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Hans’ Blog: Modern Industrial Marketing

Hans’ Blog: Modern Industrial Marketing

Capturing the stories that customers tell

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It’s obvious that if we make our salespeople into better storytellers, it can only mean good things for sales, profits and our brand.

Less obvious is that the stories our customers tell us can have a huge impact, too, as long as not too much gets lost in translation. Do your customers ask questions that only a subject matter expert can answer? How certain are you that both the question and its context are being conveyed from customer to salesperson to company?

Use mobile technology to capture customer sentiment at the source. Video, audio, or an annotation made on a drawing can accurately convey the stories that our customers are desperately trying to tell us, with all of the subtleties needed to serve them better and fine tune our approach to the market.

Make my risk smaller

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Every change in buying habits entails risk, so proposing that our solution is completely risk-free can hurt our credibility. Our offering may be fantastic, our support top-notch, and our pricing a bargain for the value we deliver, but we’re always asking the customer to take a risk.

Stories about how things can go wrong, therefore, are just as important as stories about how things can go right. Tell me what happens if we miscalculated. How will you help me recover? Show me pictures of projects and customers that ran into obstacles and ended up with even better results than expected. Explain how your safeguards mean that you’ll never, ever, leave me hanging.

We all know things rarely go as planned. Tell me a story about those times, too, and the risk you’re asking me to take will seem smaller and smaller.

Apples to apples, actually

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It may be an exaggeration to say that our offering is so different from our competitor’s that it’s like comparing apples to oranges. If we concede that we’re both selling apples, then winning the sale often depends on our ability to communicate specific differences. Highlight the subtleties and tell the story with tools that lead customers through a close comparison:

+ Show a video of a customer that tried both and liked yours better

+ Contrast images of product construction. Point out which features are related to your patented technology

+ Present an explanation of how you’ll support the purchase. The products may seem similar, but it’s your service that will make them happy they chose you

We can win the sale by embracing an apples to apples comparison. If asserting that your competitors are picking from the wrong orchard is unrealistic, make sure your people are equipped and willing to compare your apples to any other apples out there.

Take my money, not my time

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Prospects will often cite budget constraints for not moving forward. But it may be hours, not dollars, that’s the more precious resource. The people at most companies survived the recession by doing more with less and are now spread even thinner as the economy recovers. The million dollar savings (or cost avoidance, or new revenue…) that we can help a customer achieve is only compelling if we minimize the time and effort needed to make a decision and implement.

Promote the aspects of your products and services that free up time rather than consume it. Use tools and techniques that compress the sales cycle and speed up the decision-making process.  Take less of your prospect’s time and you’ll likely end up with more of their money.

You’ve got three minutes. Go.

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We’re finally in front of that extremely busy prospect: “I’ve got ten minutes. Show me what you’ve got,” they say. This is not a request to show everything, so we ask a few questions: “What would you like to accomplish? What else have you tried to fix the issue? What is it costing you to delay?” Five minutes left. We know exactly which two slides we should show. Exactly which video clip they should watch. Exactly which data sheet they need to see. Four minutes left.

Mobile technology lets us carry it all and only show what’s relevant – as if that’s all we brought. In one visit instead of two. Today instead of…maybe never. Show me. You’ve got three minutes. Go.

Congratulations on your mobile site

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10-20% of your visitors are checking you out from their smartphones or tablets. In under two years, that number will cross the 50% mark, meaning mobile traffic will surpass desktop.

Don’t have a mobile site yet? If you have a website and your customers have smartphones, then you have a mobile site…it’s just unintentional.

To make it more intentional, ask your web people about responsive web design. It means updating and redesigning so that a single site recognizes and adjusts to the device it’s being viewed on.

Now is a good time to start adjusting your site to the way more and more of your visitors choose to view it.

One size fits none

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I have a one-size-fits-all hat. It doesn’t. When I wear it, it pinches my forehead and it doesn’t quite cover my ears. It doesn’t make me stand out in a crowd (at least not in a good way).

Are the tools that your salespeople use one-size-fits-all? It may be easier to create a single slide deck, but how often does that one deck truly fit the audience? And does it ever stay one deck?

Technology can transform our content and the methods we use to deliver it. Every presentation becomes custom. Every calculation can be made using the customer’s actual numbers.

Our customers may not buy our hats every time, but the chances are much greater if we prove to them that we are willing and able to make one that fits.

Controlling the cloud

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Put a single presentation on the cloud and 10 salespeople will eventually turn it into 10 if not 100 different versions. At first glance, cloud-based systems seem to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

But there are ways to harness the cloud, take back control, and keep tabs on which of our materials are being used most often and most effectively.

As you build mobile apps for your sales team, look for the following:

+ Synchronization: Updates/edits pushed to devices automatically

+ Ease of use: Accommodates your least technical salesperson

+ Future-proof: Expandable and customizable

The cloud will hold more and more of our applications and data. If we can’t escape it, we might as well be in control of it.

Social media…or else

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A friend of mine applied social media to her company in a new way. She added it to employee job descriptions. Every industry expert is expected to tweet at least three times a week.

There was some grumbling at first, but now her company boasts several 60-something PhD scientists-turned-rock-stars with sizable followings (and no 20-somethings posing as industry insiders). The notoriety feeds the scientists’ egos and dialogue prompted by their tweets feeds the business development funnel.

All it took was putting it writing to get the ball rolling. And now the company’s social media is being handled (and embraced) by the people who really are the industry’s leaders.

The story sold the salesman

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I love the story that your salesman tells…the one about he and his brother as kids, their predicament, how they resolved it. It tells me a lot about who he is and how he might help me.

The only problem is that while I’m sold on your salesman, I don’t have the same level of comfort with your product. To be honest, if he were to leave, my business with you would be at risk.Stories are an unassuming way to help customers remember us, our product and our company. Consider the three C’s of B2B storytelling:

Capability – Have we ever trained (or simply asked) our salespeople to tell stories about our business?

Content – Are our materials mostly datasheets and specifications or do we have images and other media that make the point?

Container – Is our content accessible and mobile-enabled and if so, are we using it so effortlessly that it enables rather than distracts?

Pick one of the above and make an adjustment. Our salespeople are already good at telling stories about themselves. Make it easy for them to tell stories about what they sell, too.