Why Change Selling Blog

Earlier this year I ran a Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment workshop for an early stage company in the Bay Area. They are not actually a start-up as they have been in business for a few years, but they are still starting up.

The subject of capturing proof points and formatting them to tell stories came up during the messaging workshop and I want to use a story to illustrate the point of using a storytelling and to describe the discrete steps in the storytelling format. I partner with Mike Bosworth and use his Story Seekers method in formatting and telling stories. The format is universally understood and follows the basic "hero's journey" format that powers so many of the scripts in our popular film culture.

The people in the company I'm working with are World-class thought leaders in their field, they have a great product for a well-defined niche, but they are struggling.


Their messaging clarity was 3/10 and their website unclear and they got few inbound leads. Like many other emerging technology companies, they were using outbound cold calling and spamming lists to generate interest and not surprisingly had very little success.

An additional problem was that the few leads they got often proved to be unready for sales contact. We ( Kuno Creative and Admarco) were hired to help clarify their messaging and to transform their Website and implement an inbound marketing methodology.

After clearly identifying their capabilities or Win-Themes and applying them to their Buyer Personas in the messaging workshop, I asked a couple of the top salespeople to role-play with me around the buyer persona issues, using the capabilities we had developed. 

What happened next is happening in sales teams all over the World and explains why so many salespeople are struggling. They have plenty of success stories or proof points, but they don't have the stories in a usable storytelling form … and salespeople don't have the skills to relate their story.
(The barrier or status quo in the last sentence is the fact that they don't have the stories in a usable form – at their fingertips; the complication is that they don't have storytelling skills - even if they had the stories.)  

But let me get back to the story and role-play. 

• Their salespeople who know so much about the problem proceeded to tell me what I needed (to use their product), - I immediately felt my personal space being invaded when being told what it was that I needed to do and I felt like I wanted to push the salesperson away. It felt like I was being sold and I pushed back hard and gave them an objection, I felt I was under pressure - like every buyer does. No-one likes being sold... it's offensive. ((Telling is the STATUS-QUO delivery mode and a BARRIER to success for most salespeople))
• The other issue this sales team has is that their market has nuances that are subtle and they cannot be 100% sure they are "on-message" when making a recommendation – because typically they are premature in making it. Salespeople who have seen the problem dozens of times before, often can't wait until they fully understand the buyers story, before suggesting a solution. This is also known as premature elaboration. ((Market nuances are the COMPLICATION))

Now let’s break down the role-play with me telling a story vs. premature elaboration above.

Storytelling Stucture

1. We reversed the roles and I played the role of the salesperson and asked if I could share a story of how we had helped another VP in a similar company (same role) to solve a similar problem. SETTING.

2. I described the status quo - they had Oracle and lot of reporting tools to do the job… but the barrier was that they couldn't see the problem with their existing tools, despite having spent a lot of money on technology and decision support. STATUS QUO/BARRIER - Setting the Stage.

3. I then introduced the complication, which meant that because managers couldn't see the problems in their standard reports, they had to work Sundays to prepare for Monday morning meetings using a data dump and Excel to try and spot the problems. COMPLICATION/Constraint + vulnerable/human… we can relate to the pain of working Sundays.

4. Next I introduced the unique product capability and our insight which helped to identify the problem and show the customer how they could use our tools to see the issues and take action to solve the problems. TURNING POINT.

5. They adopted the solution and now the problems are made visible in reports that we generate automatically from our system and managers get to share Sundays with their families. RESOLUTION.
 
6. To add concrete evidence, I used the quote about the impact of the software on productivity extracted from a CEO's Quarterly Wall Street briefing = OUTCOME.

This was a watershed moment for my client and the sales team.

Summary

1. Stories give us the natural ability connect emotionally with buyers in a non-threatening way and to accelerate trust. 
2. Stories need tension and emotion/vulnerability to connect emotionally with buyers. 
3. Stories are boring without emotion and contrast to bring them to life and are quickly forgotten.
4. Salespeople need to be prepared to be vulnerable and go first with a story and then to carefully "tend" or listen to the buyer’s story.
5. The “Who I’ve Helped Story” starts with the setting and introduces our buyer and the status quo.
6. The journey begins with Barriers that describe what's preventing the buyer from achieving their goals.
7. Complications/constraints are emotional factors that bring our story to life and give it tension through struggle, resistance to change and ultimately this is the point of human connection.
8. The turning point is the insight we bring with our expertise and the use of our software to help the buyer see the problem in a new light.
9. The resolution is the successful outcome and if possible, some hard ROI evidence 
10. Stories are the most powerful connective link between salespeople and buyers to convey insight in a way that buyers want to receive it. Just about everything else can be gotten from the Website.

Conclusion and Calls to Action

Storytelling is not yet mainstream and too "touchy-feely" for most mainstream sales leaders. Individual salespeople and early adopter sales leaders looking for competitive advantage in how they sell could start their journey by;
i. Aligning sales and marketing messaging to clarify their value proposition,
ii. Capturing and formatting their "Who I've Helped Stories" in the above manner, and placing them in the hands of salespeople when they need them.
iii. Training sales people in storytelling. 

Last week I had to open a 3-day messaging workshop with a new client in front of the sales and marketing executive team. I had prepared several visual confections in a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation using examples to lead the discussion and was fully prepared for the meeting.

The night before the messaging workshop my client requested that we use a different approach to creating the messaging, which made my PowerPoint deck redundant. Fortunately the client had a whiteboard and a flip chart handy.

Starting a Meeting with a Story  

To kick off a 3-day workshop, I still needed engagement and buy-in from the audience. My sponsor in the messaging workshop and I had worked on a similar messaging and sales enablement project several years earlier, which was transformational for his company and he introduced me and told his version of the "Who I've Helped Story" of our prior engagement, from the customers point of view, which was fantastic as this story is always more powerful coming from the customer, vs. the supplier.

