A ZDNet article (that also quotes Sorrell) says that corporate social media use is not social at all because it is all about sales. As a real life example, the author describes the dinner party dynamic where “people will avoid that person that is selling something. Friends that invite their friends to tupperware parties, or multi-level marketing, are tolerated for a while, but not for long. Similarly, companies that use social media as sales media must understand there is a time and place for it, or they risk harming their brand.”

Separating sales from social media is a good idea. But in B2B, the line in the sand isn’t always clear because all media, including direct B2B selling, is social.

Sales has always been social. Making authentic connections is hard work. Getting on the phone and talking to people every day is social. But the funny thing is, I’ve never heard a single sales guy refer to himself as a ‘social selling guru.’

In Sir Martin’s big media/big brand world, “sales” is something you do to a person…no matter how much it hurts. In big media, social media gurus script and sculpt social media into sales media. The problems happen when hypercritical consumers with highly developed BS filters quickly cry foul on the thinly disguised sales media. 

In the B2B world, audiences are a bit different. Sales are social. Sales is the fruit of a relationship cultivated by people being useful (and being at least mildly social) to other people.

Successful sales people know that demonstrating character, integrity and trust is the only way to find new customers. A sales person is judged and rewarded with new business based on his or her product knowledge, honesty, integrity and whether or not he or she acts in the best interest of her customers.  Trust is built and established by individuals with individuals through repeat interaction. 

Sir Martin’s concern about the intrusive role of sales media lies in the fact that you can’t script unscripted social interaction. Really being useful requires that the entire organization be present for more unscripted moments of usefulness – moments when customers could use some guidance, information or focused attention. The best sales people and the best companies have known this for years.

So that’s my rant. I’m sick of scripted sales media disguised as social media and I’m sick of the social media gurus doing the scripting.

The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

Ready to sign up to attend our event?  You can register here:

http://tedxnaperville.com/Register/tabid/1878/Default.aspx

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/146350146

Or, onTuesday, October 20, 2009 Time: 2-3pm EDT / 11–12pm PDT, listen to Steve Martin, the author of Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology talk about some of the biggest challenge facing sales people when trying to secure meetings with C-level executives. Based upon comprehensive interviews with more than 500 C-level executives, Steve Martin will help you understand how C-level executives think, how they communicate, and how to adapt your use of language to match executive decision makers’.

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/581353803

Trust is a shared belief that you can depend on one another to achieve an objective. Trust is built through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency.

The business development challenge for most professional services firms is identifying ways to scale the process for demonstrating trustworthiness to prospects.

How do your firm’s current marketing activities strengthen the personal networks of the managing partners or help build trusted relationships?

If you have a vague feeling of marketing malaise, it may be due to the growing recognition that modern marketing-think is steadily transforming itself into sales-think. In sales-think, the conversations, the relationships, the personal network and persuasion have always been the de facto currency.

Your unease may stem from the fact that the marketing function as we know it is changing dramatically. This may be due to audience fragmentation or the shift of power from the seller to the buyer or hundreds of other equally valid reasons.    

For those practice managers and managing directors interested in more efficiently finding new business it begins by aligning marketing with the task of increasing the number of highly-qualified trusted relationships in the portfolio, not closing a deal. For marketing, it is important to recognize that new business development as a disciplined activity is steadily morphing into an exercise in “personal branding.”

If you are uncomfortable with the term “personal branding” because it minimizes the power of the corporate brand, welcome to the club. But if people buy from people and if a brand is really the sum total of a customer’s interaction with a company, then it follows that in professional services, the personal brand is really all that matters.

Traditional marketing-think such as intrusion, hard-sell tactics, product-push, branding and controlling-the-message activities just don’t resonate anymore. Marketing-as-control has been undermined by customer access to information, networks and experience far beyond the marketing department’s ability to control and manage.  The marketing department is being forced to accept that authentic, inclusive, people to people-driven information is becoming the dominant method for inviting prospects into relationship that can be nourished into customer relationships.

This is even more complicated by the fact that the isolated points of encounter between a company representative and a prospect aren’t just sales encounters, but social encounters as well.  These social and network encounters don’t lend themselves the traditional linear progression of a sales pipeline diagram.

There are some stand-out marketing organizations that have embraced this truth. Yet there are others who are just not capable of authenticity because they are so far removed from the customer.  

This is why some professional services organizations are delegating the function of authenticity to the managing partners and practice managers. The managing partners, responsible for thought leadership are now also responsible for promoting and demonstrating that same leadership through their actions.

Today, the cost of content production and distribution has shrunk dramatically, the information freely available  has grown to include not just sellers but buyers eager to share their own needs, challenges and experiences;  and reaching interested people with relevant offerings is a much more fractured challenge. The challenge is aligning personal relationships with the sales funnel in a way that supports meaningful and valuable discussion as well as trust building.

Yet agencies are not set up to do this. In fact, clients aren’t set up for this either. Agencies earn their fees by trading time for dollars and some earn commissions on media spend or printing. Marketing departments manage their vendors as cost centers. There is nothing wrong with this age old model, it just means that an agency is motivated to do what it does.

