(This article was a collaboration between Robert Hamilton and myself)

It seems every week we talk to just another IT services shop trying to kick-start their marketing and sales process. We sit down with the founder and ask the same question: “so how are you different from all the other firms out there?”

When we ask that question, we get the same answer: we have a global delivery model, we are client centric, we put people first, we are domain experts and/or we really understand our clients.

Woop do flipping do. Welcome to the club. With those credentials, you are beautiful and unique, just like everyone else.  Your competitors have the same answer. They have a global delivery model, they are client centric, they put people first, they are domain experts and they really understand their clients.

So if you are just another IT services shop, what do you do when it comes to answering the question: “so how are you different from all the other firms out there?”  How do you differentiate yourself in the undifferentiated world of IT Services?

There are really three interrelated ways to answer that question. All three answers build on each other and are critical to each other. But explaining all of them here would take too long and is beyond the scope of this post.

The first answer is “trusted customer relationships.” We believe this answer is most critical, actionable and more important and therefore will be the basis of this article. The second answer falls into the camp of messaging, positioning, and defensible-niche creation. We’ll discuss that answer in the next article.  The third answer comes at the question from the inside-out perspective – company  culture, decision making process, and internal trust. Again, this is a topic for another article.

Trusted Relationships and Hunting Big Accounts –  the founder’s problem of scale

Say the word “trusted customer relationships” and many definitions and meanings come to mind. Each definition has a different context. In this case, we need to be very specific about context and so we want to talk about a very specific scenario.

In our work with professional services firms in the $1 to $5 million/year revenue range, what we generally see is a founder who has left a senior Fortune 500 IT position to start a company. As a first customer, the new entrepreneur lands his account by selling services back to his former employer – a whale (a large farmable account capable of more than $1M annual billings and a well known brand or reputation).

In this scenario, other than a trusted relationship, there is very little that on the IT services menu that differentiates the IT services shop from the competition. Aside from marginal differences in talent, culture, expertise and methodology, almost every other $1M to $5M competing IT services firm can do a job as well as any other.

So when we talk about trusted customer relationships, we’re talking about founders who are friends with their new clients. They have leveraged a deep pre-existing relationship to become entrepreneurs. This relationship was built over many years through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency.

Because of the relationship, the founder brings speed and nimbleness to problem solving. This is due to the fact that he or she has an intuitive grasp of the project goal (i.e. benefit to the company) AND the culture’s style of generating support for the goal AND the culture’s preferred style of organizing execution toward the goal.  Together all this means a relationship that is hard to duplicate.

The problem of scaling this kind of relationship begins when the founder wants to find another major whale sized account that is just as profitable and farmable as the first major account.

The entire problem for finding the second whale is creating what was “second nature” with the founder’s former employer.  How do you replicate in the selling and marketing process the relationships that were created over time through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency?

The answer (and the currency by which the trust is established, earned and scaled) is USEFULNESS.

In sales-processes, the conversations, the relationships, the personal network and persuasion have always been the de facto currency. 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 B2B, the personal brand of the founder is really all that matters when it comes to finding the next whale.

And, if you accept the fact that, for IT services firms of this size, the definition of a successful marketing and sales campaign could be the addition of one new whale per year. In this context, the sales and marketing discussion takes on an interesting new perspective.

The web and social media did not create the idea of a personal brand. Leading with value and emphasizing relationship value over a quick-transaction have always been the hallmarks of successful professional services organizations.

The only difference that social media makes is that the technology finally got granular enough and accessible enough and instantiated enough to be useful in facilitating this level of the ageless human dialog of value exchange.

The tendency of people to become known through repeat encounters is as old as walking upright – and establishing a brand of credibility and openness to repeat transaction is earned by being accessible and broadly useful to the challenges prospects face – across the whole lifecycle of the problem solution.

Unfortunately, many founders of professional services organizations somehow got disconnected from this simple truth. You can see this in their marketing departments – day after day churning out me too SharePoint webinars with co-op Microsoft funds. If everyone is using the same campaign materials and selling the same products, then there is no differentiation.