Since many of the participants did not know me, I started with my "Who I Am" story. In 90 seconds I told the story of the past 10 years of my professional life as a consultant. It wasn't a story about how fantastic I am - it was about the journey, the struggle and the lessons learned, that give me unique insight.

I will outline my story in bullets so that you can see the form of the story from the storyboard above and you can adapt it to tell your own story.

• In 2003 I was staring down the barrel of a 2nd lay-off in 2 years. (setting stage & vulnerability)
• Realized customers had changed and I hadn't. (journey begins)
• Didn't have 20 years selling experience - really had 1 year experience repeated 20 years over. (vulnerability)
• Started a search for new ideas, journey of discovery - (call to adventure)
• (Joke) My wife heard me practicing my story - she said "keep looking" (humor)
• Moved to UK, started a sales training consultancy (transition)
• First graduates could get meetings with CXO's, but when they got there would revert to "product-speak" - Realized they needed messaging to help engage buyers around their issues. Started messaging which has been a part of every engagement since. (struggle + Insight)
• In 2008 we had customers, but no leads - introduced to HubSpot and started creating content and generating leads and has become a part of our DNA. Messaging now used to drive content marketing. (experience + lightbulb moment)
• 2010 relocated back to USA and met Corey Sommers at Whiteboard Selling, invited me to work with him to use my sales training experience and messaging skills to create visual stories. (relevant experience) 
• 2013 connected with Mike Bosworth and learned story telling, come full circle - that's why were here - capture your message so everyone can tell your story. (call to action and resolution)

Next, I needed enrollment in the discipline of our process for the next 3 days.

Using a Curiosity Hook for Enrolment

After I told my "Who-I-am" story, I drew three large numbers on the flip chart.
I asked the audience what they thought the    

128,000 related to.

After several guesses, I revealed that this is the number of times their 40 person sales team would pitch their "big-idea" in the next 12 months if they had just four conversations a day with prospective customers. If we add everyone else in the company who needs to answer the "so-what-do-you-guys-do?" question, it would be over a million times a year.

Then I revealed the question mark with a question ...How clear is your sales team in positioning the value of your technology solutions on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is terrible and 10 is crystal clear.

I was somewhat surprised when the answer came back and the consensus was 5....to which I responded "that's OK, it's where most of our clients start and thanks for your honesty and we hope to be somewhere near 10 when we exit this process".

The final number 10% had everyone stumped. This is the percentage of sales meetings with salespeople that buyers rate as actually worth having, where the vendor brought insight to the table.

The remaining 90% of sales meetings are rated as a waste of time as the vendor talked about product or tried to develop a relationship...neither of which buyers want or need.

If you are interested in learning to tell your story in an engaging manner and in more effectively listening to the buyer as you tend their story, you are invited to join us at the forthcoming Open Storyseekers workshops in Seattle.

 

Last week I co-hosted a "What Great Salespeople Do", Story Telling Webinar with Mike Bosworth to explore what the top 13% of salespeople are doing, that the core group has yet to master. 

Last week I met two entrepreneurs in the customer development phase of building start-up companies.

The first entrepreneur, Rajesh Setty founder of  WittyParrot and many other startups led the "what we do" conversation with a demo and it was very clear after just one minute how their product creates value; the other took a while to explain what his company did and it took me even longer to "get it".

I asked both of them, how many times they expected to pitch their "big-idea" and "what-we-do" stories in the next year.

I qualified this by suggesting that they were not only pitching to prospects; they will be pitching to colleagues, prospective new hires, investors, business partners, friends and family, social networking contacts, web-site visitors and of course to strangers on a plane or at a cocktail party in response to the "so-what-do-you-guys-do?" question. 

Rajesh suggested that he would probably pitch his story 2000 times in the next year, the other entrepreneur about 500 times. Let's pick a point in between, say 1000 and multiply this by 10, because both companies have about 10 employees today. Most are engineers, but all are going to be interacting with the above networks of partners, prospects and strangers.

That's about 10,000 times for the company pitch in the next year....and of course in a start-up, the story is changing by the month as lessons are learned from product usage, use cases expand, and new capabilities are built into the product.  In addition, if the company gains funding and grows, employee headcount may treble in the same period. How long will it take to enable new hires to get-on-message?

One entrepreneur rated the clarity of their value proposition at 1/10 and explained that he currently has a consultant working on helping him clarify it, Rajesh rated his message at 6/10 and a work in progress. The image below represents what is created when you are less than 7/10 for message clarity....pollution!
 

Poor messaging is like discarded waste; forgotten, of no value, to be buried forever from memory.

How then can a start-up, or an F500 company for that matter, address the problem of unclear messaging? If you have read this far I think you’ll agree that it’s important. The answer to the question is that it’s not easy.

Often it’s hard for entrepreneurs to take the buyer’s view and to truly understand the problems the buyer is facing and how they could potentially use the products to create value… but this is the place to start. Hiring a consultant to help create clarity in messaging in the formative stages of company building is potentially a high-payoff investment. How important is message clarity to you?

I believe there is an opportunity to create a software as a service product to create and maintain messaging that resonates with buyers, that everyone from entrepreneurs to marketing managers in F500 companies can use and I’m in the process of building it and we are interested in talking to early adopters in our customer discovery phase of development.

We helped an Israeli technology company re-launch their Infrastructure as a Service product at a critical time in the evolution of public and private cloud solutions and it was transformational for the company. They weren't looking for a consultant to help with messaging, but recognized they were about 4/10 for clarity in their value prop at the time. We began by creating buyer-persona’s around best guess use cases.

