The Trouble With Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is great. Or is it?
Prospects call you. Cost of sales goes down. What a promise this inbound marketing makes! So what then, is the trouble?
Inbound Marketing, why isn't telephone in this picture?
No, I’m not talking about ROI measurement. At least not directly.
The trouble with inbound marketing is control. That is, you don’t have any control over who is contacting you. Sure they’re interested in your product, your service, your solution, but do you really want to sell to them? That is, do they fit your target customer profile?
Even if they do, is the inquiry coming from the appropriate level? Are funds budgeted? An timeline established? So many questions.
Yes, having people call you is fantastic, but getting in touch with the right people at the right time is even more fantastic.
So should you stop inbound marketing? No way!
But you should not be dedicating high value employees to making first contacts with inbound marketing prospects. I recommend creating a role designated to qualifying and following up with inbound marketing, if there is sufficient volume. Otherwise, assign the role to your sales support team. Pass along the truly right-fitting prospects and shunt the others into their own separate nurturing and if possible, sales process.
Strive always in your business to keep control over the right levers. Don’t waste time chasing bad fits or Looky Lous. The best way to do this is by specializing your sales team to focus on the different facets of your prospects, your sales process.
I’ll be writing more on this over time. If you have any ideas on a particular related issue, or topic, let me know! I’d be delighted to opine and advise!
I Played Soccer With Landon Donovan Today!
What a great time! I’ve played with and against pros over the years, including against the 1986 South Korean World Cup squad but it’s been a while.
But today was special. I played pick up soccer with US National Soccer team Captain, all-time leading scorer, MLS’s MVP and Champion LA Galaxy’s Landon Donovan!!
We played hard, so we didn’t talk much, but he’s got a great humble vibe to him, and boy can he play!
Tim and Landon Donovan
Match Message to Market for Sales Success
Matching Message to Markets for Successful Selling.
They say one is the worst number in business. One customer, one product, one distribution method. Over reliance on one is risky.
Create a specifc message that matches your target market for sales success
The opposite is also true. All is just as bad, especially when it comes to identifying and pursuing your customers. Going too broad brings with it a whole host of challenges, especially an inability to resonate with customers. Marketing basics tell us that the more your product, service or solution gets a “This is for me!” response, the more you’ll sell and the easier the selling will be.
I want to share an example of how a company can change it’s approach from trying to sell to everyone, to increasing success with fewer price objections by more carefully matching its marketing message to targeted sales prospects.
Not long ago I was speaking to the CEO of construction company. His firm is prosperous, but not as much as he’d like. He has three sales offices, each with their own P&L. He tries to sell on value, but the sales team is constantly fielding price objections. The CEO advertises that sales people can earn $70,000 to $100,000, uses a multi-step hiring process, including a personality\performance survey. In fact, the sales model is classic, “fog a mirror” hunter role. That is he pays a very low base plus commission and the sales team is expected to go get sales anyway, anyhow within their territory. When pressed, the CEO admits he is hiring continuously and has some reps earning $30,000 (even after completing a sales aptitude survey!). They have no marketing team or sales support team to speak of.
The company has a fantastic safety story. They also self-perform all their work, which means they control quality and other key issues by hiring and retaining their own work crews and not sub-contract which is pervasive in the industry. They proactively call customers to ascertain and maintain their satisfaction.
So how can the CEO improve sales results by matching message to market?
First we’ll handle message. What must the sales team convey to customers consistently that they aren’t? What elements of the business make them different and worth the value they claim? To me the CEO has great tools in this regard. I recommend he combining safety, self-performance and customer service to craft his value message. Once created, the entire sales team, including sales management must be trained and held accountable to using the story.
Now, market. Here again, it’s fog a mirror. The sales people have to targets and call on everyone in an effort to make a buck. Extreme inefficiency. Period. Further, company’s using this model most often use a generic message, an inconsistent message, or no message at all. In each case hamstringing their ability to grab anyone’s buying attention. Sure, it can work, but why not work smarter, not harder?
In our example the CEO wants to sell on value. Allowing the sales team to call on just anybody is a surefire way to run into price sensitive customers. Why not avoid them altogether?
