Why Change Selling Blog

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.

Introducing Newton Klotz, Electrolux Salesman

One day my Dad calls the local Electrolux store to ask about buying a new hose for his vacuum. The sales guy, Newton Klotz, says, “Sure. I’ve got one of those in my car. About $15. I’ll drive it over...be there in about 15 minutes.” This totally delights my Dad so he says, “Sure, come on over.” 

Conversations, not Presentations

The Klotzmobile shows up at the house as promised. It’s a well-used Oldsmobile Vistacruiser station wagon jammed full of all sorts of parts and new & used vacuums. He rings the doorbell and greets my Dad with the part he wanted to fix the vacuum, but he also has a brand new, top-of-the-line Electrolux as well.

My Dad invites him in and thus begins the amazing stuff I promised you at the beginning. Old Newton is no fool. He knows that my Dad just wanted the new hose...a $15 sale. Not bad, in that selling the new hose is giving the customer exactly what he wants. Good on the karma scale, but not much commission. That only comes with the sale of new vacuums. But instead of launching into a hard sales pitch, our intrepid sales pro starts in on a line of conversation around how the hose wore out, which led to a discussion of lifestyle, kids, home-ownership, sports, you name it. Anything and everything EXCEPT vacuums.

Demonstration and Use of Props

After Newton has established a great deal of rapport with my Dad, he determines it's time to ask permission to do a demonstration.
Newton innocently asks my Dad if he wants to see something really cool and amazing. Sure says Dad. Newton throws a pocketful of dirt on the rug at my Dad’s feet. Holy shit! 

No worries says Newton and he proceeds to vacuum it up with the aforementioned brand-spanking-new, top-of-the-line unit. Dad is suitably (and predictably) impressed. To make a longer story a bit shorter, old Newton departs after my Dad has bought not one, but two new vacuums! One for upstairs and one for downstairs. Oh, and Newton threw in the new hose “just in case”. Total? Over 900 bucks!!!

• Did Newton pressure my Dad into buying? No.
• Did Newton manipulate my Dad into buying? Nope.
• Did Newton wear my Dad down until he bought just to get him out of the house? Not in the slightest.

Lessons Learned

1. Rapport opens the door to sales conversations.
2. Seek to understand before opening your mouth about product.
3. Seek permission to introduce the product and to demonstrate it.
4. Newton had great interpersonal skills, learned and honed through experience and practice, not by memorizing "closing lines".
5. Through their conversation, Newton discovered (is learned a better word?) that my Dad really did want two new vacuums. Mind you, I did NOT say that my Dad needed two new vacuums, let alone one. He WANTED them. 
6. If all Newton did was sell the replacement part, he never would have learned this and made the larger sale. 
7. If all Newton did was to do the high-pressure sales thing....same result. 
8. Simply by having a conversation, not a “sales” conversation and not according to some pre-defined “line-of-questioning” put forth by some Sales Process mind you, did all this become possible. 

I still cringe when I think about it. One of the worst experiences in a 30-year career and it was entirely my fault. Only in sales are you able to make a bad call and move on to the next one, with almost no repercussion – hopefully having learned a lesson.

Background

MicroStrategy in the late 1990's and early 2000's was successful in selling Business Intelligence software into the retail vertical and had secured a number of high profile retail customers. I had been successful in data warehousing sales at premium supermarket operators on the US West Coat at Safeway and American Stores and had worked with partner NCR in the retail market for the past year.

Flush with the success of engineering the biggest deal in MicroStrategy history, an OEM deal to NCR and recent success in the supermarket business at Safeway, we visited the CIO of a rack and stack supermarket operator.  
The meeting goal was to introduce MicroStrategy and share how our retail clients were using data warehousing and analytics in their supermarket business using MicroStrategy analytics in partnership with IBM to better manage their inventory, avoid stock-outs and improve margin.

After the greeting formalities, I opened the sales call with an introduction to the recent work we had done in data warehousing at high-end retail customers and the investments they had made and the results they were seeing. I could see the buyer getting uncomfortable in his chair before I had finished my introduction.

