In that spirit…MARKETING AND SALES FREAKS UNITE. What’s on your mind? How are you? Who are you? Where are you?

Can you take a few minutes to respond to our B-to-B Sales and Marketing Snapshot: 2010?

Take the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7NZMPVX

Macon Raine, in concert (no pun intended) with ZoomInfo, has created this survey to get a better handle on the alignment of sales and marketing.

We’re hopeful the responses will give us a sharper sense of the kind content we can provide that will help b-to-b sales and marketing pros perform their jobs better, grease the sales funnel, and, like, the Grateful Dead realized a long time ago, create life-time value with their customers.  We’ll share the results in a few weeks.

To respond to the survey, please click http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7NZMPVX

Presented by Marcus Tewksbury, Director of Alterian Customer Intelligence

Flip the funnel.  Flatten the funnel.  Get rid of the funnel!  These aren’t some loony, fringe ideas, but rather the thinking of some of the leading marketing minds of our time like Godin, Meerman, and Brogan.  Everyone recognizes that social media is having a huge impact on successful demand generation.  The problem lies in identifying how to apply it to the greatest benefit.
 
Some argue that you should rely entirely upon social media.  That if you position things properly you can just sit back and let the customers come to you.  Well… I don’t know about you, but I don’t know of any salesman that’s made his numbers by sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring.  As with all good things, and social media is a good thing, when done to excess it can be bad.  Like Twinkies and margaritas.
 
When done right, however, social media can have a profound impact on your demand generation efforts.  At a time when it’s getting a lot harder to fill the funnel with email blasts, PPC campaigns, and cold calling social media offers an alternative way to engage with your prospects and customers. 
 
In this webinar Alterian will show you how to cost efficiently keep the top of your funnel primed using a repeatable 4 part framework that covers:
 
Be Interesting:  How to understand your audience’s pains and crafting relevant, interesting stories
Be Accessible: How to use digital to be available at a place and time of the customers choosing
Be Findable:  How to use SEO and tagging to get your message in front of high value prospects
Be Measurable: How to use asset and lead tracking to monetize the impact of your efforts

P.S.  The registration URL is:
http://lfov.net/webrecorder/s?kid=57&cid=LF_82373698

The study compares the responses of the general population to World-Class Sales Organizations, a group that excels in five key performance metrics that correlate to increased revenue. The study also reveals perception gaps among sales representatives, their managers, and C-level executives related to the sales process.

“It’s so critical in this economy to focus on the activities that can produce results now,” said Sam Reese, president and CEO of Miller Heiman. “The results from this study help sales leaders focus their efforts on the best practices that are working for top-performing sales organizations.”

After the survey closes Oct. 30, Miller Heiman analysts will compile the results into a number of reports specific to industries, regions and countries. An executive summary will be available to provide an overall analysis of the most significant results.

To take part in this year’s study, visit www.millerheiman.com/2010research. All participants gain immediate access to the executive summary of the 2009 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study. Everyone who completes the survey by Friday, October 16 will receive an early preview of some of the preliminary results of this year’s study.

Enjoy.

(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.

TWITTER FOR LEADS? Personally, no. We have seen zero new business from Twitter but like the rest of the world, I’m holding out because it looks promising. On the other hand, a number of people that I follow have subscribed to my newsletter and RSS feed. I’ve connected offline with three prospects via Twitter but right now they are only in the early stages of the sales pipeline. The problem I have with Twitter is that most of the activity could be considered “preaching to the converted.”

LINKEDIN FOR LEADS? Personally, yes. Without a doubt, LinkedIn is a great tool for developing and cultivating new leads and new business. It is even more valuable for researching prospects. If forced, I would say that spending time mastering LinkedIn is by far the best investment we have made in our social media activity.

FACEBOOK FOR LEADS? Personally, no and yes. So far, no new business generated from Facebook. However, I’m connected to a few prospects on both LinkedIn and Facebook. Probably more important, I’m connected to quite a few clients on Facebook. Connecting with clients on Facebook makes it easier to share stories and photos of babies and puppies. We also use Facebook to research and monitor the weekend debauchery of prospective employees. So is Facebook a good use of time? Yes. It is a good nurturing tool.

I’ve received calls from clients that want to outsource their “twittering.” I’ve warned them that outsoucing this part of your social media persona is a little bit like trying to outsource your social life.

Just an observation but I think the people that are using these tools most effectively are the ones that can walk the tightrope between sales and marketing with relative ease. The people that function as true advocates, that are empowered to say things online that maybe slightly left of appropriate and the people who are good at building relationships are the best users of social media and the ones that generate the most leads using social media.

We’re all guilty. We write marketing plans. The plan doesn’t survive contact with the customer. But somehow we get busy with billable work. The plan stalls but does get revisited next year. The process repeats.