I recommend deploying a marketing resource to identify customers that are premium price providers to their marketplaces. Organizations that sell on value are culturally more likely to buy on value. Organizations that are low cost providers must be avoided like the plague. Sales are certain to devolve into price discussions with those companies.
By targeting other value-selling companies, the CEO will enable his sales team to position their story compellingly. Especially against price objections.
Customer: “You are $20,000 higher than your competitor for this project.”
Sales rep: “Yes, I gave you quite a deal, didn’t I?”
Customer: “What do you mean? I’m saying you’re much higher!”
Sales rep: “Both your company and mine strive to lead our marketplace by delivering top notch service. All that comes with overhead. Let me share where ours comes from and why it matters, OK?”
Customer: “Go on.”
Sales rep: ” First off, all our construction crews are our employees. We use no sub-contractors. We hire the best, train them, and keep them. No drugs, no delinquency, years of experience. We also live, breathe and sleep safety, so our really good people can do really good work all the time. Most companies use sub-contractors and with subs, you never know what you’re gonna get.
But I can tell you what you’re gonna get. We never are short crew, so we get done on time. We tarp over all your landscaping to do as little damage as possible and to make clean up go faster. We are designed to get it done right the first time and be fast, to minimize any disruptions.
We also pro-actively call you to see how our work is holding up. You ever get a call after a storm from anyone else? Well, we do. We never want a call back, and work to that goal, but if you every have a warranty or other issue, bang! we’re back. With just about everyone else, and certainly with people who skinny their estimates, you’ll have to chase to get things fixed. Not so with us.
Customer: “I’ve been there before.”
Sales Rep: “Everyone has. It’s not fun. It’s distracting. You know, we’ve talked about how our company’s operate with very similar values and market positioning. Right?
Customer: “We have.”
Sales Rep: “So you have a cost structure that supports your value statement, just like we do. Have I been clear in explaining how we support that value in the project estimate?”
<<OK, I could go on, but I think that’s a decent illustration of how to match the message to the market. I’d love feedback from salespeople and sales management on how to improve this conversation. I’ll gladly make updates to the post using your feedback. >>
You must understand that lacking a good story to connect the dots, all consumers (all people) default to a very basic, very simplistic set of decision making tools. Very few people are educated about much of what they buy, so buying criteria and decision making criteria are not rational. The one sure fire thing people will question is price because that’s what we all learn from birth.
Absent a reason, absent the value message, most often the first places buyers go is price. A great example is the maxim “Good stuff isn’t cheap and cheap stuff isn’t good.” A great value story, if a simplistic one.
I know of a stroy about a gift shop owner who desired to clearance some poor selling turquoise jewelry. The staff misread the owner’s instructions and doubled the price (2x rather than 1/2x as desired). The jewelry sold out quickly. The consumers had no decision making ability related to jewelry, so price strongly influenced their sense of “good” and the jewelry sold quickly.
So craft and use a value message to steer the conversation away from price whenever possible, and when you can’t do that, use price to position yourself differently.
What other points can you share about matching message to market to sell more, sell faster and sell easier? I’d love your feedback!
Welcome guest vs. unwelcome guest; the price of getting sales results any which way you can
There’s a lot to be learned by analyzing sales scenarios.
Not long ago I was having a conversation with the gentleman accountable for his company’s client success team. Having been in sales and account management and having some strong opinions about sales process and sales team design, I was impressed by this man and his firm, until he made one comment which made me cringe.
Strive to be a welcomed guest in every sales situation.
What did he say and why did it have me cringing?
I had been in a sales situation where after 18 months of prospecting I was invited to the table by an international retailer. I was complimented for being patiently persistent. At the face to face meeting, I had a champion complimenting me and my company due to the relationship we had formed. After the group meeting, I was invited back to my champion’s desk for a full hour where we spent firing questions and answers at each other.
In contrast, my competition was invited to the table grudgingly. The customer told me my competition had irritated the selection committee by going over their heads and prospecting their boss. When told to back off and not call on them, he ignored them. He had no champion on the selection committee and the boss instructed his invitation. The selection committee didn’t like this guy, he was a real pain in the ass, I was told. But still, he was at the table.
