May 21, 2015 | Customers, Sales
Making an offer they cannot refuse is the ultimate selling outcome, notwithstanding the limitations of the law, and common decency.
So how do you make a Godfather offer?
- Know your customer intimately
- Know their business intimately
- Know their pain-points like they were your own
- Create an offer that removes the pain-points for them
- Make the payoff compelling
- Make the payoff unique
- Present the offer like your life depended on it, with passion, conviction, and from the receivers perspective.
- Create tension in the decision by ensuring there is a decision time after which the offer is off the table.
This works pretty much all the time.
When you are able to the identify components of a problem a potential customer has, for which you have a solution that is both valuable to them, and unique, and you clearly understand all the challenges in their situation, why would they not buy from you?
May 18, 2015 | Change, Customers, Sales
mindset switch
Access to information, the tools to make up our own minds has not just changed our behaviour in the way the sales process works, it has changed our mindset.
In a fundamental way.
We believe information we source ourselves, and distrust anything we are told.
We filter the available information and make up our own minds about the bits we will accept, and blend into our version of the truth.
The power to say no” has never been stronger because there are a myriad of options available to us to get the information ourselves.
I work from a home office, and usually do not answer the home phone, as most of the time it is an unwanted cold sales call, and those who I need to be able to contact me almost always do it via the mobile or email.
However, last week I did answer the phone, and yes it was a sales call, but a pretty good one. A very nice Aussie lady, so her first language was English, rang and politely inquired if she could take a moment to speak about how her insurance company could save me a heap of money.
As it happens, I had been considering just that proposition, I am over 60, work from home, but still pay full whack contents insurance, so I had concluded that I should save some money by changing, or at least negotiating rather than just paying the auto premium.
So what happens when the nice lady rings, I surprise even myself given I had concluded that I should change and said “No thanks”.
It was not her, she did a good job, unlike most cold phone sales calls.
It was not that the timing was wrong, I had decided to do the research and take some action.
It was my mindset.
Being given information on a plate by someone who I saw as having a vested interest was automatically rejected.
Yes, I understood she could help, and that it was great timing, but the opportunity was still rejected almost without thought.
Imagine how hard it is to make a sale when all the stars are not aligned, when you cannot even get past the front door when they are!
Selling used to be a staged process with information delivered by someone who had the access you did not have, but needed to make a purchase decision.
No more.
The process has been completely disrupted and reversed, all the power is with the buyer, and if you try and sell them, even the if tools you use smell of you trying to sell them, you lose because the automatic response now is “No”
Think about it the next time you set about motivating the sales force at the Friday rev up, as you will probably just be wasting everyone’s time if you do not recognise and accommodate the mindset change that has occurred in the last decade.
May 15, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Marketing
innovation comes from dot joining
Before 3M came out with the now ubiquitous little yellow pad of semi stuck sheets, nobody realised they needed them.
There was no clamour for sticky note papers to use as messages, place-holders, and the thousand other uses we have found for them, no market research pointed at the opportunity.
Someone connected the unconnected dots.
The story goes that there was a failed glue experiment in the 3M lab archives. One of the product lines of 3M is glue, sticky stuff used as a joining agent with uses from the home to building sites and industrial applications. Researcher Spencer Silver was seeking a super strong adhesive, the line of experiments was deemed a failure, it was not glue, it did not stick, although it seemed to be re-useable, the stickiness was not strong. It was however, long lived. One of 3M’s employees who was also the member of a local church congregation choir, frustrated that his placeholders kept dropping out of his hymn book made the connection, and a product was born.
Point is the research had been done, there was a solution in the archives in search of a problem.
The challenging task for innovators and marketers is to put ourselves in the position where we can connect the solution with the problem.
That does not happen in the office, it happens where there are conversations happening, often random conversations, between people with vaguely connected networks and ideas.
The science of networking indicates we get more from those we know vaguely than from our very close peers.
Why?
Because those close to us are typically the same as us, similar views, experiences and attitudes, exposed to the same sorts of stimuli, that is why they are close to us.
The revelations, the connection of the unconnected dots usually comes from left field those who we know, but not well, who circulate in different groups to us, have different knowledge, networks and interests to us.
Go talk to them, network, engage, step out of your comfort zone, and with time, curiosity, and yes, lady luck does play a role, you might find your Post-it-note. You will almost certainly not find it if the only place you look is inside your own patch.
May 13, 2015 | Branding, Marketing
Courtesy: Tom Fishburne
Putting together a good brief is a foundation of successful business, whether it be a brief to a creative agency, engineering team, or outsourced service of some type, and irrespective of the platform to be used, a great brief plays a key role in achieving your goals.
Following are some simple rules to follow. The weight you put on them may differ depending on circumstances, but the principals remain.
- Describe what you are setting out to do. Sell a service, create a product, evoke a feeling, whatever it is, if the reader does not know in detail what you are setting out to do, how can you expect them to deliver.