He then launched into an angry tirade about how they were a pennies on the dollar retailer and they had no interest in doing what Safeway or anyone else were doing. Their customers wanted to buy groceries at the lowest cost. They had no interest in category management or householding or market-basket analysis. Their business model was to buy low and sell low….at which point he got up and walked out of the meeting….the meeting had lasted less than 5 minutes.

What Happened?

• My selling style has always been assertive and it has at times been deliberately provocative, which is why The Challenger Sale caught my attention.
• In this call on a retailer at the opposite end of the market to my former clients, Safeway and American Stores, I came across as arrogant and condescending in my brilliant and challenging opening.

• The Challenger Sale is great in theory. In practice you need empathy and sensitivity or it can blow up in your face, just like it did for me.

Lessons learned

1. Before you open your mouth about product or launch into your Challenger idea, you had better have established rapport to the point the buyer is ready to listen to your message. 
2. Know your customers business… it was clear that I had not done sufficient homework on the customer….they were technology laggards and data warehousing was still in the early adopter phase. IBM invited us into the meeting, but it was a meeting we should never have attended.
3. Empathy is a natural human trait, but for some, it is undeveloped or suppressed due to circumstance and environment and has to learned in a voyage of self-discovery. My wife told me I had no empathy and this call triggered a journey of self discovery, starting with a series of sessions with a psycho-therapist.
4. Communication and rapport skills are assumed to be innate for anyone in sales; in reality, most salespeople grossly overestimate their ability to connect at an emotional level and truly listen. 
5. NLP Practitioner training would be a good start for anyone in sales or presales struggling with empathy, sensitivity or connecting emotionally with others and it will serve them well outside their business life. 

I have integrated important communication and language concepts from NLP as well as sales survival skills in an adaptive elearning course for anyone wanting to communicate more effectively and connect emotionally with buyers.
Click here for a free trial.

Inbound Marketing is the future of marketing and the marketing and PR industry is rapidly transitioning from the old World of outbound interrupt marketing to inbound or permission marketing as it is also known.

Inbound marketing works and has been proved in thousands of instances to lower the cost of marketing and to create a content legacy that keeps on generating mind-share, traffic and leads for both very small and very large companies.

We can now assign rules for the execution of a new inbound marketing project to ensure the likelihood of a positive outcome and rapid return on the investment.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the effort required to be successful with Inbound Marketing, not to lay out the rules for inbound marketing success, that is another article.

I have excerpted a passage (in italics) from a recent article, Inbound Marketing Benefits by the Numbers, by John McTigue at Kuno Creative to identify the effort and costs of inbound marketing success.

CSO Insights is a specialist research firm benchmarking the challenges faced by today's sales and marketing organizations.  CSO Insights tracks the trends in the use of people, process, technology and knowledge to improve sales performance. 

Research is their core business. Each year, they survey thousands of Chief Sales Officers to learn the challenges they see as most critical. 

Last year I invited sales managers and business owners to participate in CSO Insights 2012 Sales Performance Optimization Survey and the pool of respondents of more than 2000 sales executives provided an extremely insightful and valuable set of benchmarks for companies in different industries. 

“Anyone looking for key trends and advice around Sales Performance Optimization should reach out to Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer at CSO Insights. Both have a wealth of knowledge and experience in this area.” -George Roberts, Partner, OpenView Partners, Venture Capital

The survey itself is completely confidential and takes about 15-20 minutes and you and your company can remain anonymous if desired. 

In return for completing the survey,  you will receive a complimentary copy of the survey (retail value $795) in late January or early February next year. As an added bonus, you will receive an instant download of the 2012 Key Trends topical report that summarizes the survey findings.

The survey is divided into the following areas:

1. Key trends in 2013
2. Hiring and Compensation
3. Sales Cycle
4. Sales Strategy
5. Sales Execution
6. Sales Process
7. Account Management
8. Sales Management
9. Core CRM
10. CRM 2.0
11. Sales and Marketing Alignment
12. Going Forward.

If you are in marketing, please bring this survey to the attention of the sales leader in your company. 
I'll take the survey!