For that and many other reasons, a dedicated emphasis on personal branding may overlap and replace some of the “traditional” tactics in marketing’s tool chest. The highest value of these personal branding activities is how they reach past the product attributes and into the underlying human issues beneath the problem the prospect company is experiencing.

Professional services marketing needs to take the next step to scale personal branding. Marketing’s ability to speak to, or at least package the pitch, to speak to this broad set of human issues feels like the leg up that the sales organization needs in order to stand out, be remembered, and be valued as sources of solid thinking, not just products.  Again, before trusted advisor, before regular meeting, even before someone recognized your name comes USEFULNESS – which we believe is the new universal of finding and growing a business through new sales. 

At first, this approach is not a substitute for the “core” business building activities. Over time, however, it will replace the shopworn marketing tactics that just aren’t working like they used to. Marketing will soon be measured by its ability to reach into the inner recesses of the decision process around every significant buying decision. The way buying decisions are made is so complex within major accounts that nothing other than pure USEFULNESS could penetrate the dialog.

Great sales people have always done this – communicated the solution when it was time, and then spoken in specific about how it could be sold inside by the champion, and how it would be implemented, and described the benefits that would accrue. Equipping the internal champion to carry the message further and generate some kudos for himself in the process is natural.

Tom Searcy, author of “Hunt Big Sales” says “People only buy what they can safely sell to others, or defend if challenged. Our job as whale hunters is to equip and train the buyers to defend themselves from the attacks that will come later.”

It is in such a discussion where you first get to cross over into the advisor role, almost coaching the internal champion on how to make the case succinctly for your solution. Not only is this valuable, but you quickly pick up other cues about the company’s comfort level with the disruption that comes with change, entrenched interests and some of their agendas, priority of the need against other investments the company is making, etc.  These are exactly the kind of things that are “walking around knowledge” for the recently exited employee when he hangs out his shingle and sells services to his former employer.

In transferring this knowledge to new whales, over time, the more useful encounters you have with the prospect/customer, the more quickly you can get to equipping them to defend themselves and eventually co-own your goal. Co-owning a goal is not just implementing the solution, but helping your internal champion adequately share and evolve the problem and its solution.

Co-ownership is an exploration of how the whale’s culture generates appropriately widespread concurrence on this problem. How does it get on the priority list of problems to be attacked? How does the company’s culture establish resources for those sufficiently high-priority problems it decides to attack? What is the current decision-maker’s role in those deliberations about priority and resources?

When these questions are answered, THEN, only THEN can the sales machinery begin sketching a proposal that speaks to prospective solutions AND how to help steer consideration of those solutions through the company’s internal machinery, equipping the current decision-maker to advance the dialog, not just show a product list and price sheet from a vendor.

Trying to short-circuit this natural process is much like getting married on a first date. It only happens to a lucky few.

The sales process must itself be value-add if it is to stand out from the competition’s.  As satisfying as it would be to sit in a prospect’s office and take an order, most substantial-dollar transactions cast a 6 to 18 month shadow in front of them. Helping with the decision dynamics of getting your solution chosen is a way to equip your internal champion, to lead with value, and to stand apart from the show-up-and-throw-up types. 

In our experience working with IT services organizations, the one true differentiator that separates one IT services firm from another is the relationship it has with clients. Unfortunately, this aggregate concept is tired, shop worn and not even a memorable cliché.

Yet, if the personal relationships of the firm are the true differentiator, then the co-ownership of problems that keep the project on track, on the priority list (to preserve resource allocation) and interim results appropriately socialized to maintain support.  These dimensions are what is inside the “relationship” concept and the goal of ever more familiarity is ever faster grasp of the goal of co-ownership.

The ideal scenario for finding the next whale begins with discovery of the client’s pain-points, or challenges, or problems – because then the dialog can begin about possible solutions.  All too often, in the rush to “close the deal” we’ve seen too many founders jump straight from this discovery to an internal mapping back to his company’s potential products and services for addressing the prospect’s problems.