- What do you want the receiver to do with the information we are giving them. When developing a creative brief, it helps the creatives to know what your choices of media are, how you want your logo to be displayed, and any cultural imperatives. Do not expect them to be able to read your mind. An engineering brief will be different, but same idea, give as much specific information as possible.
- Who is the audience for the final product. The greater the level of detail, the better. “Women over 35” is better than “all women”, and “women between 35 and 50 with executive jobs in the private sector with two children” is better still. The greater the level of detail the better the potential outcomes from the briefed activity can be.
- What does the target audience feel about the existing products and categories they buy. Having an idea of the current state of mind of the target audience is pretty important if you are setting out to change their behaviour and as a result their long term attitudes and preferences.
- What do you want them to feel about this new offer. In other words, after they have seen our offer, how do we want them to feel, and as a result, act?
- What are the key differentiators of our offer? What makes this alternative better than the others?
- How will this differentiator make a difference to the lives of those who buy it? Even if it a box of soap powder, this rule holds. It is the answer to the consumers question “Why should I buy this?
- Finally, any specific things that must be there, or indeed, cannot be there.
Sorting all this stuff out for the brief also ensures that you have thought about all the alternatives and issues before you take up the resources of the “brifees” in considering the brief.
Better yet, having a great brief gives you a basis to make an objective decision about the best alternative offered, and whether or not it meets your commercial needs.
May 8, 2015 | Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
I am speaking to small businesses all the time, and there are a lot of common conversations that occur. One of the most common is about advertising, particularly as it relates to advertising with Facebook and Google.
The conversations take a pretty common route.
The first thing to understand is the huge differences in a potential customers situation as they encounter Facebook ads, and Google AdWords.
The reasons people go to these two platforms are different.
Facebook is social, people are not there to buy stuff, so the path from the social to a transaction usually has a number of steps.
By contrast, a Google search is very specific, “I want information on XX”. Sometimes it will be for the purpose of researching, and sometimes they are committed to making a purchase of a product in your category. They are a “sale ready” audience.
It is for this reason I often recommend people start with AdWords as a means to advertise digitally, learn, and perhaps later use Facebook.
Irrespective of the platform choice, following are the 12 things that make sense to me that you should consider as you start on the digital advertising journey.
- Learn about the platforms, at least in principal, so you understand the stuff told to you by so called experts, and are in a position to ask intelligent questions.
- Start small, figure what works, and expand along the best path, always being prepared to adjust as you learn more. Having a plan, and ensuring the plan is captured in a detailed brief is essential, even if you are doing all the work yourself.
- Tracking and metrics. Before you start, know the source of visitors to your website, and track the changes that occur after the ads are placed. The huge change that has occurred with digital advertising is that we can now answer the question “which half of our advertising is wasted.”
- Define those you want to reach, in as much detail as possible. There are many different, although overlapping audiences you can target: current Facebook fans, and their friends, your current mailing lists held in whatever form they may be, visitors to your website, your competitors customers and friends, (particularly Facebook) and “lookalikes” to any of the above. The choices in the platforms are pretty good, take the time to really understand the choices you are making.
- Build relationships with current customers/fans. We all know that it is easier to get more business from an existing relationship, whatever the form of that relationship, than it is to start from scratch and build a new one to the point where they are prepared to buy from you.
- Create “stickiness” and trust by offering free advice, content, and ideas, and advice, and in responding, do so on a personal level. Webinars, podcasts, lists, blog posts, all serve differing needs in the process and the old adage that you have to give a bit before you can expect anything to come back, still works.
- Understand the customer journey. Facebook particularly, but also Google, require conversion to a sale after the initial contact. To do that you need to provide access the offers, products and relevant information through a landing page process of some sort, leading to a shopping cart, or sign up form. At each point, the potential customer has to make a choice, “do I proceed or not?” and making that choice easy, to the point of automatic requires real understanding of their mindset.
- Landing page optimisation. The differences in performance of differing landing page copy and design is astonishing, so the optimisation of landing pages is a whole process, even an art in itself.
- Create the process before you place the ads. A very common common mistake is to place some ads, they often do not cost much, then when a response arrives, you start wondering what to do with it. Wrong way around. Have the process mapped out, with the follow up content written and the delivery sequences mapped out.
- Analyse and analyse. Obviously having the right metrics to analyse is important, but tracking visitors, conversion rates, and the path a visitor takes to a transaction is enormously valuable in optimising the process. To some extent this is a repeat of step three, but the emphasis here is on the continuous improvement by testing and tweaking of the communication.
- Have a budget, and stick to it. Tracking conversion rates and the cost per conversion at each point in the customers journey as per the point above is vital. The opportunity to measure the conversion costs has never been greater, so make sure you do, and you give yourself time to correct the mistakes you will inevitably make.
- Rinse and repeat, to learn and improve.
You can pay someone too do all this for you, but even if you do, it is reassuring to understand the principals of the process. Most small businesses are careful with the pennies, so making the effort to understand where your money is going, and how to maximise the impact gives the confidence to make the commitment.