I'm delighted to introduce Jock Busuttil, my guest blogger this week on a subject that is near and dear to my heart; - connecting sales and product management with the customer. Jock Busuttil is a Senior Product Manager and an alumnus of Advanced Marketing Concepts.

Quarter-inch drills or quarter-inch holes?

Despite relying on each other for the success of their products, the Sales and Product teams often have a jarring relationship.  This is far from ideal.  By looking at where things go wrong we can identify a better way of working with each other.  The prizes on offer: shorter sales cycles, more easily achieved targets and customers who are always happy to hear from you.

Where do things go wrong?

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate” ( Cool Hand Luke, 1967)
The strongest business relationships are built on three pillars:

1. A shared appreciation of the differing needs and priorities of each
2. A genuine desire to help the other to achieve the best outcome for all
3. Trust in the other’s integrity

Dysfunctional relationships tend to be caused by a failure in one or more of these areas. There are actually three relationships in the mix.  This is how Jock sees it, he's a product marketing professional.

While we’re looking at how Sales and Product Marketing work with each other, it’s worth remembering also that each has a relationship with the customer (or prospective customer).  This customer focus provides a way to align the Sales and Product teams around value creation. 

The illustration below is my perception of the relationship from the
customer's perspective and highlights the disconnect between product
management and the customer.

Positive disruption

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” (Theodore Levitt).
 
It should be so simple: customers need something, Product builds it, Sales sell it to the customer, everyone’s happy.

Why is this so difficult in practice?  A common mistake made by both Sales and Product is that the customer wants the widget, gadget or solution that they’re selling.  Wrong!  What the customer really needs is an outcome, for their problem to vanish as simply and easily as possible.  Your widget, gadget or solution is just one way to cause that problem to vanish.  Sometimes what the customer needs is very different from what they want.

A good Product team should be concerned with uncovering the outcomes that customers need, establishing the value of that outcome (i.e. how painful the problem is to the customer), then creating a solution that achieves that outcome in the most effective (and profitable) way. 

The most successful products have always been those solving problems that customers didn’t realise they had.  These are the products that positively disrupt the market. As Henry Ford famously put it:  

One of the best ways that Sales can help Product build the thing that customers really need is to have a healthy sense of curiosity.  When you meet with a customer, they will probably tell you what they want, perhaps without realising what they need.  This is understandable: the customer may not know that they have a problem in the first place, let alone know how to solve it.  This is where you come in.  Keep asking “why”; eventually you’ll get to the customer’s underlying pain points and understand how painful they are.

At this point you should conclude one of three things:

1. This is something we can help the customer with right now.  Great!  Show the customer how to reach their desired outcome there and then.  Laser-sharp focus is needed here – digressing into irrelevant features and benefits at this point will dilute your message. 
2. This is something we could potentially help with in the future.  Bring the information you’ve gathered back to the Product team, but don’t commit to the customer at this stage.  You’re not yet sure whether a solution is possible or when it could be delivered, and broken promises are a sure-fire way to kill a healthy customer relationship. 
3. This is not something we can (or want to) help with.  If you go to a car dealership and ask for a speedboat, the Sales rep will politely show you the door and possibly direct you to an optician.  If it’s clear that you can’t help the customer with a problem, move on to one you can help with.  Do provide feedback to the Product team regardless.  You never know, it may be time to diversify! 

It’s worth bearing in mind that you can only come to one of these three conclusions if you really understand what problems your company and products solve and how to show the customer how they do so.  Equally important is to know what problems they don’t solve.  If you’ve ever attended a customer meeting with an effective Product person, you should notice that they spend most of the time listening to the customer’s problems, then quickly home in on the one or two specific and relevant ways to solve the problem, which then resonate with the customer.

A market of one, some or many customers?

This leads us to one of the main differences in priority and driver between the Sales and Product teams.  We’ve explored how the Product team benefits from you being curious and asking the customer “why” to uncover those painful and profitable problems to solve.  But they’re working not just with you solely, but with the Sales team as a whole, as well as having their own direct dialogue with customers.

