Tag Archives: sales tips

Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News

Posted by —

0

Tweet about this post

My daughter recently appeared in The Wiz, an updated, musical retelling of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. While the story is similar to the original, all of the music is different, and contains a distinct mid-1970s urban, disco feel. It’s a trip.

In one scene, the Wicked Witch of the West, named Evilene, sings a song called, “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” Watch this clip on YouTube to get a flavor (don’t worry, there’s a point to be made here):

Before The Wiz ever hit Broadway, Shakespeare was penning these words for his play Henry IV: “Come hither, sir. Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news.” Before that, the Greek philosopher and writer, Sophocles, created this dialogue for his character Antigone, “No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.”

Bring Your Client Bad News

Some of you may think it’s your job to always keep the client happy. You think a successful client relationship is one where everyone is always smiling. In other words, don’t nobody bring me no bad news.

You might even avoid bringing in that smarty-pants from the Headquarters Products Group because she’s always stirring the pot, challenging the client, pushing them to think differently. You don’t want her to “screw up the relationship.”

Then, one day, you are caught completely off-guard when you hear that your great client is piloting a concept with one of your competitors. “Don’t worry,” you’re told, “it’s just a small side project the senior executives asked for because they were at some conference and heard about a new approach that supposedly addresses some problems we didn’t even know needed fixing.”

What just happened?

Deliberately Provoking the Client

Someone else was willing to challenge your customer’s status quo. Someone other than you was able to get the senior executives’ attention by telling them something they didn’t know, about a problem they didn’t know they had.

In other words, they were able to gain strategic executive altitude and wrest your client’s attention away from you by bringing them some bad news:

  • They were willing to push the customer out of their comfort zone.
  • They helped the customer see their competitive challenges in a new light.
  • They highlighted specific painful situations and made them unmistakably urgent.
  • They had the guts to create constructive tension and use it to their advantage.

This is counter-intuitive to many companies and salespeople, who are afraid the customer will shoot the messenger. And, put all of your current business at risk.

Throughout history messengers have been vulnerable to attack. In ancient war times, news would be carried by fast runners, who would be sent to battle fronts to report back on victory or defeat, or to request reinforcements. If the news was not good, and the receiver chose to vent their anger, these messengers could meet an untimely and violent death.

But in today’s hyper-competitive, increasingly complex selling environments, where you need to cut through the clutter of sameness and overcome the rise of risk aversion to get your customer to care about your message, you might have to be the bearer of a little bad news.

A March 2009 Harvard Business Review article titled, “In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers,” captured the essence of this concept and coined the phrase “provocation-based selling.”

Briefly stated, the provocation concept contained three components:

  • Identify a critical problem facing your customer – one so ominous that, even in a downturn, they will find the money to address it. Critical problems meet the following criteria: they seriously jeopardize your customers’ ability to compete, they’ve proved stubborn to solve, and you are a credible source of advice on them.
  • Formulate a provocative view of the problem – a fresh perspective that frames the problem in a jarring new light. Rather than finding out how your client’s executives currently view the problem you’ve identified, you determine how they should view it and deliver insight around it.
  • Lodge your provocation – to win support, convey the magnitude, difficulty and urgency of the problem with an executive who has the power to approve the solution you’re proposing – without putting him on the defensive. First, you may have to convince a sponsor/referrer of the idea and get them to make an introduction.

During the early “Warring States” period of China, the concept of chivalry and virtue prevented the executions of messengers sent by opposing sides. This continued as an invisible code of conduct in war where a commanding officer was expected to receive and send back emissaries or diplomatic envoys sent by the enemy unharmed.

Today, your customers are essentially saying, “If you want my attention, tell me something I don’t already know, about a problem I didn’t even know I had.”

They aren’t looking to shoot the messenger. Take your messenger role seriously. Provoking and challenging your customer will be rewarded.