We helped to create a messaging architecture that identified the relevant capabilities and grouped them under logical positioning pillars.

We then generated sales ready messaging for the sales team to use when engaging prospects over the phone and in person and trained the sales team to use it in consultative conversations.

The marketing team used the messaging to transform their Website message from product-centric gobbledygook to buyer-relevant copy. Marketing managers in each country began to use the messaging in creating blog articles and they quickly began to generate new visitors that converted into inbound leads and new-name customers in the first 6 months after the messaging workshop.

Since this engagement, we have added visual storytelling to our methodology, to capture the value proposition in a meaningful visual confection where both salespeople and buyers can quickly "get", remember and communicate your “big idea” and value proposition.

Take-Aways

1. It's never too early to get clear about your value proposition.
2. If you can't nail your value proposition for the users you are trying to attract and sell to, how can you expect to get them excited about using your product or service?
3. The sales cycle starts in marketing with content creation and if the content you create doesn't resonate with your target buyers, they won't come.
4. If you cannot answer the next three questions with absolute simplicity and clarity so your ideal prospect can understand it, you have work to do.

• So-what-is-it-you-guys-do-then?
• What is a metaphor for an existing product idea, service or capability could you use to help a buyer who does not know your product or company to instantly understand how they could use your product?
• Why should I buy from you? 
  

Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment Consultation - Free

Earlier this month, I immersed myself in two and a half days with Mike Bosworth in his Story Seekers workshop and was once again reminded of what makes great salespeople great - their ability to connect emotionally with buyers and to truly listen.

I cannot easily summarize the 2.5 days in 600 words, but I can give you a couple of core ideas.

I've been a Mike Bosworth fan since I read Customer-Centric Selling in January 2005, but I had not read his prior work, “Solution Selling” published nearly 30 years ago, based on his experiences at Xerox and involvement in the SPIN project. Mike was one of the most successful reps in Xerox history at the time and gained much experience in selling, managing and training salespeople before most of us started our sales careers.

While reading his latest book, co-authored with Ben Zoldan, entitled, "What Great Salespeople Do", I could feel myself nodding as I could either see myself in the stories, or agreed with his ideas and training philosophy. 





One of Mike’s startling revelations in the opening of the training course is that after nearly 30 years of sales training in both Solution Selling and Customer-Centric Selling (and most of the other mainstream sales methodologies), not much has changed for the bottom 80% of the sales force, who sell 20% of the revenue.



The outcome of these training courses was that the best salespeople got better from using the techniques and processes, but the core group typically stopped using the techniques within a month or two of the training and reverted to prior behavior. Mike points out that in fact the old 80/20 rule is no longer true in fact it’s now 13% of salespeople selling 87% of the business. (Sales Benchmark Index)

Why?

The answer to this question is not masterful use of the CRM system; adherence to the 9-box questioning model, or the number of connects per day or the ability to dazzle with presentation and demonstration skills. These are table stakes in the old process oriented, logical “left-brain” training paradigm for sales professionals.


It turns out that great salespeople are able to forge strong emotional connections with buyers, either through a natural or learned ability to quickly create rapport, listen empathically and connect emotionally with buyers, typically through story.


Top salespeople are able to connect emotionally with buyers quickly, which the Franklin-Covey organization refers to as “speed of trust”. This is one of the most critical skills in today’s buyer-seller relationship, where the salesperson’s “at-bat” opportunities are fewer and meeting duration is shorter.

 
Status-quo thinking with sales leaders is that right-brained empathy and rapport skills can’t be taught. “It’s too touchy-feely for our hard-bitten sales team” We are looking for sales leaders who are willing to challenge that belief, who understand that these skills are probably the most important and most underdeveloped in the core group.
 
Storytelling is as old as mankind and no one ever turns down an opportunity to hear a good story. When you tell a story and expose your vulnerability in the process, you invoke a reciprocal emotion in the listener and create an opportunity to tend (draw out) the other-person’s story and this is what builds trust. This is not a story about how great you are as a salesperson; how big your company is, or how wonderful your products are. These are the stories most salespeople are telling today to buyers who haven’t asked to hear them - most of the time.



Truly listening to the other person, reflecting their words and emotions, (without thinking about what you are going to say next, interrupting, mentally counting the commission, or trying to qualify in or out), is a skill and it can be learned and mastered with deliberate practice.

Mike used an expression “premature elaboration” to describe how salespeople - who are experts in their field and familiar with the buyer situation are too keen to tell the buyer what they need.


Neil Rackham created an expression that still holds true today as a result of his research in the SPIN project. 


EXPERTISE + ENTHUSIASM = ENEMY.

This is premature elaboration and most of us in sales have been guilty of it at some point in our careers. If you put yourself on the buyers side of premature elaboration, it feels like you're being told and then sold and that's what gives salespeople a bad name. Learning to truly listen and tend the buyers story will help you to learn more about the buyers issues before you offer your solution. 

The Story Arc

We created and learned to tell three stories in the workshop;

1. Who Ive helped,
2. Who I am,  
3. Who I represent,

All stories we created follow a similar story arc and we used this story format to tend the stories of others. On the evening of the 2nd. day, our homework assignment was to call someone we love and ask them a question and tend their story using the skills we had learned in class and the story arc to help tend the conversation. I called my 17 year old daughter, Olivia and we had a conversation for about 40 minutes, unlike any we had had before.

We are looking for early adopters in sales leadership willing to pilot a Story Seekers Storytelling workshop for struggling reps who they would hire again (competent + character). 

Join us for a live Storytelling Webinar with Mike Bosworth

"I'm sorry to tell you that we are restructuring the company and we have to let you and twelve others go."

