This post will be of interest to CXO’s and revenue leaders in B2B SaaS companies because 25% of revenue is leaking from your funnel due to buyer indecision.

Storytelling, Visual Storytelling, and asking insightful questions are three of the most important skills for all customer-facing professionals for learning, retaining, and engaging buyers in conversation around their issues. They are equally important for conveying your story to prospects and customers in a way that makes an impact on them and that they are likely to remember.

A Messaging Architecture helps amplify your Value

Clarity in communicating how you create value for your ideal customers is vital in attracting the right visitors to your Website and in sales conversations with buyers.  Today buyers are close to 80% of the way through a buying process before contacting a salesperson and probably know as much as you do about your competitive product segment and have little time for product salespeople.

Planning Kick-off Outcomes

Now that the worst of the pandemic is over, companies are again investing billions of dollars to bring sales and support people together for in-person sales kick-off events to start the new sales year.  
These events are a celebration of the achievements of the prior year and offer a chance to:

• Review company performance and celebrate outstanding individual performers
• Set the tone for the coming year
• Refresh on corporate strategy
• Deliver a product update, and run a product training session
• Engage socially, renew acquaintances and make new friends

Selling in the post COVID era

This article will be of interest to salespeople conducting remote calls, sales leaders, sales enablement leaders and leaders of technical pre-sales teams who want to improve outcomes from every remote selling meeting.

B2B Selling process is the subject of countless books, yet basic qualification of opportunities is still problematic. As a result, precious marketing, technical and sales resources are wasted on weeks and months-long evaluations for prospects who will never buy. What if your sales team was 90% accurate in qualifying prospects, what would that do for your win-rate and forecasting accuracy?

This post is nearly 2 years old, from my time with Enableocity, but it is still 100% relevant. The embedded 2.5-minute video explains how you can transform your team's virtual selling results, boost win-rate, and build pipeline this quarter.

This charcoal drawing by Susan Krough from San Jose is a prize-winner, entitled "The Letter."

Inbound Marketing is the future of marketing and the marketing and PR industry is rapidly transitioning from the old World of outbound interrupt marketing to inbound or permission marketing as it is also known.

Inbound marketing works and has been proved in thousands of instances to lower the cost of marketing and to create a content legacy that keeps on generating mind-share, traffic and leads for both very small and very large companies.

We can now assign rules for the execution of a new inbound marketing project to ensure the likelihood of a positive outcome and rapid return on the investment.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the effort required to be successful with Inbound Marketing, not to lay out the rules for inbound marketing success, that is another article.

I have excerpted a passage (in italics) from a recent article, Inbound Marketing Benefits by the Numbers, by John McTigue at Kuno Creative to identify the effort and costs of inbound marketing success.

I still cringe when I think about it. One of the worst experiences in a 30-year career and it was entirely my fault. Only in sales are you able to make a bad call and move on to the next one, with almost no repercussion – hopefully having learned a lesson.

Channel Sales Enablement

Channel sales enablement is an ongoing process of messaging, training, marketing, communicating, coaching and leading by example and when implemented correctly helps reseller sales teams to succeed in selling your products and services.

Success starts with a crisp and clear value proposition, essentially a pact between you and the buyer: i. How is it exactly that you create value for your prospective buyers, ii. What can the buyer reasonably expect from using your products or services?

I recall the early days in the channel at MicroStrategy, prior to the release of MicroStrategy7 and our first proper API; when not only our message was vague, but our code-base was vaguer; - a huge Visual Basic executable that was a bear for partners to interface their applications. We had a commissioned sales team pounding the streets signing up anyone who would meet with us and 90% of the partners we signed didn't open the box....sound familiar?

Lots of activity, but no pull through - you may have the channel sales enablement blues.

I spoke with a prospective client this week in the marketing services business and after a brief introduction she expressed her frustration, "We’re doing all this marketing 2.0 stuff, but we're not getting in the door".
Prior to the call I ran a Marketing Grader report and her Website scored above 65% in all three areas of all sites graded for Inbound Marketing potential by HubSpot's Marketing Grader.
The crux of the problem is that you can be doing all this Marketing 2.0 stuff and still failing if you're off target in your messaging and out of sync. with market and using sub-optimal practices.
In this case, the marketing services business is transforming rapidly from the old interrupt driven model of push-marketing, advertising and PR placement, to the opt-in, inbound marketing model of content creation, social networking and community building, underpinned by analysis and testing.

The issues that surfaced during our conversation are common symptoms of the structural change in this sector and they are summarized below;–

Want to be great at golf or in sales? Anyone can be great at golf, provided they are physically able and prepared to put in the hours of disciplined, deliberate practice and get regular feedback from a professional coach.

Want to be outstanding in sales? - same rules apply; anyone can be truly great in sales - if that’s what they really want. Maybe you don’t aspire to be a truly great golfer or become an outstanding salesperson, you just want to get better - so you can have more fun playing golf or improve sales performance. Then this post is for you.

Tiger Woods is an elite athlete. If he remains healthy and unimpeded by injury, he may become the greatest golfer the World has ever known and his records (and those he has yet to set) will likely never be beaten. Why, what sets Tiger apart, how can I make such an emphatic statement? April 16. 2010. (Since this article was published, the Tiger Woods sex scandal became public knowledge. It is not clear at this stage that he will regain the confidence that fuelled his earlier success, or ever if he will ever win another major.) August 13th. 2012, The pundits are shutting the door on Tiger Woods after the Rory McIlroy win at the US PGA CHampionshipo at Kiawah Island yesterday, but Tiger has plenty of time and events in front of him to overcome his current lack of confidence.

His father Earl Woods introduced Tiger to golf at the tender age of 18 months. By the time Tiger won his first his first US Amateur Championship at age 18, he had built a foundation of fifteen years of deliberate practice and had been competing at top levels of junior golf for the prior ten years. What sets elite athletes in any sport, elite musicians, top surgeons, pilots, ballet dancers, investors, chess players, sales-people apart from the rest? Were they born with some innate gift?

The 10,000 hour rule

The evidence suggests this is not the case and many researchers in the field of great performance, the most prominent of whom is Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University have proven that truly great performance is a combination of years of deliberate practice, plus intrinsic drive and passion for their chosen field. Leading scientists all agree on the ten-year rule; no one gets to the top of their profession without ten years (or 10,000 hours) of sustained and deliberate practice.

The problem for Tiger's peers is that they will never catch-up on the practice, unless of course Tiger stops practicing but continues playing - and that is highly unlikely. Selling, like golf is a skill or craft, except you don’t need any special equipment and you don’t need to go to a golf course or practice range to do it; but you do need to deliberately practice the skills and get feedback from professional coaches and skilled managers in order to improve.

Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice isn’t what most of us do when we practice. When we practice golf, most of us go to the range and hit balls, chip shots and maybe putt for a while and we’re done.  Deliberate practice according to Anders Ericsson and other researchers isn’t work and it isn’t play. “Deliberate practice activity is specifically designed to
•    Improve performance, (often with a teachers help)
•    It can be repeated a lot, (high repetition is essential)
•    Feedback on results is continuously available,
•    It’s highly demanding mentally and it isn’t much fun”.

According to Noel Tishy Professor of Management & Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, former head of GE’s famed Crotonville Management School, only by choosing to practice activities in the learning zone can progress be made.
Identifying and continually seeking those unsatisfactory elements and striving to improve them is what makes practice deliberate. Tichy illustrates the point in the diagram, where improvement only occurs when people practice outside their comfort zone.

Hard Work Alone Wont Do it

Years of hard work alone will not improve anyone’s performance at anything. Without deliberate practice outside a person's comfort zone and without the help and feedback from a coach, no improvement in performance is likely, regardless of the discipline. This explains why so many salespeople (and golfers) do not progress past a certain level of performance...they don't like operating outside their comfort zone, yet this is where performance imrovement opportunity lies.
Having recently led a series of classroom sales training courses where salespeople were required to perform multiple video-taped and critiqued role-plays I can offer some insights into what skills a salesperson should practice. Let me repeat, the journey to excellence is painful and at times wearisome, which is why excellence is only achieved by the few. Of the 50 salespeople in the role-plays, only one performed an exceptional call. Role-playing isn't something salepeople like to do, in fact there is usually a great deal of resistance to it. Why? - because the close examination of performance and skill under their managers and peers critical eyes is way outside most salespeople's comfort zone.

Communication, language skills & Coaching are  key

The skills that matter in sales are not managing the CRM system or creating account plans or reciting product features and benefits; they are communication, language, listening, rapport, empathy and interpersonal skills which are undeprinned by an understanding of the psychology of human behaviour. Read my post on Soft-skills - Hard Currency for Sales Professionals. 
These skills require regular practice and daily use with feedback until they are mastered and it will take years until they are all fully integrated into a salepersons make-up. Classroom training sessions are not an effective preparation for success in sales, unless they are part of a structured curriculum underpinned by a learning methodologywhich includes;

• Performance Support to master the theory elements of interpersonal psychology, communication and language,
• Honest feedback on actual performance in face-face or telephone selling situations from coaches and field sales managers,
• Regular role-playing in the branch with peers, sales managers and expert coaches,
• Self assessment after every call as to what went well and what could have been improved,
•  Regular performance assessment from managers, certification and advancement.

Verizon's Data Breach Investigation Report turns 12 this year. This year’s report contains data from more than 41,686 security incidents, of which more than 2,000 confirmed breaches submitted by 73 data sources spanning 86 countries and analyzed by Verizon security experts.

People ask me this question when they are curious about creating whiteboards, and the truth is that it depends on your purpose and your desired outcome. In this article, I discuss various whiteboard types, their purpose and a process for creating a whiteboard story.

While this story is not strictly about business travel, it's very relevant to business travellers and I thought it worth sharing.

My wife and I had been undecided as whether to attend a winetasting in Santa Barbara, CA. this weekend and made a late decision to go. At the last minute,  accommodation options in Santa Barbara were very limited and we made a booking for Saturday evening through the Extended Stay America hotel website direct on Thursday.  

My wife received email confirmation of the booking on her cellphone on the dates she had booked, but she did not open the email on her desktop email system that indicated that the hotel was booked for Thursday-Friday. Neither did she check to see if there was a booking confirmation number on her cellphone email  

After a 4 hour drive and afternoon of wine tasting, we were looking forward to a restful stay at our hotel a few miles from the winetasting venue. The first inkling that there could be a problem was when we got to the hotel desk and heard the clerk advising a couple that there was no availability and that everything in Santa Barbara was sold out.  

Our turn at the desk came and I got that sinking feeling when the clerk began questioning us to the possible names the booking was made under and asked if we had a reservation number. My wife opened her cellphone email and found the booking for Saturday evening, but there was no confirmation number. On her desktop email, the booking was confirmed for Thursday and Friday on the day she made the booking. Clearly there was a problem with the booking.  