With all these sources of information, the Product team ends up with many problems to solve, all competing for a constrained set of resources (time, people, budget).  Their goal is to achieve the best outcome for the company by focusing on the best outcome for the target market.  To do this, they need to prioritise the entire set of problems they could solve into a smaller set that they will solve.

This filtering process is necessary and means implicitly that not all customer problems will end up being solved.  Remember: the dealership sells cars, not speedboats!  Don’t take it personally if they occasionally say “no” to you – they’re balancing the needs of the whole market against the needs of an individual customer and taking into account the long-term and short-term gains of what they will deliver.

Alignment delivers results

The good news is that when Sales and Product Management/Marketing are closely-aligned and both focused on the needs of the customer, you’ll see the following results:

• You’ll be having more and better quality conversations with prospective customers who have problems you can solve there and then.
• You’ll be empowered to quickly home in and demonstrate how you can solve their problem and let the product sell itself.
• Once you’ve established a track record of success, you’ll be working in partnership with the customer to solve their problems so they’ll start to bring them to you, rather than you having to uncover them over time.

Treat the Product team as allies.  You’re both working towards the same goal, but in different ways.  Appreciate and respect those differences and you’ll enjoy working and winning business together.

About the author

Jock Busuttil is a Senior Product Manager and an alumnus of Advanced Marketing Concepts.  He has worked in B2B enterprise software for over twelve years for companies such as Zeus Technology (now part of Riverbed), Iron Mountain and Experian. 

Jock is the author of imanageproducts.co.uk, a blog for product managers and marketers, and provides training and mentoring for product people.  He holds a degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge, UK.  You can find him on Twitter and on LinkedIn.

This three part blog series started with a guest post on T he evolution of marketing and PR, by PR-consultant-turned-inbound-marketer 

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".

The Product is so Strong it Sells Itself! 

Guest Post by Mike Bosworth

Actually the above statement is a myth, complex B2B products still need to be sold, but anyone selling today will confess that it's way more difficult than it was 10 or 15 years ago. 

The buyer is firmly in charge of the buy-sell relationship and the role of a salesperson in many cases is in the facilitation of a  buying process. 

In a recent Sirius Decisions Perspective, CIO’s interviewed, solved their problems in the following order.

1. Leverage search engines by entering the problem I am trying to solve or an initiative I’m considering.
2. Explore a known vendor Website.
3. Ask my team or colleagues to come back with a series of options.

B2B salespeople have become unwilling spectators in the buying process. According to the Savo Group, 85% of companies involve between 3-10 people in a buying decision and do not engage vendors until they are about 60-70% through a buying process.

At this point in the buy cycle, the buyer pretty much knows what they need to solve their problem and who the players are with viable offerings, what remains is to convince top management they made the best decision for the company and were able get the best price from the vendor they emotionally wanted to buy from, their ‘preferred’ vendor. 

With the exception of the top 10-15% of salespeople who typically run most deals, this new buying approach excludes salespeople until the buyer is ready to talk to a salesperson. 

The members of this elite group of salespeople, who are able to engage earlier in the buy cycle, are the initiators of deals, the instigators of action, the challengers and the status-quo busters, who are able to connect with buyers.

Once connected, they are able to engage in conversation around buyer issues and develop trust and influence through the insight and industry knowledge they bring as trusted advisors first and salespeople second.

Buyers Aren’t Looking for Relationships with Salespeople

All process and competency falls short if pushed on the buyer before there is an emotional connection. Trust comes from an emotional connection first and demonstrated competence second. If buyers feel connected with you, they will allow you to then demonstrate your competence. 

We have all had occasions over the years to emotionally connect with strangers who are so compelling to us that we say to ourselves, "whatever she is selling, I'm buying!” Bill Clinton is a great example of someone who can emotionally connect with people. Ideally, a salesperson can gain that kind of trust and influence with a buyer before they bring out their offering.

Buyers used to need sellers for information about new products, technology roadmaps and industry trends and they would pretend to be interested in order to get that information. 

