Mar 5th, 2009 by Bill Freedman
Virtually everyone can agree that customer references are critical tools for B2B sales efforts. In my career I’ve headed up numerous reference programs, interviewed a number of heroes at customer sites and written a lot of success stories. The sales team could never get enough customer stories.
Did these programs drive sales results? Yes. Were they what the prospective customer wanted? No.
The plain fact is that prospective customers want to hear directly from current customers…without any vendor involvement, filtering, positioning or influence. None. Nada. This is simply because:
- End users generally trust each other
- Customers are far less trusting of vendors
Can you earn a prospective customer’s trust while you are selling? Of course. But that doesn’t change their preference for communicating directly with each other. With social networks and other Web tools, it has never been easier to bypass the vendor when checking references.
Peer to peer conversations between prospects and customers isn’t a problem to solve but a fact to accommodate. Below are best practices for leveraging your installed base to accelerate sales:
- Keep publishing success stories on your web site. They are extremely useful for establishing the facts around the business you serve and problems you solve. Accept the limitations of written endorsements and do more.
- Embrace transparency. Enable customers and prospects to share their experiences. Affinity groups on social network sites like LinkedIn are a start, but public forums and wikis running on your web site are better for customers, prospects and your brand.
- Don’t fret a few negative reviews. Everyone knows that your company and product aren’t perfect. Negative reviews give your prospects a chance to see how your business relates to customers.
- Keep things lively. Nobody likes to show up to a dead party. Assign a community leader who contributes authoritatively and consistently, and who inspires reciprocity from your customers.
- Achieve critical mass. You want to get to the point where there are enough customer “ambassadors” who can and will respond on your behalf.
Points 3, 4 and 5 are very important as a whole. The biggest negative for any peer-based reference program is indifference.
Tags: innovation, marketing
Posted in Persuasion, Sales, Web | 3 Comments »
Mar 3rd, 2009 by Bill Freedman
We’re all thinking about it: how can we excel at our profession as we settle in for a prolonged period of economic challenges. I approach this topic with optimism, which means that I see many ways that the future will be better than the present.
Before drilling down into the tactics, I need to climb up on my strategic marketing soapbox.
While your tactics might change during a recession, your value proposition, message and target ought to be reasonably stable. Much of marketing is about the medium to long term. While your customers may have reduced budgets, their needs, their trusted vendor/channel relationships and your product benefits ought to be reasonably identical in good times as well as bad.
Stepping off my soapbox. …Here are my contributions to the recession marketing tactics dialog:
- Play offense — You still need to win the minds of customers.
- Innovate — There is no recession on new and good ideas. All other things equal, better mousetraps sell.
- Listen to stakeholders — Communication is a two way street. You have two ears and one mouth. Listen twice as much as you talk.
- Execution excellence — Nothing derails progress more than execution blunders. Meet or exceed reasonable expectations for timeliness and quality. This applies to everything from terms of service in contracts to typos on your Web site.
- Focus — Resources are now tighter, so you need to focus in areas where you are abundantly talented.
- Outward optimism — Not everything in the world is gloomy. The sun comes up. Stephen Colbert tells funny jokes. You meet new and interesting people. Be mindful of the gloomy environment and make it part of your inner calculations, but be positive when interacting with others…it really helps.
Is your marketing strategy in order? Are you innovating? Which tactics are relevant for achieving your goals? Share your comments below.
Tags: innovation, marketing, optimism
Posted in Ideas, Sales | 1 Comment »
Feb 24th, 2009 by Bill Freedman
I’m a little late to the Wordle party, but happy to find this gem of a toy. Wordle generates a stylized “word cloud” from provided text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
Above is a Wordle rendering of Bill Freedman’s Soon To Be A Major Trend. It takes text, RSS or a URL as input and provides countless variations of fonts, colors and alignments for hours of family fun.
Enjoy.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Feb 24th, 2009 by Bill Freedman
Conversion rate is the one of the most critical macro-level statistics and trends monitored by Web marketers. Simply put, conversion rate is the relationship between two easily measured quantities:
Tools like Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics simplify the collection and calculation of raw Web traffic and conversion rate. Investment decisions on lead generation campaigns and programs are now based on hard numbers such as conversion rate and program cost.
The easy job for the marketing team is establishing a “natural conversion rate” for your brand, products and company. Just implement an analytics tool, create conversion forms on your site or e-store and measure the results. The harder job, and the true measure of marketing success, is to steadily improve your conversion rate over time.
Improving your conversion rate at the macro level means that you’ve improved your effectiveness in one or more of identifying prospective customers, creating affinity with your brand and changing the individual behavior of Web visitors.
“Conversions” happen in buyers’ heads and are only measured on your web site. Changing people’s behavior by getting them to consider and purchase a new product is a difficult and worthy marketing task. Think about it: do you give out your email address and name with each and every site you visit? Do you want site owners to contact you after your first visit to the web site?
Knowing your conversion rate is one thing. Having the skills to improve and optimize conversion rates over time is the real job of marketing. Communicating information of value, establishing trust and persuasion are the critical and harder tasks that require significant attention, deliberation and skill. Without an analytics tool hard-wired to customer brains, skill, experience, artistry and tenacity remain essential marketing skills.
Tags: conversion rate, web analytics, web marketing
Posted in Persuasion, Sales | 1 Comment »
Feb 19th, 2009 by Bill Freedman
A recent study by Psychometrics Canada of 350 human resources professionals confirms that workplace conflict is ubiquitous. The study reports that the “most common causes of conflict are warring egos and personality clashes (86%), poor leadership (73%), lack of honesty (67%), stress (64%), and clashing values (59%).”
Violations of norms of civility and respect are negative forms of conflict that beg for immediate corrective action. The report suggests that leaders should quickly address toxic behavior by increasing supervision of problem personnel, providing additional clarity about expectations and modeling appropriate behavior. These findings are obvious but not always given sufficient management attention.
Even more interesting was that 87% of survey respondents believe that conflict can lead to positive outcomes such as
- Better understanding of others
- Better solutions to problems
- Improved working relationships
- Higher performance in teams
- Increased motivation
- Major innovations
I can’t agree more. When there is clear evidence to multiple people in the organization that things are off course or sub-optimal, conflict is a powerful tool to focus collective attention on the root cause and inspire improvements. The key is to focus on the evidence and potential solutions, not the personalities or behaviors.
While it’s easy to talk about the benefits of conflict, leading teams to embrace conflict, generate positive outcomes and avoid personal attacks is extremely difficult. The report concludes with several useful techniques for managing conflict such as understanding the situation in detail before acting and remaining positive amidst problems.
Thanks to the team at Psychometrics Canada for it’s insightful research on the beneficial aspects of conflict.
Tags: conflict, evidence, problem, solution, teams
Posted in Ideas, Observations, Sales | No Comments »