Likewise, clients have learned to manage the agency as a cost center. So it makes sense due to the inherent inefficiency of the agency model, that you have high client turn-over and pressure to reduce price on work that is essentially a commodity

What would you call an agency with no graphic or interactive designers on staff? An agency that is proud of the fact that it has never produced a brochure. What kind of agency would this be? How does an agency explain how simple tweaks that integrate interactive with the sales process and measuring engagement instead of exposure and building branded content that supports informed decision-making are the killer competencies that clients should buy?

So what does an agency do? So what should an agency become?

In my company, there is the growing realization that reinvention will happen. Agencies must become an accountable piece of the sales process. The problem we’ve had growing this approach is that most large clients are not prepared to address real performance based compensation plans. There are too many complicating factors that make program measurement too complex.

On the other hand, the inevitable convergence of sales and marketing drives the realization that one-to-one communication is becoming more important than mass marketing messages, especially in B2B. Our ability to impact the sales pipeline is truly our core competency. The question is how do we reframe our business model so we are massively rewarded for helping our clients meet their sales goals?

All great stories include conflict. They include mistakes, weakness and a protagonist that changes and grows. The protagonist is the central character in a literary work. He/she is often in conflict with the bad guy or the antagonist.  

You can’t have a good story without change, growth and conflict.

Story telling is the basis for building relationships. Sharing what you’ve learned, challenges you’ve faced, and the dragons you’ve slain helps communicate your story to customers.

The problem with most marketing stories? No change, growth or conflict.

At BWMG, the deals we walk away from are the ones where the client isn’t willing to open the kimono talk to customers or the media openly. Warts and all. Put yourself in the shoes of a journalist – a professional story teller. Now imagine your job is writing great stories with no change, growth or conflict. Where is the job satisfaction in that?

In talking to some of our favorite editors, we constantly hear that most press releases and marketing literature is far too focused on accentuating the positive and staying on message. Controlling the message. Too bad most controlled marketing messages and press releases get lost in a sea of sameness and “me too” messages.

So what is the risk of talking about warts and all?

This is a legitimate concern…especially for health care organizations, governments, financial institutions and other heavily regulated industries. That’s one reason we probably don’t have many banks or hospitals as clients.

But for everyone else, the risks are minimal.  The biggest risk is not talking about warts and all.

In fact, just like our favorite characters from college literature, the ones we remember are the ones with the best stories – the ones that overcame their shortcomings, grew, changed and became better protagonists. As marketers, we could learn a lot from our college professors.

I went to the website. My immediate comment…insanely great, deeply differentiating and long overdue.

I followed some links and arrived at the blog of one of Valorum’s founders. I read the first article. Again. Insanely great, deeply differentiating and long overdue.

Here’s a quick excerpt about the troubled economy and what it means to professional services firms…we must find the silver-lining…

“The moral of these posts is that the economy is a once in a century meltdown, things are not getting better yet and the magnitude of these problems is such that one must anticipate profound change in the profession.

There, I said it. Profound change in the profession. I using the C word given how it has become the centerpiece of the US Presidential election and there both overused and misused. But here is the inescapable fact: General Counsel, indeed all in-house lawyers (save, perhaps those in the oil and gas industries) are facing unimaginable pressure to lower legal costs. The pressure is no different than that experienced by those in charge of procurement, sales and others responsible for the business of business. But the key factors are (1) the pressures to save are enormous, and (2) law department leaders are not immune from the pressure, or the accountability that goes along with it.

I recently was having a discussion with an in-house lawyer about cost control. He said his boss was very interested in the topic. His next sentence will stay with me forever: “What interests my boss fascinates me.” I’m sure that line or at least the sentiment has been used by many, but what a lesson for we outside lawyers.

The title of this post asks if there is a silver lining in the black economic cloud hanging over our clients’ heads. If you don’t see the opportunity to restructure relationships in ways that produce savings for your clients while at the same time strengthening your relationship with that client, you need to open your eyes. There is no formula–I’d write about it if there was–because each client’s situation is unique. But there is surely a topic of discussion there that all should pick up on. If you do it right, you’ll like back and say that your response to these unprecedented difficult times was your finest hour (with my respects to Sir Winston Churchill).”

Sue Stenbo, talent acquisiton manager at Fellowes will do most of the speaking. I’ll chime in when called.

The topic is employer branding.

Employer branding is about attracting the right talent that can make a meaningful difference to your business. People who are great and also reflect the culture of your business. Employer Branding takes the qualities which make people want to work for an organization, ensures they are established throughout the organization, and uses them as a marketable point of difference. What is the strategy which drives the purpose for Branding? What are the tactics and how do you measure the success? How does Employer Branding add value? How do you define your target market and execute your proposition? Learn how to develop Employer Branding that leads top talent to you, and keeps them there. We’ll explain how to develop the strategy and tactics to deliver the right talent every time.

http://www.mynhrc.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=25