Today, they do not need the seller for information. When they get a 'touch' opportunity today, salespeople have to have the ability to get the buyer to want to buy from them as human beings.

If you can connect emotionally with buyers and bring insight to the table that truly creates value, you have can have a relationship with any buyer. Is it any wonder that just 13% of sellers are delivering 87% of the revenue? (Sales Benchmark Index).

Largely because of technology advances and the Internet, we are in the early phases of a permanent shift in buying behavior. This shift is as real in the B2B world as in consumer marketing. Over the next few weeks we’ll be providing you with a series of posts that examine how traditional media, marketing, sales functions and training have been affected and how sales, marketing and PR professionals can successfully evolve to take advantage of emerging opportunities.

The series will start with a guest post on the evolution of marketing and PR
PR-consultant-turned-inbound-marketer Ellie Becker.

We continues with a guest post by Mike Bosworth entitled,  B2B Sales in Turmoil - Who Needs Salespeople? on the changing perceptions and realities of the sales role in the B2B buying process. The series concludes with a post from Mark gibson entitled B2B Sales and Marketing in Transition, What's Working.

The Marketing and PR transformation.

Guest Post by Ellie Becker

The most radical and positive change in the PR world is embodied in the
statement, “We have met the media, and they are us.” 

The channels and the tools have definitely changed. Traditional media – newspapers, magazines, radio stations – are folding their tents in droves. Remaining print media are shrinking along with the amount of editorial coverage they can give.  

We now have hyper-local news websites that use a combo of professional and citizen journalism. We send “social media news releases” that include multi-media exhibits and direct links to our websites, in addition to text. We follow and engage journalists in social media. Journalists often don’t need the PR person because they can connect directly with resources/experts online.

Yes, there is still third party credibility in what’s now called “earned media” -- placing news or a feature story on established media. In fact, a placement in the NY Times and other traditional media has more value today because the stories get posted on media web sites and readers can often click through to our own websites or our accompanying video channels, etc.  

But, just as in every other instance in our information flooded world, it’s much, much harder to break through. Newsrooms are lean and mean, fewer journalists with more responsibility, less editorial focus, covering multiple industries or topic areas. The great news in all of this change for organizations is that each of us now has the potential to actually BE the media. Through our blogs and other online content, we can go direct to our audiences with a clear and credible message unfiltered by third party media.  

We can become the news source, the expert voice, the opinion and thought leader. And if we consistently make our voices heard, the media establishment will find us. Not only that, but our efforts are fully measurable in ways that they never were in traditional PR. 
We can analyze just what our communications are taking to the bottom line.

For PR professionals whose world has been disrupted, the good news is that we have honed skills that transfer remarkably well into the online marketing realm. We are great at communications positioning, messaging and differentiation. We can tell a good story with words, images and video. 

And we’ve always focused on the non-commercial, human story, which is what’s required to attract online audiences. We understand reputation management, an area that I believe will be getting much more attention online in the future.  

We know how to think creatively, how to leverage PR and how to recognize opportunities for tie-ins and strategic partnerships. We’re content creators. And creating quality content is at the heart of successful inbound marketing.

We are eminently capable of delivering the paradigm shift of online marketing: Helping people to buy, rather than trying to sell them something.   The key to success in today’s rapidly evolving marketing arena is to recognize the timeless knowledge and skills we’ve developed and then synthesize them with current needs and solutions. Here are some additional thoughts on knowledge and skills synthesis.
 

The Challenger Sale Momentum

The Challenger Selling concept is gaining in popularity based on the number of people joining the LinkedIn Group, the rank of The Challenger Sale book, (currently #2 in Amazon sales and marketing category) and the references to the book on the Internet.

Last week we saw a spat between sales training profesionals in one of the LinkedIn groups, about the veracity of the Challenger model, caused no doubt by the mindshare "Challenger" is generating in the market at the expense of rival approaches.

The Challenger behavior archetype identified in The Challenger Sale research stands out because Challengers produce better results than any other sales behavior type selling complex B2B products and services. Why? Because these individuals bring insight and informed opinion to influence the thinking of buyers and they exert a degree of control on the outcome of a complex B2B buying process.

