Sales

The Risks of Awesomeness Marketing

There are many strategies for marketing, but one that has been growing in popularity, particularly in the United States, might be affectionately called “Awesomeness Marketing.”

As a type of viral marketing, the concept is pretty simple: associate a product or service with something awesome. Often, the connection between the product and the awesomeness will be tenuous at best. The association between a car and a Greek god, for example, is irrelevant; but putting the product next to something witty, outlandish, and intelligently over-the-top associates the product with favorable qualities and a sense of enjoyment.

Recently, the startup Dollar Shave Club has attracted a lot of attention because of its YouTube viral advertisement video:

The video appeals to a range of audiences, pushes on a real pain point most men have (overpriced razor cartridges), and includes a number of more subtle riffs, including having the guy getting his head shaved reading a copy of Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup. Nice touch.

For a video of this nature to be effective, it cannot dance with any middle ground of reality: it must be clearly and decisively over-the-top. Otherwise, the company runs the risk of being taken seriously in its boasting. Or, worse, just flopping. Video advertisements of this nature shamelessly extol the awesome powers of the products they sell: “Anything is possible,” says the Old Spice man after passing seamlessly through an impressive series of fantastic set changes. Furthermore, by claiming to be so “awesome” that nothing can come near, the company builds into its marketing a solid defense against inevitable attack. They can say, “Hey, don’t you have a sense of humour? We were obviously joking…”

“…But we really are awesome.”

In order to create the desired effect, however, one must be very careful to actually produce something amazing. Trying to be awesome can be fatal and will be worse than more traditional forms of advertising. In many ways, working with the real selling points of the product can be dangerous; every message needs to pass through the twisted gates of hyperbole.

Awesomeness Marketing is high risk/high yield. Do it right, produce a legendary campaign, and your brand will stand as legendary in the minds of consumers (provided the product is actually decent). But if your advertisement falls short of awesome, or worse, if in trying to be awesome, it comes across as juvenile or offensive in some way, then you have big problems.

One can never be certain that a video will go viral, even when the requisite qualities of brevity and over-the-top humor have been included. For an example, see the Zeus Scion commercial below, which does not have the same viewership as other similar ad campaigns. The video itself does it right, but it has not enjoyed the same success as others. Not going viral is always a risk when aiming to produce a video of this kind. But equally, there is the risk that the video actually will go viral. What then? Can you scale quickly? Is everything ready to fill orders on a large and perhaps international scale? Are all mechanisms in place? Is the product actually any good?

Awesomeness Marketing is also risky because of its implications in terms of social media. When a commercial goes viral on the Internet, there is no time to have a legal team vet all social media correspondence. Tweets, Facebook posts, responses of various kinds all come in and must go back out very quickly in real time. The team in charge of handling that social media presence must be sharp and switched on, able to respond quickly and appropriately without approval from corporate boards or legal teams.

The customer’s initial reaction to “Awesomeness Marketing” typically has nothing to do with the product itself. The product is in many ways irrelevant. The goal is to get the viewer stirred up and to think, “That was awesome!” The product can almost be an afterthought, which is one of the reasons the advertising is effective: the customer does not feel pushed. Gradually, and perhaps long after seeing the advertisement, the customer’s awareness—and the association with awesomeness—will shift to the actual product itself.

The efficacy of this kind of marketing comes down to the way in which the association with the advertisement shifts to the product:

Distributive Property of Awesomeness

Customer —> Awesome Commercial

Awesome Commerical —> Brand

Awesome Brand —> Product

Awesome Product

Customer —> Product = Awesome

Awesomeness—in terms of advertising—appears to be highly transferable.

Awesomeness Marketing will find a stronger appeal among the younger generation, but that is not to discount its effectiveness with other demographics. Who doesn’t like things that are awesome? It can be an incredibly powerful tool, especially because it requires relatively little resource to use, but it is likewise an incredibly dangerous tool and one that should be used carefully and only when one is certain the advertisement will be effective and the company is prepared to handle the responses.