By Tim Riesterer
CMO and SVP Strategic Consulting at Corporate Visions Inc.
Co-author of Customer Message Management

Too Many Taglines are Tag-Alongs

Posted by —

1

Tweet about this post

*********************
Want to learn more about messaging?  Check out one of Corporate Visions’ live Open Sessions for sales professionals, and executive Insights sessions for marketing and sales leaders.
*********************

I’m not a big fan of the Geico gecko commercials.  Too cheeky and not much substance.

Except when it comes to their power position – “15 minutes can save you 15% or more on your car insurance.”  It’s perfect.  Simple, specific and provoking.

You’ve probably seen this recent commercial where the big boss has some big ideas (don’t they all) for new slogans to promote the company.   As I watched this, I couldn’t help but think of the many tagline and elevator pitch exercises I’ve seen over the years.

A lot of time, expense and fancy-pants, agency hocus-pocus goes into creating brand promises, slogans and taglines.  And, here’s the amazing irony.  Most say absolutely nothing, but at the same time they manage to say the same thing as everyone else.

No Sacrifice.  No Positioning.

Too many companies unwittingly find themselves at parity in their messaging.  Often they want to tell you everything about themselves in their brand promises, elevator pitches and mission statements.

What companies should be doing is finding their “value wedge.”  Your value wedge is that sweet spot where you do something unique or in an advantaged way that can be clearly tied back to a prospect pain point.  It’s a wedge, it’s not the whole pie.  And, that’s the power.

Let’s look at the Geico slogan.  They completely nail the prospect’s pain points, while showcasing their uniqueness.

  • 15 minutes – Hey, people don’t have time, and don’t want to make the effort to meet with insurance agents.  I had an insurance agent friend who just retired, saying he was glad he was getting out of the business as the internet was taking over.  He said, “People aren’t going to want to have a relationship with their insurance agent anymore.”  I said, “I hate to break it to you, friend, but people never wanted to have a relationship with their insurance agent.”
  • Save 15 percent or more – Everyone knows insurance is a necessary evil.  No one wants to pay more than they have to.  The thought that your insurance carrier is overcharging you is always in the back of your mind.  Car insurance is a blatant commodity.  Why overpay a middle man for adding no value to the transaction?  If you can make it easy to see if someone is ripping you off, and then painless to make a change, you have a value wedge against the competition.

What can the prospect do better or differently?

The other thing the Geico messaging does right is that it focuses on what the customer can do better, or differently, as a result of your solution.  It doesn’t talk about the insurance, what it is, or even what it does.  It talks about what you can do as a result.

I know what you are thinking.  It’s easy to create a clear, powerful slogan when you are the low-price leader.  Wal-Mart doesn’t require much imagination in their marketing, right?

The same principles apply when you are trying to maintain your prices and protect your margins.  Even as your buyers are trying to force you into a commodity trap.

We worked with a commercial cleaning company that wanted to convince multi-tenant office building owners to choose their cleaning service over the myriad of other national franchise or local options.  They created a breakthrough by tapping into the issue of staff health and absenteeism.  They approached the rental companies and showed them how they could help market the space by promoting their choice in a cleaning company.

How?  By focusing the decision on which cleaning service did the best job “cleaning for health,” not just surface cleaning the space.  Their slogan:  “Healthier clean at no extra cost.”  The landlords used it as a way to differentiate themselves when competing against other office space, explaining to potential renters how their cleaning service uses unique, proven approaches to disinfecting and avoiding cross-contamination to improve building and staff health.

Of course, the cleaning company did a lot of different things, and offered a bunch of cleaning services.  But, they were able to ride their “value wedge” to increasing deal size and close rates.

- Timothy Riesterer
CMO and SVP Strategic Consulting at Corporate Visions Inc.
Co-author of Customer Message Management

Demand Creation Requires Urgency Creation

Posted by — 
Tweet about this post

What does Dwight from NBC’s The Office have to teach us about messaging?  In the thirteenth episode of the fifth season (“Stress Relief”), Dwight tries a unique tactic to teach fire safety (don’t try this at home… or the office).

