Richard Fouts

One of my favorite pieces of advice from Guy Kawasaki’s book, Reality Check, is about the value of entertainment. As business leaders, Guy tells us that our number one goal, when presenting, is to entertain. 

Sure it’s important to inform, and you have to be insightful, but if you bore people to tears, you won’t achieve anything.  Hence, entertain first, inform second. 

But let me qualify it a bit. Guy is referring to certain types of presentations, for example – the keynote speaker at a conference. Or you’re doing a webinar, or a seminar, or speaking at an association meeting. So you needn’t worry about your stand up routine at tomorrow’s staff meeting. Those are more instructional or status oriented; in fact, if you try to entertain at those things, people might think you’ve lost it, or that you don’t take them seriously.

But what if you’re not an entertaining type of person? What if you’re not funny?  Well, you can always get yourself to the Comedy Club; watch and learn. Or just learn to be lighter, more human. Think about how you behave at a social gathering. Pull out the personality you already have. Lighten up.

How many times have you said, “She was born to be a finance manager, or a realtor, or a cab driver … or a competitive analyst?”  I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone link DNA to these other professions, but plenty of people still think sales people come from the factory with special “sales genes.” 

Convinced that this question was old school and antiquated – I decided to poll 10 clients just for fun. “After all”, I thought, “Sales is a business process just like any other business process.” 

And can’t it be learned as we learn other processes?  No one has ever said to me, “You were born to be an IT analyst.”

But interestingly enough, the results came back 50/50.  Yup, half the respondents to my informal survey said with absolute conviction that salespeople are born, not made. Are they right?

We’re all told to “never bash the competition” when we take our first Sales 101 course. However, when I was a 24 year-old sales rep for HP, my boss (an amazing guy named Phil Endliss)  told me that rule didn’t apply when it came to IBM. Apparently it was okay to bash the big guys, but only if they were really big, to the point where a little bashing sure as heck wasn’t going to change anything.

I was vividly reminded of this story when I saw an ad in today’s New York Times by Barrie D’Rozario Murphy .. the 2009 O’Toole Award Winner for best small agency. In a case of head-on, no holds bar, blatant, unapologetic, take-the-gloves-off advertising, Murphy ran an ad for itself. They congratulate themselves, but graciously include a hearty congrats to their bigger fish competitors as well.

Ah, but keep reading. If you like sarcasm, you’ll love this ad. As the winner of best small agency, they admit that they would prefer to be a bigger player.  Why?

Well, for starters, they would get to charge three times more for similar work, bill by the hour, throw 12 creative teams at every project, and conduct big dog-and-pony shows for big prospects … but then take the pups and ponies away after prospects become clients.

If you’ve ever worked with big agencies (famous for their our-way-or-the-highway approach and their attitude that all clients are dummies) you’ll get the sarcastic undertones.

I’m not sure if it was Dave, Stuart or Bob that dreamt this up (maybe it actually came from one of their creative people) but I have no doubt it was the idea of  one person. Things like this rarely emerge from a committee .. and the ad is actually a representation of letting creative thought have its own way without interruption.

Congratuations guys .. for building a good agency .. . and giving me a bit of entertainment on an otherwise typical Wednesday at Starbucks in midtown Manhattan.  Two patrons couldn’t help notice my sly smile and asked me what I was reading.  You gotta love nosy New Yorkers.

It’s tempting in any economy, but especially one where demand is soft, to cast a wider net in hopes of generating more leads. But with sales costs soaring, it’s more important than ever to keep lead quality high. Nothing can burn dollars faster than chasing down unqualified opportunities.

Carlos Hidalgo

In this interview, lead management consultant Carlos Hidalgo of The Annuitas Group talks about several best practices in managing lead generation – from how lead quality can close the gap between marketing and sales – to when and how providers should get serious about lead scoring.

Contact Carlos Hidalgo at chidalgo@annuitasgroup.com

There are volumes of books, articles, blogposts, classes ….tweets .. on what it means (and requires) to be a customer-centic organization (I just googled “customer centric” and got 1,880,000 returns). Every highly paid management consulting firm in the world makes boatloads of money in this space. But quite frankly, is it really that hard? 

Okay, I admit that the things that are obvious are often the most difficult. Some of the “easiest looking” exercises my personal trainer puts me through are the toughest. Moreover, when I proposed my research on “How to Construct a Unique Value Proposition” it was met with “but isn’t that obvious?” and it’s now my most popular note (that and “How to Craft the Perfect Elevator Pitch” .. another painfully obvious topic, right?).

So how do these obvious things that “everybody knows how to do” get off track?  Well, there’s a whole other industry on that topic as well. But for now, I’ll stick with customer-orientation and some simple advice:

1.  When you write your market messages, imagine a real live customer. No, no .. I mean a REAL customer.  One with a name … and a checkbook. For example, I started writing a piece for CEOs the other day. Then I thought, “okay, let’s say I’m actually saying this stuff to Jeff Immelt or Jack Welch, or Warren Buffet.”   Wow, I tore it up and started over. Half my copy fell into the category of “stuff they already know.”  When you imagine your copy being read outloud by a real customer, you tend to sharpen up and get real.