At this point we have two options, either get mad at the clerk and vent our frustration and demand that they solve the problem on the spot, or call the hotel company and get mad at them and demand that they solve the problem while we fume on the phone, threatening never to use their services again and slagging them off on social media. 

The other alternative is to shrug your shoulders and say bummer, - and begin to create options for yourself to solve the problem that don’t involve you becoming enraged and upsetting others.
 
While my wife was on the phone with Extended Stay, I chose the latter and asked the clerk for a Wi-Fi password and began looking at alternatives. After a few minutes we found a hotel 30 minutes up the road we had already traveled and made a snap booking as there were very few available options remaining.

We spent the night in a Motel-6, not our first choice for accommodation, but it was the last room within a 30 minute drive. We had a good night’s sleep in a room that was clean, where the beds firm, but comfortable and we got a $10 discount on the room… whoopee!  

This morning in one of our favorite breakfast places, Andersen’s in Santa Barbara, we had another encounter that we have all seen played-out badly in restaurants.

We arrived at the restaurant at 10AM, were served coffee and juice and our orders taken. The food was taking a long time coming and a clue that there might be a problem was when the people sitting next to us, who came 10 minutes after us, were served their breakfast. Bummer

I inquired as to the whereabouts of our breakfast and the hostess gave us a curt “this is Sunday morning” reply. Fair enough I thought, it’s a busy place and the food is worth waiting for. However it was now 10.45 and still no food. A few minutes later our curt hostess came back to our table and apologized that our order in fact had gotten lost. Bummer
Meanwhile the people next to us were paying their bill.

I was getting a little impatient and could easily have made a scene, passed a rude comment and stormed off; but that would only upset me, the staff and immediate patrons and we would still be 30 minutes away from breakfast. Finally the food arrived at 11AM and we were advised that everything would be complimentary. Whoopee.  

Our curt hostess asked if we liked champagne and returned with two glasses… the Sun was over the yardarm somewhere. Whoopee.    

I reflected on this experience and recall a humorous talk I had heard from Tim Gard five years earlier at the Professional Speakers Association annual conference in London.  

He spoke about the highs and lows of business travel and the potential for things to go wrong – often and right occasionally. The point of his talk was that things will go wrong, it’s how we react to them that sets the tone for the remainder of the encounter or trip. His advice, when things go wrong – shrug your shoulders, say bummer and move on. When things go right, click your heels, say whoopee and be grateful for the break. Tim was no doubt influenced by Viktor Frankl.
 
Viktor Frankl wrote in “Man’s Search for Meaning” that human beings are the only species with the freedom to choose how they will react in any situation through the exercise of our free will. Life will present many challenges, but our power to shape our response to the challenges determines our attitude and ultimately shapes our experience. His insights came from his experience in surviving the Dachau concentration camps in WW2, when all those that he loved, save for his sister, perished.  

Largely because of technology advances and the Internet, we are in the early phases of a permanent shift in buying behavior. This shift is as real in the B2B world as in consumer marketing. Over the next few weeks we’ll be providing you with a series of posts that examine how traditional media, marketing, sales functions and training have been affected and how sales, marketing and PR professionals can successfully evolve to take advantage of emerging opportunities.

The series will start with a guest post on the evolution of marketing and PR
PR-consultant-turned-inbound-marketer Ellie Becker.

We continues with a guest post by Mike Bosworth entitled, B2B Sales in Turmoil - Who Needs Salespeople? on the changing perceptions and realities of the sales role in the B2B buying process. The series concludes with a post from Mark gibson entitled B2B Sales and Marketing in Transition, What's Working.

Two weeks ago at the HubSpot User Group Event #HUGS11, I saw a great idea in action that I thought could be of interest to readers of this blog....it's IdeaPaint.
                                      
I've been using the same whiteboard in my home office for the past 15 years and I was happy with it until the HubSpot event. Now having seen IdeaPaint in action, my whiteboard looks small and dull; flat surfaces in offices I visit loom as a potential surfaces for visual storytelling.


IdeaPaint is a urethane-based paint that comes in a 50 Sq. ft. kit, with roller and requires only one coat. It's the invention of two young Boston entrepreneurs who conceived the idea of creating paint that could cover any smooth surface and turn it into a surface for dry erase markers.

Think of any smooth surface, curved or flat; table top, bench, door; literally anything can become a whiteboard. Use IdeaPaint to help you make your work space work, whether you are in sales, marketing or a student interested in using a whiteboard to capture ideas and write down your thoughts.

IdeaPaint position their paint as more cost effective, easier to apply, longer-lasting and works well with all dry erase markers. In addition it provides:-

The following article is based on a recent client conversation and could be of value to anyone interested in using a whiteboard to improve sales performance.

My client who asked to remain nameless, works in a technology company and has been using a whiteboard to tell her story for about 6 months; she is a fan of Paper-Show digital paper for remote whiteboarding as she does most of her selling virtually.

Using the WhiteboardSelling Methodology, we worked with her team and created a powerful whiteboard story and helped her team develop mastery over the material in a Whiteboardselling Symposium.

Recently they started using the whiteboard during the introductory call to capture the client issues and it has made a big difference in their ability to qualify.

In the past, they held a 15 minute telephone call to understand the client's issues and to qualify them better before inviting them to a whiteboarding session. If qualified, they would then schedule a whiteboard session using Gotomeeting and these whiteboard sessions were usually well received by clients.

I asked Shirley what she thought of their new process.
"In the introductory call we don't talk about our products or service at all, except for the big-picture to frame the conversation, this is pure discovery.

Our top reps have complete confidence in telling our story and pretty much own the message; this means they can focus on the interaction with the buyer, rather than worrying what to say next.

Since we started using the whiteboard to capture the initial conversation, discovery has improved dramatically and our pipeline quality has improved. Not all of our reps have adopted the whiteboard in discovery yet and are sticking to the telephone only approach for the first call."

Lessons Learned.

1. Using a whiteboard at the outset of a sales call for discovery disarms the client and they are typically intrigued by the interaction.
2. Capturing client issues on the whiteboard and asking questions to drill down on problems and goals helps the client to open up when they might otherwise remain silent.
3. Using the whiteboard for the discovery conversation, before telling your story improves diagnosis and qualification and increases pipeline quality.
4. Instead of jumping in to your story, which most sales reps love to do, you are capturing the buyers story and drawing them out on the issues that are important to them. Let me ask you a question...Which is more valuable at the outset of the buying cycle?
5. A whiteboard is an excellent way of creating consensus around next steps and gaining commitment to taking action.
6. If you have done a good job with the discovery session, it will usually run over the time allocated and the client will want a copy of the whiteboard.

Most of the readers of this blog will agree that Inbound Marketing or Internet Marketing is the future of marketing; but it's a journey, not a one-off event and there is no final destination, because the foundation technology and tools are constantly evolving and the horizon as to what is achievable is ever-expanding.

I was explaining our sales training approach (which is based on improving communication, language and inter-personal skills and applying these skills in selling situations) to a corporate sales training professional recently, who made a comment to which I took exception.

He said, “Yes, well of course that’s soft skills training, and we are not planning on doing any of that. We offer it for our management team, but our sales training is focused on product training, overcoming objections, negotiating and closing the sale and we are currently implementing the TAS methodology and training.” The implication here is that soft skills are touchy-feely and somehow optional or nice to have, or something that sales people are born with....not the hard skills sales people to need to crunch deals and close hard. Needless to say it was a short meeting.

According to Wikipedia: Soft skills is a sociological term relating to a person's "EQ" (Emotional Intelligence Quotient), the cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that characterize relationships with other people.
I continued to consider what the training buyer had said, because it called into question our recent experience and the sales performance improvement methodology we had developed.  I began to analyze the selling process and dissect its elements and offer the following insights.

Selling is a craft or skill that can be entered as a profession at a minimum by anyone with the ability to use a telephone. The craft of selling is innate in some individuals with highly developed interpersonal skills and intellect, - these people (about 5%-10% of the sales population) are known as naturals. For the rest of us, selling is a skill that is learned both by doing it and through training, - and with practice and coaching it can be mastered.

The B2B selling profession is underpinned by process (this resembles a science) where every move and transition in the selling cycle is captured and as such can be analyzed and optimized. Selling methodologies and CRM however will not help salespeople engage buyers, diagnose needs and qualify if capabilities are relevant, which to my mind are the highest order elements in the whole sales cycle.

I recently downloaded Seth Godin's “The Icarus Deception” on Audible as my work habits have changed and I have a couple of 90 minute commutes every week. I consider it a real plus in the audio version that Seth reads it himself. 

Seth Godin is a visionary with a powerful message for anyone who will listen. 

#Inbound12

I’m here in Boston for #Inbound12, with 2800 HubSpotters, customers and partners at the World’s largest gathering of Inbound Marketers, for 3 days of meetings, presentations, tutorials and networking with the HubSpot community.

As a sales professional, you know that there are three possible outcomes for every sales encounter with a buyer.  In the best-case scenario, you end up closing the deal, or in complex sales, you get an advance to the next step. But what about the deals you forecast to close, how many of them actually do close?

I don't condone torture, nor do I consider Waterboarding an acceptable treatment for detainees of any race or religion.

If you want to read more about Waterboarding, please follow this link, or if you feel strongly about the ill-treatment of foreign prisoners in US custody click on this link, as the rest of this story is about the misuse of PowerPoint by sales, marketing and technical people in front of innocent audiences.


Having to sit through bad PowerPoint presentations can seem like a mild form of torture for the audience, inflicted usually by a sales or marketing person under the guise of presenting a solution or informing the prospective client in more detail, the worth of your offerings.

I was at the recent Marketing conference in San Francisco, attended by high caliber marketing professionals and saw a lot of bad PowerPoint presentations delivered by marketing executives. Presumably the excuse for the poor presentation being, I didn't have time to create a stunning presentation for this one-off industry event, so I created this one on the plane on the way over, anyway they were peers not prospects in the audience. What constitutes a bad PowerPoint presentation?….many factors, I like Seth Godin's take on really bad PowerPoint, but let's agree that you know you are in one when it's happening.


PowerPoint is a great presenters tool, but terrible for the audience unless handled with great care, preparation and rehearsal, yet we still do PowerPoint to our peers and ourselves, laboring lengthy, bullet-laden, text heavy and product-centric rants that fast become boring and invoke deep smart phone trances.

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.

This article "The Essence of Listening" was written and delivered as a recent Toastmasters speech - Project 2 in the Competent Communicators Handbook. It was a project to organize a speech, with clear transitions, opening, closing, for delivery in 5-7 minutes.

At the bottom of this post is a game to test your linguistic skills in handling sales objections.

Trader Joe's Thirty Wines under $10.00 Tasting

Trader Joe's is a privately held supermarket chain with over 450 stores around the USA, in business since 1967.

