Skip links

communication

Stop collaborating

by

There’s a time and place for collaboration, meeting halfway, and rounding off the edges. Collective wisdom often prevails and the result is greater than the sum of its parts.

 

But the things that set us apart from our competitors can not, must not, be compromised, negotiated or otherwise diluted.  Does the industry’s thought leader work for you? Is lightning-quick responsiveness in your company’s DNA? Do you offer a complex business case that no one else can touch?

Our differentiation is subtle and as we convey it, we can’t afford to let one iota of our message get lost in translation. So make your stories strong and pointed, make them engaging, and use technology to make them easy to tell and spread.

Death by a thousand bullets

by

Think about the last sales presentation you saw. What was the most memorable bullet on, say, slide ten? On any of those slides? Even if there was a stellar idea among them, it was lost in a pile of bullets.

Some customers (and salespeople) are visual learners, some are auditory, others respond to hands-on. And since we rarely get compliments on the effectiveness of our bullets, why do we pump out slide after slide as if we’re trying to hit some sort of bullet quota?

Use mobile technology to sell with pictures, video, sound, and interactivity. Let your customers experience what sets you apart by seeing, hearing and putting their hands on what makes you and your offering special. Then, maybe we can stop killing our presentations with all of those bullets.

How credible are you?

by

Your offering is rock solid. You’ve done a really nice job of designing and executing your product or service. Seriously. Well done.

Once I establish that you’re in the running for my business, on what other criteria do I make my decision? To some degree I make it on the credibility of the salesperson sitting across the table and the company she represents. Is she able to persuade me that she knows what she’s talking about? Do I agree that her company stands behind everything said so far?

We’d like to think that our product accounts for the majority of our credibility, but if our sales force turns over often or if we’re headquartered in the east and selling in the west, there may be many non-product obstacles making us less credible.

Picture your newest, most remote salesperson. Is he equipped with the right stories and mobile tools to build credibility?

Eager to apply technology? Then consider it last

by

A few words for you to consider, pass on, or ignore as you see fit…

Eager to apply technology? Then consider it last

Sounds counterintuitive, but the easiest way to choose the right technology to help tell your story is to make the technology decision last. First, answer these questions:

  1. WHO needs to see your message? (existing customers? prospects?)
  2. BY WHOM will it be presented? (self-directed? your salesperson?)
  3. WHERE will this happen? (on their desktop? in person/in the field?)

Try it out on your most pressing B2B communication need. The answers will guide you…to the web, to develop a smartphone app, or to a face-to-face selling tool.

The answers to these simple questions will help you define the technology and avoid choosing a technology first, then trying to make it fit.

Make my risk smaller

by

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.

Social media…or else

by

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.

You are a mind reader

by

You and your sales team are very knowledgeable. Tons of expertise. Been in the industry for years. You can finish customers’ sentences. Practically read their minds.

Cut it out.

Shortening the sales dialogue never shortens the sales cycle. Instead, help customers reach their own conclusions:

  • Discuss questions, not answers
  • Listen more, talk less
  • Don’t over-prepare, but be ready to address anything

It takes years to learn to read minds, but we sell more when we don’t.

Social Mediocrity

by

I’m skeptical of the way most B2B companies approach social media: hire a 20-something to tweet, facebook, pin, instagram, link in, blog, (and so on…) and hope that they connect with the demographic that makes the buying decision. This leverages the fact that the barriers to engaging in social media are ridiculously low and overlooks that quality matters more than quantity in most B2B settings.

Consider these two approaches to B2B social media:

  • Require that your subject matter experts engage in social media by writing it into their job descriptions, as a friend of mine did, chronicled in an earlier blog post.
  • Don’t even try. Instead, focus on making products that are exceptional and let your customers do the social media part for you. In this Fast Company article, Baratunde Thurston lists some social media backfires and suggests that we put more effort into the value of the thing we’re selling.

Social media marches on with or without us. As long as we don’t let mediocrity creep into our offering, we won’t have to settle for social mediocrity either.

Legalese and legal ease

by

I write and review a lot of contracts and it’s easy to slip into a mindset of paranoia and alarm. Worse yet, legalspeak often chills otherwise collaborative and constructive conversation with clients and prospects.

Prompted by this Seth Godin blog post about choosing your words, I’ve gotten in the habit of prefacing my contracts with succinct and friendly language that captures the intent and the spirit of the agreement.  For example:

  • Legalese: [insert typical lengthy Software Licensing Agreement here]
  • Legal ease: “We wrote the software and we’ll license it to you, but it remains ours. You’re providing materials so that we can configure just for you. Those materials remain yours. If we ever part ways, each of us gives back whatever belongs to the other.”

If we must have legalese, provide a little legal ease, too

Make it easy, make the sale

by

I’m in the market for a  [ __ ]. It’s not that I can’t figure out which [ __ ] is best for me, I just don’t have the time for a research project. So I’m holding off.

Same goes for our customers. On their own, they would eventually figure out which [machine, process, material, software, advertising strategy, janitorial service,…] to choose. But they’re so busy, it’s easier to muddle through whatever (imperfect) approach they’re using today.

If our customer needs to take a step forward, we can show them where to plant their foot if we’re always ready to present, train, consult, and run the numbers. On a cocktail napkin or with the latest mobile technology, our people need to offer a path of least resistance because if we make it easy, we make the sale.