Car2Go is a car sharing service that lets me skip the hassles of car ownership or conventional car rental. I paid a one time membership fee and — BOOM – I can reserve a car ahead of time, or simply find one via an iPhone app. When I’m done, I just park the car back within the operating area and the car2go Austin service team takes care refueling, cleaning and everything else.

So what is the difference between a car rental service like Enterprise or Avis and Car2Go? The difference between the two companies is not access to a rental vehicle. Instead, Car2Go competes on a range of value-added digital services that are more important than the car itself.

Car2Go provides a range of digital services that make renting the car for an hour more convenient than using a car rental company. These services include the ability to reserve a vehicle from any device, the ability to find a car in my neighborhood, a member card that unlocks the car and activates service, a geolocation function that makes finding a car easy (and charging you extra if you leave the geofence).

The value-added service, not the car, is the real product.

A the critical enabler of that product is billing. The value proposition of billing has changed from the simple delivery of an invoice to a function that measures time, miles and other customer activities.

In other words, Car2Go is using Billing as a strategic asset for building new, dynamic business models that meter, rank and store value AND as a means to disrupt markets and dramatically increase ARPU (average revenue per user).  These types of car rental business models will disrupt business as usual. They also mean I don’t need to wait in line at the airport for a car rental.

Yuri Aguiar, CIO of Ogilvy Worldwide, stated that the time has come to focus on what business users need to get out of technology now that the computing power and the networking services are becoming more and more like a dial tone in their reliability and predictability.

That means increasing business performance is no longer about increasing efficiency (you’ve already streamlined everything there is to streamline). All processes and workflows and systems of record have already been optimized.

The next step is innovation. It’s time to dig into event and usage information to understand customers’ preferences and circumstances, and the ways in which they consume and wish to consume in terms of devices, services, payment methods, and on-demand capabilities. From there, new value-added services can be created that may become more important to your business than the products they support.

The idea behind the website was simple: to reduce marketing and sales costs, it is important that you improve the way you manage your marketing projects. At the risk of repeating myself, why do marketing projects fail?

• Poor definition of project goals, role of marketing
• Overly complicated marketing objectives
• Marketing objectives not clearly defined and difficult or impossible to measure results
• Little-to-no accountability for results
• Not enough momentum

With these failure points in mind we build a lightweight marketing dashboard – nothing special. The only claim to fame for www.marketingreportcard.com is that it forces you to define why you are doing something and then measuring the results.

The problem? No one is really using the website except me. So what do you think? Take a look at it and let me know if I should invest more to improve the usability or just kill it?

Thanks.

A new set of services is emerging. Content, applications, data and cloud-attached brick and mortar services such as Netflix and Car2Go are disruption traditional markets and reaching new types of customers and realized new sources of dynamic revenues and new profits.

Companies thinking about launching these types of services are embracing concepts such as lean, agile development and perpetual beta as they adapt to the fast incremental cycles necessary to launch new services. Product launch time frames must compress and new services should be launched in weeks.

Simple pricing models such as “unlimited” or “all you can eat” are being replaced by activity based pricing that customizes a consumer’s utilization of a service to an optimum price level.

That means the financial and technical infrastructure required to support these new product launches must also undergo transformation.
Finally, it means billing systems, order to cash processes and more importantly the set of processes called Activity to Cash must be customized and implemented in unique ways for every product launch.

How is billing transforming your business? How are pricing and promotional bundles changing the way you engage with customers?

We are looking for beta testers for our new website called MarketingReportCard.com – a marketing measurement dashboard. Designed for small to mid-size businesses, companies can login to the beta version of the MarketingReportCard.com and document and measure tactical marketing results over time.

The MarketingReportCard.com beta is simple and free to use. Honestly, the biggest advantage of the marketing report card methodology is the fact that everyone agrees on the key performance indicators upfront. If you can agree on how you are measuring your marketing, it becomes easier to improve your marketing performance.

MarketingReportCard.com was originally envisioned as a dashboard for small and medium sized companies seeking a simple way to evaluate tactical marketing performance. Marketers use this tool identify, agree upon Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and measure marketing performance month over month, so they can quickly see when performance is slipping and when to take corrective action.  To be effective, KPIs must be monitored and updated monthly. Continuous monitoring allows marketers to quickly take action when performance drops below benchmark levels.