You need to know that when it comes to wine, TJ's has some of the biggest wholesale clout (and that translates direclty into lower prices) on the planet as they are owned by European mega-supermarket chain Aldi. 

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

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

The Four Big Objections 

This post explores the nature of objections and examines their meaning and offers an interactive game at the end of the article to test skills in unpacking the buyers objections and fluffy language.

There are hundreds of ways for buyers to say no to a salesperson, but there are really only four basic objections and all other objections are variants of there four.

The objections in Table 1. are the type of objection we are likely to see early in a sales cycle and very typically when we on the phone trying to advance the sale and set the next appointment.

Objections typically occur when the sales person is trying to advance the sale beyond the buyer's readiness to move to the next step. "I'm not interested" is a variant of I don't have time and usually occurs when cold-calling and having asked the buyer to something they are not ready to do.

What Buyers Really Mean

If we get to the end of the sales-cycle in B2B selling and we get objections like the ones in Table 2. below, we are in big trouble.

Objections are far more likely to come up in the qualification phase or during evaluation, but when salespeople don't listen and miss the buyers comments, questions and feedback, then these questions or concerns typically resurface as objections. 

Objections typically occur as a result of unanswered questions that salespeople missed earlier in the sales cycle, which is why reversing the buyers question is so important. 

I'm grateful to Stephen Allott who shared the above chart, based on his experience as president at Micromuse. Having sold B2B technology products and services around the World for more than 30 years, I have heard every one of these more than a few times.

With the above chart there are of course exceptions and when there is a trusted advisor relationship and rapport, the buyer may well be telling the truth. Only yesterday I was told by the EVP of a mid-sized technology company that they had corporate initiative under-way, (code for - we're doing an acquisition), that prevented them from focusing on our messaging and whiteboard story development until mid Q4 = a nice way to say "the timing isn't right".

Overcoming the Four Big Objections

The following excerpt is from Wiki "selling technique" "While many sales techniques offer specific advice on how to handle objections and stalls, Sandler suggests that only the objecting client is able to remove the objection"

I'm in complete agreement with David Sandler on this one and am not going to offer specific technique to overcome objections...there are hundreds of entries on Google and Youtube if you are interested.

I am offering an exercise in the use of precision language to get salespeople thinking about how to uncover the underlying reason for the objection, so that a conversation can occur around addressing the buyers concern.

Precision in Language Exercise

The following exercise is excerpted from the Selling Psychology section of our Selling in the Internet Age, Adaptive E-Learning program. It uses a number of linguistic techniques and should be both amusing as well as informative.

Take Aways

1. Objections are not neccessarily a bad thing during the sales cycle. I would prefer to have objections, that way I know there is interest. 
2. The opposite scenario is proceeding through the sales cycle and getting no objections, which often means that you are being invited along for the bake-off and they are actively engaged with another vendor...who is getting objections.
3. Language and communication skills are traits of the most successful salespeople. They can be learned and will pay a dividend for those sales people prepared to learn and deliberately practice using them.

NLP has its strong proponents and equally strong detractors in the sales training community. If it can’t be measured it must be bunkum is an oft heard rebuke of NLP.
However the scientific community occasionally publishes something that proves and supports the adoption and use of certain techniques that have long been observed and adopted as part of NLP, and when they do - I like to use it so that the skeptics in the audience have the proof they need to take on that particular belief and use the tools.

I have embedded this 2007 Sociometrics video from MIT Prof. Alex Pentland to introduce concepts being discussed in this article. Pentland and his colleagues have come a long way in their understanding of the dynamics of human communication and group interaction since this video was recorded and there are many other videos and studies published and accessible in a few keystrokes.

Consultative Selling Myths

Sales books, blog-posts and training courses that offer “consultative selling secrets” and magical closing-techniques, constantly amuse me.

Most of the ideas in these so-called secrets are common sense and have been in practice since the “Fuller-brush man” came a calling.

If there truly were secrets to success in consultative selling or any other form of selling, then nobody would know them. Another myth is "Consultative Selling is Dead", but I will deal with that one another time...clearly it is not.

The truth is that there is a growing body of knowledge around consultative selling best-practices that anyone with a Web browser and an ability to read can access.

Great sales people are great communicators with strong ego-drive and the self-discipline, to do on a daily basis the little things that average sales people do not, that lead to successful sales outcomes. 

Words. Often it's the little things that turn visitors off after arriving at your Website, reading your copy in a brochure or sales letter, or suffering through a bad PowerPoint presentation.

The technology business is rife with words in Website, whitepaper copy and bad PowerPoint presentations, that I call "product-speak".

Write from your Best Customer's Point of View

When people read your copy, visit your Website or sit through your presentation, they are doing so because they have pressing issues or problems that they need to solve. When you write - start from the point of view of your buyer's needs, not your "ground-breaking" product, unless you want to sound just like your competition.

David Meerman Scott calls these words Gobbledygook and he wrote a brilliant E-Book that you can download instantly called The Gobbledygook Manifesto.

You can even run your copy through a content analysis tool called Gobbledygook Grader, to identify text that could be improved.
You might find David's blog "The Four P's of Marketing" that topples one of the pillars of marketing literature worth a read...and a laugh!

If you need help in translating your "product speak" into something that your visitors will want to read, then we can help.

In our work with technology companies in creating website messaging and whiteboard stories, we see the following words or phrases frequently.

My Top 10 "Product-Speak" words.

Using Inbound Marketing to realize the full potential of your sales team

White Paper Executive Summary

Anyone who has been part of a Business-to-Business (B2B)

In May this year I posted an article entitled "A Guide to creating engaging Powerpoint Sales Presentations"

How NOT to use LinkedIn

This article is a lesson for sales newbies and people who are new to LinkedIn.

Anyone who has been using LinkedIn for a while will be familiar with the problem outlined in this story and tired of being on the other end of SPAMMY connection requests.

What is Sales Enablement?

To my surprise, the Wikipedia definition of Sales Enablement has been removed and after a few queries I uncovered this definition from Forrester, which aligns with my take on the subject.

"Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system". 
One of the many objectives of the sales enablement team is equipping client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with customer stakeholders. Note this does not say a presentation, but there may be a point in a customer's problem solving cycle where a presentation is appropriate, but it is usually well into the buying cycle.

What is Value-created selling and why does it matter?

I visited the Apple Store in Monterey CA., three times in the last three months to buy products and noticed what a pleasant experience it was. These experiences combined with learnings from a recent MECLABs webinar, contributed to the criteria for our Website redesign.

Our Website is critical to generating inbound leads for business and our prior design was overdue for an update, it was text heavy and I was not happy with the look and feel and the CTA's were clunky and hard to read.

Whiteboarding is emerging as a mainstream enablement tool in B2B technology companies that actually contributes real value during the sales cycle.

Having trained several thousand sales and support people in the Whiteboardselling methodology over the past 18 months, my observations on the most valuable aspects of whiteboarding as an enablement methodology are:-

1. Creating clarity in your value proposition and building it into a story that everyone can tell is an excellent initial win. Most companies confess that their messaging is somewhere between 2-3/5 for clarity when we start the process.
2. Message Ownership - in 1/2 a day Whiteboardselling training Symposium salespeople either see or do the whiteboard up to 9 times using an active learning method and on the very next day they can give the whiteboard, - they know it.
3. Consistency and confidence in telling the story are the knock-on benefits for individuals and this is important in creating differentiation in the mind of the buyer - when the competition are saying the same things you are. 

What is under appreciated about whiteboarding is that sales-people will find it very difficult get up and whiteboard on an ad-hoc basis....unless they have already decided what they want to say and practiced what they are going to draw.

A pre-requisite for salespeople to whiteboard effectively is a visual story that centers around what the buyer is trying to achieve, that salespeople can use to engage the buyer in conversation.

A Simple Visual Confection - the Whiteboardselling method

My observations in riding shotgun on many sales-calls as a sales trainer are that salespeople can often get a meeting, but when they are face-face with senior executives, often don't know how to engage in a business discussion and thus revert to where they are more comfortable - discussing their products, and the meeting terminates shortly thereafter.

Ten Tips for Effective Whiteboard Engagement

A few things that might be of interest.

It's the official start to Barbecue season here in California with the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Much has happened over the past 8 months since arriving in the US; including buying and renovating a house and settling in Pebble Beach and working as an affiliate with WhiteboardSelling.

Do you attend B2B technology tradeshows? If you do, please answer the following questions to put you in the trade-show mind-set.

• Do you love tradeshows or hate them, or do you see them as a necessary evil?
• How good were the leads you got from your last tradeshow?
• Is the tradeshow on the wane, or is still a viable marketing investment?
• What's your tradeshow strategy as a vendor...are you like HubSpot and shun them, or do you select the best ones and invest in them?
• Do you just talk to the visitor or you do a quick demo and hand out a brochure?
• Do you have a 3-5 slide PowerPoint presentation with just the elements of your story?
• How do you sort out the visitors who just want a stamp so they can enter the draw for the iPad from a potential prospect?

I attended a trade-show recently and used a visual confection to tell my story. (The confection below is an excerpt of the Advanced Marketing Concepts Whiteboard story - a visual confection).  According to Edward Tufte, Visual Confections are “ structures that consist of a multiplicity of image events that illustrate an argument, organize information, show and enforce visual comparisons; they should be transparent, straightforward, obvious, natural, ordinary, conventional…with no need for hesitation or questioning on the part of the viewer”

You have 20 seconds to hook the visitor, 3 minutes to engage, tell your story, qualify and get permission to follow-up

Visitors come thick and fast during the breaks and at lunch and drinks sessions. You have a 20 seconds to hook the visitor and between 2-4 minutes to discover their top issues, tell your story, qualify their interest and get permission for follow-up.

Last night FC Barcelona,  a “star-team” beat Manchester United, a “team of stars” 2-0 in the final of the European football championship.

It was a disappointment for many English and Man-U fans, but an outcome entirely predictable. Apart from the first 10 minutes of the match, Barca controlled the ball through crisp passing, ball control through mid-field and selfless 100% contribution from every player on the team.
 Man-U’s star strikers were held for most of the game and could not put penetrate the Barca defence; while Barca showed remarkable composure and scored 2 goals from a total of 7 on-target attempts, vs . no goals from 2 on-target attempts for Man-U.
At sport’s highest levels where teams are evenly matched, we see time and time again that “star-teams” almost always beat “teams of stars” in final matches.

Last year I wrote about FC Barcelona in “Training to Win”, after witnessing their summer training camp regime from my office window. Barca brings their whole team, trainers, doctors, coaches, even their own security and some of their grounds-men when they come for summer training; their preparation and training is second to none.

Barca’s 2008-9 performance was exceptional in winning the La Liga championship and EUFA Cup, scoring the most goals in any season, having the least goals scored against them. In just one year as coach, Pep Guardolinos' capacity for leadership, ability to develop and inspire individuals to believe in themselves, combined with disciplined and extreme work-rate and focus on technical excellence, have found him a place in football history.
In business we look at sporting hero's and great teams for lessons and inspiration.