Ever been laid off? I have - and chances are that at some time in your life it could happen to you. Layoff's happen, it's a fact of life in our time and it's no big deal. Companies re-organize, merge, get acquired, have a bad quarter and suddenly, headcount becomes a problem.

After 9-11, there were hundreds of thousands of sales and marketing professionals in the Bay Area suddenly unemployed. Long gone is the era of my parents (grand-parents for many readers), when you joined a company and expected to work a lifetime and retire on a pension at 65.

What happens when you do get laid off? How do you get back into the workforce and perhaps more importantly, how do you win the job you really want, when there are potentially dozens or even hundreds of others applying for the same job? Hint - be different!

Wil Loesel (www.linkedin.com/in/wloesel) worked for Time Warner Cable as a sales manager and was recently laid off due to a restructuring. Wil visited my Website earlier this month and viewed our " Your PowerPoint Presentations Suck Webinar" and decided to apply some of the ideas he learned in the Webinar to differentiate himself in his job search.

Wil's Story

"I had an interview for a B2C Manager position on May 5th. I had prepared a presentation a week earlier for another company I was interviewing at and was working on tailoring it for my interview the next day. I watched your webinar the evening prior to my interview and decided I wanted to change my entire presentation.

I stayed up all night (until 8am) revising the presentation. I then slept for 2 hours, woke up and kept working, all the way until my interview. I wrote and memorized talking points and stories for each slide (keeping the slides visual, using only a word or two and a picture) and let my voice present the story."

Wil's Before Slides

There is nothing wrong with Wil's before slides, it's just that they are typical, the same meaningless graphics, too much information and have a memory retention lifecycle for the viewer of one mouse-click.
This is one of the worst slides in Wil's old deck, but it's so familiar. I've seen something like this many times and when I see it my eyes glaze over it and move on.  The slide below is popular at the moment. I have seen a derivative of this several times at industry conferences and Webinars already this year. It is unreadable and has too much information to be presented effectively.

Wil's After Slides

I have reduced the size of Wil's "after" slides to cover the points in his management philosophy section, because I can... you will still be able to get the key idea from each slide that Wil wanted to discuss, when the slides are shrunk. The images are clean, one main idea per slide, are easily understood and the images create meaning to support his point. It's Wil that is talking, the slides are doing their job as visual aids.

This article is the third in a series of articles on aligning marketing and sales with buying behavior and it will be of value to sales and marketing professionals who wish to adapt their process to align with buyer behavior.
 


The first article in the series,  "A Guide to Aligning Marketing & Sales Engagement with Buying Process" discussed buyer behavior and how it is affected by risk. Last week's article,  The B2B Buying Cycle and How to Influence it, pt. 1 is an in-depth review of the formative stages in the buying process and the role of sales and marketing in early adopter engagement as well as the risks to the supplier.

Phase 4: Assessment

Congratulations, you made it through  Position, the graveyard of most opportunities. Chances are you are well on your way to a sale to an important new customer, but don't put the champagne in the fridge yet, it could be months before a formal transaction. 

The  Assessment phase is a necessary step in a post Enron-world and the era of corporate accountability to satisfy that due diligence is carried out, compliance issues are met and risks are properly considered. 

In the assessment phase the organization is weighing both the upside and the risks in implementing early stage technology. Qualitative and quantitative performance information is sought, as well as assessment of upside, risks, plus all costs. Assessment involves assembly of a project team, proof of concept or pilot to create evidence & gather data. 

Role for Marketing

I asked John McTigue from Kuno Creative to contribute the three marketing segments on this blog as they are engaged with a number of current customers on exactly these deliverables.

Marketing automation is more than sending an email to a list of buying stakeholders and tracking form submissions. It starts with aligning your sales and marketing teams so that they are on the same page with respect to:

• Understanding the sales funnel concept and how it aligns with buying-cycle stages,
• Understanding the demand generation and lead nurturing process,
• Agreeing to criteria for buy-cycle stages, including lead scoring thresholds and sales-ready events and triggers,
• Understanding and agreeing to the definition of a sales qualified lead and handoff between marketing and sales with respect to criteria and CRM integration,
• Feedback (or closed loop marketing) to the marketing automation system (and team) based on sales engagements and status updates,

Role for Sales

• Work with mentor/champion/buyer to implement a sequence of events for the assessment/evaluation,
• Support the proof of concept; where possible, seek to influence the construction of the assessment,
• Work internally within the supplier organization to support the assessment and provide technical support resources,
• Do not commence an assessment unless you know what the outcome of a successful evaluation will be.

Risks for Sales

• Pilot or proof of concept not properly specified or outcomes unclear,
• Internal adversaries influence the assessment criteria to make it hard for the supplier to succeed,
• The product doesn't work or deliver the anticipated result. (When this happens, it may be time to find another job.)

Risk Mediation

1. The sales team needs to lead the client "let me share with you our process that has helped others make the transition...".
2. Influence the construction of the assessment.
3. Get your best minds focused on this vital task.
4. An assessment takes time, effort and resources and exposes the supplier to considerable risk.

Do not start an assessment until you know what the outcome will be if your trial is successful. 

Phase 5: Case

The  Case phase converts the Assessment into a project to acquire the product or solution. 

The case phase involves creation of a formal business case, assignment of internal resources and budget.

• Uses the output of the Assessment phase, 
• Possibly includes analysis of alternative solutions to arrive at final cost estimates and an ROI, 
• Likely to use 3rd party analyst data if available and independent comparisons of vendors and costs
• In this phase, the Case is pushed back and forth between the mentor and the sponsor (champion) until the sponsor is happy all relevant business and political goals are served.
• Budget is applied and the acquisition made public to potential suppliers.
• The buyer may issue an Invitation to Tender (ITT) or Request for Proposal (RFP) to satisfy purchasing rules. At this stage the case could be passed to purchasing to formally engage suppliers in the procurement process 

Role for Marketing

Marketing's role is to assist the buyer in their journey towards becoming a customer. 

