’s nothing but pointing fingers with baseless accusations and generalizations.

Well, I hear you, but I disagree.   It’s not nit-picking to defend sales groups against the encroachments of marketing.

The conflicts between Sales and Marketing are not a conflict between equals.  In most cases, the source of the conflict is that the group the creates the revenue (i.e. Sales) is trying to remain productive and profitable. And sometimes the only way to do this is to downsize, disempower or downright ignore the marketing group.

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Last week’s post “Top 10 Reasons Sales Hates Marketing” produced a detailed comment titled “Top 10 Reasons Marketing Rolls Their Eyes at Sales.”  In attempting to tell the other side of the story, that comment was a perfect example of how screwed up thinking can get inside some Marketing groups.

This post reproduces that entire comment (with some minor editing), along with my explanation about why each “reason” is fundamentally wrongheaded.

Note: the original anonymous commenter has since asked that I identify her as “Heather Goodwin.”  (Needless to say, the picture at right is a stock photo and is not intended to depict her.)

CLICK HERE for the first BS reason Marketing rolls their eyes at Sales »