Why Change Selling Blog

I read an article today that mentioned Chris Anderson (former editor of Wired Magazine) and his presentation on Vimeo entitled, Makers: the New Industrial Revolution. I was so enthralled with his talk I wanted to share it.

"The idea of a factory is in a word, changing. Just as the Web democratized innovation in bits, a new class of rapid prototyping technologies, from 3D printers to laser cutters, is democratizing innovation in atoms. You think the last two decades were amazing? Just Wait." Chris Anderson.

The stories are personal and compelling and the examples of his own and his familes use of these now almost free technologies are a lesson for parents, grandparents and our children.

This video was made in Feb 2013 at the Confluence Maker event in Rome Georgia, USA. It runs for one hour, but you will not want to turn it off once you get going.

Ask any marketer or sales enablement professional how many marketing/sales messaging projects they have completed or participated in the past 10 years and you will hear anywhere from none to over a dozen.

Ask those same professionals, how many of those projects actually paid a dividend on the investment and effort to create them and you will get a lot of head shaking.

Who needs more messaging that fails to deliver?

There are many reasons why messaging fails to deliver value, but these three are top of my list:

• Messages are internally focused and product-centric, and not relevant to stakeholders,
• Messaging is not in from that is immediately usable by salespeople (trapped in document containers, in portals),
• Salespeople don’t have the right skills to use it.

Once a messaging project is completed and delivered, usually in Word documents, or PowerPoint, the messaging is emailed to the sales team, uploaded into a Portal somewhere and then it becomes invisible. 



The problem with this traditional approach is that the core messaging is not converted into content that can be easily used and shared in the different forms required by salespeople, sales enablement professionals and marketers who need it.



Think of messaging as source material, to be mined and reworked to create content to bring it to life.


Jim Burns of  Avitage, published a great article in the Selling Power blog yesterday, entitled, " Turn Content into Sales Currency" and I excerpted some of following text to illustrate my point on content.

Why Salespeople Need Unstructured Content

Messaging must be enriched and freed from its container to become useful as content.

Once text is freed from container, it becomes unstructured content.
But unstructured content can be more than just text and includes images, video, graphics, audio and hyperlinks.


Salespeople need inventories of unstructured content that is buyer-relevant and sales-ready for the top 3 customer problems, selling purpose, buyer’s role, buying stage and even industry context. 



Specific examples of inventories include the following:

• Emails & LinkedIn messages (for all key selling scenarios and versions)
• Customer stories and proof points
• Facts, trends, and research findings
• Answers to customer questions and objections
• Tweetables and LinkedIn and Google+ short posts
• Curated articles (company and third party) with summary explanations
• Key messages – recommended language and phrases
• Links to key blog posts and landing pages

Recently I completed the initial phase a joint project for a global technology company with Jim Burns of Avitage. We collaborated on a sales and marketing message and content development, which included creating much of the above unstructured content.

This project was a learning experience for me in creating a new library of unstructured, sales-ready content assets using the Avitage content creation methodology. 
 
These assets are built from foundational messaging templates, but created in an unstructured form that can be easily accessed and immediately used by salespeople. They are delivered in the WittyParrot content delivery platform and are easily maintained, curated, shared and enriched on an ongoing basis.

If you would like to take your company's sales and marketing content to a higher level, I invite you to  use my schedule link to set a convenient time for us to talk. 

 

Introduction

Pebble Beach, Carmel and the Monterey Peninsula are jewels that are not to be missed on a trip to Northern California. Lots of friends in the technology business from Silicon Valley and all over World visit us here in Pebble Beach and we get many similar questions. This is a quick reference guide for first-time visitors and those who would like to know more about visiting Carmel-Monterey area. 

"If I had only one more round to play, I would choose to play it at Pebble Beach. I've loved this course from the first time I saw it. - Jack Nicklaus.

This is the 18th at Pebble Beach, taken from The Bench... imagine yourself here.

