Posted by Mark Gibson on Wed, Jul 28, 2010
In May this year I posted an article entitled "A Guide to creating engaging Powerpoint Sales Presentations"
This article attracted above average interest and I thought I would follow-up with a short list of high value resources and advice on Powerpoint content creation and delivery, to assist marketing and sales professionals in more effectively communicating value to customers. Please add to it if you have a link to great advice, consistent with the above goals.
Start by answering the buyers WIIFM question
Any successful sales conversation, whether a presentation, whiteboard session or cross table chat using a flip-chart, should start with an understanding of the most important question on the customers mind, "What's in it for me." If you need help answering this question, start by developing the buyer persona; if you are selling novel technology or attempting to influence mentors in the buying organization to initiate a sales opportunity, value identification could also be useful in answering this question.
Resources
- Here is Seth Godin's original 2007 post Really Bad Powerpoint that spawned hundreds of follow-on articles and thousands of comments.
- Check out Carmine Gallo's Youtube video, "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs"
- For a complete one-stop shop for Powerpoint resources including a free Ebook, visit Olivia Mitchell at Speaking about Presenting for presentation tips. See Olivia's well researched list of presentation skills books.
- Most Powerpoint sales presentations fall short of achieving their sales objective...have you ever thought not doing a Powerpoint presentation? What are you actually trying to achieve in making the presentation in the first place? If your goal is customer engagement and active discussion on your ideas then maybe a white-board session could be more useful. Check out WhiteboardSelling.com for an education on how to engage and convince customers without using Powerpoint.
- If you are not using a mind-mapping tool to help you think through and create your story, then you could be missing a trick. I have been using and recommend Mindjet MindManager since 2004 and you can get a free 30 day trial download here.
- Learn more about the 4MAT system and how to get your message
across so it sticks, by watching the introductory video on 4MAT concepts from the creator of 4MAT Dr. Bernice McCarthy. Note: this video is heavily slanted toward teaching school-kids, but the techniques apply to any discipline in getting ideas across and 4MAT works. Instead of asking students why they need to learn this, we need to answer the question our prospects are asking at the outset...why should I listen to this presentation?
- We have met the enemy and he is Powerpoint, New York Times article of interest on US Army use of PowerPoint for briefings.
- For a completely new approach to Internet based presentations, that does not include Powepoint, take a look at Prezi.
- Finally, if you would like some help in creating clarity in your message and tuning your story to the buyers WIIFM antenna, regardless of the presenation medium, we would be pleased to discuss Value Identification and aligning messaging around buyer needs.
Posted by Mark Gibson on Mon, Feb 22, 2010
On Monday two weeks ago we received a surprise call from a prospective client who was running a HubSpot trial. We started the trial to gather data to make the business case for an investment in our Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment process, HubSpot, and our HubSpot implementation support.
The call went something like, "We're selling the company on Monday and spinning out a new business, I need your help for the next week to build a new web site, to make it corporate and cool and to address our new target market of email data storage solutions for the World's largest message service providers. Oh, and by the way, we have no time to spend on this as we are tied up with the sale of the business and will be in the USA attending an industry conference next week. Also we want a new 4 page brochure to hand out the conference"
This was an unusual engagement based on a 20 year personal relationship and where the exec. team had to trust us in our decision to build their new website in HubSpot and in our ability to deliver. We knew what we could deliver and what we needed to outsource to get the job done.
- The first call was to Dan Lynton of Lynton Labs, a HubSpot certified partner to deliver a custom CSS
- Stephanie Tilton from TenTon Marketing helped with professional editing of the brochure.
- Frank Roesner, a professional photographer, who supplied images from a recent corporate shoot to add a personal touch to the Website.
- Kallkwik, a design and print shop in Kensington did a great job with design and layout of the brochure and delivered on the same day.
The Bizanga Store Website and brochure were delivered on time and the customer is delighted. But this is just the end of the beginning. What we delivered to the client is far more than just a new website and we will help the client implement the following inbound marketing sequence of events.