Posted by Aaron Ralby on April 4, 2012 at 10:47 am in Demand Generation, Entrepreneurship, Sales | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackback (0)

         

Key challenges in sales and marketing for entrepreneurs and growth-stage firms

Permasense corrosion monitoring systems provide engineers, inspectors, planners, and plant managers insight into condition and capability of critical oil and gas assets. Potentially it is a technology with wide appeal. Given this, what are the key challenges in the sales and marketing process? What are the key steps and challenges entrepreneurs face in taking a product like Permasense successfully to market and what would you advise they do to overcome them? We asked the CEO of Permasense, Peter Collins…

Identify the product champion

Identifying the individuals in a company that are ‘own’ the problem your product or service is addressing is the place to start in finding the individual to champion it in your target customer.

For example, in Permasense’s case, this person my be an asset integrity, engineering, corrosion or inspection manager.

Identify all that have to sign off on adoption

If you are selling a system solution, impacting on a number of functions or business processes, you must also win the buy-in of these gatekeepers. For example in Permasense’s case this includes IT, safety, plant operations and frequently others.

Identify the economic buyer

It’s as old as sales itself – no sale without a budget, and it’s so easy to believe you’re close to a sale, when the person who has to sign the cheque hasn’t even been brought into the sales process, let alone convinced.

Posted by Paul Higgins on March 23, 2012 at 11:55 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Real World Lessons, Sales, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Facebook stalking is a transferable skill

I joined Facebook on 17^th August 2006, back in the days before the doors were thrown wide to the general public, before Farmville and mobile updates and timelines, when Myspace was still the most popular social network and Twttr was a group SMS service from Odeo. Scary, dark times they were indeed.

I graduated high school a year early at the tender age of 17, a gap year looming ahead of me in which I would be too young to travel and too apathetic to do much of anything else. I had already been accepted to university for deferred entry and so had little to do but continue to slog it out at my minimum wage job and wait for my life to begin.

And Facebook.

I spent my first few months on the site finding my feet, hesitant to leave behind the comfortably garish sphere of Myspace that I had come to trust. But I got there – I added more friends, posted my first photos, and even wrote a couple of notes (remember those?) along the way.

Where it really kicked off for me was in January 2007 when everyone in the UK received their offers for university places. Suddenly I didn’t have to wait for my life to start any more: Facebook was delivering my future university life in England direct to my snowy Wisconsin doorstep. I could reach out to people who would soon be on my course, or at my college, or who shared in my angst about the seemingly inadequate preparation a US high school had provided. We commiserated, anticipated, and waited together within the blue and white walls of Facebook.This is probably the only time in the past five and a half years that I really used the site for ‘networking’ per se.

I arrived at university and my friend tally shot up:  people I met on nights out, through sport, in lectures, but largely people with whom I did not regularly speak or stay in touch. What proved fruitful from my year out was the ability I had developed to identify the people I wanted to find on Facebook with very little information available to me. I could find a friend of a friend of a friend from a different university knowing only a first name and irrespective of privacy settings. I had learned to pick out the small, relevant pieces of data and manipulate Facebook to find what I really wanted: information about people and their networks.

Faced with the real world, I thought my days of endless Facebooking, stalking friends from America to friends who lived next door, would be put to rest, to be replaced with scrutinizing the rigour of my privacy settings on a regular basis and reading the Financial Times.

In fact, what I learned on Facebook have been some of my most important research tools. Replace Facebook with LinkedIn, and it turns out that the time I thought had been wasted on procrastinating was in actuality time spent honing my transferable skills!

In executing a complex sale in a large organisation, identifying the key members to engage in the buying centre is a principal task in opening a successful deal. However, many companies will not openly share names and contact details if you simply call them up and ask. This is where LinkedIn is a potentially valuable tool in business development, for being able to identify the key individuals you need to contact in a company.

Putting aside the problem that not everyone is on the network, LinkedIn constantly challenges us by concealing surnames, making certain features premium, and taunting us by only allowing us to see who has viewed our profiles if we allow others to see when we view their information.