"Pebble is a piece of sacred ground. They say it's the greatest meeting of land and water in the world."  - Johnny Miller

"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco" 
Mark Twain did not say this, however it's good advice for visitors - bring a jacket. The temperature in the region varies between 45-70, it's seldom hot, but often cool. Lots of people get a shock when they arrive from the Bay Area; when the temperature is in the 90's in San Jose, it can be 60F in Monterey/Carmel, due to the predominate maritime influence and in particular the onshore marine effect which delivers fog to much of coastal California in summer. Best weather is from mid-September to June. October is hottest month. December and January are also warm and sunny.

If you are planning to fly to the West Coast to come to Carmel/Monterey, why not fly in and out of the Monterey Airport. You'll like the no-waiting security line, also an excellent restaurant for a meal before you depart and the extra you have to pay for the airfare is saved in travel time and hassle getting to and from Bay Area.

Lead generation has never been more difficult.

Inbound marketing, email marketing, social selling, cold calling, referral based selling; - you name it, any way that you can reliably generate quality leads that works for your business is goodness.

What's the use of capturing tribal sales knowledge if no-one can find it to use it and how do you know what to look for if you don't know the question to ask?

These are good questions and they were asked of me last week by a sales VP at a fast-growing Silion Valley startup.

His problem is that new hire salespeople find their technology difficult to position. He added that there are many new hires in the sales team as a result of a recent "series-B" funding event and that they get quite a few technical questions that they have difficulty answering". We have invested in product training and in building a great sales Portal, however the questions are often situational in the sales process:

• What do I do when this happens? 
• How should I handle this configuration issue? 
• Where can I find out about this use-case, who knows about this?

This results in salespeople reverting to SME's for answers as default behavior, without taking enough time to find answers for themselves. 

I explained that part of the problem is behavioral, salespeople will take the path of least resistance. If it's quicker to pick up the phone or jump on Yammer and ask a question than looking in a portal for an answer, they will.

The other problem is that knowledge management systems applied to capture sales tribal knowledge have been hit and miss. It has to be effortless for anyone to capture knowledge and index it, and it has to be dead-simple to find and use it, or knowledge management systems will not get used.

Creating an environment where people want to share what they know and proactively capturing it is a management challenge in itself.

I have been consulting to WittyParrot and using their new content organization and delivery platform for one year now and recently created a 1-minute video to illustrate how easy it is to capture and share tribal knowledge.


 

Yesterday I published an article on the WittyParrot website about our experience and learnings from the 30 day HubSpot Blogging Challenge in January 2014. Below is an excerpt.

I joined WittyParrot as VP Marketing in July 2013 and recommended that WittyParrot use HubSpot for Inbound Marketing. 

There were no other candidates in our evaluation as I have been working with HubSpot for 5 years and have implemented it in 7 other technology companies.  

I did not need convincing of the underlying, technology, methodology or ROI on effort and investment… it works as advertised. 

We installed the software in July and began work on the new Website for the company launch in October.

We chose the HubSpot Enterprise system because we expect WittyParrot to scale rapidly and need the full functionality of the enterprise system from the start, even though we were starting from scratch.
When HubSpot announced the 30 day blogging challenge, we accepted the challenge as we were beginning to see the fruits of our early blogging effort with the direct correlation between a great blog and leads that followed.
Read the article in full ... http://www.wittyparrot.com/blog/30-lessons-from-the-hubspot-30-day-blogging-challenge

December 2013 marked the end of our 5th year as HubSpot customers and 4th year as HubSpot partners.  

You can read prior reviews here:
HubSpot Review Year 1
HubSpot Review Year 2
HubSpot Review Year 3 
HubSpot Review Year 4

I realize now that we were very early adopters of an important new paradigm in marketing and one from which there is no turning back, once the journey is begun.
 
2013 marked the year that inbound marketing “crossed-the-chasm” from the realm of the early adopter into the early majority in the cycle of adoption of discontinuous technology.
 
HubSpot, in 2008 had a few hundred customers and the product compared to today was crude and limited in function.

It was basic and unsophisticated, but perfectly functional for content creation and inbound marketing as it was then.  

