Sounds like a line from a familiar TV show, except it would be "put the gun down and step away from the ....."

The best advice I can give to sales professionals whether starting out or with 20 years experience, is to put the clicker down and step away from the PowerPoint projector.

There may be a time toward the end of the sales cycle when the buyer actually wants to see a presentation of your proposed solution... then it's OK to present. If you want to use Powerpoint, then please use the resources for creating engaging PowerPoint presentations....otherwise I recommend that you learn to use a whiteboard to tell your story.

 

Two weeks ago at the HubSpot User Group Event #HUGS11, I saw a great idea in action that I thought could be of interest to readers of this blog....it's IdeaPaint.
                                      
I've been using the same whiteboard in my home office for the past 15 years and I was happy with it until the HubSpot event. Now having seen IdeaPaint in action, my whiteboard looks small and dull; flat surfaces in offices I visit loom as a potential surfaces for visual storytelling.


IdeaPaint is a urethane-based paint that comes in a 50 Sq. ft. kit, with roller and requires only one coat. It's the invention of two young Boston entrepreneurs who conceived the idea of creating paint that could cover any smooth surface and turn it into a surface for dry erase markers.

Think of any smooth surface, curved or flat; table top, bench, door; literally anything can become a whiteboard. Use IdeaPaint to help you make your work space work, whether you are in sales, marketing or a student interested in using a whiteboard to capture ideas and write down your thoughts.

IdeaPaint position their paint as more cost effective, easier to apply, longer-lasting and works well with all dry erase markers. In addition it provides:-

• Larger dry-erase surface for less money
• Goes on in one coat
• Erases effortlessly
• Warranty-guaranteed
• The most environmentally friendly dry-erase product on the market

You can buy it at their online store, but before placing your order, check out the installation instructions, as it won't work well on walls that are not smooth and flat, i.e. with a rendered plaster surface, (like in my home office).

The following article is based on a recent client conversation and could be of value to anyone interested in using a whiteboard to improve sales performance.

My client who asked to remain nameless, works in a technology company and has been using a whiteboard to tell her story for about 6 months; she is a fan of Paper-Show digital paper for remote whiteboarding as she does most of her selling virtually.

Using the WhiteboardSelling Methodology, we worked with her team and created a powerful whiteboard story and helped her team develop mastery over the material in a Whiteboardselling Symposium.

Recently they started using the whiteboard during the introductory call to capture the client issues and it has made a big difference in their ability to qualify.

In the past, they held a 15 minute telephone call to understand the client's issues and to qualify them better before inviting them to a whiteboarding session. If qualified, they would then schedule a whiteboard session using Gotomeeting and these whiteboard sessions were usually well received by clients.

I asked Shirley what she thought of their new process.
"In the introductory call we don't talk about our products or service at all, except for the big-picture to frame the conversation, this is pure discovery.

Our top reps have complete confidence in telling our story and pretty much own the message; this means they can focus on the interaction with the buyer, rather than worrying what to say next.

Since we started using the whiteboard to capture the initial conversation, discovery has improved dramatically and our pipeline quality has improved. Not all of our reps have adopted the whiteboard in discovery yet and are sticking to the telephone only approach for the first call."

Lessons Learned.

1. Using a whiteboard at the outset of a sales call for discovery disarms the client and they are typically intrigued by the interaction.
2. Capturing client issues on the whiteboard and asking questions to drill down on problems and goals helps the client to open up when they might otherwise remain silent.
3. Using the whiteboard for the discovery conversation, before telling your story improves diagnosis and qualification and increases pipeline quality.
4. Instead of jumping in to your story, which most sales reps love to do, you are capturing the buyers story and drawing them out on the issues that are important to them. Let me ask you a question...Which is more valuable at the outset of the buying cycle?
5. A whiteboard is an excellent way of creating consensus around next steps and gaining commitment to taking action.
6. If you have done a good job with the discovery session, it will usually run over the time allocated and the client will want a copy of the whiteboard.