The BETA version of the MarketingReportCard.com uses a simple spreadsheet interface that makes the learning curve virtually non-existent and also to make data collection quick and painless.   Since no two companies are the same, marketers using MarketingReportCard.com can define their own KPIs as well as their own methods for weighting and measurement.

To register for the beta, simply visit MarketingReportCard.com to register. No credit card or other financial information is required to participate.

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.

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

In concert (no pun intended) with ZoomInfo, we’ve 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

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

Maybe this is why CSO Insights reported that only 52% of sales reps met their quota in 2009? 

Selling is the management of a very complex business process. It is complex because customers aren’t predictable, they don’t always act reasonably. They need sales because they value the continuity of contact.  Customers can’t have a relationship with your brand; they need a person to have a relationship with.  

Do the math, a top closer with a $2 million annual quota creates value worth $1000 per hour ($2,000,000/2000 hours=$1000/hour). Asking your top relationship managers to turn over stones looking for leads and updating CRM is costing your organization big. Prospecting is expensive.

In the 2010 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, fewer than one out of five study participants reported they use a prospecting plan. Yet, a full three quarters of top-performing sales organizations said they are consistent in this activity.  There is a disconnect somewhere.

At some point, as your sales organization grows, you’ll find it more cost effective to insert specialists into the process rather than ask your closers to manage the entire process. To triple sales, instead of tripling the size of the sales organization, the smart money looks for ways to triple the effectiveness of the best closers.    

So how should you do this? What is the fastest way to break away from the old habits and build new, scalable, repeatable and affordable processes for creating new sales opportunities for your best closers?

• The first task is the task of definition: Don’t fight it anymore. Go ahead and ignore the marketing purists who believe sales and marketing are different. For you, now, as you think about taking the next step in the evolution of your sales organization and as you try to stretch your very limited budget, the job of marketing is to create new opportunities for sales.  Period. The end.  The job of sales is to carefully manage those opportunities and relationships until they are ready to become customers and provide feedback on ways to streamline and improve the marketing activities.
• Get on the same page. Get on the same page with what a customer actually looks like… less than a third of Miller Heiman’s study participants agreed that their sales and marketing organizations are aligned in what their customers want and need. 
   
• Decrapify your marketing: a January 2009 Customer Experience Panel conducted by IDC Global asked “which of the following is the #1 thing a rep can do to improve the value of your relationships with the sales team and the vendor they represent?” More than 40% of respondents said: “Put aside the generic sales pitch.” This means – it is okay to go ‘off message’ or off-brand as you help your people build sustainable relationships with your customers.  
   
• Give sales people time to do what they do best: It is easy to under-estimate the amount of work required to convert a qualified lead into a sale. From justifying ROI, recruiting and coaching an internal champion, managing expectations and competitive positioning, the skills required for successful selling are very different from the skills required for successful prospecting. Expecting the same person to excel at both is unreasonable.
   
• Lead generation must become a core competency: Cold calling, tradeshows, advertising and other big marketing tactics still work for lead generation. However, the time is not far away when a consistent program of long-tail content, SEO and word of mouth marketing will become your primary source of leads.  The time is now to start understanding this reality and begin preparing your organization for the inevitable.
   
• Simple data matters: In B2B, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to know that you can’t sell something to someone unless you know their email, title, mailing address, company affiliation, title and phone number. In other words, you can’t sell something to someone unless you know who they are. Getting the right data, keeping the data clean and cultivating the contact data until the prospective customer is ready to have a conversation matters more than most think.  If you love your data, your data will love you back.
   
• Slightly more complex data is even better: once your data is clean, you are then ready for the big time with lead scoring and modeling “online body language” by tracking a prospect’s visits to the website, webinar attendance, downloads and other behavior to determine the best times to enage the sales team.  You can’t do the fun stuff until you get your data under control.
   
• How many net new names did you add to the CRM each month?  Don’t be content with the existing database. Every month there should a concerted effort to bring new names into CRM.  Even if you have a huge flow of inbound leads into your website each month, the acquisition of new names ensures your marketing remains proactive as you hunt for new key accounts.

The type of person comfortable cleaning data, that understands key account selling and is happy being the guardian of data is very different from the type of person happiest in front of customers. It may be the best qualified person for this role is not a sales person at all – but rather a specialist that understands the tools and techniques of marketing AND selling

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