So after sharing this story, I asked this sales manager which company he’d rather be. His reply, “The one that gets the business.”
This is an alarming answer.
It is also the correct answer. But there is so much wrong with it. Let me explain.
I doubt that anyone will challenge that being invited to a sales opportunity as a welcome guest is the preferred positioning. How you do this comes from cultivating respect, patient persistence, thought leadership, referrals and smart use of Web 2.0 technology (some call it Sales 2.0).
But what about when you’re invited to the table and you’re a pain in the ass, a truly unwelcome guest? Sure you’re at the table, but will you actually get careful consideration? Unless you win the business you will never, ever know. No way, no how.
Many companies and certainly, most Fortune 5000 companies have multiple bid sourcing requirements. In these cases, by being the squeaky wheel, are you being invited in just to take up a spot in order to satisfy this requirement? Are you being used?
Will the time and resources spent in responding to the RFQ, RFP, the T&E, be a foregone conclusion and a colossal waste of time of money?
As a business leader, if you are willing to gamble that you’ll get a fair look, there is much to be done to ensure that your product, service or solution is so much better than the competition that it can overcome the welcome guest’s head start.
As the unwelcome guest, it’s not unreasonable to expect your RFP’s score to unofficially start at -10 or -20. While the welcomed guest’s score is very likely to include bonus points and is certain to include what I call the “universal tie breaker.” That is, that all other things being equal, people will do business with people that they like.
Related to the universal tie breaker point that is wise to keep in mind that buyers of anything are extremely concerned about what happens after the sale, the service, the account management, the ongoing support. How your sales people conduct their business, whether they like it or not, paint the picture of what that after sales relationship is going to be like.
Yes, being the company that gets the business is the best answer, but one that can come with an awful lot of awfully expensive baggage.
When a salesperson is gets invited to the dance, but doesn’t often close, smart sales managers will take action to determine if they are too often the unwelcome guest and take corrective steps.
If your company espouses getting to the table any which way you can, then be prepared for increased cost of sales, lengthier sales cycles and more garbage in your pipeline forecasts because you never can tell if you’ll get fair consideration from the customer.
On the other hand, being the welcomed guest gets you a champion and the universal tie breaker. I hold fast to my goal of being a welcomed guest, what about you?
I’d love comments and insights from other sales professional, sales managers and executives on this topic.
Dysfunctional Leadership?
I dug up this exchange on Leadership from my archive today. This was back before blogs existed. My response is in red a ways down.
“Dysfunctional Leadership?”
If you intentionally try to lead others, is that an inescapably manipulative act by its very nature?
REAL WORLD QUERIES
A participant in one of our recent leadership development retreats posed such a question in full earnestness. His concern: Engaging in leadership behaviors that affect the performance of other people may actually minimize the led’s capacity to produce work independent of the leader’s intentional tugs on their emotional strings.
The experienced executive who raised this issue essentially likened the planning and executing one’s leadership behavior to creating a kind of emotional dependence in those one would lead. Perhaps it is dependence similar to the kind exhibited in relationships that psychologists label as “dysfunctional.”
He wanted to know: why isn’t simply providing employees with a task assignment and clear performance expectations sufficient leadership? After all, isn’t the mark of a professional the capacity to do one’s work without needing a lot of high maintenance care and feeding (or fanfare) around the work? To effectively lead people, must one be delving into their psyche and tugging at their hearts?
TOUGH QUESTIONS
Those are some interesting questions. And they lead to others; some a bit disconcerting.
Bear with the apparent headiness of the following questions related to the ones above. These are important issues for you to both consider and reconcile in order to lead consciously and therefore effectively.
* When you strive to lead, are you setting out to use your personal relationships with others as a tool? And isn’t that disrespectful and demeaning?
* Isn’t intentionally touching people at an emotional level to influence their on-the-job performance necessarily playing to their emotions? And if you can do that, don’t your actions as a leader foster the emotional immaturity of the people you would lead?
* If you play (prey?) on other’s emotions to get them to do what you want, have you taken unfair advantage of them?
* Doesn’t your capacity to tweak another’s emotions so that they respond by doing what you want them to do therefore imply an unequal and unfair relationship between you and them?
