Sep 1, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Sales
Think of the average presentation you sit through.
If I can summarise: Boring, potentially useful information quickly forgotten.
Am I right?
Now think of the best presentation you have ever sat through.
You remember not just the occasion, and the presenter, and probably those with you, but also the information.
What is the difference between these two presentations?
Chances are the first was a wooden recitation of facts that were also on a powerpoint showing behind the speakers head, even worse, the speaker was reading the slides.
Chances are the best was a three dimensional “performance” by the speaker, there were moments of quiet, of passion, of visual conjuring from the verbal, of a simple point made that tied the whole thing together in a take-away message. The presence of props was limited to a very few photos, drawings or physical props that emphasised the point being made, the presentation was dominated by the physical presence of the person on stage.
The speaker brought emotion to the presentation, a physicality and personal engagement with the message being delivered far more than is possible with just the words.
Years ago before my first major public presentation, it was to an industry conference with an expected attendance of about 1500, (the “Foodweek” conference about 1988) I undertook a training session with a presentation coach. I do not remember much of that training, although it was well used on the day I was told, despite the almost terminal case of nerves, but I do remember the trainer saying again and again:
“it is not a presentation, it is a performance”.
That statement is as true today as it was then, perhaps more so because we are awash in messages, and increasingly those messages are visual, recognising we are a visual animal, so to be remembered, the bar is now set very high.
There are plenty of coaches out there, this session by Doug Stevenson is probably as good as it gets. My thanks to Mitch Joel for bringing it to my attention.
Aug 26, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
The word recidivism is usually heard in the context of those convicted and punished, going on to re-offend. The objective is to reduce the rate, ideally to zero.
Not in the context of marketing and sales, where the objective is to raise the rate.
Think about your own processes, and sales and marketing funnels.
Most are messy, illogical, emotional pathways with all sorts of traps along the way, very few are the orderly, and sequential progressions that are usually reflected in consultant drawn funnels.
During the process, the objective is to bring as many of the wanderers from the path back into the funnel as possible, and help them to the end point, a transaction, or at least keep them in the funnel until such time as they are ready to progress.
The “recidivism rate” is an enormously valuable measure of the effectiveness of your sales and marketing processes, and can be applied at all points in the process, irrespective of the form of the process, from a simple spreadsheet to complicated CRM and lead generation software.
Would some help figuring this stuff out help?
If so, call me, now.
Aug 25, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
David Ogilvy said many things that have gone into the marketing lexicon, one that is particularly relevant to the ways we are communicating today:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar”.
It is disturbing for me to sped several hours creating a blog post, and then to have just a few people read it, and I find that following the rules below, my readership increases markedly.
- Lists always work,” 6 ways to build a better backhand”
- “How to” headlines always work. “How to build a better backhand” If you can actually find a way to combine a “How to” with a “list”, well, off it goes. Like “How to leverage these 6 ways to build a better backhand”
- Highlight the benefit, a WIFM (what’s in it for me) headline. “Having a great backhand increases your chances in doubles”. Sometimes a bit of innuendo or double meaning goes a long way to making a headline better “linkbait” to the body of the article or email.
- “Free” is good, “Free e-book on how to build a forehand Federer would love”
- Evoke curiosity, then deliver in the body. “How many more sets would you win with a better backhand?’
- Draft several headlines, and give considerable thought to which is the best to use in the context of the audience, and what it is you are trying to convey.
- Length, SEO experts tell me that about 60-70 characters is the limit, as the search engines cut off the subject lines at about 70.
- Learn from what others are doing. About the best source of effective headline writing lessons is in the local newsagent, spend a bit of time browsing the magazine section, there are SEO killer headlines effectively selling stuff that nobody in their right mind should buy
- The final consideration is that while it is the headline that gets people in, it is the value you deliver through the information in the body of the message that keeps them there. There is just so much content out there, so many opportunities to spend your time, that the real value is in delivering sufficiently good information and ideas to induce people to read the whole post, then return, again and again. The headline is just the icing, it is the cake that people consume.
There are many formulas, that claim to make writing good headlines easy, just like those above. However, like most things that can be broken down into a formula, you end up with some degree of repetition, a “sameness” with others, it may work, and usually has to date, it may deliver the outcome, but it is still the outcome of the same formula your competitors are using. So be different, add some humanity to the message, nothing is as good as a bit of humanity to connect to your audience.
That is really hard.
Aug 20, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
The blokes I saw as a youngster who had outrageous success with the girls were not always the best looking, or the most interesting, or had the best cars (although all these assets did seem to help) they were the ones who were genuinely interested in whoever it was they happened to be talking to at that particular moment in time. They directed all their attention and empathy at their companion of the moment, casual or otherwise.
