How to stop looking stupid on sales calls

Mark Price

Over and over, we all share the same experience.  Some salesperson calls you on the phone, and immediately launches into a laundry list of all the amazing things that their product does, after barely saying “hello.”  It is as if they are on a game show, trying to get the right answer by dumping enough words into the call, hoping that some chance phrase lights your interest before you hang up.

Salespeople call me anywhere from 4-8 times daily, all with some variation on the same pitch.

And they wonder why they have such little success.

Most companies, including some of the largest sales organizations in the country, follow the same approach:  Call, describe your product and ask if they are interested in purchasing.  If not, then hang up and go to the next name on the list.  The goal is to move through the list and find any opportunities you can in the shortest amount of time.

While they may achieve some short-term sales wins, the net effect of such a sales approach is to alienate a larger and larger share of your prospect pool.  That share by the way, includes a valuable group –prospects who may be willing to buy later, but lack the information and clear benefit to make the switch at this moment.

When you try to force a sale on those prospects and then repeat the same process over and over again, you create three impacts.  Your prospects learn that:

1. You are less interested in them than you are in yourself

2.  You are not to be trusted

3. You do not care for them as individuals

The net result is not only do you fall out of the “circle of trust” with prospects, you also make it more unlikely that the prospect will make any decision at all.  In a world where there is no trust, who can you believe in?

But there is another way.

The top business development efforts today combine the best of database marketing, publishing and sales in order to build relationships with key prospects, nurturing them and building trust until they are ready to make a sale.  The process is called Content Based Selling (CBS), and it hold potential to reinvent relationships with prospects and lead gen from now on.

I will write in more detail about CBS in my next post, but the high-level approach is to determine NOT whether a prospect is ready to buy, but instead, what information they need to have to be ready to make a decision – what questions, what concerns, what objections do they need to overcome in the process of making a decision.  By providing impartial information to prospects based on those specific needs, you can build trust and relationships over time – critical ingredients in building a stable, growing pipeline of business.

Follow Content Based Selling and you will be able to:

• Stop cold calling in your firm
• Build an accurate, predictable sales pipeline
• Drive insights from prospect needs to improve your marketing and customer service experience as well as sales process
• Enjoy your work more every day while you consistently surpass your goals

In my next post, I will tell you what to do so Content Based Sales can revolutionize your business and your career.

Mark Price is Managing Partner of M Squared Group, a consulting firm focused on understanding and building customer relationships, and the author of the blog “Cultivating Your Customers,” where he writes about practical approaches to improve customer retention and overall customer value. 

4 Challenges to Improving Email Response (and How to Overcome Them)

Mark Price

Email is so inexpensive (compared to direct mail) that many of my clients are moving toward making it their primary customer communication vehicle.  Yet these clients discover that these emails, while still profitable due to their low cost, do not drive meaningful revenue.  In response, they email and email, trying to make up for poor performance with increased frequency.  But all that does is annoy customers and make them more likely to delete their emails in the future.

Yet, these same companies, in all their email blasting, are missing a fundament strategy that can change their results in a moment – customers love personalization.  Multiple pieces of research have shown that response rates to e-mail increase by up to 50% based on the amount of personalization that can be added to that e-mail.

If this research is true, then the question to ask is: why do marketers not personalize their email?

There are four reasons why smart marketers end up sending generic, “blast” e-mails to their customers – technology, time, data and measurement.

1. Don't have the right technology:  In many companies, the software that marketers use to send e-mail does not permit personalization without coding and HTML manipulation.  Most email software tools have the capability for personalization; however, those personalization modules are often available as a surcharge, which many marketing organizations have not chosen to take.
2. No time:  Personalization email requires time and planning, and most digital marketers are significantly lacking in those two areas. It is NOT that they do not know how to plan; it is just a tiny bit slower in order to achieve dramatic short-term and long-term benefits.  Instead, enamored of the speed of digital marketing, management just keeps asking for more and more, faster and faster.  As a result, most digital marketers I know are in danger of spontaneous combustion!
3. Can't get the data:  In order to personalize communications you must know something about your customers.  It is not that the company lacks the data about customer behavior; it is that the data has not been analyzed and then provided to the marketers in a form that can be used in the e-mail tool.  Without good data, email marketers end up falling back on the same old blast, blast, blast.
4. No measurement:  As digital marketers sprint to fill ever increasing management requirements in less time with little data, there is rarely enough time to set up measurement strategies at the outset and then follow through, measure the results and incorporate the learning in subsequent marketing efforts. Even the basics like Measuring Marketing With Control Groups and Champion/Challenger approaches fall to the wayside. 