If FC Barcelona was a technology company it would likely have all or some of the following characteristics...and a whole lot more;-

How important is clarity in your messaging and how clear is your message?
I'd say it's the difference between life and death for start-ups.

Sales and marketing are dependent on the clarity of your message to win mindshare, generate leads; and to engage, diagnose and qualify new opportunities, yet clarity is often an afterthought. 

I was prompted to write this article after a call this week with a technology company based in the Mid-West. This company has World leading technology, great vision and is completely failing in marketing.

They are in the red zone. When you arrive on their Website it is not possible to figure out that they do on the home page. Nor is it possible to figure out what they do by clicking on the CTA. You have to click on the product page to find the description of what they do and it's in 10 point font in the middle of the first paragraph. This is not a joke....this is a disaster.

This year's, top sales performance problems that sales leaders are investing in solving are - ability to show benefit/value, closely followed by differentiation from competitors.

The symptoms of marketing under-achievement are fairly standard and there are tens of thousands of companies Worldwide with good to great products that are under-performing in marketing. Here are a few symptoms of a problem at B2B company, Acme Inc.:

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. 

I saw this article from Seth Godin last week "Why Lie" on why prospects lie to salespeople in another forum and commented on it. I'm not sure if you saw it, so I have referenced it below and want to add a comment and a few links to resources as I have written on this subject before.

Why lie?

It's 2011 and still we are presented with B2B Websites, promotional materials, brochures and advertising copy that scream product features and so-called benefits.

Sales induction boot camp and annual sales training is built on a foundation of boring PowerPoint presentations that describe product in terms of features and benefits.
A product feature according to Wikipedia is a distinguishing characteristic of a software item, (e.g., performance, portability, or functionality).
A product benefit according to Wiktionary is an advantage, help or aid from something.
For a product feature to be of benefit to a user, the user must firstly have the problem or sub-optimal condition that the product feature addresses and have a pressing need to resolve it.

It is impossible to know if a product feature will be of benefit without first understandng the client condition.

I therefore propose that we declare features and benefits a deceased concept in B2B selling...they have served us for the past 60 years of marketing computer technology, but it's time to move on, because the majority of salespeople struggle in translating product features and benefits into meaningful conversations with buyers.
Furthermore B2B buyers are not interested in features...they are interested in capabilities.

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. 

Originally published on Linkedin 2/25/16

The CSO insights 2015 Sales Performance Optimization survey of more than 1000 Chief Sales Officers in companies Worldwide was published last month and the findings are alarming. 

Salespeople are struggling to hit their numbers and marketing is not contributing enough value! 

This article contains links to resources to answer some of the "How can I improve sales performance?" questions

Article Length: 1960 words

Reading Time: 10 Minutes

I'm not in inside sales, I'm a consultant, but 95% of my interaction with prospects and customers occurs over the phone and Internet, so I think I can bring some insight to inside sales pro's, consultants and particularly SMB salespeople working from home. 

In the past 18 months I have used Glance, Fuze, Webex, GotoMeeting, Adobe QuickConnect and Join.me, either as a tool provided by the company, or as a personal subscriber. I have no financial affiliation with any of these providers. This assessment is application-specific based on my work profile and may not be relevant in your work environment.

If you require fast screen-sharing and hassle-free, download-free interaction with prospective clients and customers, then tools that require a downloadable client are sub-optimal. I don't use a Webcam in my conferences, so I don't need the higher-end video capabilities that come with Webex and Gotomeeting. If I want to do a face-face Web meeting I will use Skype, but the dynamic is usually social with a friend or acquaintance and the connection set up in advance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The PBS Masterpiece Theatre period costume drama, Downton Abbey is a masterful example of visual storytelling, featuring superb British acting talent, staged in the magnificent Highclere Castle, (hailed as the best castle in England).
It's the best TV drama I have seen for a very long time and a welcome departure from the US election news; I'm a huge fan and recommend it to anyone interested in quality entertainment.

For those who have not yet seen Downton Abbey, Series 2 is playing on Masterpiece Theatre on Sunday evening in the US, on the PBS channels. 

Downton Abbey has enormous appeal across age groups from 10 years old to 100 and is being shown in 100 viewing territories. It is hugely popular in the US, UK and is the biggest television hit in Spain for 10 years.

Downton Abbey is a beautifully written and visually compelling story from a time of tremedous social upheaval, World War 1. The characters are fully developed; the aristocrats restrained and rule-bound by the mores of the era and the servants, subjugated by dutiful obedience. The superb grounds and the setting of Highclere is stunning.  

The essence of great storytelling is our ability to identify and connect with the aspirations and frustrations of the characters in the story as they confront their personal challenges. The tension and excitement in the struggle to overcome them as the story unfolds makes the next episode a compelling must-watch event and a reason for staying in on Sunday evenings.

How can we apply these lessons in selling?

John Kotter, Harvard Business School professor, and author of "Leading Change" who comments on the power of visual storytelling states, "Over the years I have become convinced that we-learn best-and change-from hearing stories that stike a chord within us. Those in leadership positions, who fail to grasp or use the power of stories, risk failure for their comanies and themselves".
Salespeople are leaders running their own business franchise and John Kotter's advice is highly relevant. 

Top Salespeople are Natural Storytellers

I'm currently working on a whiteboard story for a leading technology company and have received contributions from some of the sales and marketing stars in the company over the course of its development.

What struck me about a number of the salespeople and marketing team members is their use of story in discussing their products. 

• They use anecdotes and simple, yet powerful metaphors when talking about how their products are used. 
• Use cases come alive through examples that are relevant and compelling.
• They create tension in their discussion around the use of their products to differentiate themselves from the competition. 
• They have figured out how to tell their story naturally....without a script.

Bottling your Story

Our goal in creating Whiteboards is to capture and bottle the magic from the top performers and create a story around how the products are used to overcome problems with the status-quo and have everyone on the customer-facing team learn it and have fun telling it.

When the buyer is at the center of your story vs. your products and the story captures their current situation and their struggle, then you are well positioned to have your capabilities unfold naturally in conversation. 

Combining Visual Imagery and Story

The earliest evidence of Visual storytelling is 35,000 years ago in the paleolithic cave paintings in Chauvet Cave, South of France. With the advent of the slide projector and then PowerPoint, we forgot how to tell stories and let the bullets and slides do the talking.

The best presentations in sales communication successfully integrate simple images with product value-creation and weave a story around the buyer condition.

When we use whiteboards to tell our story vs. PowerPoint bullets, we use simple hand drawn images (that are immediately meaningful in the context of the discussion), interwoven into a story around issues that the buyer is potentially struggling to overcome.

In a WhiteboardSelling enablement symposium, everyone on the customer-facing team learns to draw the whiteboard and to tell their story and in half a day, they will have learned the story well enough to use it with prospective customers the next day...although they may be somewhat uncomfortable until they have mastered it.

There is massive difference in the level of cognition in the audience between an un-trained novices scrawled notes on a whiteboard and the whiteboard created by a person trained to present a visual story and to use icons to convey meaning.

Buyers will often remember a well constructed whiteboard story months after the interaction; scrawled notes on a whiteboard will not be stored in our brain in the same way a poor PowerPoint presentation is discarded from our memory.

Take-Aways:

1. The essence of selling is effective communication and the most effective communication uses simple visual images interwoven into a story.
2. For those who enjoy British humor, a spoof of Downton Abbey for last year's Red Nose Day charity fundraising event is hilarious. Links below. 
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5dMlXentLw 
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3YYo_5rxFE
3. PBS Interview with the producer and cast members
4. Learn more about the science behind WhiteboardSelling Enablement.

As a sales professional and sales performance coach, I read a lot of books and invest in some way in my own professional development every year. Recently I purchased a copy of Baseline Selling by Dave Kurlan to complement a recent HubSpot partner sales training course and coaching session.

I've been consulting on sales productivity for 12 years and published my first blog on the subject, Sales Performance Tools for Getting Started on Sales Effectiveness on my new HubSpot website in early 2008.

Just listened to Rob Jeppsen's Sales Leadership Podcast episode #42, with Joe Caprio of Chorus.ai. This was excellent and I took notes which I'm happy to share below.

"A must read for IT salespeople"
Millions of salespeople sell into IT around the world, but few of them actually understand what it's like to be on the other side of the table. This book changes that.

Innovation is happening everywhere as our economy transforms from the 20^th century model of mass production and lifetime employment in monolithic corporations to individuals and knowledge workers in small businesses investing in their sweat and ideas to make a living and to live their dreams.

I'm delighted to introduce Jock Busuttil, my guest blogger this week on a subject that is near and dear to my heart; - connecting sales and product management with the customer. Jock Busuttil is a Senior Product Manager and an alumnus of Advanced Marketing Concepts.

We moved from our home of 5 years in Scotland last month as we are returning to Northern California after 7 years away, settling in the Carmel/Monterey area...(also a reason why this blog has been quiet for the last month). We were amazed by the amount of stuff that we had accumulated in that time, stuff we did not need.

This "Visual Confections that Sell" video below, defines what visual confections are, how to use them in sales situations and outlines our process to create them. 

The video requires no registration form to play and runs for about 14 minutes.

It will be of interest to a broad audience who want to communicate their ideas more effectively in a shorter space of time. It will be of particular interest to those interested in leading with an opinion, supported by a visual confection, to disrupt status-quo thinking.

If you would to download the visuals and script or discuss converting your PowerPoint presentation into a visual Confection, or give feedback on the video, please complete this Let's discuss Visual Confections form.

How Visual Confections Create Value in Selling

• Visual Confections help sales people convey their value creation story, creating confidence that leads to better buyer engagement. 
• Visual Confections combined with visual storytelling technique, help sales people get their big idea across more effectively in conversation.
• The process of of creating Visual Confections aligns sales and marketing messaging and brings value creation into clear focus.
• Visual confections when used in sales training can help reduce sales ramp time and foster stronger message ownership, leading to improved sales results.

To reach new B2B Buyers and connect via email is a low probability game, but the marginal cost of sending email is close to zero, so don't expect volume to decline.

Email is a science, with every element from the senders name to the signature analyzed and dissected for optimal performance. If you want to read the current research, follow this link to directly read the 2014 report.

This article is about the opening sentence and will be of interest to sales and marketing professionals.

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)

What could be better to drive book sales than a super successful tech company not so secretly trying to squelch your muckraking, hilarious and soon to be published book.

Answer, nothing; and all the more fodder for the amusement and delight of supporters on both sides. Disrupted has already hit the NY Times top 5 best seller list on its first week.

Selling with Pictures and Emotion

What makes a great sales presentation and what's the difference between a good presenter and poor presenter?
Lets get crystal clear about the purpose of a sales presentation.