1. It starts with buyer persona and messaging that addresses buyers directly at each stage in their personal decision process.  
2. Demand generation campaigns tuned to buyer needs at the beginning of the journey (top of the sales funnel) attract new leads that are pre-qualified by virtue of targeting and messaging. 
3. Lead nurturing campaigns keep potential buyers engaged and help them to become introduced to your products and services at their own pace.
4. Calls to action at each step in the lead nurturing chain enable buyers to move forward when they are ready. 
5. Marketing is responsible for creating the content that maps to each buyer persona and decision stage and for developing marketing automation workflows for demand generation and lead nurturing campaigns. 
6. Ideally, sales and marketing work together to define lead scoring criteria for buyer behavior and to develop workflows for managing leads and handing them off to sales reps when they are ripe for purchase via CRM.

Role for Sales

1. Set the agenda for the RFP/ITT or expectations/outcomes in a Term-Sheet, or Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) if the transaction is informal.
2. Working through the needs analysis with the client and understanding the issues, goals and concerns of each constituent in the buying group. 
3. Generate business support for the Case by demonstrating (if appropriate), that your product can help them achieve goals and overcome these issues.
4. Providing assistance with cost/Return On Investment (ROI) models.
5. Provide relevant examples and proof points via case studies and where appropriate, through reference calls with satisfied customers.
6. Use briefing books, white-papers, Webinars and presentations to circulate ideas 

Risks 

• Insufficient executive sponsorship (salespeople have only one key player on their team and their champion leaves).
• A late-coming competitor engages internally though their champion and cleverly changes the ground rules at the executive level.
• You receive an inbound inquiry asking for information on your products, and pricing. There is a sense of urgency and the buyer is not sharing with you all of their issues.

Risk Mediation

• Meeting key stakeholders involved in the decision is mandatory,
• Fight the battle on your terrain, fight to influence the assessment and the outcome of a successful business case,
• Beware of the Inbound Inquiry with a short time to respond; you may be invited to compete to make up the numbers in a deal where your competition has been working for months to set the agenda and you are being invited along for the ride.

Phase 6: Transaction

The transaction phase confirms project details to all internal and external stakeholders. Procurement may become involved for a formal acquisition.

This could require competitive tendering, a short-listing of possible vendors, demonstrations and selection committees, the conclusion of which will be the award of the contract to the successful supplier.

Role for Marketing

In the final stages of the buy cycle, marketing also plays an important role in providing Sales with the lead intelligence and content they need to overcome objections and close the sale. 

Bottom funnel content such as case studies and video testimonials can help to sway buyers on the fence, and lead behavior monitoring can signal their intentions to the sales team so that they can prepare the most effective approach to closing. 

Once the sale is finalized, feedback from buyers as well as sales reps arms the Marketing team with valuable information for reaching new leads and nurturing them throughout the buyer cycle.

Role for Sales

1. Close the sale at the best possible price. If the answers to the following two questions are not yes and yes, do not begin to negotiate price. 
   1. Are we the chosen vendor?
   2. Is price the only remaining obstacle to doing business?
   (Customer Centric Selling, Bosworth and Holland)
2. Execute a Sequence of Events where the outcome is an order on completion of a successful assessment and business case.
3. Salespeople should strive to time the order outcome other than at the end of quarter. 

Risks

1. Insufficient Stakeholder coverage results in your offering being marginalized by vendors aligned with more powerful executive team members,
2. You get outflanked by a competitor who has blind-sided you and cleverly changed the ground-rules of the evaluation,
3. Your champion or executive sponsor leaves or is transferred,
4. A late-coming competitor drops their price through the floor and the client uses this as a lever to get big discounts,
5. The buyer delays the transaction until the end of quarter and engages the purchasing team who are trained in negotiating pricing concessions and compensated on reducing vendor margins,
6. There is an announcement that the company is making a strategic acquisition or is being sold or merged. (Not much you can do about this one - usually means a minimum of 6 months before the opportunity will be revisited - if ever; - back to the drawing board.)

Risk Mediation

• Use a project plan or sequence of events which is timed to conclude in an order, other than at the end of quarter,
• Ensuring you have met with, understand and to the extent possible, satisfy the needs of key stakeholders,
• Keep your mentors and champions involved in the machinery of the purchasing process; this is particularly important if you have proven a business case, established ROI and the purchasing team is being very aggressive in their negotiation stance,
• Be prepared to stand your ground against professional purchasing teams; call in your champion,
• Be prepared to walk if you cannot close the transaction on acceptable terms.

The B2B Buying Process - and how to influence it.

Buyer behavior has changed radically in the past 5 years; sales process unfortunately in most companies has not adapted and marketing has been slow to adapt.

I first noticed these changes 10 years ago, when buyers would come to meetings knowing more about the products and competitive approaches that I did. I began working on aligning buying and selling processes after meeting Dominic Rowsell, author of "Why Killer Products Don't Sell", on which much of this work is based. 

This article is the second in a series of articles on aligning marketing and sales with buying behavior and it will be of value to sales and marketing professionals who wish to adapt their process to align with buyer behavior. Last week's article "A Guide to Aligning Marketing & Sales Engagement with Buying Process" discussed buyer behavior and how it is affected by risk.

The beauty of this approach is that it's universal, simple and based on actual buyer behavior. When you understand each of the steps, you can ask buyers where they are in their buying process. Salespeople typically think that the sales opportunity is one or two steps in advance of where the buyer actually is in the buying cycle and this is a primary contributor to forecasting inaccuracy.

Phase 1: Idea or Identify  

The buying process starts with an idea at Identify. 