We built the Website in HubSpot and created the foundation for an inbound marketing strategy that over time will:
- clearly identify target buyer persona goals, needs and problems and align messaging that matches unique capabilities to buyer needs
- generate inbound leads through conversion pages where visitors opt-in to give their contact details by subscribing to blogs, news and events, email newsletters and to gain access to Webinars, white-papers and online content.
- to connect, establish and strengthen relationships with prospective customers industry influencers, analysts and thought leaders through social networking and regular communication
- creating fresh content relevant to prospects, customers, partners to build inbound links to improve rankings on Google for favorite keywords
- creating thought leadership in their market through using ideas from David Meerman Scott's best selling book, "The New Rules for Marketing and PR".
- Build sales one customer at a time and build brand through making each customer successful and using the above tools to spread the news.
The next step is to present the above game-plan to the client and get buy-in to execute.
Posted by Mark Gibson on Thu, Aug 27, 2009
I'm speaking with Stephanie Tilton, marketer, writer, blogger and expert on generating inbound traffic based on the words you write in blogs, E-Books and White papers. I'm showing Stephanie in real-time how easy it is to create a blog-post on Hubspot's Inbound Marketing platform and I'm getting some free advice on writing white papers.....I hope this is of interest to you.
According to Stephanie there are five main areas of focus when writing to generate traffic....these are:-
- Who are you interested in connecting with?
- What are some of their concerns that you could potentially help them address - what is their buyer-persona?
- How does your content align with the various stages of the buying cycle? - this is important as one-size fits all copy might work in retail clothing, but not if you are selling technology.
- Create a clear and compelling reason to take the next step with your company.
- Focus on what your prospects are interested in - not your company or your products.
Download a free copy of Stephanie's E-Book, entitled "5 Steps to a White Paper that Pulls in the Perfect Prospect" which I highly recommend.
This whole exercise took 15 minutes (including meta-tags and optimization)...and would have been faster if I was a better typist. Check out Hubspot's case study on how Advanced Marketing Concepts increased inbound visitors and inbound leads by 500% in 6 months on YouTube.com
Posted by Mark Gibson on Wed, Aug 19, 2009
The following is a true story extracted from a recent call in a company, possibly just like yours.
Julie, a sales rep from ABC Software, just got back from an initial meeting with a prospective client who registered interest in your products on your Website. Your inside sales team spoke with the prospect and qualified interest in a meeting to discuss ABC application usage in Acme. Julie's Sales Manager, Bob, asks "So how did the Acme meeting go?"
"Well it went pretty well, we had the buyer tell us about what they were thinking and they actually shared with us that there is a real need driving their interest and they also mentioned that they are looking at a couple of our competitors. I gave our standard presentation and we had some good questions at the end of the presentation, which I had to cut short because the prospect had another meeting and we started late."
"So what are the follow-ups?" Bob asked. "Well they said they would consider what we had told them and get back to us with a configuration spec., so we can deliver a quote."
Unfortunately, Julie did not get a second meeting with the client. (like 3 out of 4 reps today* CSO Insights). Julie dutifully submitted a quotation in response to the spec. and a month later received an email from the client advising them they had run second in a close-run thing.
This story has some of the details removed for brevity, but it illustrates a common problem in many companies that affects both sales and marketing; differentiation vs. competition.
The question is - how do marketers and sales people actually achieve differentiation?
The key to differentiation that is widely mis-understood is that differentiation occurs in the mind of the buyer, not in PowerPoint presentation or on your Web-site (unless both are based on the criteria below).
According to Geoffrey Moore's "Chasm Theory", in the early market you may be alone in the market, striving to get found on the Internet and to convert visitors to take more than a passing glance at your product. As the market matures, competitors will emerge; - either "fast-followers" or "innovators" working on the same idea at the same time; competitors that look and feel from their descriptions on the Internet, just like you. Your product might be cheaper, faster or have more gizmos, but the base functionality provided in the product-class appears the same to the buyer.
In our Post-Internet World, where competitive advantage is fleeting, differentiation is a major issue for all companies.
In the B2B and B2C space, differentiation is achieved through the interactions your prospects are having with your Web-site and the quality and relevance of the conversations of your sales and support team...but how is it achieved?