#HUGS2011 Report

I was in Boston last week for #HUGS 2011, the 2nd HubSpot User Conference and this is my report.

Last week in Boston there was even more for marketers and HubSpot customers to get excited about than at this event a year ago.  HubSpot’s community has grown in the past year to more than 470+ partners and 5000+ customers and more than a thousand of the faithful gathered for the second Annual User Group Meeting. You can read my report on last year's event HubSpot 2010 user group meeting here.

HubSpot was founded just 5 years ago by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (pic on stage taking Q&A at HUGS 2011), with a grand vision to make marketing easy for everyone. It is clear with the recent funding from mainstream V.C. firm Sequoia, as well as Salesforce.com and Google that the bets the founders made in Inbound Marketing are beginning to look extremely valuable.

Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing method and product suite are very much what the market needs and wants as evidenced by the rapid adoption of the Inbound Marketing methodology and dramatic growth of the company.

Co-founders Brian Halligan and  Dharmesh Shah reviewed progress made in the past year and outlined the strategic direction for the company. (Disclaimer; - we are a San Francisco Bay Area Hubspot Value Added Reseller, focused on creating clarity in marketing messaging  to drive inbound marketing and sales performance and have been using the system for nearly 3 years.)

HubSpot 2011 Report Card

HubSpot is a tool that almost everyone in the user community uses every day; the founders use the product in same way as customers and experience the same frustrations with the product imperfections.
Co-founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan reviewed their progress over the past 12 months against the goals they set in 2010, based on qualitative and quantitative evidence and rated their performance as follows.

HubSpot Self Assessment Report Card

Fewer Bugs; bugs/customer/month reduced from .12 to .06	A-
Page Loads reduced from  4-6 seconds to < 2 seconds	A-
Call wait for tech support from 220 secs to 43 secs	A
Application Maturity	C+
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)	B
Throughput on Idea implementation	A

12 Month Product Plans

If you’re a HubSpot user you will be delighted with what is coming. Hubspot is tripling its investment in R&D and has grown the R&D team from 15 last year to 70 this year and will grow to 130 people in the coming year. This means; -

• Tighter integration between applications in the existing product
• Improved usability and functionality of applications
• Rewrite of the Content Management System
• Better social media integration
• Snappier performance
• Integration of the Performable functionality in the platform to enrich Middle of the Funnel. The vision here is very exciting and with the implementation of Performable, Hubspot intends to Leap-frog the competition in functionality in the marketing automation space

Big Ideas

A Market of 1

Brian Halligan framed the big idea that will drive the innovation and medium term direction of the company.  In the same way that Amazon, Netflix and Google learns more about its customers with every transaction and presents highly attuned offers to increase conversions, HubSpot’s goal is to create a platform that will allow mere mortals to be effective in marketing to a market of one, whether via the Website, email or social media interaction.

Outbound to Inbound:

HubSpot started with the goal of changing marketing from Outbound to Inbound and the team is delivering on this vision. Inbound Marketing is the future of marketing and the changes HubSpot has championed are already being felt in most parts of the industry.

Application to Platform

The product is a currently an integrated set of 19 core applications that work together to improve productivity in performing the tasks required to execute the Inbound Marketing Methodology.

Over the past 12 months, the API has been opened up to partners with the goal of platformization.
3 ^rdParty applications integrated today and available in the HubSpot Marketplace include:-

• CRM
• Email
• Blogging and content creation
• Content Management System
• PR News feeds
• Webinar lead capture
• HubSpot productivity applications including social, search, benchmarking, keyword and search analysis.
  
  

Software System to Ecosystem

HubSpot was quick to recognize that success is dependent on an effective and vibrant partner channel. The HubSpot Services Marketplace will enable the VAR community and service providers to market and deliver their services via HubSpot and for their performance in partner projects and implementation to be delivered, analyzed and, rated within HubSpot.