2.  When you engage in an activity that you think is worthless or of borderline value ask yourself, “Would a cusotmer be willing to pay for the activity I’m engaged in right now?” 

3. Talk to people, not companies.  Companies don’t buy your product, people do. When you market, sell, tweet, blog .. or whatever … who are you really talking to? If it’s the CIO, acknowledge what CIOs are going through. If it’s an IT infrastructure manager, same thing…. or an HR professional, or the cleaning service. One of the best things you can do?  Think about how and why your target buyer will get a raise this year. What would your target buyer need to do to get a promotion?  Now, go write to that. Stop talking about how you’re going to increase profitability, improve business performance, or reduce costs, unless of course, it’s in the context of how these things help your buyer get a raise or get a promotion. Or how they stay employed. Knowing this one thing will change your messaging bigtime.

4.  For Pete’s sake, stop starting every message with the word “we” or “our” or your company name. If you’re customer-oriented, and I’m sure you think you are, why does every sentence of your web site copy begin with the word “we”?  Start with the customer’s situation, not yours ,..because

Marketing is not about you and it never will be.

Someone asked me the other day to direct them to a web site that I consider customer-centric. It was an easy answer: EchoSign. I’m not endorsing their product in any way, but seriously, they have the most customer-centric web site I’ve ever seen.  It has customers everywhere. You’ll be hard pressed to find any paragraph that begins with “we.” EchoSign’s VP of Marketing, Loretta Jones, doesn’t do anything in a context other than what customers want and need .. in the context of her product of course.

So cancel your expensive consulting engagement on “Becoming customer-oriented” and start doing these things. If you’re a marketing manager, start leading by example. When someone answers a question with the word “we” .. ask them to re-phrase it. If they think you’re nuts, help them out.  If someone says, “We are going to have the highest traffic of any booth at this trade show”  try something like ” buyers will come to our booth in droves because we’re showing tangible evidence of how Insurance providers improve claims processing throughput by 50% or more with our solution.”

When you ask customers why they like you, they will rarely talk about your product. Try it. You’ll see that they tend to talk about the results or business outcomes you helped them achieve. Marketing managers spend so much time crafting the perfect message, usually about themselves .. when lo and behold, ask your customers what they think. There’s your message.

About half the marketers I talk to in technology firms, manage just one of marketing’s 4 Ps.  Promotion.  About 25% of them manage promotion – with influence one of the other P’s such as product management or distribution (aka, Place). 

The rest don’t even know the other three exist (because they are educated in fields other than marketing) or they just let their senior managers relegate them to marcom and promotional campaigns. Hence, “throw it over the wall” marketing is alive and well. It is particuarly rampant in Silicon Valley.  When I call on smaller vendors in the valley, this age-old phenomena is everywhere. But even marketers in the divisions and BUs or larger firms are often limited to promotion and lead generation.

If you’re a marketer that’s trying to get out of the marcom trap, there’s a body of research about the CIO’s move to the strategic table that Gartner has published for years. And it’s working. Since Gartner started coaching the CIO who simply “keeps the trains running on time” to become educated in business strategy, more and more CIOs have successfully done two things:  they are reporting to the CEO, and they are successfully shifting more resources to projects of strategic, not just tactical, value.

What an odd coincidence. Many marketers are in this same situation. Without going into the details of how a marketer can get out of the weeds and garner an inviation to the strategic table, let me illustrate with an example.

Nick Jones writes an interesting blogpost about “the end of mobile isolation” and how the killer application in mobile is still the phone call. In his post, he describes several capabilities mobile phone manufacturers can start exploiting for greater differentiation.

Mobile marketers should be all over his advice. But unfortunately, they are so buried in promoting phone calls and other current gizmos that they will do what they always do: wait for engineers to throw products over the wall for them to promote.

However, by getting involved in new product ideas up front, and in fact actually leading the charge, they can put their skills to work to to align (and quantify) various strategic business options with the competencies of their companies. 

For example Nick talks about audio wiki, photo conferencing, spill-over video, VuPoint, multiplayer mobile games, and how to take more advantage of context. But in so many cases, the decisions to pursue these developments won’t be market driven, rather engineering or product driven … meaning, those ideas that engineers are comfortable with will go to the top of the list, versus those that have the highest potential for market adoption and traction.

So marketers, start getting in front of the curve on new ideas. Garner the respect of your senior managers with your knowledge of business strategy, not just promotion.

If you sell to buyers in IT departments you’ll want to look at Baseline’s story “What Business Managers Really Think of IT.”