Differentiation for both sales and marketing occurs in the mind of the buyer and for sellers, it starts by identifying your ideal customers and developing their buyer-persona's.
- By analyzing the interests of your target buyers, their likely needs or goals, the issues preventing them from achieving them, and the cost of not achieving them, we can engage buyers in "what's in it for me" conversations for each target buyer group.
- If we know what our buyers really care about and take the time to think through the value-exchange that occurs when using our products; we capture and share this insight, along with best-practices diagnostic questions (in Buyer-Relevant Messaging Templates) with the sales and marketing team, then we can use this Messaging to improve the quality of our Internet site and to improve the quality of sales and support conversations both over the phone and in person.
This is just first-base though. Your sales and support team needs to be trained in how to use the templates to create stories to truly engage buyers.
Improving the skills of your sales team to engage targeted buyers
in conversations about their business and relevant industry issues requires industry knowledge, product knowledge, communication and language skill. (Most sales training is centered on product knowledge, not inter-personal skills).
The Internet-era mainstream buyer (value-added, value-offered) knows what they want, in many cases what they are prepared to pay and often are more knowledgeable about the market than our sales reps.
- Our sales and support team needs classroom training and performance support tools to master new interpersonal communication language and psychology skills.
- Regular role-playing is required to master diagnostic conversations based on content within the templates and to engage buyers in conversations about their business and to create buyer-vision.
- Finally we need collaborative tools and feedback mechanisms to share our success, what works and what doesn't, and to tune the ineffective and unused templates out of the Messaging Architecture over time.
Sales naturals (the top 5-10% of your team) will have figured out how your products create value in the eyes of the buyer and are effective in engaging buyers in the value-exchange....that's why they are the top-sellers.
If the other 90% of your sales team is not armed with a clear understanding of the goals, needs and issues confronting your target buyers, skilled in using best-practices questions to diagnose whether your capabilities are of value and to create buyer-vision; then the default behaviour for sales will be to revert to "product-speak" in front of an LCD projector and as Julie discovered, this usually spells no follow-up meeting and the end of the opportunity.
Posted by Mark Gibson on Sat, Jul 18, 2009
The following best-practices are guidelines for high performing sales professionals. Thanks to Don Henrich, VP Sales and Marketing at Vico Software for the genesis of this article.
- Start your day early with 15-20 minutes mastering a concept in the “Selling in the Internet Age" Performance Support curriculum. If you are not an Admarco client and don’t have a company supplied performance support tool, you could use this one for $2 per day. (One year subscription)
- Check your goals for the day
- Login to your dashboard in Salesforce.com/CRM tool – dial from your lead list and dial for a set period.
- If you don’t have enough inbound leads we can help your marketing team generate them, but in the interim, work from introductions from existing clients, LinkedIn and social network contacts, news events related to your target accounts.
- Process your leads – these are either new or people who keep coming to your website and your events. They might not know enough yet to want to invest, but they should know who you are and what your process is to help them.
- Shut out distractions, switch off email and focus, put yourself in a peak state every time you pick up the phone, this is money time!
- Executives and managers come to work early to get things done before they are pulled into meetings and the daily turmoil, so plan to dial from 8.00 am to 11:00 am without interruption except for scheduled meetings, bio and stretch breaks. Leave well constructed voicemial when appropriate, with the single goal of getting a call-back.
- Quality trumps quantity, but aim to do 40 dials/day minimum, especially if your sales pipeline is weak and/or poorly qualified.
- If you have a face-face/Internet meeting with a prospective client, you will be prepared from the day before.
- What is your “commanders intent” for the meeting?
- Only 25% of reps get a second meeting so understand the buyer-persona, likely business goals and industry issues from your buyer-relevant-messaging templates.
- Aim for a minimum of 8 in-person or Internet meetings per week with interested prospects.
- 11.00am-12.00am check your voicemail, email and return any high priority calls/emails.
- Call your manager and spend 15 minutes catching them up with your work, your progress and your challenges. Enlist the aid of others in the office to help perfect call openings and sales technique.