The Idea phase is usually an internal customer activity, as a result of an executive off-site meeting and blue-sky thinking, brainstorming opportunities or as a result of a strategy session. Business executives are constantly looking to identify trends in segments and markets which may yield opportunity.

A buying cycle can be initiated in answer to CXO questions like, "how can I grow revenue, expand reach, or contain cost", etc.  Similarly business leaders look for  economies of scale, acquisitions and to identify i mportant customer groupings as well as emerging  technologies that could help them become more competitive. Think about the last time you bought something of value...it was likely months after the idea came to you that you actually made a purchase.

Role for Marketing

Most B2B buying cycles now begin with an Internet search, but it's probably not a search for product in the first instance. Developing Mind-Share is the imperative for marketing and to get found in a Google search in response to the type of query your target buyers are using to identify possible approaches to solving the above problems. 

Marketing's role is publishing fresh and engaging ideas in various forms of content in blogs, videos, article marketing, social media. Thought-leadership content takes time and intellectual-effort to create, but is worth the effort as it creates an ongoing legacy of Web pages that create brand awareness as well as providing an evergreen source of ongoing referral traffic.

Role for Sales

1. Understand the Value-chain of the customer's business - this is research and may not involve customer contact. 
2. Engage CXO's in existing accounts in mindshare development in strategy sessions (not product related), but designed to truly understand the customer's business and to share ideas.
3. Building connections with the visionaries in client organizations through social media - read their stuff, make comments on and retweet their ideas.

Risks for the Supplier

The likelihood is that salespeople will not be engaged in this phase, unless the sales team is working a multi-level strategy and senior execs are engaged at the top level of the client organization and the account team is proactive in running executive briefings. 

Other risks include:

• The prospective client finds an innovative alternate approach through Google that leads to a competitor when doing "big idea" research,
• Unvalidated market analysis...this means basing your marketing plans and growth assumptions on the size of the opportunity, customer propensity to buy, the price, or any number of factors, based on incorrect assumptions. Get out of the building...read Steve Blank's HBR "Lean Startup Changes Everything"
• Lack of evidence to compare with your offering/idea....this problem is a big issue for start-ups with discontinuous technology.
• The prospect found your Website, but clicked away because they did not understand you or your offerings due to lack of clarity. 

Risk Mediation

If you have a novel product/technology and you are not blogging and using social media to spread your ideas and build mind-share, you are at a distinct disadvantage, regardless of the merits of your technology.

At the outset you are not selling, you are sharing ideas on the Internet and in responding to early stage leads, you are looking to provide help and ideas in conversations of possibility.

Phase 2: Mentor

This phase is about finding and enrolling a Mentor or evangelist in the buying organization to run with/or who is already running with the idea. The Mentor is typically a senior manager or analyst who works with executive team, but is a recommender, not the decision maker.


The Mentor's role is to scope and test feasibility, credibility, acceptability of the idea. The Mentor works with a small team; the idea is still under wraps and not for public consumption in the business. 

• Typically will use the Internet to gather ideas and research.
• May use informal meetings with suppliers to get ideas
• Could use an RFI to gather ideas, but typically will use social networks and Google to gather ideas

The Mentor produces a report for executive team.

If accepted the Mentor will start to plan how the breakthrough idea can be implemented as an initiative, how it will be presented and to whom and the route through the political maze.

Role for Marketing

Effective Content Marketing activity generates mind-share and inbound inquiries through publishing buyer-relevant, keyword rich content and placing it where it will get found on blogs, syndicated and curated Websites and in social media specialist groups.

Marketing Messaging across the Buying Cycle

Role for Sales

The role for sales is to field these inquiries and engage the buyer in a conversation of possibilities. These are early stage inquiries from customers gathering ideas and information. 

1. Develop a high level engagement plan; this is not a detailed account plan or a blue-sheet; more an outline of the possible opportunity, the key players involved and the next steps for both buyer and supplier. (Mind-mapping is a perfect way of collecting and sharing high-level ideas).
2. Risk analysis on customer vs. opportunity (are they the right fit, are they innovators, do they have money, can you access decision level, etc.)
   This means sales managers need two green lights; one from the client that there is an opportunity for further investigation, and one from salesperson that there is indeed a worthwhile paid engagement (proof of concept, feasibility study) as a next step.
3. Develop conversations with prospects, - (you are not selling, you are consulting at this stage of the process). Visual confections are excellent tools for sharing big ideas, getting buyer to tell their story and getting buy-in from a wider audience in the prospective opportunity.
4. If you are engaging existing accounts, sow seeds, share your ideas via hand written notes with relevant articles attached. (Emails get deleted, hand-written notes get read).
5. Salespeople should try to understand buyer goals and the high level problems they are seeking to overcome.

Salespeople must identify the key players involved in the decision process; the salesperson is looking for a champion who can make things happen and to establish a relationship with that person.

Risks for the Supplier

• If the salesperson is only talking to one person in the opportunity (which is the case most of the time), and that person is a weak mentor and is not giving them access to a champion or to key decision makers on the team, then you are wasting your time.
• The customer wants you to do free work - this is a tricky call for many salespeople. As a rule in selling to the early adopter, all consulting on feasibility, product modification prototyping, etc., MUST be paid for; the supplier can refund if absolutely necessary on conclusion of a successful deal.
• Salespeople are too aggressive in trying to close a deal, instead of engaging in fully understanding the landscape of the account and the needs and goals of the key players in the decision process.
• Over-enthusiasm; the salesperson sees an opportunity and starts building expectation in the selling organization around it, without sufficient diagnosis and qualification

Now a tricky question for salespeople and their managers, What do you put in the forecast when it's still an idea on the horizon? (Answer: it does not appear on the forecast yet.)