Today HubSpot is a company of more than 400 employees, 10,000+ customers and more than 1000 partners. The product is unrecognizable from its early beginnings and leads the industry in functionality and usability.
 
In short, the product is a complete integrated tool-set for inbound marketing, which if used in conjunction with the HubSpot methodology will produce predictable and measurable results, a high ROI and a content legacy that will produce traffic and leads for years to come. 

There are no short-cuts to inbound marketing success. The product and the methodology works as advertised. The results are tangible, progress is visible – or otherwise.  

The chart shows our traffic and leads and sources for the past 5 years.

In May 2013, I began a marketing consulting with a sales and marketing messaging alignment project WittyParrot, an exciting new Bay Area technology company. You can download my new eBook Sales and Marketing Alignment, Content Capture and Reuse which is a result of that engagement on their new website; one of the first on the new Enterprise Hubspot COS, which went live in late October.

Most of my effort is now going into WittyParrot in the role of VP Marketing, which explains the drop in traffic on Admarco.

The first 100 days with WittyParrot have been astonishing and I will write about that in a different article.

Crossing the Chasm into an Avalanche of Content

5 years ago it was relatively easy to rank for long tail keywords, with search volumes less than 200 per month.
 
You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to create optimized on-page SEO with HubSpot, it was common sense (and still is) with a well though-out set of keywords. We never spent a day building back-links, we bought into the quality content creation strategy and decided to let this drive our success.

If you wrote a solid article every week, followed the HubSpot methodology, it got read, tweeted and shared on LinkedIn and it was not unusual for a small business like ours to get 200-300 visits for an article and to rank for important keywords in a few weeks or months.
 
Publishing a new eBook or white paper could produce hundreds of downloads in a day.  

Five years later it is much harder to create content that ranks in Google.

It’s much harder to get people to read your stuff and download your Top of Funnel offers.

People are buried under an avalanche of content and most of its mediocre.

Quality is King

Content is no longer king, it’s suffocating me and I want to turn the volume off, or at least way down. 

Dr Mani’s brilliant article, published on the WittyParrot website, “whittle down and tune-in” highlights the problem and a solution.

Counter-intuitively, Dr. Mani suggests that smaller is better than big when it comes to social networks. 

That is you have to reduce the size of your social network to improve the quality of your interactions.  

I’m much more selective who I follow and what I read because there is so much of it coming past every day. 

I have no time for spammy email, I only read a few LinkedIn group postings and I’m very selective about the email open.
 
On content that I create, I strive to write original and thought provoking content and after 500 blog posts I’m getting better at writing.  

Quality is everything.
But this is old news.

Inbound Sales = Content + Context

HubSpot is leading the inbound sales movement in the same way they led the inbound marketing movement.
 
Buyers are most likely to be receptive to a conversation with a vendor/supplier when they are on your Website, when they are viewing a video or reading your content.   

Would you prefer, an in-context conversation with an informed salesperson who is offering help when you are actively engaged in exploring options? 

Or would you rather take a call from a sales closer who is trying to make their number this month, a week after you downloaded a white paper?  

Or perhaps an endless stream of canned email that someone has spent a lot of time in a marketing automation and designed for your “persona” hoping it will strike a chord? 
Download the guide to building highly responsive sales teams to find out more.

Real-time Signals
Responsive engagement in real-time in the buyer’s context seems intuitively to be a better strategy for engaging and facilitating buyers vs. programmatic canned responses.  

Signals is a new product incubated within HubSpot that facilitates real-time engagement, which is integrated with HubSpot, but is available as a stand-alone product.  

I tried Signals when it was released – and I could immediately see in real-time when someone opened my email or clicked on a link and watched a video or downloaded something.  

I was hooked on the product after a one-month free trial and gladly pay the $10 per month for the premium version.  

New Content Optimization System.

Hooray for the new CMS. The old one was a dog. I have not fully mastered the new COS yet, but its powerful, fast and positions HubSpot as a leader in terms of function and modularity and adaptive output… and did anyone mention it’s the fastest CMS out there?  