When do Challengers engage in the Buying Process? 

I was asked this question yesterday by the SVP of a major information services company in conversation about the difficulty of selling a B2B product and services against strong competition in 2012. While I am not affiliated in any way with the CEB, I offered the following.

Challengers are able to influence buyer thinking through their expert opinion and industry insight and are capable of exerting control in moving the buying process along. 

I'll use the IMPACT buying model from the book, " Why Killer Products Don't Sell", which accurately describes a universal buying process, to discuss engagement points. For an in-depth look at the buying process and how buyer behavior is affected by risk, get an instant download of the Killer Products Whitepaper.




As a vendor, you can be engaged in a buying process at any point in the buying cycle, but the closer to the start of the buying process, the higher the odds of succeeding.

Think about it for a moment. You can get married the week after you meet someone, celebrities do it almost daily - we see them on the cover of supermarket comics at the checkout. But this is not normally the case, most marriages begin with a courting period, followed by a formal engagement. Making a complex B2B sale is like getting married, except if you are a celebrity.

The odds of winning a deal you did not initiate are better than marrying Kim Kardashian after dating her for a week, but they are not great.

Mike Bosworth in Customer-Centric Selling suggests that your chances are between zero and 20% of winning an RFP if you did not initiate the discussion. If you initiated the conversation, your chances of winning are up to 80%. (Any update on these numbers would be greatly appreciated, as I suspect they may have changed in the last 10 years)

So is it easier to disrupt status quo thinking as Challengers do, in the Transaction phase after the RFP arrives, or when the buyer recognizes they need to do something to correct a sub-optimal condition at say IDENTIFY or MENTOR at the start of the buying process?  Duh!, it's obvious that it’s easier to influence thinking at the outset and becomes progressively harder as the buying process matures. It's not impossible to turn around an RFP that is written by a competitor, but I wouldn’t want to base my income on winning RFP’s influenced by the competition.

But how to engage earlier in the buying cycle? 

How to Engage Early in the Buying Process

We read about Challenger success in the case studies in The Challenger Sale book, but we don't how the salesperson engaged the buyer.

I don’t have that data, but I suggest that the best odds for Challengers succeeding are as a result of an inbound lead at the outset of the buyer’s journey or through leveraging a client relationship to upsell or cross-sell into an existing account… it’s all about gaining access.

Buyers will research approaches and gather ideas around solving a problem or achieving a goal through an Internet search, long before they are ready to buy. They download whitepapers, E-books and attend Webinars and conferences in return for exchanging their contact details and opting in to receive your communication… and they become leads in an inbound marketing system

Inbound Marketing Creates Challenger Openings

In about 25% of companies surveyed by CSO Insights in 2012 , it's marketing that creates the opportunity and an opening for Challengers, but typically when these leads first convert on your Website, they are initial inquiries and are not sales ready.


At this stage buyers are looking for possible approaches and associated risks, not product. This is the ideal opportunity to begin to influence buyer thinking through a combination of behavior based lead nurturing, until they achieve a “sales ready” lead score, and helpful insight provided by sales professionals who look more like consultants than salespeople to the buyer.

Why is Inbound Marketing Important again? Check these numbers

• 46% of daily Internet searches are for information on products or services.
• 70% of the links search users click-on are organic—not paid.
• 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.

Take-Away: If your business is not ranking well for the words that describe your products and services, then you’re not getting found for them by potential customers either.  

Find out if your Website is Capable of generating Inbound Leads

How can you find out if your company Website is capable of generating inbound leads to feed your Challengers? You can run a free Marketing Grader report to see if  you doing enough to bring visitors to your website and fill the top of your sales and marketing funnel. The report tells you how you are doing when it comes to converting traffic into leads and leads into customers and what marketing activities are working (or aren't working)?

If your Website scores less than 70 on Website Grader, the chances are you are not getting enough leads. If you need to generate more inbound leads, I suggest that you give inbound marketing a try.