The key is to be able to repackage and rephrase information creatively using a range of search tools in order to narrow your field of results to the most relevant. Not all individuals in a given position will simply call themselves ‘Business Development Directors’ or ‘Finance Directors’, so the ability to think around the language and possible key words is essential. Not everyone will openly share their full name or role, so locating other places on the site where these individuals might hang out is an important activity. The same sort of creative research is also often necessary in identifying email addresses for the individuals targeted via LinkedIn.

Maybe I can’t claim all my time on Facebook as personal development. But I can certainly say that the creative research skills I developed have been invaluable in opening complex sales into multinational organisations in terms of identifying and engaging the key players in the decision making unit.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on March 12, 2012 at 3:16 pm in Blog, Sales | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

The balance between capturing new clients and retaining existing clients

Anybody who has ever tried to secure new clients for their business will know that this is a crucial process of growing businesses. It is also commonly known that it is just as important to retain existing customers as securing new ones. In fact, in some cases, it can be more valuable. We asked Tony O’Shaughnessy, a renowned entrepreneur, whether he has any tricks of the trade that he can pass on to entrepreneurs on how to secure new clients, retain existing customers and balance the interest of all concerned parties whilst meeting your own company goals…

Securing new clients

“Firstly, I would suggest that you should take a step back, put a clear-cut structure and plan in place, and work consistently to that.

Secondly, you need to understand exactly what it is that you do that makes people buy from you. Then create a simple message at marketing level that puts exactly that point across to prospective clients.

Thirdly, you must identify the people you should be marketing and selling to. You should really take time to understand that. There is a big difference between people who are ‘interested’ in your product/service and then there are people who would ‘buy’ your product. You must distinguish between the two.

Finally, you must be transparent and honest to your clients. If you are having problems, tell them that you are and what you are doing to fix it.  Be realistic to your clients about what you can achieve.

What made Rapid Innovation Group stand out from the crowd was the fact that you had the answer to: ‘What can you do for me and why nobody else can do it for me?’”

Retaining existing clients

“I believe keeping good relationships with your existing clients should be intrinsic, not only a strategy. Honesty and transparency are not only key for gaining new clients, but are also crucial for retaining existing clients. Essentially, they want to trust you, and these are the ways to attain that. You should not look to blame somebody for any mistakes made, rather you should find a way to fix it. You must be loyal to the relationship between yourself and your clients.

For example, ninety-five per cent of the companies give bigger promises than they can keep. You must position yourself in the remaining five per cent. Do not offer something that you cannot materialise, because that will not be honest.”

Posted by Paul Higgins on March 9, 2012 at 5:34 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Management Tips, Sales, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Competitive differentiation – are you the WiFi or the cinnamon?

Around our offices in Red Lion Square there must be 50 cafes within 5 minutes’ walk. There are the big chains – Starbucks (two of them), Caffe Nero, Costa Coffee; there are bakery cafes; there are outdoor stall cafes; there are sit-down-for-lunch cafes; there are takeaway cafes. Lots of choice.

Sitting in one of the two Starbucks the other day, to which I’d been coming regularly for 18 months, I realised that Starbucks had successfully differentiated itself in my mind as one of the better options for me.

For a long time Starbucks was the only major coffee shop chain in London to offer free wireless internet to all its customers. It was also the only one that stocked cinnamon shakers so that you could add your own cinnamon to your coffee.

So for 18 months I’ve been going regularly to Starbucks despite the fact that it’s not the most friendly cafe in the area; it’s not the best coffee; it’s not the closest to the office; and it doesn’t do the best food. But it has free wireless internet (I don’t care much for cinnamon).

In fact I can’t imagine there are many people who would consistently choose Starbucks for its cinnamon shaker whereas I know plenty who go there for its internet.

I often meet entrepreneurs that are competing in very crowded markets – particularly in the B2C world of apps or consumer internet – and they talk through their “significant”, “compelling”, and “unique” competitive differentiators and USPs.