Instead of rushing to a solution, co-ownership should begin with fresh perspective about the issues surrounding the problems, the solutions, the challenges, the benefits, untethered to promotional push to sell the products.  It’s the intellectual property that is related to the solution-provider’s area of specialty that can be scattered around like seeds, to find fertile ground wherever they can. 

This really is where the payoff is when it comes time for the customer to source his next solution – it shows when the sales person gets the call telling him of the need, it shows in the degree of involvement in helping shape understanding of the need, perhaps even contributing to the internal defense document to secure funding. 

This is far beyond “will the prospect know whom to call” when he needs something.  In every case, the IT services firm that wins disproportionately is the one that has established trusted relationships with clients, possibly  many years in advance of projects.  

Recurring features of such a relationship include:

SKIN IN THE GAME.  Perhaps this is better framed as alignment. Do you have skin in the game? Are your fees tied to the client achieving their project goals as well as their business goals? How closely is your success tied to the client’s success?

TRANSPARENCY. This is another component of co-ownership. When your profitability is aligned with the client’s goals, there is a level of transparency and trust built into the transaction.

RELATIONSHIPS. Invariably project success will involve interactions beyond just the sales person and the internal champion – to what degree does the sales person have relationships with sources of special knowledge or experience when helping refine a solution?

ACCUMULATED LEARNING.  The essence of repeat-interaction is that no one has to start from a blank sheet to establish a baseline understanding of the challenge, the resources, the culture, the goals.  The sales person with a trusted relationship is this “on steroids.”  Not just having access to previous purchases, but having notes about issues learned while implementing the solution, technical notes, people notes, management hot-buttons, etc that broaden the reach of the internal champion as he navigates the project.

The items listed above, when appropriately investigated, can lead you to the answer of what is different. It can help you help the client mitigate risks (and in some cases share risk) as well as understand your critical thinking abilities.

If product specs, delivery times, rates, and service level guarantees are all very close and can be put on the IT “menu,” where can the differentiation come from?  As all veteran sales stars know, the differentiation happens when youhuman beings finally make sense of chaos –  when data becomes information, specs are aligned with goals, project timeline get fleshed out and dollars are allocated.

The IT Menu of services can be neat, clinical and rational; the messy part is in the eating. No one ever gets nourished consuming the menu.

What else should I add to this list?

Decent article here about content and the “emerging role” of marketers as publishers. Like a magazine, marketers should start thinking about their editorial calendar and pushing a new edition out every month to their customers and salesforce.

I'm feeding the feed

Two posts from http://mimasummit2.blogspot.com/ caught my eye. I’m going to respond to both at the same time. Here are the posts….

Topic #1: Keynote presenter, Ze Frank says, “You have a paradigm shift coming around. There is so much that happens as soon as you release anything — you get all this feedback…you get unexpected usage patterns, you get requests for new things, you get crises.” So, whose job is it to respond to all of these feedback, and how should they go about doing it?Topic #2: Speaker Leah Buley asks, “What’s the process for creative brainstorming at your company? Who gets involved with creative exploration, and how do they do it?

Make it easy
Sam Mele, founder and managing director of Firm58 (www.firm58.com), a provider of on-demand post-trade management solutions sells by reducing the buyer’s purchasing risk.

“To understand how we reduce buyer risk,” said Mele, “it is important to understand the context of our business. In the capital markets, the vast majority of trades are now executed electronically – so the number of trades has gone up, but the profit on each trade has gone down. This has caused a strain on post-execution. Brokers, trading firms and exchanges need more efficient ways to bill their clients, calculate payouts, fees and commissions and require daily visibility to gross and net, realized and unrealized P&L. That’s where we come in.”

There are significant perceived risks in letting someone else provide software to manage the middle and back-office. Mele says overcoming these objections has become easier because Firm58 can demonstrate the scalability and reliability to manage all these critical functions as a hosted service.