Take-Aways

1. Like great software companies before it, HubSpot has a vision that is changing an industry and is attracting lots of really smart people to make the journey with them. Don’t bet against HubSpot or Inbound Marketing.
2. If you are thinking about HubSpot, or on the fence waiting for a bolt of inspiration from the blue, what else do you need to convince you to make the leap?
3. Don’t have the time or the manpower to do Inbound Marketing yourself? – don’t worry you can hire in certified talent and make it happen from the HubSpot Services Marketplace.

Recently I spoke to Justin Pirie about his role at Mimecast and his take on the biggest factors to get right in building a successful channel in a SaaS business.  

Justin has managed the largest SaaS group on LinkedIn over several years and has adjudicated over thousands of articles on the subject of SaaS. He works at Mimecast and leads Social and Community Marketing. He has first-hand experience in engaging their channel to help them succeed, enabled from spending the majority of his career in the channel.

Mimecast provides Cloud services  that augment Microsoft Exchange; Email Archiving, Continuity and Security, whether for on-premise, hybrid or cloud. Mimecast is one of Europe’s largest and fastest growing SaaS companies with growth around 60% a year, fuelled by 400+ channel partners.

Most important ingredient for success of a SaaS Business

As a warm-up question, I asked Justin - aside from product and team, what the most important ingredients for success of a SaaS business. “Outside of those two - Marketing is probably the most important component in making a SaaS business successful - much more so than in previous generations of software. Which makes process and an integrated inbound marketing strategy much more important. If you are not crystal clear in your value proposition  and DOING all of the activities to help you get found on the Internet, convert visitors into leads and nurture leads into sales ready opportunities, then you are doomed to fail.”

Selling Software is Typically not in a SaaS Channel Partners DNA

We then discussed the critical channel success factors in a SaaS  business and his answers are core tenets to Mimecast business and the foundation for their success.

“The first thing you need to recognize is that a typical Channel partner probably has a million and one things on their plate- so unless they have an immediate need you fulfill- it’s not going to be a priority for them…so you need a belt and braces approach to help your channel to be successful. The second factor to consider is that a typical channel partner is used to large up front margin and is not always as motivated by recurring revenue….”

Justin’s Core Tenets for SaaS Channel Success

Relentless Focus on Channel Partner Success

• Staffing a channels team with the bandwidth to talk to, motivate and lead partners
• Joint marketing and access to inside sales resources, marketing expertise, presentations, email templates and use of our logo as well as joint marketing funds to successfully run partner campaigns
• Protect and nurture the channel with lead registration to prevent channel shopping and a sophisticated portal where partners can self-serve.

Constant Education

• We are constantly running Webinars, creating training content, presentations and material that will help our channel to sell our product.
• The trick is to keep the cadence high without overwhelming your partners. You have to remember, most partners will have many other products in their price-list and finding the right balance is important.

Events

• Every quarter we host an event here in head office and run frequent partner Webinars.
• We actively encourage our partners to come in to our offices, meet our exec and partner teams face-face and participate in networking and group learning as a way of staying top-of mind.

Take-Away’s

1. The secret to success in scaling a SaaS business is a channel where partners can add value and extend your capabilities and augment your services with specialist expertise
2. SaaS channels require the same amount of attention, education and support as a direct sales team and this requires real people and real money.
3. Helping your channel to clearly articulate your value proposition and jointly become successful in marketing your products may be the most valuable contribution you can make to their success. Get started on the process by reading the messaging alignment and content reuse ebook.
   
   

You can find Justin on Twitter and LinkedIn or jp@justinpirie.com

In the past year we have generated hundreds of inbound leads using our HubSpot system and I've noticed an interesting trend that I thought I would share. I have come to realize that many sales and marketing leaders are looking in the wrong place for sales performance.

I don't condone torture, nor do I consider Waterboarding an acceptable treatment for detainees of any race or religion.