Here's my new definitiion, "the purpose of a sales presentation is to have the audience interact with both the presenter and the material to engage, transform and activate the audience to create change."

The best presenters successfully weave a story around the buyer's current condition... "what-is"; they engage emotions and lead the buyer to understand "what-could-be" as a result of using your products/services and conclude with a call to action or logical next steps.

Great presenters make the buyer the center of the story. Great presentations are delivered in a true dialogue with the audience....images and props serve as visual aids - where appropriate.  It's not about Powerpoint slideshow technique or bullets.

Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone announcement is continually referenced as an exemplar presentation. Steve uses emotion, humor and props as well as dramatic music.... his images are simple and powerful and add clarity and weight to the point he is making. His timing is perfect and he knows the material and this comes from rehearsing the presentation more than 20 times.

The Hero's Journey Story Structure

In the development phase of a whiteboard story or visual storytelling structure we loosely follow the Hero's Journey structure to create contrast between "what is" and "what could be" and engages the buyer in conversation around the challenges of the "now".

The Hero's Journey from Nancy Duarte's Resonate

If you are in sales or consulting, live in the USA or Canada and work most of the time from home, you might find the following article on setting up high quality sales communication system worth the time it takes to read.

The news is that the state of the union between sales and marketing is not all bad. Like President Obama's State of the Union message, we're doing well in some areas, but have a long way to go in others.


The state of the union between sales and marketing is imperfect, but growing stronger and the hard work and dedication of the pioneers is beginning to deliver quantifiable results. It is our unfinished task to ensure that both sales and marketing teams are served by the sales and marketing alignment process, not just a vocal few in sales.

The changes in buyer behavior are permanent and both sales and marketing must unite and adopt a new vocabulary, new methods and embrace new technologies to more effectively serve buyers, achieve revenue goals and to lower the cost of acquiring and servicing customers.

We need to recognize that for sales and marketing to best serve today's Internet savvy, socially connected buyer, we need to evolve one contiguous and tightly coupled revenue generation process. The outbound "hunter" B2B sales role as we knew it, is giving way to scientific methods of lead generation, lead nurturing and scoring, marketing automation, free trials and light-touch engagement across the IMPACT buying process.

Inbound Leads vs. Traditional Outbound Leads

Mark Roberge, VP Sales at HubSpot is a 10 on a scale of 1-10 of the smartest sales leaders I know. When he talks about sales and marketing alignment, I listen.

This article was publsihed in full, yesterday on Linkedin pulse, you can find it under "What not to do at Trade Shows".

The following is a true story. A few names have been changed to protect the identity of some of the people involved.

This three part blog series started with a guest post on The evolution of marketing and PR, by PR-consultant-turned-inbound-marketer 

Most marketing executives will have lead generation close to the top of their list of goals in 2010; however generating quality sales leads has never been harder, or easier - depending on your strategy.

Why Responding to Proposals you did not Influence is a bad idea

In sales we get the opportunity to learn lessons by making mistakes and those lessons usually serve us well through our careers.

Occasionally we get to learn the same lessons over again, either because it was so long since the last time it happened and we forgot, or maybe we moved into a new line of business and went along with the buyer's request, because we were learning the ropes in the new market.

In December, I received two proposal requests; an inbound lead and an inbound phone call from seemingly genuine and very nice people. I typically generate about 50 inbound leads per month, but these are not proposal requests, they are downloads of ebooks or whitepapers or webinar registrations.

I don't advocate salespeople selling complex B2B products sending proposals when they are solicited by prospective customers and they come out of the blue. Why?

But what if the buyer has been reading your blogs for a while and follows you on Twitter....what's wrong with sending a proposal?

To understand my reasoning on this point we need to take a closer look at how customers buy and I will use the IMPACT cycle from the book Why Killer Product's don't Sell, by Dominic Rowselll and Ian Gotts to illustrate this point.

 The Magic Software Case Study has been moved to Sales And Marketing Performance Improvement Case Studies

Long awaited and an even more useful book for sales enablement and marketing professionals than The Challenger Sale.

“The Challenger Customer, Selling to the hidden influencers who can multiply your results” is a “must-read” for all B2B marketing, sales and sales enablement professionals.

This is the second part of an article Are Sales People needed in Selling SaaS solutions written in response to conversations with three entrepreneurs who have created, or are creating SaaS solutions to serve very specific needs for a well-defined market opportunity. In conversation it emerged that none of them were planning on having any sales people in their business.

Over the Christmas holidays I took my daughter to the London Museum of Natural History, and among other exhibits, spent a good deal of time in the Charles Darwin Exhibit. Darwin has been in the news a lot lately as it’s his 200th anniversary and there are all sorts of metaphors and lessons being drawn from Darwin’s works.

I was struck by the exhibit and his genius and thought about my industry, the technology industry, and how this closed system has recently undergone violent upheaval. I asked a partner of ours, Barry Trailer co-owner of CSO Insights, (CSO Insights is a research firm that specializes in measuring the effectiveness of today's sales and marketing organizations), what his thoughts were on surviving in the current market, and they were insightful

Barry suggested, “Most companies will simply jettison people in a knee-jerk reaction to reduce cost, but this is not adapting to the new environment. The companies with formal sales process that mirrors the customer buying process, those who adapt their sales process when conditions change, are favored to be preserved while companies with informal or tribal sales process will find it very difficult and may go the way of the Dodo".

We signed with Hubspot 12 months ago in December 2008 and chose to migrate our Website onto the HubSpot Owner (now Small Business) package, which uses the HubSpot CMS. (Click the following link for a review of our 2nd year with HubSpot.) For a review of our 3rd year on Hubspot visit Hubspot Review - Year 3.

We are a specialist marketing consulting helping companies to generate inbound leads through aligning sales and marketing messaging around buyer needs. We create buyer relevant messaging and use this messaging in conjuction with communication, language and conversation skills training in our  selling in the internet age blended learning program to improve individual sales performance.

We contacted HubSpot after receiving a strong recommendation from one of our clients, VICO Software in Boston, who had been using HubSpot for over a year and were achieiving outstanding results.

Our goals with HubSpot are to generate inbound leads and to grow awareness of our marketing and sales performance offerings in the markets we serve.

The situationprior to HubSpot was that we were doing poorly with Google Adwords; our old CMS had no social media integration, nor the ability for us to change any content. We had been placing articles in the Cambridge Network magazine and averaged about 100 unique visitors per month. We received only one inbound lead in the prior year.

The HubSpot $32Million series D funding round from new investors, Salesforce.com, Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital, with all original investors doubling-down is old news by now, but the ripples are now being felt in all parts of the marketing automation industry.

"Why Killer Products don't Sell" is a revelation and MUST READ for technology sales and marketing leaders for a number of reasons.

1. Firstly, there is original thought in the analysis of the buying cycle and the lifecycle of every purchase in the buying organization. The authors state and I agree that every purchase follows the I-M-P-A-C-T (Identify - Mentor - Position - Assessment - Case - Transaction) process, the difference is that in a mature buying category, this can happen in a couple of minutes for acquiring a "value-offered" product (Dell Laptop), vs. months for an emerging buying category "value-created" = your discontinuous technology.

2. The second key idea is that there are four different selling cultures, depending on the maturity of the buying category. This indeed explains why so many "proven" sales-people and sales managers from well known corporations (value-added or value-offered) fail in early stage companies where the buying category is still being formed (value-created) and a consultative sales approach is required....this is worth the price of the book alone.

3. The imperative is for sales teams to understand where they are in the technology adoption life-cycle in order to more effectively facilitate the buying process; and for technology sellers to align their organizations operational cultures to match the buying cultures of their target markets.

Dominic Rowsell and Ian Gotts have made a valuable contribution to a growing body of work in the science of professional selling.

We have spoken with both authors and with their permission will be integrating the IMPACT concept and ideas from their book into our Consultative Selling Training courses and E-Learning programs.

Highly recommended!

I loved Seth Godin's latest book Linchpin, but Linchpin is not for everyone.  There is a certain percentage of the population that doesn't want change; hates the concept of personal development - especially when it comes to them, is not interested in new ideas and prefers to pretend like Candide in Voltaire's novel by the same name that - "all must really be for the best and that hard work, from day to day is what life is about."

Please answer the following questions so that you can decide if you want to invest the next few minutes to read this article. 
1. How important is clarity in messaging your value proposition? 
2. How would you rate the clarity of your message on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is "opaque" and 10 is "crystal clear"?  

Recently I attended a Sales Hacker forum and one of the questions from the group was “We have a very complex product, it takes 12-18 months for salespeople to become fully productive, how can we reduce the time it takes to get salespeople up to speed?”

The answer to this question takes more than a few minutes and it varies, depending on the complexity of the product and the learning culture of the organization.

But ramping new hires quickly in a SaaS business is key to accelerating business growth.

Part 1 of this two-part blog post examines the causes of the slow sales ramp and explores ways to reduce it.

This article is relevant for B2B technology sales professionals, not just inside sales, as we are all becoming more virtual in our engagement with prospects and customers.




Findings from the CSO Insights 2011 Telemarketing/Inside Sales Performance Optimization survey set the stage for our conversation. The big Aha in the 2011 survey is that nearly 50% of inside sales are selling independent of field sales.

A visual confection is a powerful tool for communicating a lot of information in a short space of time.

Visual confections are excellent sales aids for inside sales and field sales professionals selling complex products and services. A completed Whiteboard is a visual confection in itself.

I'm a Mac user and had been toying with the idea of buying a tablet PC so that I could more easily create visual confections in PowerPoint. Up till now all of my whiteboards have been created using either objects from WhiteboardSelling's pre-populated style gallery or created on my Mac using an external touch pad.

An example visual confection below is the Message Strength vs. Clarity graphic below. It contains words and hand drawn images to quickly convey an idea around the effectiveness of your Website message in attracting visitors in the first place and then its clarity in conveying meaning. If you missed the original message strength article you can click on the image to read it.

Message Strength vs. Clarity, an example visual confection

In the book Why Killer Products Don't Sell, authors, Dominic Rowsell and Ian Gotts state there are four different and distinct buying cultures, which vary based on the buyers tolerance for risk across the technology adoption lifecycle. Understanding the difference in the four buying cultures and optimizing the supply/value chain to service customers is often an after-thought, particulary for early-stage companies transitioning from start-up to company building. Indeed many large corporations have difficulty in introducing novel products through a salesforce that is accustomed to servicing customers in a mature market.

David Meerman Scott's new book World Wide Rave builds on concepts in his highly original "The New Rules of PR and Marketing" and creates a manifesto for massive inbound marketing success in marketing ideas/products/services over the Internet. Rich with anecdotes and stories from people who have created their own World Wide Rave, David inspires challenges and stimulates thinking which has profound impact for anyone selling or marketing anything. 