“Our customers are in the “business” of managing risk,” said Mele. “They are initially reluctant to provide third parties access to their transaction data. We overcome this objection by demonstrating our how our software provides cost savings but also can increase revenues in an extremely safe and secure environment. Additionally, we’re obsessed with client service and we’ve based our business model from the perspective of our clients – we don’t require any upfront fees, we charge monthly, and we’re one of the few software companies not looking to lock people into long-term deals. Our feeling is that if we don’t satisfy a client’s business issues and add value to the organization on a daily basis, the client should have every right to terminate our contract and seek other services. All told we make every attempt to mitigate our client’s risk of doing business with us.”

Work with Trusted Parties

Michael Petitti, Chief Marketing Officer for Trustwave (www.trustwave.com), has had the greatest success in working through trusted parties such as banks and payment service providers to reach his end-user clients: retailers.
Despite the high profile security breaches of the past several years that have kept companies in the spotlight with less than flattering coverage, many businesses – especially small-to-medium sized businesses – are not motivated to ensure the security of their systems that handle sensitive consumer information such as credit card data. For these businesses, the relationship with their acquiring bank – their underwriter and principal service provider – tends to govern their behavior when it comes to securing information and complying with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

“Through our relationships with many of the top acquiring banks, we have been able to provide service to more than 40,000 businesses throughout the world,” said Petitti. “In a world in which scams, such as ‘phishing,’ continue to proliferate, trust matters more than ever to business. Not only does working with the banks eliminate the challenge of trying to market and sell to millions of businesses directly, it positions Trustwave as a “trusted” entity to the retailer.”

Demonstrate a clear market advantage…and deliver on it.

Lanworth’s director of sales, John Terzich, supplies hedge funds and large commodity trading firms with advance information on global grain supply. Terzich likes to keep things simple because Lanworth’s (www.lanworth.com) entire value proposition is time and accuracy.

“We provide key acres and yield data in advance of the USDA predictions and reports.,” said Terzich. “Our clients measure our service in a very defined way. It is our job to deliver to a very simple expectation … did our customers gain a competitive market advantage when placing their positions in the commodities we report and did they earn a greater return or minimize their risk?”

Make it worthwhile for your customers to give you referrals

Michael Kiefer, general manager of BrandProtect (www.brandprotect.com), a domain monitoring and anti-phishing service for financial institutions, has integrated referrals into the sales process.

“Our customers benefit by collectively sharing intelligence about phishing attacks. An attack on one bank generally shares unique characteristics with attacks on other banks. In some cases, the same criminals are responsible for both attacks. By encouraging our customers to refer other banks, our customers benefit by having access to better information and ultimately are made safer by banding together,” said Kiefer.

Kiefer believes each Internet ecosystem like insurance or banking or e-commerce, has their own specific Petri dish of problems/opportunities. “By facilitating referrals and community, and bringing together our customers and their eco-systems, we make everyone stronger.”

Stop selling

Coley Perry, sales and marketing manager with Solution Partners has seen no let-up in demand for talented technologists in the financial sector.

“In the technology staffing business, we’re seeing no shortage of demand from financial services,” said Perry. “Financial services is totally driven by the best and brightest. Banks, trading firms, exchanges, or whatever, they all want the best and the brightest. Our customers have a very low tolerance for stupidity and nonsense. So we lead with candidates and don’t try to sell. These days people are way too jaded to be sold.”

Even more important…stop selling the technology

According to Darren Schwartz, CEO and founder of SureSpeak, LLC, (www.surespeak.com) one secret to selling technology in a volatile economy is to stop selling the technology.

“We sell a training platform to call centers and trainers in the financial services industries. Our technology helps call center reps practice and model sales conversations and customer service scenarios they encounter on the job,” said Schwartz. “While the technology itself is important, what our customers are really buying is improved productivity – more time to manage, more time to capture, distribute and archive best practices, more time to coach and mentor the most promising employees. That’s where we focus our message.”

If possible, solve more than one problem

J. Schwan, senior partner of Solstice Consulting (www.solstice-consulting.com), sells by trying to solve multiple pain points with one solution.

“Financial services companies tend to be faced with three common problems; data throughput, data quality and regulatory compliance,” said Schwan. “If you can help solve any one of those issues while addressing the other two, you’re going to have an interested buyer.”