The result of these challenges is an ever-increasing barrage of undifferentiated emails, teaching customers that the company does not care about their needs and leading to lower response rates and higher commoditization.

So what’s a digital marketer to do in the face of such challenges?  Find another profession?

If you are stuck in this situation, then No Excuses Marketing is for you.  No Excuses Marketing is a series of 7 common-sense, low-budget approaches to improving marketing in your organization, now. 

Two in particular apply to digital marketers stuck on the treadmill.  They are:

·      Use partners to add resources. 

Email software companies frequently have teams that can implement personalized email for you, on a trial basis, to demonstrate the economic argument for adding the personalization module to their software.  Leverage their teams to add additional, experienced resources to show your management just how much you can improve results with personalized email.

·      Work spreadsheets hard to move fast. 

Rather than conducting a complex analysis to determine which customers should be purchasing what products or services, simple queries can provide you with lists of past customers of those products.  Take those lists and run cross-sell programs.  Make sure your sales and customer service teams are ready and then measure the campaigns compared to the same campaign to a regular, undifferentiated customer list. 

There are many other nuggets in No Excuses Marketing, but these two can get you started making the business case for a planning data-driven approach email personalization.

Mark Price is Managing Partner of M Squared Group, a consulting firm focused on understanding and building customer relationships, and the author of the blog “Cultivating Your Customers,” where he writes about practical approaches to improve customer retention and overall customer value.

Don’t Forget About News Releases!

Shallon Hagen

Controversy about the future of newspapers swarms headlines every day. There is no doubt that newspapers have to reconsider how they go to market with their product and service. Some newspapers have already begun charging for online subscriptions. No matter what the future holds for newspapers, the one thing that won’t change is the need to send news releases.

In the old days, a “press release” was used to release news to the press; reporters and editors. Documents were written for the media, with the media’s existing understanding of the subject. Nobody actually saw the press release besides a handful of niche reporters and editors.

Today, this has all changed because companies communicate to more than just reporters; companies communicate directly to buyers.

News Releases and the Internet

Pretend for a moment that you’re in the market for a new car. What would you do? Where would you go to begin your research, online and/or offline? I would be willing to bet that your research begins on the Internet through news articles, blogs, etc. A lot of this news comes from news releases because journalists, reporters and bloggers, all go online to company websites to the “news” section to see what’s the latest and greatest thing going on.

A news release should be written in a voice that educates buyers, so you can build a relationship. If search engine marketing is implemented into your marketing plans, then be sure keywords are used in the news releases too.

New releases can be sent to:

·       Trade magazines

·       Journals

·       Associations

·       National, regional and local newspapers

·       Radio stations

Stories can be generated from news releases and posted on social media sites and websites and mentioned in external and internal newsletters.

Components of a News Release

Understand your target audience. Does your target audience need to be sliced up? If so, identify the situations each target audience may find themselves in. What are their problems, business issues or needs? Always focus on what your buyer wants to hear. Make it informative, don’t sell! What are the product benefits? Does your product or service have an environmental, social, health or technology benefit? Is it something that hasn’t been done before? If so, all of this is newsworthy and should be sent to your key publics.

Shallon Hagen is the Director of Marketing for two Ford dealerships, and is responsible for marketing, communication, promotional and public relation strategies campaigns. She has more than 12 years of experience in customer service, sales and marketing. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Marketing Management with magna cum laude honors. She is a freelance writer and graphic designer. You can reach her at shallon.hagen@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.