Why Change Selling Blog

I spent Yesterday with the Duarte organization in Mountain View, CA. in a one day Resonate story development workshop.

This was an excellent workshop that helped me identify the core elements of my story. I came away from it with the basis for a story that will resonate with a much broader audience and that I expect will improve my engagement and the outcome of meetings.

This HubSpot Review marks our third anniversary as a user of the HubSpot system for Inbound Marketing.

We had a record year last year, which we attribute to increasing inbound traffic more than 50% and doubling our average visit lead conversion rate. Our ROI on HubSpot license fees last year in terms of revenue directly attributable to our inbound marketing activity is more than 60:1

Your company is fairly successful, but you're not about to be acquired by Google or Facebook for a billion dollars, so it's more of the same for the immediate future.

The business is more than 5 years old and great news - you got out of start-up mode quickly with the discovery of a scalable business model and ramped marketing and sales to achieve revenues in excess of $25M (or $50M or $100M).

According to business lists on Manta, there are more than 500 mid-size technology companies in the US with revenue between $20M and $500M.

Our Objective is Revenue and Profit growth.

I have met with leaders in a number of mid-market technology companies over the past year and nearly every one I met has an aggressive growth objective for the next 12 months. Growing at 30+% is easy to say, but not so easy to do.

• Achieving aggressive growth targets in an established market means taking market share....what are you going to do differently to achieve this?
• Achieving aggressive growth goals in a nascent market is about developing mind-share; finding and selling early adopters in a value-created way and working your way across the chasm, one deal at a time.
• Would your company get found for the ideal Google query from someone with an idea looking to solve a problem that your company is perfectly placed to fix today?
• If leads are the oxygen of any B2B company, then competent sales execution is the muscle tissue. Somewhat surprisingly, leads - or the lack thereof and poor sales engagement and execution are the biggest barriers to success in many mid-size technology companies, it's seldom the product. These companies are old before their time and are facing a mid-life sales and marketing crisis.
   

This is the first in a series of articles that sets out the symptoms of the problem and how to solve it. Our next article will address how to overcome the lack of leads issue.

I need more leads

The two biggest problems in the quest for mind-share and market-share are not solved by the traditional approach to marketing pursued by many mid sized technology companies. As HubSpot's co-founders eloquently state in this brief video, the traditional approach to technology marketing is not working. Aside from social media marketing, not much has changed in Silicon Valley in the past 4 years.

 

Let me replay a sales call I made this week in Silicon Valley on a mid-sized technology company to see if there are parallels in your company.

I received an inbound lead from the VP Product Management around this post on measuring clarity in messaging. After an initial telephone dialogue we agreed to meet in their offices.
In our conversation the following issues came to light.

• We are not getting enough workable leads
• We have a strong brand, but plenty of competiton in our product markets.
• We get 50,000+ website visits a month. (Subsequent analaysis reveals that 95+% of the search traffic arriving at the site is based on a keyword with either the company name or product name in the search string. This means that potential prospects doing research to solve real problems will not find them, but will find their competitors.
• We are paying a lead generation firm to generate leads for us and we are not happy with the quality of the leads or the ROI on this investment.
• We have a marketing automation platform, but we are struggling to overcome a bunch of issues and it doesn't help fill the top of the funnel with new leads.
• Our Website message is fuzzy and it needs a refresh, our market positioning is vague and people can't really understand how our channel creates value through integrating our product.
• We have a marketing person doing social media and have 5000+ Facebook fans and we are active on Twitter with a few thousand fans, but they are not driving leads that turn into customers.
• We do exhibit at tradeshows and they are a good source of leads.
• We have a fairly big Google Adwords budget and this is our primary source of quality leads.
• We publish a couple of blogs per week, but the readership is low and we get few comments or shares.

The purpose of sales communication is to have the buyer interact with both the sender and the material, to engage around the core issues, transform thinking and activate the buyer to create change.

If your sales letters and proposals look visually boring and are chock-full of features and benefits, and “product-speak” that’s all about you, then it's time to stop sending them and re-assess what you are trying to achieve.

Do the images you use on your Website, in your sales letter, proposals and sales conversations create clarity or confusion and cause the buyer to turn off as they try to unpack the meaning of all the chart junk, drop shadows, text boxes and block arrows?

A picture is worth a thousand words - and it truly is when it comes to communicating your ideas on your Website, in-person, over the Internet and in a sales letters and proposals.

Why?

More than 50% of the brain is dedicated to processing information in the visual field. The brain processes images differently than it processes words. Simple images are stored as complete objects, no reconstruction or thought process is required to recognize them or understand their meaning.

Collections of images tell stories in context and pre-date written language, with man’s earliest visual images painted on cave walls at Chauvet Cave in the South of France, some 45,000 years ago. These images give an inkling of the sophistication of the human brain and the power of images alone, to tell a story.

Introducing Visual Confections

According to Edward Tufte, Visual Confections are “structures that consist of a multiplicity of image events that illustrate an argument, organize information, show and enforce visual comparisons; they should be transparent, straightforward, obvious, natural, ordinary, conventional…with no need for hesitation or questioning on the part of the viewer.”

When I create a whiteboard story, I am effectively creating a visual confection, consisting of hand drawn images, words and numbers that tell a story, that is ideally meaningful without any explanation.

A day in the life of a Visual Confection used in sales

The exquisite beauty of visual confections is their scalability and adaptability for a multitude of sales and marketing purposes.

Visual Storytelling is the future of presenting

Users of PowerPoint like it because it's easy to create and modify presentations and that's the good news. The bad news is when you are on the other side of the presentation - in the audience as a salesperson at a kick-off, or as a prospective customer in a sales or marketing presentation or in a business setting.

PowerPoint Sales Presentation

Sales and marketing industry experts have been talking about how ineffective Power Point presentations are at building audience engagement and accurately conveying information for years now. Perhaps the most vocal critic is Edward Tufte, author of the widely acclaimed "Presenting Data and Information" books and lecture series.

So why does it seem that we’re being subjected to more bland deliveries than ever?! PowerPoint’s failings as a medium for sales presentation have already been well-established.  When used in today’s standard fashion, Power Point:

I'm delighted to introduce you to business partner Adam Zais, VP Business Development at professional video hosting and analytics company Wistia, who related this story in a recent conversation and I asked him to write it down.

Actually Adam wrote this one down and quite a few more in a collection of sales stories and what we can learn from them....and we plan to publish them in a book next year.

This three part blog series started with a guest post on the evolution of marketing and PR, by PR-consultant-turned-inbound-marketer Ellie Becker. 

The series continues with a post on the changing perceptions and realities of the sales role in the B2B buying process with Mike Bosworth. Mike Bosworth is the founder of Solution Selling. From Solution Selling, Customer Centric Selling was born. He is the co-founder of Story Leaders in which he provides workshops and executive coaching, helping people learn how to use the powers of story and empathic listening to connect with, inspire, and influence change in others.
The series concludes with a post from Mark Gibson, entitled B2B Sales and Marketing in Transition, What's Working".