Beware of “simple implementations”
For Peter Tapling, CEO of Authentify (www.authentify.com), selling out of band authentication technology into financial services firms means you need to talk the talk and walk the walk.

“Financial services companies operate under a host of regulatory and compliance constraints. This means there is no such thing as a “simple implementation,” said Tapling who advises companies to be aware of these constraints and be ready to help address them on two fronts: 1) contracting (be prepared to be “vetted” as a 3rd party to these compliance efforts) and 2) project (review and testing cycles are greatly increase as everyone who needs to in their organization has their say).”

“There are no simple implementations. Build dealing with these complexities into your pricing and forecasting cycles. Otherwise, you will be frustrated with all of the extra effort that you will end up providing for free,” said Tapling.

Be trusted (and in the right place at the right time)

Mike Flannery, a VP of Sales for Business Only Broadband (www.bobbroadband.com), returned to selling after a ten year hiatus. “Back in the 90s, selling technology was a much different game than it is today. Back then it was easier to make a phone call into a company, and set a meeting with buyer provided you had a reasonable value proposition.”

Today, says Flannery, it is challenging just getting in touch with someone by phone. The phone is a difficult way to sell. Selling is becoming more about networking, joining associations, talking to others, leverage existing customers and ask them for referrals.

“What I have found is that there are so many different technology offerings being put in front of buyers, no one has time to manage all the information. It doesn’t matter how compelling your value proposition is,” said Flannery. “You need a trusted relationship to make any traction.”

Ben Bradley is the managing director of the Bradley Wiltjer Marketing Group — a B2B marketing, lead generation and PR agency for companies with complex sales cycles. Want to be featured in an upcoming article? Feel free to e-mail bbradley@bradleywiltjer.com with your suggestions.

We asked some local technology entrepreneurs to share some quick marketing advice for other technologists. If you’d like to contribute to this list, please email bbradley @ bradleywiltjer dot com.

1. Be findable: According to Alex Machinis, president of SpatialPoint (www.spatialpoint.com), findability is the degree to which an object can be found, discovered or located. Being findable means that no matter how or what you sell, your customers and prospects can find you easily. The concept of “being findable” applies equally to a brick and mortar store front, to the geographic zones that one serves (and does not), to organic search engine rankings or how product information is organized and represented in a reseller’s catalog. No matter what your industry, as the effectiveness of advertising continues to decrease, buyers must be able to find you in order to make informed decisions about you.

2. Get the prospect the right answer fast to win more deals: A JDPowers study showed that 30% of the reason for losing deals is lack of responsiveness by reps. “Typically the first salesperson back to the prospective customer with a good proposal that meets the customer’s needs gets locked into the customer’s mind as the vendor of choice and ultimately wins the deal,” says Godard Abel, founder of BigMachines, Inc., (bigmachines.com). Abel believes competitors become “column fodder” by responding slowly or not listening to the customer and have their proposal miss the mark.

3. Your brand is an asset: No matter what your size, your brand deserves protection, says Michael Kiefer, global SVP for BrandProtect (brandprotect.com). Kiefer, an expert in enterprise Internet risk mitigation, believes if your business depends on a positive internet reputation, then you must decisively manage your reputation online. Negative brand sentiment is virtually impossible to erase. No matter how large or small your firm, brands and ecosystems are routinely damaged by disgruntled employees, partners, online vandals and criminals. Kiefer advises small businesses to watch their domains, web linkages, and their brand chatter on the Internet, usergroups and blogs.

4. Listen to what your clients are telling you. Dan Swartz, founder of Midmarketer.com – (midmarketer.com) says current clients and prospects can tell you a lot about your B2B marketing efforts. Do they really know who you are or what you do? What are the biggest misconceptions of your organization? Taking a close look and listen to what the people outside your organization are saying will always bring some great insight into your marketing direction. There’s often many one-time events and sporadic activity in B2B marketing. Because these events always seem to stand out, they usually get the attention of many marketers. Be sure to focus on trends, and not just “blips” on the radar- doing so will give you a clear and objective outlook on marketing efforts.