Unfortunately a lot of the time those differentiators can sound like cinnamon and not like free internet.

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Posted by Paul Higgins on March 2, 2012 at 12:03 pm in About RIG, Blog, Entrepreneurship, Sales, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

The differences between traditional enterprise sales and the Yammer approach

New business models and sales approaches rarely receive much attention until a company comes along and really makes it succeed.

Enterprise social networking is a growing area and Yammer has become its poster child. Moreover, it is an interesting case because its non-traditional sales approach outflanked the competition. Now it counts over 80% of the Fortune 500 as customers.

A few years ago I met with well-funded competitors to Yammer in the UK and in France that had developed strong technology to enable the socially-connected enterprise – businesses whose employees could build social networks across department and country boundaries with all the associated productivity and communication benefits. However, the companies I met were trying to sell to major corporates – the more major the better – through a traditional enterprise sales model; and it didn’t work.

By following the traditional enterprise sales model I mean that they hired a sales team, which tried to engineer access and sell directly to a corporate budget-holder, who would then in turn procure the technology and take responsibility for its adoption by the rest of the organisation.

Initially this seemed to be a very effective route to market. Like a lot of enterprise software startups they started by going through their management team’s existing personal networks to gain access to some impressive companies. Some of them became customers, and on the back of this early success the startups raised additional financing to expand the sales team, and to hire marketing and PR professionals in order to support it.

Gaining access to corporate buyers then started getting more and more difficult. In the early days they were able to call on CEOs, who were attracted by the ideas behind bringing social networking into the enterprise. But as the sales team got beyond the few evangelist buyers they were steadily pushed further down the prospect’s organisational chart and budgetary discretion decreased.

As sales targets were missed the sales teams were disbanded and reconstructed several times over. Sales Directors were brought in and given three months to turn things around before being moved on again. As it got harder and harder to get sales signed off management gave permission to do one-month free trials so that prospects could see the tool in use and perhaps develop a business case based on real data. But too often the trials ended without much user adoption and with even less basis for an ROI.

Yammer’s approach, which has been well documented elsewhere, was to ignore the traditional corporate buying centre altogether and just think of the user base as consumers. It was a B2C company selling to corporates (it forced users to register a work email address) and it made adoption easy because the platform was free to users.

By encouraging early users to use and share the platform with their colleagues Yammer was able to grow a large user base and then generate revenues from the corporates that wanted to ‘claim the network’ – and all without having to hire an enormous sales team.

At first glance this approach might suggest a revolution in sales strategy. Why would anyone hire sales teams that have to worry about accessing senior stakeholders and getting hold of budgets when instead you can simply give access to the users and generate revenue thereafter?

I put this table together to show some of the differences between ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ approaches (click on the table to enlarge it).

In the case of Yammer and enterprise social networking, they were in an area that allowed them to focus on the right-hand column – what I’ve called the ‘non-traditional’ approach. The product was inherently ‘social’ in the sense that using it to its fullest potential required users to involve other people; it was simple (especially to users who already had other social networking accounts like Facebook); it provided standard functionality; and it didn’t require any input from corporate IT to function.

But this is not true in all cases and not every startup should pursue the same strategy. You can’t say that one of these approaches is ‘better’ than the other in general terms.

One of the most important indicators for which one is right for your startup is whether or not you are solving the same problem for many different customers. An ERP software company will try to sell systems that cover all sorts of different issues in a corporate; they require complex integration with existing systems; and so they need talented, consultative sales people to uncover the prospect’s real issues and customise the technology to solve them. On the other hand, mobile app companies do not typically need any customisation.

The other major factor to consider before selecting a sales approach is where you see your sustainable advantage. Technology companies selling to complex organisations like government authorities may have to invest a lot of time talking to procurement officials and IT teams but once those boxes have been ticked they represent a significant advantage over the competition, which has not made the same investment.