If you want to read more about Waterboarding, please follow this link, or if you feel strongly about the ill-treatment of foreign prisoners in US custody click on this link, as the rest of this story is about the misuse of PowerPoint by sales, marketing and technical people in front of innocent audiences.


Having to sit through bad PowerPoint presentations can seem like a mild form of torture for the audience, inflicted usually by a sales or marketing person under the guise of presenting a solution or informing the prospective client in more detail, the worth of your offerings.

I was at the recent Marketing conference in San Francisco, attended by high caliber marketing professionals and saw a lot of bad PowerPoint presentations delivered by marketing executives. Presumably the excuse for the poor presentation being, I didn't have time to create a stunning presentation for this one-off industry event, so I created this one on the plane on the way over, anyway they were peers not prospects in the audience. What constitutes a bad PowerPoint presentation?….many factors, I like Seth Godin's take on really bad PowerPoint, but let's agree that you know you are in one when it's happening.


PowerPoint is a great presenters tool, but terrible for the audience unless handled with great care, preparation and rehearsal, yet we still do PowerPoint to our peers and ourselves, laboring lengthy, bullet-laden, text heavy and product-centric rants that fast become boring and invoke deep smart phone trances.

What’s wrong with a Product Presentation?

Product presentations have been carried forward as part of a marketing and sales culture that pre-dates the Internet.  Up until about 15 years ago, buyers would invite sales people in to hear about capabilities of new products and technologies, because they had problems to solve and the salesperson, brochures and slide presentations were the medium for the message.

Today the concept of the product presentation as part of the sales process is obsolete, yet it’s alive and thriving in its post-Internet form in millions of PowerPoint presentations. Buyers no longer need or want product presentations because they can find out all they need to know about your product and how it's rated with couple of mouse clicks.
The reality is that nobody cares about your products or services - except you, and maybe your colleagues. People really care about getting their needs met, solving their business problems and achieving their goals.


The Purpose of a Sales Presentation


What are you trying to achieve with your presentation?
If you are in sales, I'll give you my definition. "The purpose of a sales presentation is to have the audience interact with both the presenter and the material to engage, transform and activate the audience to create change."


Why Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling is as old as our civilization and cave-man drawings are our link with pre-history. Simple images, coupled with a story that engages the buyer in conversation and creates a fabric of understanding are an order of magnitude more effective than the average PowerPoint product presentation.

Using Whiteboarding for Discovery and Storytelling

The best presentations are conversations and the best way to start a conversation is in a discussion around issues affecting the buyer.  Using a whiteboard is a wonderful way to capture the elements of that conversation, to document the trends and issues affecting the buyer and capture the challenges facing the buyer in achieving their goals. A whiteboard is also an excellent tool for opening a discussion with an opinion about the buyer condition to provoke a response and engagement.

Having established the buyer condition and the need for your product or service you can tell your story using simple images on the whiteboard, adding relevant facts, proof points and all the while confirming with the buyer that your story is relevant and your capabilities are of value. If during the discovery process you learn that the buyer does not have a condition that you can help solve, then it will be a short meeting and you won't deliver your story.

Which meeting would you prefer to be in as a buyer? The PowerPoint whipping or the whiteboard conversation?
 

A large assortment of some of the World’s finest cars came to my home town last week for the annual Concourse de Elegance in Pebble Beach.

On Tuesday afternoon about 200 cars were on display in Ocean Avenue, Carmel for the non-paying public to get up close and kick the tires (I don’t think so). With so many wonderful machines from the past century of motoring in better than showroom condition, I was given to ask, “What is the most prestigious and enduring brand for any motor car, for the past 100 years?”

There are only a handful of manufacturers still around around after 100 years that are still going, let alone one that is 97 years old and one of the World's Superbrands. One brand in my opinion rises above them all - and that is Rolls Royce. I then asked myself the question, “what’s in the brand Rolls Royce…what does it mean to own one, who buys them and why?”.
A bad photograph of a beautiful pre-WW2 Rolls Royce drop-head coupe that inspired this article.