An overnight success - 10 years in the making, David's ideas are rapidly changing the way people market products and create PR. He describes himself as a recovering marketing executive having led marketing efforts at Knight Ridder and News Edge in the old World of Marketing and PR.

Every day in the technology business I see old-World examples which David highlights - marketers wasting time, money and precious resources on doing things the old way. Buying PR services, counting print impressions, spamming people with direct mail and email campaigns; hiring telemarketers to generate leads because their me-too Websites don't have sufficient inbound lead flow to feed the sales force.
Typically these companies are product-centric; you'll see product features and benefits (another sure sign of old-World thinking) on their site and the good stuff, their interesting ideas are under lock-and-key...you have to give your contact details to get it - so they can SPAM you with email and hound you with Telemarketers.

#HUGS2011 Report

I was in Boston last week for #HUGS 2011, the 2nd HubSpot User Conference and this is my report.

Last week in Boston there was even more for marketers and HubSpot customers to get excited about than at this event a year ago.  HubSpot’s community has grown in the past year to more than 470+ partners and 5000+ customers and more than a thousand of the faithful gathered for the second Annual User Group Meeting. You can read my report on last year's event HubSpot 2010 user group meeting here.

HubSpot was founded just 5 years ago by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (pic on stage taking Q&A at HUGS 2011), with a grand vision to make marketing easy for everyone. It is clear with the recent funding from mainstream V.C. firm Sequoia, as well as Salesforce.com and Google that the bets the founders made in Inbound Marketing are beginning to look extremely valuable.

Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing method and product suite are very much what the market needs and wants as evidenced by the rapid adoption of the Inbound Marketing methodology and dramatic growth of the company.

Co-founders Brian Halligan and  Dharmesh Shah reviewed progress made in the past year and outlined the strategic direction for the company. (Disclaimer; - we are a San Francisco Bay Area Hubspot Value Added Reseller, focused on creating clarity in marketing messaging  to drive inbound marketing and sales performance and have been using the system for nearly 3 years.)

If you are selling SaaS applications or B2B products/services over the Internet and like to use a whiteboard for discovery and to tell your story, Paper-Show offers precise digital image and text creation in real-time and when combined with Gotomeeting HD Faces, provides an exceptional visual communication experience for video conferencing. 

Paper Show consists of an over-sized pen with an infra-red camera in the nose. The pen uses a blue-tooth transmitter to communicate its precise position on the A-4 sheet to a USB receiver key which holds the Paper-show application and all of the drawings you have created in Paper-Show.  
The pen is positioned in the paper-Show application on the computer screen in the same location as on paper so that when the screen is shared in a video conference, a real time whiteboarding session is enabled.

The digital paper comes in books of A-4 paper sheets. The Paper-Show starter kit which includes the pen, USB key, A-4 paper pad and Letter size paper for printing and uploading graphics sells for $172 on Amazon, or at a number of commercial stationers. Replacement A-4 books are about $25.

Online Whiteboard

I have been working with Paper-Show for Online Whiteboarding for over a year now and have found it to be extremely powerful for engagement and enhanced visual communication.
How do I know it is effective? - every time I close a Paper-Show session with a prospective client, I ask them what it was like to be on the receiving end of the whiteboarding session and I have never once had anything other than positive feedback.

The Challenger Sale Momentum

The Challenger Selling concept is gaining in popularity based on the number of people joining the LinkedIn Group, the rank of The Challenger Sale book, (currently #2 in Amazon sales and marketing category) and the references to the book on the Internet.

Last week we saw a spat between sales training profesionals in one of the LinkedIn groups, about the veracity of the Challenger model, caused no doubt by the mindshare "Challenger" is generating in the market at the expense of rival approaches.

The Challenger behavior archetype identified in The Challenger Sale research stands out because Challengers produce better results than any other sales behavior type selling complex B2B products and services. Why? Because these individuals bring insight and informed opinion to influence the thinking of buyers and they exert a degree of control on the outcome of a complex B2B buying process.

On Wednesday last week, I had the pleasure of sitting in a one day course entitled "Presenting Data and Information" presented by Prof. Edward Tufte.

I subscribe to the New Scientist magazine because each week articles are published from the fields of pyschology, neuroscience and behavioral science on the understanding of human behavior.

Recently I spoke to Justin Pirie about his role at Mimecast and his take on the biggest factors to get right in building a successful channel in a SaaS business.  

Justin has managed the largest SaaS group on LinkedIn over several years and has adjudicated over thousands of articles on the subject of SaaS. He works at Mimecast and leads Social and Community Marketing. He has first-hand experience in engaging their channel to help them succeed, enabled from spending the majority of his career in the channel.

Mimecast provides Cloud services  that augment Microsoft Exchange; Email Archiving, Continuity and Security, whether for on-premise, hybrid or cloud. Mimecast is one of Europe’s largest and fastest growing SaaS companies with growth around 60% a year, fuelled by 400+ channel partners.

How important is listening as a skill for sales and support people? I would rate it as the #1 skill and an essential development area for salespeople to achieve their potential.

In our Selling in the Internet Age sales training courses, I ask individuals to rate their listening skills at the outset of the program. Typically salespeople rate their listening skill as above average. We then videotape a listening exercise to calibrate actual skill level. Having trained thousands of salespeople we have observed that most salespeople’s listening skills are average at the start of the program. Naturally the top performers stand out with highly developed skills, but for the core group, this is a priority area for development.

I rate my own listening skills as an area for development and I am aware of this problem as my wife reminds of it often, which is why I tuned into a recent McKinsey video excerpt of AMGEN’s CEO Kevin Sharer talking about his own epiphany when it came to listening and how he became a good listener. 

A large assortment of some of the World’s finest cars came to my home town last week for the annual Concourse de Elegance in Pebble Beach.

On Tuesday afternoon about 200 cars were on display in Ocean Avenue, Carmel for the non-paying public to get up close and kick the tires (I don’t think so). With so many wonderful machines from the past century of motoring in better than showroom condition, I was given to ask, “What is the most prestigious and enduring brand for any motor car, for the past 100 years?”

There are only a handful of manufacturers still around around after 100 years that are still going, let alone one that is 97 years old and one of the World's Superbrands. One brand in my opinion rises above them all - and that is Rolls Royce. I then asked myself the question, “what’s in the brand Rolls Royce…what does it mean to own one, who buys them and why?”.
A bad photograph of a beautiful pre-WW2 Rolls Royce drop-head coupe that inspired this article.

Responsive Sales Enablement 

The Inbound Marketing model pioneered by HubSpot has been proven by nearly 10,000 companies to efficiently lower the cost of acquiring new customers. The next logical steps in this evolution, articulated by HubSpot CTO and co-founder Dharmesh Shah at the recent #Inbound13 event in Boston, are Inbound Sales and Inbound Service.

The idea of flipping the sales model of calling cold, or even warm prospect lists on its head, to real-time engagement, while or within a few minutes of prospects visiting your Website or opening your email is a smart approach to facilitating buyers who start their journey as an inbound lead.  

Think about it, would you rather be contacted by a vendor salesperson to ask if you need help, two days after your visit to their Website, when you are in the middle of something else - or within 10 minutes of being on their Website? 
I would rather get that call while it’s still fresh in my mind… whether I decide to take action or not.

What Price or Value was your last Sales Call?

Would your prospect have paid you for the value they received from meeting with you or one of your sales executives on your last call with them? 

This is a vexing question and it's one of many vexing questions that have been on my mind since I read the "Challenger Sale".  It's a question that should be keeping B2B sales enablement professionals, sales managers and sales professionals up at night.

This question is vital in a World where buyers can find everything they need to know about your products and services without having to speak to you.

On your last call, did you bring the gift of knowledge and insight? Did you educate the buyer on an industry issue or sub-optimal condition that you are aware of because of your domain expertise, view of the market, knowledge of their company and your unique understanding of how your capabilities can create value?

Alternatively, would the buyer have invoiced you for 40 minutes of their time that they felt you robbed from them on your last sales call because you occupied their time, but failed to bring any value?

I will introduce a couple of related concepts to begin to address the value of the sales call question.

Challenger Selling is not new to Top Tier Consultants

The Challenger Sales type has been identified as the most effective in selling complex B2B products and services. When we examine the

10 Trends every Sales Exec Must Know for 2013 - CEB

Introducing new high technology and green technology products or services or getting an acquired company’ products sold through an existing sales team is a challenge for entrepreneurs in early stage companies and sales and marketing leaders in more mature companies.  

We have had both as clients, however I’m always astonished to see smart people doing really dumb things with their own and their investor’s money. There are a few telltale signs of a struggle going on inside an organisation. This is a struggle to find new prospects and to improve sales and marketing performance, accompanied by lots of hand-wringing and pointing blaming fingers at each other.
 
The first clue that there are problems is the corporate Web-site. The company’s Website, which is without a doubt the company’s most valuable asset (after its people), very often looks like it has been written by the product management team.  Often densely packed, with no white space; or sparse with nothing to engage the accidental visitor other than “product-speak”= meaningless features and benefits and gobbledygook. Pay-per-click is used to generate inbound leads and is fast burning investors cash.

The second clue, is that the sales team is tasked with making cold-calls to generate their own leads; and the company is wasting money on external telesales teams to generate appointments that hardly ever convert. We are marketing and selling in the Internet age and in 2009, buyers don’t want cold calls and junk email from suppliers to introduce them to their latest widget….yet strangely we see telemarketing companies thriving and a die-hard group of cold calling sales trainers and promoters who are championing an obsolete way of doing business.

I believe that in all high-tech and green-tech companies, sales and marketing should be united and aligned under one leader. A sale starts with an inbound visitor and it’s the role of marketers to generate inbound visitors that convert into leads. Sales and marketing teams need a universal way of defining leads and engaging prospects around their buyer-persona; one language from the Website to the sales person's lips that engages buyers around how their products or services are used by their customers to create value; the messaging reinforced by high value video testimonials, keyword rich blogs, case studies, Webinars and sector relevant white papers and E-books that pull in prospects.

In November and December this year as a certified affiliate of WhiteboardSelling, I completed six WhiteboardSelling Enablement Symposia on three continents. I wanted to share thoughts and the lessons learned from this immersion in different cultures and the general applicability of the WhiteboardSelling development philosophy and Enablement methods.
I ran WhiteboardSelling Enablement events in Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, Cologne in Germany and here in Silicon Valley CA. The smallest group was about 25 and the largest was about 90 people.

In every case, the WhiteboardSelling Enablement method was very well received and sales and support people had learned and could tell their story after this half day session.

To illustrate how well this enablement method works, a new hire Pitney Bowes product manager who participated the WhiteboardSelling Symposium in Melbourne, gave a great Whiteboard demonstration to lead off the first session the very next day in Sydney. Our executive sponsors were well pleased with the training outcomes in every case.