Your choice of sales approach has an impact on the whole of your business as a startup. Following the ‘non-traditional’ approach requires a skilled product team that can excel at the user experience and a marketing team that knows how to build brand awareness across a wide user base. The ‘traditional’ approach will impose different constraints on product and marketing, for instance, the technology must be more configurable to different customer demands and marketing must be able to generate real demand for the sales team.

It’s also possible to combine aspects of both approaches, as long as it is well thought-out. Don’t try to gain additional competitive advantage by building a relationship with your customer’s CFO if you can’t point to a strong ROI case; and don’t rely on a user adopting your product quickly if it is too complicated and there isn’t immediate value to them.

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Posted by Paul Higgins on February 15, 2012 at 10:26 am in Blog, Entrepreneurship, Sales, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackback (0)

         

How to approach an initial sales meeting

I wanted to write this post to follow up a previous one which covered the importance of having an effective sales process. The post began with a comment that entrepreneurs have a fantastic passion for their products and are able to convey this deep enthusiasm in sales pitches.

The risk is that this can lead to relying upon a solution-centric approach which takes no heed of the prospect’s challenges. Founding CEOs frequently turn up at a sales meeting and wax lyrical about the features, capabilities and benefits of their solution. But how can you presume the solution will solve the prospect’s problem, without understanding what that problem is in detail? Getting this right is especially important at the early stages of your company’s life, as feedback from these early sales meetings can be vital to helping you refine product / market fit in the wider sense.

A meeting (or meeting preparation) should always begin with a focus on identifying the prospect’s key challenges. In addition to taking this approach for our clients, we also use it with our own prospects. I thought I would lay out the high-level methodology I employ when meeting potential future clients, because although we are selling services, the same approach should be used as part of a consultative sales process for an enterprise technology solution.

Set a clear objective

E.g. ‘To understand the {prospect’s} key growth objectives, strategies and the accompanying challenges. From this, to determine whether our capabilities and experience could be utilised to help address these challenges and as such accelerate the growth of the business’

Understand their challenges (to determine whether they can be addressed by your competencies / capabilities)

1. Elucidate these through a series of insightful questions. This serves a number of purposes beyond identifying their challenges:
   1. By asking the right questions, you demonstrate your expertise
   2. It gives a chance for you to highlight issues / opportunities which the prospect may not have been aware of
   3. It shows you have done your homework on their company, demonstrating that winning their business is of value to you

2. For example, I often try to drill down to the crux of a prospect’s challenges by structuring questions under the following headings:
   1. Market and competitive landscape
   2. Growth objectives / window of opportunity
   3. Market focus and rationale
   4. Market strategy and proposition
   5. Demand generation activities
   6. Sales and sales management processes
   7. Partnering capabilities

3. Explore potential synergies / areas of collaboration
   1. Give a relevant (according to the answers to the questions) background to your company / solution
   2. Discuss how a relevant selection of your competencies / capabilities could be used to address their most strategic challenges (elucidated earlier on)
   3. Add credence to the discussion by referring to appropriate case studies

Next steps (if appropriate)

1. Agree to structure the discussions into an objective driven programme of work
   1. If well put together, this document will in itself give you significant credibility, as well as laying out the value the prospect will gain from the collaboration
   2. Suggesting to put together this programme of work should be compelling for the prospect – they should get value from it even if they end up not choosing you to execute upon it

If you are thoughtful, effective and easy to work with during the sales process, you give direct assurance to the prospect that this will be the case after the sale. As well as using what you learn to tailor the relevance of your offering to the company in question, it also helps you develop your overall proposition and further refine your product / market fit.

Posted by Guest Author on October 27, 2011 at 1:58 pm in About RIG, Blog, Sales | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Designing an effective sales process for a complex B2B sale

Entrepreneurs have a fantastic passion for their products. This deep enthusiasm which they are able to convey is often the driving force behind their company’s first few key sales. A common complaint that then follows is that the initial sales people they hire are unable to close by themselves – the entrepreneur believes he/she has to remain involved in all opportunities. This is obviously not scalable and it highlights the vital importance of an effective and well-codified sales process.

What constitutes an effective sales process?