- After lunch focus on opportunities; what is your "commander’s intent" – the single thing you need to get in motion or completed to be able to move an opportunity forward.
- Lowest priority is admin and travel, do this at the end of the day.
- Before you leave the office for the day, spend 15-30 minutes getting ready for the next day and updating your opportunities, (if you haven’t done it already).
- If you don't have enough inbound leads, send out 5-10 opt-in meeting requests on LinkedIN.
Posted by Mark Gibson on Tue, Jun 30, 2009
What is Value-created selling and why does it matter?
To understand Value-created selling we need to examine the supplier-prospective customer interaction from both sides.
Buyer – the value created buying culture is used when the buyer has recognised they have a problem, an idea of where they want to be in the future and they have started to envisage various options to take them to that point on the horizon. The challenge for them is to understand the different levels of controllable and uncontrollable risk in the different options. With this being the situation they will call on vendors who can give them insight on unforeseen and critical risk. Solutions are not relevant at this stage.
Seller – they will be looking for issues creating change in the buyer’s world and by understanding the dynamics created by the change for the customer they will be able to create a vision of the future and to certain areas of risk in their response to the market conditions: by revealing these areas of risk to the customer and by showing where they can mitigate or migrate the risk they will initiate a Value Creation engagement.
In summary, Value-created selling is the approach taken to help a customer who has identified a problem or sub-optimal situation, to mentor and position a way forward where risks are unknown and there is no established buying category. In many cases the client will not be aware that a solution to its requirement exists; it takes the sellers view of the market, thought-leadership and industry insight to create understanding of how the products could be used to solve the problem and to mentor the buyer through the internal approval process.
I hadn't heard of the term value-created selling until I read "Why Killer-products Don't Sell", by Ian Gotts and Dominic Rowsell. This book is a revelation for technology sales professionals and I have since incorporated their I-M-P-A-C-T buying process into the sales training and E-Learning courses we deliver. See my review of the book.
According to Dominic Rowsell, "you don't choose how you want to sell. The customer, or rather the maturity of the product in a marketplace, determines the buying culture at any point in time."
The technology Adoption Lifecycle/Risk animation is excerpted from AMC's "Selling in the Internet Age" Salescraft Process eLearning Program.
Why is it important?Because in order to achieve success selling innovative products in the market the seller must adapt their sales process at each transition of the Technology Adoption Life-cycle to effectively match the way companies buy.
The great majority of sales professionals selling technology in the B2B space today operate in value-added or value-offered modes. Here buyers know what they want, have established buying procedures and a formal process to compare, evaluate and acquire products/services, including industry analyst briefings and product rankings from various sources and recommendations from colleagues. There is nothing wrong these selling modes, provided they are in sync with the buyer, it's just that corporations and salespeople who sell this way will not be effective in selling into the early market until they are retrained and develop value-created selling skills and adapt their business models accordingly.
As a sales trainer, having observed hundreds of sales role-plays with sales people in all stages in their careers in the past 5 years, I have seen less than 10 sales-people who are really good at engaging the buyer in a "conversation of possibilities". If your company is selling technology products into a market that is still forming, then your sales team will function best if they acted like consultants....not fast-talking sales people. Time for training?
If you are an early stage company, how do you know there is a problem?
- In value-created sales there will be little competition yet big deals won't come through,
- Pilots will not convert to meaninful deals,
- Salespeople get an initial meeting, but no second meeting,
- Salespeople are talking to weak mentors who are not decision-makers and sales are stalled,
- Salespeople talk a lot about their products in meetings and fail to listen to the information the buyer is imparting,
- Salespeople use trial-close techniques, which perplex the buyer who is trying to sort out a problem and is not ready or able to buy.
What can be done to improve the success in selling to the early market?
1. Get marketing and sales aligned with the value-created selling process and clearly identify the Buyer Persona and how the products specifically create value for the persona.
2. Adopt an Inbound Marketing approach to get-found on the Internet, create mind-share, and incubate interested prospects
3. Equip your sales team with appropriate communication, language and listening skills - in an emerging market, the buyers may know there is a problem, but may not be able to clearly articulate how to go about solving it.