Watch as much of this clip as you can handle:


You clearly don’t want or need to go to extremes, but creating urgency with context is the key to driving home your point.   How many times have you simply tuned out an alarm because you figured it was just another drill?

As I’m writing this, it’s Saturday in my small suburban community and the siren is going off, signaling it is noon.  But, no one gives it much attention in my house, or neighborhood.  It’s just the “noon whistle.”

Since I live near Milwaukee, WI, tornadoes, hail, and the ominous storms with “damaging” or “straight-line” winds can occur suddenly.  Interestingly, the siren that signals it is noon on a Saturday is the same one my community uses to signal a severe weather emergency.

The siren that is ignored on Saturdays at noon when the weather is nice can clear an entire park within minutes on a threatening summer Saturday.  I’ve heard that the only time the “noon whistle” does not happen is when the weather is bad.  Why?  The Public Safety department doesn’t want people to mistake it for a real emergency.

In other words, the siren uses the exact same sound, but you don’t know what it means without putting it in context.  The siren on a sunny Saturday at noon means nothing.  The same siren with dark clouds or wind means “take shelter now!”  Context gives the message its meaning.

Context Creates Urgency

It’s the same with your company’s marketing messages or value propositions.  Context creates urgency.  It’s what causes your prospect to take action versus listen passively to the same blah, blah, blah they’ve heard 100 times.

Many companies tell their story in a generic way, often comparing themselves to their competitors.  Hoping the prospect will care.  But, there’s no reason for a prospect to do anything different, if they don’t understand the potential impact on them.  Just like the siren during the sunny day vs. the cloudy day.  You need to clearly show your prospects the potential upside or downside of responding to or ignoring the challenges they face – not the features you offer.

This has never been more important for Marketing and Sales leaders to grasp.  As the economy struggles to escape the grips of a recession, you will be working harder than ever to create demand and create urgency — versus trying to beat competitors — just to build a respectable pipeline.

Sales Can’t Wait for BANT-qualified Leads

I recently spoke with a VP of Sales at one of the biggest software companies.  He said that his salespeople are spending significantly more time on “deal creation” than running traditional competitive sales cycles.  “Otherwise, they’d have nothing to do,” he said.

“Unfortunately, it’s the part of the job where they have the least messaging and least training,” he added.  “But, they know they have to do it if they have any chance of succeeding.”

Today more than ever, your marketing and sales efforts need to create opportunities before your prospects have determined a budget.  Why? Because there aren’t enough deals happening fast enough on their own to help your company make its number.

If you wait for Marketing to create awareness and then demand, and focus your sales people exclusively on managing BANT- (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) qualified leads, you are going to hear a lot of crickets chirping on your pipeline calls.

One superstar salesperson recently told me, “If I had to feed my children based on waiting for Marketing leads, they’d starve.”  That’s why he approaches demand generation as a significant part of the job.

The Challenger Model

So many companies get their underwear wadded up over the competitive matrix.  You know the chart I’m talking about.  The one with all the competitors’ names and the images of half moons, quarter moons and full moons to show where you are different from your competitors.

That’s all well and good when you are buried deep in the weeds of a “competitive bake-off.” And you have all you can handle keeping up with RFP’s (requests for proposal).  But those days are a distant memory.  And, they aren’t coming back anytime soon.

You know what else has disappeared?  The days of the elongated, expensive dog-and-pony demo parades.  Prospect decision-makers are telling researchers they want a different kind of engagement with sales people.

According to the Corporate Executive Board’s Sales Executive Council (SEC), the sales profile most likely to succeed today is something called “The Challenger.”  Decision-makers tell SEC they prefer conversations with companies where they, the prospects, learn something new.  They want their sales interactions to provide a new, fresh insight by challenging the status quo and showing them a better way to do something.