The report begins, “A survey of non-IT executives … shows that many business leaders believe IT investments create value, but many still view the department as an operational and tactical asset rather than as a strategic partner. ”

Okay, not too profound …  so … any new insight?

The leading cause as to why business people think IT doesn’t deliver on its quest to be a business partner turns out to be “difficulties implementing applications.”  So, if you sell anything that needs to be implemented you have an obvious opportunity.   The next cause?   Culture.  Next? Lack of skill base.  After that?  Fear of change.

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere – and the story emerges. IT falls short of strategic partnership because it hasn’t figured out how to implement solutions that involve changing the culture.

And as an IT provider, you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t propose change services. Vendors of sales training are particuarly good at leaving money behind, especially when you consider 90% of salespeople forget everything they learn in sales training class within 90 days.

IT has always been about change.  History has taught us that even people who are trying to change, find it difficult to change. Marketers of technology solutions, and their couterparts in product mangaement, simply need to fold the “change thing” into their offerings, whatever that might be. And you don’t have to figure it out yourselves of course … it’s why the industry leans on partnerships.

Every marketer wants to stand out, to be different, to have a unique value proposition … to rise above the market noise, to get out of the clutter .. to blah, blah, blah.

But if you’re like most Americans you suffer from conformity.  I live in New York City, three blocks from Citicorp and when I walk by its building in the morning, there they are … all in cacky pants and blue button down shirts. Seriously, 90% of them must have all attended the same class on how to dress business casual (sponsored by The Gap). Before business casual they all wore blue suits, white shirts and red ties.

We are trained to fit in, to conform, to be team players. When someone says “How are you” we give the standard response, “I’m good.”  And I don’t think any working Moms out there show up to PTA meetings in black leather pants.

As a marketer, you’re also trained (whether you know it or not) to look like everyone else. It’s why we are in an age of what many people call “cut and paste marketing,” 

So what makes you think, as a marketer, you’re going to suddenty break out of years of conformist upbringing to suddently produce some out-of-the-box, crazy brand idea that will separate you from the pack?  It’s probably not going to happen … so here’s what you do.

First, you get some outside help. It’s rare that anything innovative occurs inside the company when it comes to creating a breakout brand. Unless you’re super confident in your job, you simply don’t have the envrionment that lets you get crazy. 

Gartner client, Asigra, markets backup-and-recovery software (certainly what you could call a mature market).

After a branding exercise, they hit on something pretty innovate called, “Discover Your Cool.”  Their brand idea speaks directly to the IT leader that is tired of spending 70% time on boring stuff … like “keeping the lights on.”  I can relate. When I was in the systems integration business, I lost some of my best architects to companies that were doing ‘much cooler things.’  Keeping talent, means you gotta offer cool projects. So Asigra’s brand is about leaving the mundane to them, so you can discover your cool. 

Asigra’s VP business development – Eran Farajun – along with his marketing team came up with the idea. But he recruited some outside help to faciliate a series of brand workshops to attack the question ‘How are we different?” with an authentic desire to get out-of-the-box. After some greuling exercises, whiteboard sessions… lots of coffee and several debates  … the idea was born.  

Click here to listen to my interview with Eran .. and what advice he has for marketers in any industry about approaching a re-brand.

I know, I know; social media is transformational and a game changer, but seriously folks, it’s just another channel. Granted, social networks help you locate many prospects you may never have found with traditional techniques, but consider these two statements, both from marketing executives in tech firms with similar years of experience.

1. Social media is creating lots of low quality leads

2. Social media is creating lots of high quality leads.

This is not about social media.  It’s about fundamentals of marketing. If you use social media (just another channel) to broadcast messages to everyone, and you go out with a “we are all things to all people” strategy, of course you’ll generate lots of leads, many of them low quality.  And you’ll get a pitiful response rate (just like you always did when you employed mass marketing techniques).

If you use social media (just another channel) to target messages to narrower groups of people with common interests, you’ll get higher quality leads and higher response rates ( just like you always did when you employed targeted techniques).

Social media informs every aspect of the marketing activity cycle, from market analysis to product development to customer satisfaction and brand awareness. But if you think social media changes the fundamentals of good marketing, I’d love for you to enlighten me.

Venture capitalists have invested $5.1 billion into 828 Web startups since 2004. The majority of these are startup revenue models are supporting by advertising. However, according to the National Venture Capital Association, look for the VC community to push back on companies that don’t seek new ways to make money, like selling real (or virtual) goods or subscription revenue.

Case in point: OpenTable makes money selling its software to restaurants and charging them $1 for each diner seated. And – OpenTable was the first venture-back Web company to go public in two years. General investors appear to agree with the venture guys. OpenTable’s stock opened at $20, closing at $28.71 at the end of its first week.

Another interesting case is Pandora, an online radio site that now offers a $3/month subscription that relieves listeners from ads and get faster streaming. Like its friends at OpenTable, Pandora is finding that ad revenue just isn’t enough.