I had a hilarious morning today, now that I look back on it - and it really didn’t phase me when it was happening, although it might have bothered me earlier in my sales career.
 
I thought I’d relate this story because I’m sure you’ve probably had something that has challenged you in your sales or marketing career, where compounding events have conspired to prevent you from being successful, but you came through under pressure and delivered your best anyway.

Situation

The photo is the view from my bed, taken last Friday in hospital recovering from surgery for a collapsed lung. I got home from hospital on Saturday and have been working from home in the mornings and resting in the afternoon; it’s relevant background for the story to know that I’m not 100%, while this story unfolds, (when you are a consultant working from home, you never stop working).  

About a month ago, I received an inbound WhiteboardSelling lead on my HubSpot Inbound Marketing  system from a marketing manager in an important "brand-name" technology company and after several email exchanges, we set this up this morning’s 9AM meeting, prior to my prospect going on long leave. 

Complications

Yesterday, I received a note in the mail from the power company that there was going to some urgent overhead cable work and there would be a power outage in our area from 7AM-3PM today and to plan accordingly. It was too late to change our meeting as the prospective customer lives in Europe so I decided to try one of the local hotels to see if I could use their foyer for a breakfast meeting and access their WiFi.  

I’m a member of a sports club associated with the hotel, so the Inn at Spanish Bay kindly accommodated my need for WiFi for my breakfast meeting and I set myself up on a sofa and coffee table in a quiet corner of the lobby, next to a fireplace and adjacent to the piano.  

I needed a table to rest my computer on, so that I could see the screen while I was doing the WhiteboardSelling discovery and demonstration session using a digital pen and paper called “ Paper-Show”. (Paper-Show is a fantastic tool that enables me to whiteboard very effectively over Webex, or any other Web conferencing tool; for $180, its one of the most valuable sales tools I’ve ever used).  

Since I was using the sumptuous hotel lobby for the meeting, I could hardly grumble or ask them to turn the Musak down which consisted of smooth swing jazz vocals from Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, etc….but it was there and it was a distraction.  

Another problem was the cellphone reception; where I was in the hotel, I could only 1, 2 or no-bars and I dropped connection twice waiting for the call to start. Fortunately the phone worked perfectly for the whole call and my Bluetooth headset had enough charge in it to continue for the work….I had the phone charging overnight, but forgot to charge the headset.  

The presentation was going well until a couple of guys from hotel facilities came over with a 60” TV on a stand and put it next to my sofa, then stood around and started scratching their heads and then began climbing around me. I offered to move and had to get up while they moved the sofa and wired in the TV and this took longer than it should, but that’s probably my imagination.

Meanwhile I’m listening and whiteboarding, but I can't see the screen. The presentation was going well, great dialogue, learning lots about the client situation and it was running over the hour, which wasn’t a bad thing.

Next thing, this guy with a meter of some sort and a toolbox comes past and plonks himself down at the piano about 10 feet away. I continued with the presentation and looked up when I heard the piano going, - he was the piano tuner….and it was my lucky day.

Resolution

I’m pleased to say that the Webex went well, we have a positive set of action items and despite the challenges, the outcome was positive. I’ll let you know who the prospect was if we get to do business and they allow me to mention their name.  

Take-Aways

1. No matter how serious life appears to be, we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously…its never a bad time for a laugh.
2. If you're in sales or marketing and planning a kick-off training event next year, then you might want to think about DOING some WhiteboardSelling training.
3. My brother sent me this Youtube Redneck Duck Shooting video this morning and I laughed so much it hurt, so I took another pain-killer. (Warning contains mildly offensive lanuage)

Sales Kick-Off Planning

Are you involved in the planning of a sales kick-off event to occur in January through March 2012?