Risk Mediation

• Salespeople need to engage powerful sponsors - politely demand it. Use the qualification confirmation letter after each meeting with a buyer. If the buyer fails to respond within a week to your meeting summary letter and confirm that your summary of the meeting is correct and follow through on next steps, (which may include access to stakeholders), they are not a prospect. This letter really works - download the template and use it.
• Identifying key players in the decision process is mandatory (also known as Stakeholder Mapping)
• If the customer is unwilling to pay for consulting on feasibility, proof of concept, or product modification, they are not a prospect.

Phase 3: Position

Public discussion occurs within the key players on the executive team to make resources and funds available. The Mentor works hard to drive the project and their own personal credibility.


If the supplier's product is disruptive, this will arouse emotions and the positioning discussion will become POLITICAL; Change = Emotions.
Without executive sponsorship at this stage, the idea is unlikely to survive the internal battle for resources and funds. 

Many potential opportunities fail to turn into projects because they are killed off at the Position phase by competing priorities or strong adversaries who are either fighting to maintain status quo, are aligned with alternate approaches, or simply don't understand your offering and by default, oppose the idea. 

The transition from Position to Case is the specification for a project for the internal assessment of the idea.

Role for Marketing

After a Website visitor has converted into a lead on your Website, the process of building trust and credibility begins. Lead nurturing is the process of  sending the right message to the right prospect at the right time and in most cases, this is hit and miss.

Lead nurturing is a science and it takes dedicated effort and often professional help is needed to set-up and generate meaningful results that justify the investment in the marketing automation platform.

Email is the preferred vehicle for lead nurturing, based on sending appropriate content to segmented lists of your leads, based on buyer persona role, company demographics, interest areas and sundry other criteria. 

Each email should follow a logical path to educate the buyer on the issues and advantages in your approach and move them to take action. Typically top and middle of the funnel content presents an opportunity to read a new article or download a white-paper or e-book.

Role for Sales

Position is make or break time for salespeople, although few ever know when or how it occurred. Typically, (80% of the time), the buyer goes radio silent and disappears and the opportunity is over for now.

1. Support your mentor and find a champion
2. Generate business support for an Assessment, meet key players
3. Use the meeting summary and visual confections as well as providing links to relevant examples and proof points.
4. Use white papers, eBooks and presentations to circulate ideas to stakeholders.
5. Understand the politics and work with the mentor/champion to develop a sequence of events to fully scope the idea.

Risks

• Strong adversaries aligned with the status-quo or alternate approaches,
• Competition for scarce resources means your idea may not survive without sufficient emotional commitment from key stakeholders,
• Behavior or process change are strongly resisted by the "USER"  stakeholder of the innovation,
• Weak or no champion to fight for your solution,
• The opportunity loses momentum and client goes "radio-silent"

Risk Mediation

Any work must be a paid engagement - if the idea is worth doing, it's worth paying a little to be sure. Work the key stakeholders, understand their roles, issues - create vision as to the value of your approach.

Have you ever had a situation where you engaged a prospective lead, they showed a lot of interest, your meaningful conversations led to a demo or a presentation and then the prospective buyer went radio silent and disappeared?

This happens a lot; according to Scott Santucci of Forrester, at least 80% of the time leads fail to make it through the sales process.  There are many possible reasons why leads die, but I suggest that most early leads don't make it past the critical internal "fight for funds" (Positioning) phase in the buy cycle. 

Buying behavior has changed permanently and way faster than most sellers and marketers have been able to adapt their processes and their business. Much recent debate about the point at which salespeople are engaged in the buying process leads me to believe that an in depth review of buying-selling process is required. 

The Book that Launched a Thousand Others

"The Diffusion of Innovation," by Everett Rogers is a hugely influential study on the process by which innovations are adopted or diffused into a population. This work, now in its fifth edition was first published in 1962 and has spawned dozens of books like  "Crossing the Chasm," by Geoffrey Moore,  "The  Tipping Point," by Malcolm Gladwell and many others.

This series of article will help you understand why most early stage opportunities die, how buyers buy and how you can better influence a buying cycle in your favor. The articles are based on a collaboration with Dominic Rowsell, co-author of " Why Killer Products Don't Sell" and adds a layer of understanding from the buyers perspective on how they go about buying innovative or disruptive technology and how risk affects vendor engagement.

Understanding the buying process will help sellers to engage and optimize their value chain. This is new thinking for most sales teams and with insights gained from this work, we can adjust our selling process to serve our customers according to how they buy - which is governed by their tolerance for risk. 

Why do People Buy?

People buy for many and varied reasons; our role as sales professionals is to find out the underlying motives of the buyer and once in possession of this knowledge, do our best to satisfy the buyers needs. 

People buy technology solutions and consulting services for dozens of reasons, however most of these can be distilled into the following four business drivers, or buyers compass.

• To grow top-line revenue
• To reduce cost and improve profit
• To create competitive advantage to attack new opportunities
• To reduce risk exposure to the business

How do People Buy?

There is a pathway or process that all organizations and individuals follow to reach purchasing decisions. This pathway is universal and does not vary by culture or geography as it is inextricably linked to human nature. What changes from one company to another is the speed at which organizations or individuals travel through the process.

Every purchase goes through the IMPACT cycle, either formally or informally, - with or without the supplier.


Whether an airline is buying a fleet of Boeing Dreamliners, a small business is buying an innovative new software service, or a family is buying a new laptop computer for the home, every purchase goes through the same process. For a Boeing 787 it may take 20 people two years to decide, for a Laptop in the home, it might take a discussion with your partner, a visit to a few Websites and a couple of hours in total.

The six steps in the buying process use an acronym which is easy to remember as it has huge I-M-P-A-C-T on organizational performance. Every purchase goes through all six phases, with or without the supplier.