It should precisely reflect a customer’s buying process, for instance:

• Which individuals (influencers, decision makers and likely blockers) need to be met?
• What do they need to be presented with and what do they need to understand in order to give their approval?
• What is the optimal way to articulate and deliver this information?
• In which order do these individuals need to be approached and what is the best way to engage them?

An effective sales process provides answers to all these questions in the form of a ‘best-practice’ roadmap which is split into discrete and well defined stages, each with:

• A clear objective and unambiguous gateway (to the next stage)
• An information requirement (the key information which needs to be obtained to help you effectively progress)
• A ‘tool-box’ (e.g. FAQs, presentations, business case building structures, email templates) – i.e. codified best practice

How is it created?

A sales process can only be created through direct experience of engaging with your target market, and it is a process of continuous refinement. A different skill-set is needed by the sales-person involved in these initial pioneering sales. They need to continually gather insights around how customers use the product and how it can be most effectively positioned against alternative solutions, and then be able to incorporate these into a freshly re-iterated approach. It is vital to get this process well defined before ramping up a sales team – this is brilliantly explained in an HBR article ‘The Sales Learning Curve’.

The benefits

• Effectiveness and scalability – by developing best-practice and codifying it, best-practice becomes repeatable (by other people)
• De-risking of the hiring process – all the different stages require different capabilities. Once these have been defined, the optimal individuals to execute upon them can be hired and managed

This role of sales-process creation is one of the key things we do for those of our clients at an early stage (i.e. where the CEO is often the sole sales-person). By clearly designing and segmenting the sales process we make their time go much further – we can execute a large percentage of it, and only involve them at stages where their capabilities are required. Also, by taking menial tasks off their hands (e.g. sending agendas, booking in calls) they are able to be positioned much more powerfully with the prospect.

Posted by Guest Author on September 26, 2011 at 1:12 pm in About RIG, Blog, Entrepreneurship, Sales | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Key stakeholders in a partnership process

In Strategic Selling, Rob Miller and Stephen Heiman define a 'complex sale' as one in which "several people must give their approval before the sale can take place."

These people play roles in the buying process such as guiding the seller and providing information ('Coach/Influencer'), screen possible suppliers and make recommendations ('Technical Buyer'), make judgments about the impact of your product or service on their job performance ('User Buyer'), and give final approval to buy ('Economic Buyer').

In some of my recent work with startups trying to sell through partnerships it struck me that there are roles in the partnership process that are comparable but different in important ways. By selling through partnerships, I mean convincing another organisation to use its resources to sell your product or service to its customers, and sharing the revenue in some way.

For instance, if your product is an email marketing tool for small businesses you may want to sign up a network of resellers to distribute it to their existing network of customers rather than trying to sell to each small business individually.

Signing off a partnership typically does not involve any money changing hands, so there's no 'Economic Buyer' whose budget you need to access. Similarly, there's no 'User Buyer', because the partner is not the one who will use your product.

However, there will be 'Technical Buyers', who will assess whether your product or service actually works, whether it fits in with the rest of the portfolio, and whether your company fits the right profile for their company to work with. There will also be a 'Coach/Influencer' role, to guide you through your potential partner's organisation and politics. It is typically the Coach/Influencer role that you initially have to convince that the partnership opportunity is worth exploring.

In place of the 'User Buyer' I suggest that an important role in any partnership discussion is Sales. It will be the sales team that is responsible for answering questions such as:

• Which customers will we target first?
• How will we engage them?
• How will the sales team be incentivised for selling your product or service?
• What support will they need from marketing and who will provide it?

In place of the 'Economic Buyer' I suggest the key equivalent is the 'Project Lead', who will typically be an executive in your potential partner's organisation, responsible for answering questions such as:

• What is the commercial model for the partnership?
• Who will be involved in overseeing the ongoing success of the partnership?
• What are the key metrics for the success of the partnership?
• At what point will the partnership be re-evaluated?

The roles may overlap and some individuals may play several roles during your negotation.