5. Facilitating knowledge is the strongest form of marketing: Malcolm Lotzof, CEO of Inxpo (www.inxpo.com) says the most knowledgeable sales people generally generate the highest revenue. “This is because knowledge breeds comfort and comfort closes the deal. The same logic goes for marketing, especially in the B2B world where products and services are complex. Traditional marketing tools don’t provide comfort because they do not put internal experts who have the knowledge in front of all our prospects. However using web 2.0 tools in virtual environments we can now give the key knowledge sources “an interactive presence” in front of all prospects. Interactive presence blows away static presentation every single time.”

6. Use metrics – even if the metrics change: Marketing measurement is not a thing, advises Michael A. Davis, CEO of Savid Technology (savidtech.com). “It is a process. The process of measuring your marketing performance will lead to new insight and perspectives that will help you adapt and hone your process over time. If your metrics don’t work, don’t be afraid to change them. Don’t be afraid when your key marketing metrics change. In fact, be happy that your metrics are evolving and you are learning more about your customers.”

7. Your sales people are your brand: John Aiello, CEO of SAVO (http://www.savogroup.com), believes a great brand is built by positive, repeated actions. Every sales interaction (good or bad) represents the brand. Therefore, every time your sales representatives put your message in front of your prospective customers, your brand is being represented. Every sales conversation is an opportunity to build brand awareness and loyalty. In fact, says Aiello, the promise of the brand is not just about the product (no matter how great), it is about the personal connections, trust and consistency necessary to build a relationship with key buyers. When allocating resources to build your brand in the market, you should not lose sight of this critical factor.

The answer might be human nature, says Nicole Wicks, president of ReferNow.com – an online referral rewards and customer loyalty marketing service.

“Exercise and eating right requires change. It’s hard work. The same goes with asking for referrals. It takes practice and time to integrate referrals into everything you do, but it works,” said Wicks.

Wicks believes far too many organizations don’t give referrals the attention they deserve.

“You walk into a business and see they offer a cash bounty for referring a friend. This is usually a sign posted near the door or on the front desk. But the the front desk people or the sales guy who signed you up in the first place never mention the program,” she says.

Wicks believes Lifetime Fitness is one of the industry leaders in referral rewards programs.

“Lifetime Fitness has done a great job of taking the risk off the table. When the person who is referring a friend can actually give a discount to the prospective member, everyone wins,” said Wicks. “It gives a prospective member an opportunity to try it. It gives the current member something of value that they can pass along. It is a win-win for everyone.”

Wicks advises new businesses to look at new members AND employees as champions of the brand.

“The people that carry your torch, the people that carry your brand out to the rest of the world are your current customers – so treat them well! Every company should have a program or a system in place to reward the people that are telling the world about you,” said Wicks. “Your members don’t spend their days and nights thinking about your bottom line,” Wicks said. “So it’s okay to ask for referrals and not feel awkward about it. As your product adds value to the member, the number of referrals you receive should increase.”

Wicks believes it does not matter if you ask for referrals before, during or after the sale – the hard work, she explains, is getting the courage to simply ask. “Don’t ask once. Ask again and again and again and I guarantee you’ll grow your business,” Wicks said.

 

www.refernow.com

The ability to be located and found, i.e. findability, is one of the most important facets of marketing today.

Findability, however, is not only about being found on the Internet or whether users can navigate a company’s website; it is also about the physical realm. Whether online or offline, findability is the customer’s capacity to access clear, useful information throughout the entire purchase decision process.

A prospect who is evaluating your company uses a process that includes the following key phases: defining selection sets, vendor research, vendor selection, vendor filtering and then purchase consummation. This can happen online or offline. Understanding your findability inside eash of these phases is critically important.

The company that devotes the time and effort to understand and incorporate findability into each element of the decision process has much to gain. Organizations that support the customer in finding the information required through the purchase decision process will find, in the concept of findability, a direct and very positive correlation between findability and increased sales.