In most B2B firms, marketing and sales strategies are constantly evolving.  Strategies are dynamic rather than static. In order to survive contact with the fickle customer, the marketing strategy must evolve and keep pace with the customer. The evolution must be rapid and inexpensive. If the new business campaign does not change quickly enough or spends too much money too quickly, the objectives of the plan will never be validated. In terms of organizational flexibility, organizations that preserve marketing budget do not commit overwhelming budget to actions and investment.

This is the essence of an emergent strategy. An emergent strategy emphasizes the benefits of letting the strategy emerge as assumptions and knowledge gradually becoming apparent through contact with the customer. This approach requires a new organizational philosophy that typically manifests itself as a shift from the scenario where management controls production to one where the workers are empowered to innovate and the role of management is to alleviate anything that slows or prevents production.

Emergent new business strategies are a “try before you commit big budget” approach where strategy is an ongoing process of constant learning, experimentation and risk-taking. In the software development world, emergent development approaches include agile, SCRUM, Xtreme Programming and other lightweight development methodologies. You can read more about it and find a good reading list on this topic here at the Herding Cats Blog.

We all have experienced the sales and marketing process in professional services firms. Simply finding an excuse to get in the prospect’s door is often an opportunistic, adaptive, incremental and complex learning process. But it is important to be very clear – the fact that an emergent strategy is opportunistic does not mean the approach is completely ad-hoc. 

Letting strategy emerge through customer interaction provides the environment to learn and evolve the strategy based on real customer requirements. This is not cowboy sales and marketing. There should be process and method to the madness.

In the early stages of business development, new product roll-outs, new business models and new ventures, we go to market with a number of guesses and very few facts about the desires and needs of the customers in that market.

As we sell, we fail, sometimes succeed, fail some more. But most important, we learn what works and what doesn’t. By rapidly repeating this fail, learn, succeed loop, we increase our “knowledge to assumptions” ratio rapidly and hone in on actual customer requirements.

As we learn, we modify the plan quickly before too much cash is spent. This approach is entrepreneurial and the success of web 2.0 properties demonstrates that the best way to figure out what customers want is to put something in front of customers quickly and adapt based on their feedback.

Business owners trained as traditional product marketers, engineers, software architects and other linear thinkers have an automatic bias to define a plan and pursue a strategy. This bias comes from formal project management training where goals, assumptions are generally known. In traditional projects where there are few unknowns, and markets are clearly defined, this approach makes sense.  I would never build a tractor or a nuclear submarine using emergent project management approaches.

Tyler Blain has some great thoughts about “selling” the agile approach to old-school barrel riders. I’ll let you read his blog for a better idea of what a barrel rider is. : )

But when little is known about the needs or wants of the market, a linear approach does not make sense. Rapid, small and highly iterative campaigns help you develop a marketing and sales strategy that speaks directly to customers.

Learning and research comes from both the execution and the measurement of simple campaigns iterations. At the end of each iteration, campaign modifications are made and the process is repeated.

Like agile software development, the goal for each marketing or sales campaign is to create something to which a customer can react.  It should offer a sampling of the key benefits and provide a solution that is simple enough to understand and act upon immediately. To keep a record of the iteration process, keep a project diary with a record of all changes that are performed to various campaigns as they evolve. Update the diary constantly.

Obviously, the goal for every marketing and sales campaign is success. The analysis of every campaign iteration is grounded in customer feedback (success, click-throughs, or even failure).  Heehaw marketing has a good post on the importance of failure in the learning process.

Simple marketing campaigns (experiments) can be executed and measured quickly. Simple projects always take less time to finish than complex projects. The goal of this approach is to do the simplest thing possible….and nothing more. Before you waste a lot more time on brochures and massive rebranding efforts, try simple campaigns that improve your assumption to knowledge ratio.

Macon Raine clients have the opportunity to participate as part of the  Sales Leadership Advisory Board (SLAB) –  a peer network of accomplished sales and marketing executives.  Business owners rarely have the opportunity to consult or collaborate with peers about the challenges of B2B sales and marketing.  SLAB is an organically grown community and forum for peer learning and promoting best practices.

To participate, take the survey here. All survey participants receive a copy of the whitepaper and summary survey result.

The real benefit of the Sales Leadership Advisory Board is access to a team and network that cooperates to assist, nurture and challenge thinking while providing valuable networking, interaction, coaching and mentorship. 

Additional benefits of the Sales Leadership Advisory Board include:

• Benchmarking opportunities
• Peer evaluation
• Lead referrals
• Community and best practices sharing

SLAB helps companies enhance performance and become more successful in all aspects of the B2B sales and marketing cycle.  To learn more about SLAB, please contact ben@maconraine.com.