Got a Killer-Product, but having trouble achieving its and your companies' potential?
These 6 short videos (hosted on Wistia) were produced by Dominic Rowsell of Hot Rivet. Dominic is author and copyright holder of "Why Killer Products Don't Sell".

In this series, Dominic provides new insights on buying behavior as he explains that there are four and only four buying cultures and suggests how to adapt B2B selling to match how customers buy. He explores the IMPACT (Identify-Mentor-Position-Assessment-Case-Transaction) buying process that every B2B transaction will go through, from initial idea to a purchase order.

If you are interested in The Challenger Sale method, you will see some very clear parallels in the Value-Created Selling model as the Mentor phase in the IMPACT buying process is typically where Challengers engage.

Regardless of your company and its stage in the technology adoption life-cycle, the IMPACT cycle and four buying cultures are relevant and useful for marketers and sellers to understand how people buy and what is needed to move a deal through each stage in the buying cycle.

Introduction to the Four Buying Cultures

In the past couple of months I have met with four entrepreneurs, all highly passionate about their products and excited with the potential for them in the market.

Most sales professionals will be very focused on closing last minute deals in the popular end of year discount-fest enjoyed around this time of year by our customers. Most marketers will be considering how they can improve program performance in 2010 to generate more leads and build mindshare.
It's a bad time to be calling sales and marketing leaders to engage in conversations about improving sales and marketing performance in 2010, but when is a good time?
So instead of calling prospective 2010 clients, I'm posting a blog and sending a link with the top 10 things for sales and marketing leaders to consider in their planning for improved performance in 2010, with a link back to a landing page on our site to register interest in further discussion.

Stan DeVaughn of Turner DeVaugh sent me a survey his firm conducted late last year in conjunction with Jigsaw for the CIO council entitled, “Vendor-CIO First Contact: Smarter Approaches for Vendors Seeking to Connect with CIOs”, which you can download by clicking on the link.

This is an enlightening, yet disturbing survey into the business development behavior of sales and marketing representatives from IT vendors and B2B software companies. It surveys more than 300 CIO’s about their experience with first contact from new vendors and suggests ways that corporations can better defend themselves from unwanted cold calls and SPAM.

The survey interviews 30 sales professionals to understand the problem from both sides and offers enlightened vendors suggestions on how to better engage their target market, and is worthwhile reading for every sales and marketing executive.

The chart in figure 3., excerpted from the report is worth pondering a few moments;

• Sales reps revert to the cold call and telemarketing to generate leads, (despite low conversion rates) in order to satisfy sales managers, who need to be seen to be driving lead generation – this does not serve either organization.
• Lack of preparation and lack of homework prior to a call is just plain unprofessional–period.
• Unsolicited emails are SPAM and are as unwanted and annoying as cold calling to CIO’s; IT executives are actively encouraged to use permission-based SPAM filters.
• Emails and voicemails with no clear value proposition–from the clients perspective, rank in the top 5 DON’T DO list.

We’re in Q3 2010, yet many IT vendors doggedly persist in 1980’s cold calling and poorly targeted email techniques, despite the miniscule success rates in vain the hope of connecting with IT buyers. 
“When we want or need a product like yours, we will find you” - is the CIO mantra that sales and marketers need to heed and understand; IT executives are not waiting for your call or your SPAMMY email.
The right approach to engage IT executives is made clear for vendors in figure 9:

1. Vendors wanting to make first-time contact with CIO’s should do their homework prior to making an approach; leading with an opinion on value-creation, specific to the company and relevant to the industry.
2. They should seek to connect through referrals from trusted acquaintances and social network introductions with a clear and relevant value proposition,
3. They should also be prepared to include rather than circumvent the executive administrator (gatekeeper) in the process of calling IT executives,
4. They should be prepared to use current technology to reach buyers on a permission basis and track click-through rates to measure buyer interest,
5. Vendors should be prepared to use vendor portals and to communicate with a clear and relevant value proposition, coupled relevant proof points.

Conclusion and Call to Action

If the activities of your sales and marketing team rank high on the CIO annoyance scale in chart 3 or if they struggle to communicate value and differentiate offerings as in figure 9., then more of the same Outbound Marketing techniques are not going to help.

We believe the top priorities for IT vendors to help CIO’s and IT executives to find you on the Internet, understand your offerings and interact with your sales and marketing team are as follows;

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.

Onboarding and Ramping New Hires  

Executives responsible for hiring and ramping new marketing and sales hires have a whole host of challenges in finding and hiring good candidates and in getting them productive. For new marketers it's usually a brief, sink or swim induction that starts with a content immersion and then the writing begins. 

Onboarding new sales hires is a longer process, commencing with indoctrination in the product; demo, presentation, pricing, followed by CRM and sales process training.

After meetings with the sales manager to discuss territory and key accounts, the sales rep is off-and-running.
 
Unfortunately for sales reps in many companies, from this point on, they are on their own. They have to source their own leads, figure out how their customers buy their product and through trial and error, how to sell the product.  

Sound familiar? 

It should, this is pretty standard stuff in mainstream technology companies.  

For a straightforward product with a 1-month sales cycle time, it might take 3-4 months for a rep to become fully productive. For a complex enterprise solution with a 6-month sales cycle, it will likely take a year or more.  

Dave Kurlan’s formula for Ramp up time = the length of your sales cycle + the length of your learning curve + 30 days. Dave adds a couple of months to ramp time for either lack of industry knowledge or lack of sales experience.  

The only variable in Dave’s formula is the length of your learning curve.
 
CSO Insights suggests that the factors causing long ramp-times are:

With so much at stake in every prospect encounter, why would I promote the idea of leaving the laptop, PowerPoint presentation and LCD behind?

I've been working with sales and marketing teams for the past 8 years as a consultant to help align sales and marketing messages and create clarity around value creation. With one or two exceptions from the hundreds of presentations I've seen, they all follow the same format.

It's all about me, my big office, my stuff, my awards, my customers (slide 4), my partners, my products, my compelling features and my unforgettable and highly differentiated benefits. 

It's like there was a gold standard master PowerPoint presentation written 20 years ago and every presentation since has inherited the format....only the buildings and the names change.
If you want a good laugh and some introspection take a look at the Chicken, Chicken, Chicken video below (Thanks to Neil Warren for making me aware of this).

According to a CSO Insights survey on "Optimizing Sales Performance with Consistent Message Management", companies that are world-class at integrating sales and marketing messaging around the customer;

1. Best Book: Seth Godin's Linchpin really addresses a bunch of personal issues that prevent people from getting the important stuff done.
2. Obama's healthcare reforms: mean affordable healthcare coverage for me and my family and the employees of our business...and millions of other small business owners and employees in the US.
3. Moving back to the USA...it was a good time to go to the UK in 2003 and it feels like a good time to be back in the US - an added bonus, we missed the coldest, snowiest winter in Scotland for 60 years.
4. Becoming an affiliate of WhiteboardSelling provides a logical output of our Messaging Architecture process and translates it into something the sales team will actually want to use and enables me to implement a lot of the Salescraft technique I have developed as well.
5. Our Toyota Prius has to be the smartest car I've ever owned and we are averaging 50+ MPG. A real surprise inside, with more leg and headroom than our old Volvo Waggon and a terrific load deck that will carry most stuff we need to haul.
6. Moving in to our Pebble Beach home in just 10 weeks from purchase with a complete renovation has to be some sort of record...thanks to my wife, Robin.
7. My new Kevin Burns Putter...this is the first putter I have ever owned that is scientifically fitted exactly for my physiology and putting stroke. It is also the finest quality milled putter available and the custom-fitting-machining process that Kevin Burns invented and his practical stroke improvement tips mean that KBGolf putters are the only truly custom golf clubs that actually improve your game.
8. Best Work Engagement: Working on implementing Inbound Marketing at hot Cloud Storage spin-out Scality in Paris.
9. Best Wine of the year: 1976 Penfolds Grange Hermitage - a majesterial wine, still improving, incredible colour, nose and massive sweet and intense chocolatey red and black fruit flavors that linger for minutes, this wine still has 20 years in it.
10. Best Pub: The Central Bar, St Andrews and ask for a pint of my favorite real ale "Bitter and Twisted" from Harviestoun Brewery.
11. Best New Golf Course I played: Loch Lomond, Scotland thanks to my host Rick Gardner and the best parkland layout I've ever played - shot a 79 gross.

The following is a true story. A few names have been changed to protect the identity of some of the people involved. 

In the first installment of this story, Scorched Earth, I described the situation leading to my being hired at MicroStrategy into an OEM sales role and the problems in overcoming relationships that had been soured by my predecessor. This episode is about the events leading up to my being given 30 days notice of termination and reflects on the changing role of salespeople in B2B selling.

For B2B marketers, quality trumps quantity in lead generation priority and according to a recent Marketing Sherpa poll, generating quality leads is the greatest challenge marketers face.

"We have just spent $25,000 on an SEO project and we don't have the budget right now!"
I have heard this sales objection a couple of times in the past year
from prospects in discussion around providing inbound marketing strategy and services (we are a certified HubSpot partner) and I was going to write a post and share some lessons learned.

In preparing to research this article I ran a number of searches and Google'd up the phrase "SEO is not a one off event" as it perfectly encapsulates the sentiment of the article I was planning to write.  A couple of clicks later I came across an excellent article on SEOMoz from 16 year old Fryed7 entitled "The definitive guide to awesome Web content".

This is a long, but excellent article and well worth the 5 minutes or so it will take to read, more if you follow all the links....and maybe you will want to watch the 17 minute Seth Godin video on TED on building Tribes.

I love Ed Fry's jet engine metaphor (an original thought) and although Ed calls it Tribal SEO, in the HubSpot community, creating "manifesto" content is one of corner-stones of Inbound Marketing strategy. Bob Apollo's brilliantly titled blog yesterday social media without thought-leadership is like broadcasting into space echo's this idea.
Take-Aways

The marketing messaging used in Websites and Blogs to drive Inbound Marketing leads, must be used to drive sales conversations with the gamut of prospects and customers, without salespeople having to translate it or figure it out themselves.

Rules for Inbound Marketing Messaging:

For a B2B Internet Site to be effective, there is more work required than simply selecting and optimizing keywords. Effective Website messaging and blogposts have the following characteristics

Whiteboard Selling Best Practices

If you are interested in Whiteboarding, you are invited to join a new LinkedIn group set up to promote and share Whiteboarding best practices, tips and to advance the art of whiteboarding in sales.

Whiteboard Selling Best Practices is an open group created to share and disseminate Whiteboarding tips, ideas and best practices.

WhiteboardSelling alumni and sales, marketing and enablement professionals with an interest in using whiteboarding techniques for in-person and remote whiteboarding are most welcome.

The goal of this group is advance the art of whiteboarding so as to improve engagement, discovery and differentiation through visual storytelling.

Click on the whiteboard to go to the group.