* When you appeal to another’s emotions to affect their behavior, in some way don’t you minimize the person you strive to influence? Is “influence” an overly polite word and not so obviously deceptive word for control?
* Is there a difference between leading people and using them, if your aim is to have them achieve your ends?
* If you deploy your personal power as a lever to affect how others behave, could it be that you are even reducing their dignity by creating an over-reliance on you as the leader?
* Doesn’t the leader-follower relationship disable, to one degree or another, the followers? Could it be that they would be more effective as individuals if were not for the strong leadership on which they’ve come to depend? Does strong leadership by the one create helplessness on the part of the many?
* Leadership is conferred unto leaders by the led. But if you set-out to influence others’ actions by purposely behaving in ways that result in people wanting to perform for you BECAUSE you are you, could you actually be operating with a touch of deceit under the cloak of purity?
* Do you need to intend to deceive or manipulate others unfairly in order to still have the effect of deceit or manipulation?
* If you don’t intend to unfairly influence, but you really are, in effect, “playing” people with your methods, are you any less blameworthy? Haven’t you essentially behaved in a less than noble and enabling manner?
* Is intentionally behaving in a way that encourages people to follow your lead somehow emotionally dishonest or demeaning to the led?
BEYOND PROVOCATIVE
Hmmmmm. Could there be a kernel of truth lurking in the questions? Maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss these questions as mere musings, or cranky inquiry . . .
…………………………………
LEADERFUL ACTION STEPS
* Consider the implications of these questions. How do
they make you feel? What makes you uncomfortable, defensive,
or challenges the ethical basis for your actions?
* Reply to this e-mail with your own thoughts on any of the questions raised above.
Send your replies to DonB@LeadWell.com . We’ll incorporate readers’ thoughts as we attempt to reply to the questions posed above in the next issue of The Leader’s Letter.
Don, your questions are the best kind, toughies!
Tough as they may be, your questions often overlook two key points about leadership. First, the job of a leader is to grow more leaders. Lao Tsu speaks to your questions in his statement, “A leader is best when people hardly know he exists. Less good when they praise him and obey him. Worse when they fear and despise him. But with a good leader, when his aim is met and his dreams fulfilled, they will say: ‘We did this ourselves.’”
Second, your questions often focus on manipulating the led to do what the leader wants. True leadership has a focus on the collective – collective goals and collective relationships founded upon respect and (hopefully) trust. Lao Tsu’s quote above, removed from its context as it is, does seem to support my assertion, so I’ll look to sports for an example that makes my point clear. Dan Clark shares a tale when he speaks. When he interviewed the last place Tampa Bay Buccaneer players several years ago, he asked them individually, “Why are you here?” They all replied, “To play football.” When Dan interviewed the World Champion Dallas Cowboys he asked each player the same question, “Why are you here?” To a man they answered, “To win the Superbowl.” So what was the difference between the two teams? The league’s punching bag, the lowly Buccaneers, had individual goals, nothing to unify them. While the Champions had collective goals. Now, keep in mind that it’s important to bundle individual goals within the collective goals. Without a unifying objective, the Buc’s coach would indeed have to resort to manipulation to get the results he wanted. While the coach at Dallas uses a collective, unifying goal to create leverage to help lift everyone towards all the team’s goals.
I think it’s clear that the leverage unity creates completes the loop between leaders growing more leaders and collective goals. In order to reach individual goals, one uses the collective lever, which in turn encourages leadership development.
Thanks for stimulating my brain this morning Don! Any comments?
Tim
Wow, Tim, what a thoughtful reply! And great examples! Your comments are a superb thought jogger.
I am grateful you took the time to send your comments. You made some great points in your note. Unless you object, I darned near certain to quote you in forthcoming leadership articles.
Yes, good leadership should be antithetical to manipulation… And, yes, a shared purpose makes the question entirely moot. Great stuff: Lao Tzu to Dan Clark; now there’s some wide-open thinking! I appreciate your deeply insightful thinking on this fascinating issue.
Thanks again for your stimulating thoughts.
All the best!
Don
______________________________________________________
Don Blohowiak
1-888-LeadWell www.LeadWell.com
Fax: 609-799-8271 DonB@LeadWell.com