Engagement and the Cycle of Adoption 

The Cycle of Adoption shown in the visual confection below, layers the cycle of adoption over the universal buying process IMPACT and introduces the four buying behaviors and the point during the cycle of adoption that they engage buyers.

 

Email data solutions provider, TowerData went live with their redesigned Website last week, with a stunning new appearance and a message that grabs your attention after landing on any page on the Website.

TowerData Background

TowerData helps companies increase the performance of their email marketing by validating email addresses for improved deliverability, providing intelligence about email leads and subscribers, and increasing size of the email list. TowerData has been in business since 2001 and has helped thousands of customers improve their email marketing results and take their email list to the next level.

We created the new TowerData brand message in partnership with enterprise inbound marketing agency, Kuno Creative (Kuno),  who created the redesign and new content and managed the website transformation project. Kuno is managing the content marketing, demand generation and marketing automation program for TowerData.
 
TowerData is a HubSpot customer and has already been successful with its demand generation activities, generating a predictable volume of inbound leads and doing well with keyword rankings. As a next step, TowerData wanted to attract and convert more qualified sales leads by improving its brand messaging and content.

Goal: Brand Update and Website Revamp

Tom Burke, CEO of TowerData stated, “the project was driven by a need to update and focus our brand and revamp our 6-year-old website.” Prior to the redesign the TowerData Website, although functional, looked dated and the message did not clearly identify how TowerData served its clients or what differentiated their services in a highly competitive market. TowerData sought to make its core service strengths readily apparent and easily understood by website visitors. 

Complication: Prior History

TowerData had already identified a redesign and branding vendor who proposed a traditional approach of interviewing stakeholders, including TowerData customers, to understand the business, and pull out the themes and message from there. Our approach would involve more than a brand refresh.

Resolution: Create a Messaging Architecture

TowerData selected Admarco and Kuno for the messaging and Website transformation, and we began the project with the development of the TowerData Buyer-Persona, which details the roles and thought processes of representative buyers. The messaging process was done entirely over the Internet to save time and money and we used the MindManager tool from MindJet.com to capture the information in a brainstorming session attended by Kuno and top TowerData stakeholders.  



With the Buyer Persona created, we moved to developing the Messaging Architecture and began brainstorming the Win Themes and Positioning Pillars. 

The Messaging Architecture is developed by identifying product usage Win Themes, i.e. how the products are used to create value, solve problems and help buyers achieve their goals.  

Win-Themes are self-describing information chunks that encapsulate feature, function and benefit in a meaningful sentence. In other words a Win-Theme describes what the product or service is, what does it does for the buyer when they use it and what that means in terms of value for the buyer. The brainstorming and review process required five Web Conferences to complete and took around about 10 hours to capture and edit over a period of 2 weeks. 

Positioning Pillars are used to position the product in the market vs. competition. Some of our clients are unsure of their Pillars at the start of the process, but in TowerData’s case they knew they wanted to position around Email Append, Email Intelligence and Email Validation. 

Content Creation Templates

Content Creation Templates are used for generating content from the Messaging Architecture and Buyer Persona. For TowerData, we created more than 20 templates, one for each target buyer goal.

The template development process starts with selection of the buyer goal and we populate it with the related problems and consequences from the buyer persona. We then select the appropriate product usage Win-Themes, and write the solutions summary, highlight the keywords and an attention grabbing Hook that can be used in an email header or call to action. Templates are completed with a proof point to support the product usage scenario and the value contribution.

Content Creation templates are the key to creating consistent content that can be used across the organization by people who were not involved in the messaging development process. Content Creation templates enable professional writers quickly generate Web page and blog content that is keyword rich, technically accurate, resonates with buyers and highlights the value in using the products/services. There is no limit to the number of templates that can be generated and combinations of Win-Themes can be used to fine-tune value messaging for very specific buyers.

Lessons Learned:

1. The Internet-only brainstorm process was less than ideal as the Mindjet tool interface and screen painting process over the Net was slow and difficult to follow as the brain-pattern became more complex. (We are creating a SaaS Messaging development tool to enable collaborative real-time data entry to improve the message-capture process and hosting of the Messaging Architecture. Messaging is not static. As new buyers and needs are identified, new product capabilities are added, new market segments entered and market conditions change, your messaging needs to change. Our goal is to enable our customers to manage their own messaging on completion of the project).
2. This was the first time we have used the content creation templates and they served as a critical link in extracting intelligent copy from the Messaging Architecture and formatting it for reuse by others not invoved in the brainstorming process to generate quality copy.
3. Key-word rich Win-Themes are high value deliverables that can be reused countless times throughout marketing and sales messaging and serve to reinforce the brand value and align sales and marketing conversations. 
4. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and we will report in a few months on the results from the project in a comprehensive case-study.

TowerData CEO's thoughts 

Tom Burke, TowerData CEO, remarked on the process, “Rebranding was much more to us than a new logo or graphics. We wanted someone who could help us articulate and crystallize our message and positioning, and then convert that into engaging content. The Admarco process provided a comprehensive view of our services from the buyer’s perspective and a robust structure that we can use with Kuno Creative to develop our content.”

A Final word from Kuno Creative

John McTigue, Kuno’s EVP and Co-Owner, has been guiding this process from the Kuno Creative side. “What’s often missing from any brand refresh or website redesign project is understanding who the customer is and what they want, then tailoring the entire content strategy to fulfill their needs.

Admarco’s interview and modeling process provided a structured way to develop buyer personas and easily turn their needs into product-usage Win-Themes to drive a content marketing strategy and editorial calendar. We plan to incorporate this process into many of our enterprise inbound marketing client accounts to help them achieve success faster and more efficiently.”