I've only got a couple of minutes

If you are in B2B technology sales on a trade-show floor, you have 20 seconds  to greet a passing visitor, figure out if they have potential and engage them in discussion. The main goal of the trade-show is to have conversations that turn into leads and sales, not to give away coffee mugs or tee-shirts....both can be measured, but only one will turn into revenue.

No time for a Presentation

It's amusing to watch salespeople at Tradeshows drag visitors off the floor and back to the booth to give them the 5 minute introductory pitch. I've done it in the distant past and I've created the crisp introductory slide-deck and I can't help thinking of wild animals dragging prey back to their lair to devour them. 

Scott Santucci, principal analyst at Forrester Research stated in a recent survey, that “88 percent of executive-level buyers believe it’s important that a sales pitch is framed as a conversation, as opposed to a prepared PowerPoint presentation.”  Buyers want effective conversations with intelligent salespeople at Trade-shows, not presentations.

Rule: No presentations at trade-shows, focus on conversations.
If you have a great demo and the product capabilities are enhanced by viewing it on screen then OK, by all means give a demo.

Give me the Big Picture

At a trade-show, you are in a less ideal environment for verbal communication; amplified presentations, music, PA announcements, and nearby conversations, make it challenging to be heard and to clearly understand what the visitor is saying. For that reason I recommend using big-pictures and stories to engage visitors.

Visual Confections

Visual confections are big picture stories - a single image superset of information that include images, text, numbers and an overarching storyline that can quickly help buyers get your big picture and enable them to focus on their areas of interest.

A visual confection is basically a completed whiteboard story and if you are using one at a tradeshow, it should be broad, but specific enough to allow visitors to readily identify with their challenge areas.  The goal is to engage visitors in conversation, uncover their concerns, have your capabilities unfold in the course of conversation, qualify interest and get a meeting.
 

Visual Confections are Differentiators

Here is a reproduction of the whiteboard visual confection I used in our inbound marketing partner,  Kuno Creative's booth at the recent #Inbound12 conference in Boston. It stood out in front of the booth, no dragging people off the floor, I pitched them where they stood and plenty of people were curious to know what it was. Total investment $64.00 for 3*2 whiteboard, tripod stand, 4 color dry erase marker set.

Visual Confection Trade-Show Best Practices

1. Use a whiteboard or paper version of your story already laid out....don't attempt to whiteboard in real time at a tradeshow, there simply isn't time.
2. Triage visitors who come thick and fast in the breaks. Be ready to politely send those looking for a stamp or tee-shirt on their way to the next booth. If you take junk to give-away at your booth, you will have plenty of visitors who want it and lots of noise, - is that what you really want?
3. Engage visitors with a brief story and establish their role and their interest area...then ask the following question, "what's the biggest problem you are having with....."
4. If you haven't engaged the visitor and they are not forthcoming with an interest area, then why pitch them? Give them a hand-out and politely send them on their way, or ask them to wait till a few more people show up that are interested and then tell your whiteboard story.
5. Start your story with your "why I'm here story" that introduces the big picture. Whiteboard storytelling is an opportunity to have the visitor interact with the content and you, the presenter....you don't have to start at the start or finish the whiteboard.
6. Go as deep as you need depending on the level of engagement, but you will only have 5 minutes at best, as others will likely show up half-way through.
7. Check for interest and understanding, ask questions, does this make sense?, would it work for you?
8. If interested, they will tell you, or if the conversation is lively and there is genuine interest, you could ask, "would it be OK if I contacted you after the event to continue our discussion", or if they are interested, but not the right person, ask "would you mind if I followed up after the show and if you could connect me with the right person in the organization?" This may sound obvious, but getting permission to contact them is important.
9. Write brief notes on the back of the card that will help you remember them - red hair, loud voice, 50 salespeople, has a problem here....this is very important for follow-up.
10. I like Mike Bosworth's strategy for tradeshow leads. You put all the business cards of visitors with whom you had a meaningful conversation in one pocket of your jacket, (after you have made notes about your discussion on it) and you put the visitors who dropped in their card for the "prize-draw' in the other. As you leave the show, you put the cards from the prize-draw pocket in the bin and you work the rest.