Why do we think we can be successful digitally with strategies that are second rate in the real world?
Websites are communication tools, they are a digital metaphor for the conversations you have at a party, in a pub, at the office, in private. Nothing more.
So, go to the home page of your site, (or your competitors) and look at it through the eyes of the person you are attempting to communicate with, and:
- Count how often you talk about yourself, using pronouns like “we”, “our”, “us”
- Count how often you talk about the problems your customer has, the ways that you are referencing their needs and challenges
- Compare the numbers, and in most cases be amazed at how often you talk about yourself.
- Repeat for every page on your site,
- STOP talking about yourself!!
- Rewrite, and reap the benefits.
Pretty simple formula really, no different to those blokes I was envious of years ago.
Aug 19, 2014 | Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Small business
As everyone will tell you, (including me here) marketing is about stories, stories that resonate, are remembered, that generate empathy, and lead to an action, and hopefully if your effort is to be rewarded, a transaction.
So what are the elements that make a good marketing story?
It is instructive to look to the stories we all read, from books we read to our kids, to the fiction we read as adults. All seem to share elements of 6 common traits:
- They are written for an audience. Kids love stories, and reading to my kids was one of the joys of being a parent. They would have loved last years best seller, Jeremy, the story of the kookaburra chick that fell out of the nest and as reared by a family until he could look after himself. Great book for my kids, as kids, but not my choice for my personal reading.
- They have a hero and a villain, and the hero always wins after a seemingly unwinnable struggle, usually at the last moment, and unexpectedly.
- They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning sets the scene, the middle tells the story, and the end does a recap, and reinforces the message of the story.
- They all have a message, something worthwhile taking away, and that takeaway is the point of the story. Aesop, a Greek slave had this part nailed.
- They all have dramatic tension coming in waves through the story. The hero is confronted, and prevails, then is confronted again and prevails again by being smarter, more helpful, inventive, and resilient than the villain. The rhythm of the story builds to the climax, with the hero again, prevailing in some way that demonstrates the traits of ingenuity, resilience, and “goodness”.
- The story has a plot. Pretty obvious, but the plot is what ties it all in together, and provides the context for the hero to beat the villain, to achieve the unachievable, and deliver the message.
A good story gets remembered, and can be retold. That is not just luck, it is the way we have evolved, storytelling is the way we related information vital for survival in the first couple of million years as we moved from caves to the present, passing on the strategies for staying out of the way of all sorts of risks to life and limb along the way. Recently there has been a lot of sophisticated research searching for the mechanics, this post from Chris Penn includes links to several.
Point is, the sophisticated research is simply telling us the mechanics, Aesop just knew the formula, and it remains the formula today, from writing a blog post to making a presentation, you may as well use the formula to your benefit.
How did I do?
Aug 18, 2014 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Sales
www.strategyaudit.com.au
18 years ago running an ingredient supplier to the food industry as a contractor, I sponsored a project of quantifying a range of ingredient specifications against a matrix of organoleptic, and cost outcomes given a range of processing parameters.
Our objective was to be able to demonstrate on the spot to a customer the impact of apparently minor specification changes of the ingredient and/or processing conditions on the operational, taste and viscosity outcomes, and costs of the product. We did many hundreds of bench trials in the lab, carefully documenting progressive changes of all the parameters, their impact on the product outcomes, and recording them in a database that enabled us to call up the information at any time. This turned an ad hoc, iterative, time consuming, and inexact process requiring expensive lab time that had often taken months to complete, into one that could be done in front of the customer with a few mouse-clicks. Real time outcomes that we were confident could be replicated in a factory trial.
The impact on customers the first time they saw this capability was profound.
I was reminded of this project again recently talking to the manufacturer of extruded plastic components. His sales process involves extensive iteration on a 3-D cad/cam package following usually extensive design and problem definition discussions, and then still pretty expensive models that need to be validated before “cutting steel” for extrusion dies.
It seems to me that in the next very short time, all these processes would be able to be done in real time, in front of the customer with 3-D printed prototypes.
The intersection of sales and technology is ignored by many, for a host of reasons, but pretty clear when you think about it for just a moment. The scary part is that you no longer have to have the resources of a multinational at your fingertips, this stuff is available off the shelf at your local tech vendor, and if you are not doing it, the competitors you may not even know about probably can.
Writing this post, I also realised that we missed a really important parameter in the exercise 18 years ago, one that is the focus of my esteemed “e-mate” Howard Moscowitz‘s work. That missed parameter is what the consumer really thinks, rather than what the marketer with whom we were working thought they were thinking. This discrepancy has been made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s celebrated TED presentation reflecting on Howards work in the development of Spaghetti sauce.
This is a whole other area where sales, marketing and technology are increasingly intersecting