Most companies struggle to equip their sales people to have these types of interactions.  Why?  It goes back to the initial premise of this article.  You have the context all wrong.

A company-focused context that emphasizes your product features and tries to take out your competitors on a competitive matrix has nothing to do with what your prospects are looking to accomplish.  You are arguing in your context, but the prospect is living in their context.

The real winners create and deliver messaging in a customer-focused context that points out problems and pitfalls that are threatening your prospect’s ability to meet their objectives, and then aligns your solution to their context.  You also show them how you can help avoid the landmines and pains others like them have experienced.

By getting into your prospect’s context, creating urgency to solve a problem, and showing them how you can uniquely help, you will significantly increase the chances they will care enough to start a buying cycle with you.

And, after all, that’s job #1 today.

- Timothy Riesterer
CMO and SVP Strategic Consulting at Corporate Visions Inc.
Co-author of Customer Message Management

Pop Cans, Parity, and Positioning Your Product

Posted by —

1

Tweet about this post

Three Rules to Help You Create Preference, Not Parity

According to a survey of 9,000 companies by the Corporate Executive Board’s Marketing Leadership Council, only 14% of the so-called unique benefits companies choose to promote drive enough preference to have a commercial impact. This means that 86% of the things companies claim as unique features and benefits are not perceived as significant enough to get customers to consider doing anything different.

The video below illustrates what can happen when your latest and greatest product offering isn’t a whole lot different from what’s already available and you are not connecting your differentiation with the customer pains you solve better.

The bottom line is that most companies overestimate the uniqueness of the benefits they promote. The failure point, according to the Corporate Executive Board, is proximity. Companies are too close to what they do and lose sight of what is relevant enough to drive customer preference and compel them to take action.

Here are three rules for creating preference vs. parity in your value propositions:

Rule #1:  No context. No value proposition.

Due to Marketers’ proximity to their own company and products, they overestimate the uniqueness and relevance of the benefits they choose to promote.

One of the biggest problems with proximity is mistaking customer “touch-points” for value propositions. Companies like to tout such things as customer service as a differentiator. But, the research shows that decision makers see these types of “touch-point” activities as marginal or poor drivers of preference.

Meanwhile, what really gets customers excited is hearing about clear, unique benefits attached to their business needs. Strategic agenda items such as “streamline my supply chain” or “help me get more out of my existing capital investments” are what people will pay you for because it’s relevant to their responsibilities and how people hold them accountable in their organizations.

Rule #2:  No contrast. No value proposition.

Value lies in the contrast between the pain and the gain.

Brain research proves that humans make decisions that are more adaptive than rational. They need to see a change in their environment that makes the status quo no longer acceptable. They need to see that change is coming now and fast. And, they need to see your solution as critical to their survival.

In fact, emotion needs to be injected into your messaging. Even in B2B, you have to get decision makers emotionally invested in the decision. They will justify with facts, but they will buy based on how this will impact their success or failure in their jobs.

Rule #3:  No corroboration. No value proposition.

The third rule pertains to proof points. Most Marketers think of proof points as quantifiable validation of the value you provide. This is true. Actually, it’s partially true.

When you are trying to get prospects to care enough to consider a change and choose you, proof points must corroborate your solution on two levels:

First, you need proof points that will corroborate or turn up the heat on the problem. “Amping up the pain” as we like to call it. Notice at the beginning of this article, we told you that 86% of unique benefits cited by companies don’t create preference. Did it get you thinking about your own benefit statements and value propositions? It hooked you into the story and got you to care about a potential solution.

Second, you need proof points that will corroborate your claims to be able to solve the problem in a meaningful way that eliminates the pain and brings measurable gain around the strategic agenda item you are addressing. Do you have documented results that validate what doing something different tomorrow will mean to your customers – in terms they care about?

Use these three rules when creating your value propositions and you will discover the difference between preference and parity.

To learn more visit this instant webcast:

http://www.brainshark.com/corpv/PP