4. Run regular training events and use performance support tools to develop great communication skills, industry knowledge and practice critiqued role-playing until skills are mastered.
5. Align the operations of the company to support the new value-created selling mode.
Posted by Mark Gibson on Sat, Mar 28, 2009
Chances are you didn’t arrive here by accident; you followed a link from either a search engine or a Blog or links from a social network site…welcome to inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing refers to the New World of permission-based marketing strategies. The Old 
World of interrupt marketers, obsessed with ROI, bombarded supposed prospects and demographically selected masses with advertising, direct-mail, telemarketing, email spamming and their really useful Web content required registration to read.
Inbound marketing is a World where interested consumers find you: - primarily through keyword searches on Google and other search engines, social networks or recommendations from friends; choose to learn more about you by subscribing to your RSS or email feed, opting into your email newsletter, freely downloading and sharing your E-Book or white papers, watching your videos, listening to your podcasts, visiting your social network or commenting on your BLOG or Twitter stream.
Migrating to the New World of Inbound Marketing is a journey, not a destination.
There are many concepts to grasp and tools to be mastered on the inbound marketing journey, but it’s not rocket science…anyone can do it and using tools like Keyword Grader and Page Grader from HubSpot, you don’t need a PhD in computer science or search engine optimization (beware of SEO experts with expensive price tags). Whether you are a sole-trader, a fast growing software company or a multi-billion dollar corporation, the principles are the same, but the tools may differ and the time it takes may vary. Many of the tools we use in our business are the same tools used by some of the World’s leading corporations.
What is the Tool-set?
The tools we use and are learning to optimize are;
| SFA & CRM system |
Salesforce.com |
| Website host |
Hubspot.com |
Web analytics
|
Hubspot.com |
| Content Management System |
Hubspot.com |
| Social-media feed aggregator |
Hubspot.com |
Inbound lead management
|
Hubspot.com |
SEO on-page and off-page
|
Hubspot.com |
| BLOG |
Hubspot.com |
EMAIL& calendar
|
Google.com |
Web conferencing
|
GotoMeeting.com |
| VOIP telephony |
SKYPE.com |
| Social network - business |
LinkedIN.com |
| Social network -microblogging |
Twitter.com |
On-line collaboration
|
Huddle.com |
| E-Learning and ETraining |
CogBooks.com |
Website design
|
Realnet.co.uk |
Guidelines in Getting Started in Inbound Marketing
1. Your Website is your #1 asset in the Inbound Marketing World. How does it rate? Run a simple, free check of your site and that of your competitors at www.Grader.com to get some valuable feedback on where it could be improved.
2. What is the goal of your Web-site? How do you want visitors to find you? What do you want people to do as a result of landing on your site? What are your calls to action?
3. Unless your current Web-site is dreadful and you are not getting any traffic, don’t go for a big-bang rewrite, tune pages and add new pages incrementally. Don’t obsess over graphic-design or Flash animations, Guy Kawasaki states that people want quick access to content not glitz.
4. Use a Keyword grading tool to optimize each page on your Website so that you will get found by the right buyers for the right reasons.
5. Don’t obsess over brand message and try to control participation in social media in head-office. Make your interesting content freely available and easily shared.
6. In every corporation there are lots of really smart people who could contribute brilliantly in creating mind-share and attracting inbound visitors if they were empowered; - empower them.
7. Understand your target-buyer persona! This is an essential first step connecting with buyers who are interested in what you sell or do.
8. Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment uses buyer personas to create a framework for a Customer Messaging Architecture which can be shared across the organization to enable global participation in the social media across small and large corporations to drive inbound marketing traffic.
9. Create corporate social-media participation guidelines and allow employees to access useful business and social networking tools at their place of work.
10. Encourage your employees to update their online business persona and connect with their clients, former colleagues and business friends.
The Inbound Marketing Pay-off
What ROI can I expect from migrating from the interrupt driven World to the permission based World of inbound marketing. Significant! See inbound marketing ROI report from Hubspot.com.
We have only just begun and will let you know our own 6 month ROI in June 2009.
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