To summarise, there are four key roles that you need to involve before you can feel comfortable signing up a new partner for your business:

• Project Lead – for commercials, metrics, and management
• Sales – for targets, sales strategy, incentive plans, and marketing support
• Technical – for product assessment, compatibility, and legals
• Coach/Influencer – for validating market size and value proposition, and helping you navigate the rest of the organisation

Posted by Paul Higgins on September 8, 2011 at 1:51 pm in Blog, Partnering, Sales | Permalink | Comments (3) | Trackback (0)

         

How listening to jazz helps you communicate your ideas

Last month, I was on a jazz course in France. I’m a pianist – I can play rhythm and accompany a singer, but soloing has always eluded me. Jazz solos seem so complex and dynamic – where to start?? How to play something meaningful (or even just pleasant)?? I felt like I was looking at the top of the mountain without a clue of how to get there.

I sat with the piano tutor – the fantastic Zoe Rahman – and she showed me how putting together simple phrases – working from a basic theme and using repetition – is more engaging, giving the listener a narrative that links it all together and guides the journey.

As I was thinking about this later that evening, it occurred to me how many parallels there are between jazz in general and communication in business. Here are my top 4:

1. It's important to have a clear and compelling central theme, reiterating it in different ways
2. It’s easy to lose your audience when you get technical: the technical bits should always link back to the narrative so that they feel relevant
3. The best jazz players are great listeners. They don’t play a fixed message on autopilot – they’re highly responsive and, as a result, what they play is crafted to the moment
4. The value of ‘space between the notes’ – how silence can frame a message and make it more powerful. (I’ll be doing it right when I no longer need to be told “don’t play so much!”)

What does this mean, for example, in a sales presentation?  Well, if you’re going to use Powerpoint slides, make sure there’s a strong story running throughout. The story should be clear and flow well enough that you can deliver it without looking at the slides, which should be uncluttered and favour graphics over text. When you present, don’t offload on the audience and don’t be afraid of pauses – they give more weight to what comes next.

If you want to hear what this sounds like in music, listen to this beautiful track, Do It The Hard Way, by Chet Baker. Pay attention especially to his vocal solo – it’s the perfect illustration. It's also on the album Chet Baker Sings.

Posted by Simon Jackson on September 7, 2011 at 10:00 am in Blog, Sales | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackback (0)

         

How to give your startup more power when selling to corporates

A friend of mine used to run a technology project at Tesco, working alongside a growth-stage technology company. Whenever he phoned that technology company, he represented Tesco with the full weight of its brand and its revenue potential: his calls would be answered at all hours of the day. On the other hand, even the CEO of the technology company was seen as only one element of a much wider project, from which my friend would shortly move on to the next one.

There seems to be a clear imbalance of power here. I think that this can sometimes arise from the very understandable eagerness as a growth-stage company to prove yourself and your product or service to the best and the biggest in your sector.

But growth-stage companies should remember that they have power too. And this should be reflected in your approach to potential customers.

Compare these two approaches:

1. We have a really great product; we have experience in your sector and a proven ROI; we can save you £1m within the first year. Based on your characteristics x, y, and z we think you might be a good fit for us. We'd love to open a dialogue with you to see whether we might be able to help you
2. We have taken funding from VC investors in order to demonstrate in the next 12 months that one of the major players in this sector can save £1m within the first year through using our product. We're going through a process of identifying which the best company would be to partner with to generate this proof. We feel based on your characteristics x, y, and z that you might be interested in exploring this with us.

The second approach creates a sense of scarcity: the startup is choosing the customer not the other way around. There is an opportunity here to save £1m, the entrepreneur is saying, but it's not open to everybody. The offer won't be around for long because our investors need to see a return. It's then up to the potential customer to convince the entrepreneur that they are the right people to capitalise on this opportunity.

Give yourself more power when selling to corporates by remembering that your resources are limited and so you have to be just as careful to select with whom you work as your customers are.

Posted by Paul Higgins on August 4, 2011 at 10:15 am in Blog, Sales, Technology, Venture Capital | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)