The Future

No doubt the content avalanche will continue and get bigger, but not better.  
HubSpot will continue to deliver tools that anticipate solutions to the problems and give us finer control over who and what we tune into.
 
I’m hoping to see the excellent HubSpot contacts system evolve more CRM functionality so that I can switch off Salesforce.com system as it adds marginal value to HubSpot.  

The future belongs to the innovators who combine Responsiveness with Context and where their sales and marketing organizations deliver insight.  

HubSpot is setting a brisk pace for innovation and leading the transformation of the marketing industry.

The future is very bright for HubSpot and I’m glad to be a part of it.

This is not a sales or marketing blog, but may be of interest to the golfers who read this column. I had the distinct pleasure of living in the home of golf, St Andrews, Scotland from 2003-2010 and count George Peper, featured in this video as one of my friends.

Here is the eloquent George Peper, editor of Links Magazine giving you a guided tour of the "Auld Grey Toon" of St Andrews... gives me a lump in my throat to watch this.


I agree with George, if you are a golfer and have not been to St Andrews, then you are missing one of the greatest experiences the game has to offer and for a father and son bonding experience, nothing beats it. (Best advice for mothers and daughters is head for Paris on the train when you land at Heathrow). 

I disagree with George on pubs however and rate The Central (below) as the best pub in the town and the champion "real ale" pub in Scotland... and you are bound to find a lot of locals (and students) here, to get some true Scottish atmosphere.

Content is your product, the lifeblood of your organization, yet the core components used to create it are often either kicked around like trash or locked up where it cannot be shared. 

When up to  70% of content created by B2B marketing teams is never utilized by salespeople  who waste up to 15 hours per week searching for and creating their own, isn't it time to look for new approaches?

Despite massive investment in sales enablement,  buyers rate 9 out of 10 meetings with salespeople a waste of time. Salespeople are still struggling to engage buyers and articulate their value proposition in a way that sets them apart from competitors. (Forrester Research).

Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment, Enrichment, Enablement


Disruptive innovation and proven sales and marketing alignment methods are breaking down sales and marketing silos that contribute to the above conditions. 

If you want to create a core value proposition that clearly captures your differentiation and to reuse it consistently across the company in your sales conversations and marketing messaging then please join us for our Webinar on Thursday 5th Dec. at 11.00AM PST.

In the Webinar we will discuss:

• How to create and structure a value proposition aligned with buyer needs,
• How to adapt and reuse value proposition content components to create website content, brand messaging, sales-ready messaging and customer-service conversations.
• How WittyParrot, an intelligent content delivery platform, is used to create, manage and deliver the right content to create consistent communication and competitive advantage in the hands of marketers and salespeople.

Join us on Thursday 5th Dec. at 11.00AM PST for our Sales & Marketing Messaging Content Capture and Re-use Webinar.

It's 2014 Chief Sales Officers (CSO) Insights Sales Performance Optimization survey time and this is your invitation to participate in one of the most comprehensive and useful surveys of sales behavior. 

Why bother? For 20 minutes of your time you will receive the most comprehensive sales behavior surveys in the industry. Results from previous research studies have been referenced by publications such as Harvard Business Review, Dow Jones, Wikipedia, Selling Power Magazine, and others.

2014 is all about revenue growth. Achieve this, and shareholder value will increase. Fail to do so, miss your number, and investors will punish you!

To help companies determine the right strategies to increase sales in the coming year, CSO Insights'  20th Sales Performance Optimization study will focus on four key themes:

• Find More—by optimizing lead generation
• Win More—by closing more forecast deals
• Keep More—by minimizing customer churn
• Grow More—by maximizing customer wallet share

The research report will retail for $795.

Be part of the research project and get the results early at no charge. As a special thanks, you will receive the CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization 2013 Key Trends topical report which summarizes last year's report.

Please feel free to forward this to your colleagues whom you think would like to participate in order to paticipate in the surrvey and receive the 2014 CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization Survey.

Click here to take the survey