I'm in one of America's premier convention cities as I write this, having attended a sales Kick-off and sales enablement event for a major technology company. This event, like many prior events I have attend was a lot of fun and a great time was had by all.

In the past couple of weeks I have spoken to three entrepreneurs who have created, or are creating SaaS solutions to serve very specific needs for a well-defined market opportunity. In conversation it emerged that none of them were planning on having any sales people in their business.

The thinking here is that since the products are so strong and the market need exists, by offering a free trial, the prospect will learn to use and love the product and convert into a customer; all without needing a human touch. Who needs sales people anyway?

This approach is similar to the "Field of Dreams" (if you build it, they will come) strategy; popular with entrepreneurs who are long on product engineering skills but underestimate the importance of marketing and selling in the lifecycle of successful products. This attitude has led to the premature death of many killer-products.

Now let me say here that I would not advocate putting a salesperson in the way of a buyer who was motivated to buy and did not require interaction with a salesperson. Dell recognized this desire early on and enabled people to self-serve PC’s and Laptops nearly ten years ago and cut billions out of their cost of sale. Dell had a couple of things going for it that early stage SaaS companies don’t; - brand equity and market dominance in a mature buying category.

Killer-products, and especially software products don’t sell themselves unless they fulfill the following criteria

• A mature, clearly defined buying category exists,
• Market demand exists for the products/services,
• Acquisition is as simple as buying a book on Amazon,
• Implementing the products is seen as risk-free and the vendor is trusted,
• The products are easy to use, learn and deploy,
• The buyer knows what they want and it's really a matter of what color and how many.
• The market price is established and the vendor offerings are within an acceptable range.

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. 

This post started at the insistence of a colleague who knew of my work with WhiteboardSelling and wanted me to check out Prezi as an alternative to PowerPoint.

I had dinner with a Sales VP of an early stage technology company this week and discussed her business and her experience in building the startup revenue stream. We got down to talking about "the how" of building the sales team, recruiting the channel and generating revenue.

They now have 6 people in sales globally and their resellers are starting to sell their product, although she mentions it was a painful process in getting there.  

This month marks the second anniversary as HubSpot Inbound Marketing customers and the following is a review of what we have achieved and learned in our second year.

We signed up for the HubSpot Inbound Marketing platform halfway through the product demonstration, when we realized that it exactly fulfilled our lead generation requirements and perhaps more importantly had the potential to fulfill the lead generation needs of most of our clients.

If you are interested in our first year experience please visit HubSpot-Inbound-Marketing-Performance-Review-Year-1. If you are interested in how we did in our third year, visit our HubSpot Year 3 Performance review.

Prior to HubSpot we had a second generation "presence" Website of about thirty pages for our consulting and training business, but we did not receive any inbound leads from the Website, although we were creating content monthly for magazine placement and did see a small traffic spike with every article we published.
We updated our sales and marketing methodology by replacing our old outbound lead generation methods with HubSpot and their Inbound Marketing Methodology and our lead generation process is dependent on it today.
Since we started with HubSpot we have generated over 220 leads (a lead is defined as a visitor who exchanges their contact details in return for viewing a joint AMC-HubSpot Webinar, downloading our WhiteboardSelling whitepaper or signing up for a free Marketing Messaging Alignment Consultation.)

These are my top 5 sales and marketing performance blogs from 2011 in order of popularity. I also want to extend holiday greetings to all of my connections and friends in the industry on the last working day before Christmas.

Relocating back to California has been a great move for me and my family and we look forward to a promising 2012.

A Guide to Engaging Sales Presentations - Do not use PowerPoint

Thoughts on Powerpoint usage in sales presentations, following Edward Tufte's 1 day course, "Presenting Data and Information" in Los Angeles on 9 Feb.

Avoid these 5 Pitfalls for effective Whiteboard Sales Presentations

In making great whiteboard presentations, there a few things to avoid. Get them right and you will be very successful.

Selling from Home - Here's an Updated Sales Communications Setup 

If you are in sales or consulting, live in the USA or Canada and work from home, the following advice on home telecommunications could worth a read.

Time to Bring Outside Sales Inside - A Guide to Virtual Selling

The Internet is quickly eliminating the need for in-person selling in favor of virtual or inside sales. A 5-step guide to inside sales performance.

Product Training Doesn't Work- Get Sales to DO Product Training

Article discussing the old way of product training vs the new way of product training. The new way gets sales people to DO the product training. 

Readers of this blog collectively will have sat through tens, if not hundreds of thousands of hours of product training in their sales and marketing careers.

The PowerPoint Cringe

I’ve developed a conditioned reflex when I know I’m going to have to sit through a PowerPoint presentation. After nearly two years of working on whiteboarding to communicate with buyers instead of presenting to them, I feel a certain uneasiness and find myself shifting in my chair, stomach sometimes churning and often - my jaw clenching when the presentation starts.

This is a conditioned response and natural reaction to the way the majority of 
sales and marketing presentations unfold; the slides are dense and chock-full of words, the medium is dull, the delivery is product-centric and tedious and the presentation style is generally uninspiring – exactly the type of atmosphere you want to avoid when trying to inspire people to action!

However, I recognize that there are certain situations in which PowerPoint is unavoidable.  Conference organizers may require that presenters deliver information using the same slide template; corporations may insist that you use the corporate slide deck or potential customers may specifically request a PowerPoint presentation.

In these cases, how can you use a PowerPoint presentation without boring your audience to tears or losing out on the engagement levels that other delivery styles allow?

Here’s one rule that’s worthy of repeating – “Never give a presentation you would not want to sit through.” (Nancy Duarte)

In truth, it is possible to create engaging PowerPoint slides, but it takes a lot more effort than most people think.  Unfortunately, because the vast majority of presentations are created the night before they’re used, preparation is rushed, the ideas are jammed-up against each other and it’s no wonder the majority of them fail to achieve their intended outcomes.

The worst offenders are often our sales and marketing leaders, who beat us over the head with bullet after bullet at the annual sales kick-off meeting.  By avoiding their example and adhering to the following guidelines, you’ll increase your odds of both connecting with your audience in a delightful, authentic way and delivering a message that’s both well-received and retained.

The following is a true story. A few names have been changed to protect the identity of some of the people involved. 

In the first episode of this story, Scorched Earth, I described the situation leading to my being hired at MicroStrategy into an OEM sales role and the problems in overcoming relationships that had been soured by my predecessor.  

In the second episode, Defeat, Adam Zais and I explored the changing fortunes of B2B sales professionals and I describe the events leading up to my being given 30 days notice of termination. This article covers the 90 day lifecycle of the deal itself.

I met serial entrepreneur, Rajesh Setty about two months ago as a result of an introduction from a friend. I went into the first meeting with Raj cold, having been referred in the morning and meeting in the afternoon and we hit it off straight away. After 30 minutes of intense conversation, I felt like I had know Raj for years. In that meeting, Rajesh demonstrated his new product to me, and after we were one minute into the demonstration, I had an Ah-ha moment and Rajesh had an OEM partner in me - I could use the technology he and his co-founder had developed to solve a messaging development problem I was working on.

Wow, what a year for Admarco.net and for HubSpot.
In our 4^th year as HubSpot customers, this review will by necessity examine the advances in the HubSpot platform as well as what we have achieved in using it. Prior reviews are available.
Hubspot Review – Year 1
HubSpot Review Year 2
HubSpot Review Year 3 

This year HubSpot took some very big steps in product usability and capability which established the product in a new market, where it is able to compete directly with marketing automation vendors Pardot, Marketo and Eloqua, but with some fundamental and important distinctions in that it is a robust and easy to use inbound marketing platform.

HubSpot accelerated growth and now has more than 8,000 customers in 46 countries. During the year HubSpot placed itself on the path to IPO by adding key executives and raising a further $35M in a funding round to bring the total funding raised to $100M. 

As Hubspot customers, Hubspot partners and fellow travelers on the inbound marketing journey for 10 months now, we heartily recommend "Inbound Marketing", by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, as this book represents a very readable and do-able playbook for implementing inbound marketing methodology.

Packed with concise guidance, case studies, and practical to-do’s that you can implement today, this book is really a text-book on the subject and is one of the most important books for Internet era marketers published to date.

"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.

Early adopters of new technology are prepared to accept more risk when buying technology than the majority of buyers.

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?"

Old School - "Mad Men", Top-down Branding

The marketing World is always evolving, and one of the most notable shifts in recent years has been the move from the outbound marketing era's “top down” branding approach to the more inclusive buyer-centric messaging favored by savvy startups, marketing innovators and companies utilizing inbound marketing to drive sales.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to my friends colleagues and fellow group members.

Mike Bosworth is a sales trainer and mentor for tens of thousands of B2B salespeople Worldwide through his seminars, consulting, and his books, "Solution Selling", "Customer-centric Selling" and now "What Great Salespeople Do".



When Mike stated recently that the old stuff isn't working any more and moved away from these generally accepted sales process models to start an entirely new business to teach salespeople to tell stories, I took note and I bought his new book, What Great Salespeople Do.
 
One astonishing statistic published in the book reveals the unfortunate truth in the sales profession and that is, now just 13% of salespeople are responsible for 87% of the revenue (*Sales Benchmark Index). This led Mike to the realization that despite decades of conventional sales training, the core group of salespeople had not improved their performance. That is, decades of sales training made the best salespeople better, but the bottom 80% did not improve. On closer examination of the 13% who were selling 87% of the business in his own organization, Mike found that they all had the ability to forge real emotional connections with their customers.

Reducing Sales Ramp 2.

Ramping new hires quickly in a SaaS business is key to accelerating business growth.

In part 1 of this post I discussed the high cost of a slow ramp and the causes of the slow sales ramp problem. I shared some ideas on hiring better quality sales talent excerpted from Mark Roberge's new book, The Sales Acceleration Formula and discussed 21^st. Century learning concepts.

In this post I will examine specific high value steps to accelerate sales competency, including;

• Understanding how your customers buy.
• Capturing your "Why Change" Story that everyone can tell.
• The Whiteboard Storytelling Secret.
• Making it Stick, Social Learning and Certification.

In June this year, Gartner held their mid-year Chief Sales Officer Conference, featuring a keynote from Distinguished VP Advisory, Brent Adamson, which I summarized in Brent Adamson Gartner CSO Conference Insights.

In May this year, Gartner’s Customer Service and Support team published a paper entitled, Why Service Reps Disengage and What You Can Do About It.

 4 must haves For pipeline growth in a virtual world

The essential ingredients for salespeople to rapidly build a pipeline in addition to selling competence are virtual presence, video competence, brand mojo, and visual conversation frameworks for synchronous and asynchronous selling. Each element in the pipeline growth equation is important but they are accretive and help salespeople to capitalize every moment on camera in front of buyers.

Last week I joined Dave Kurlan, CEO of Objective Management Group for a conversation on Virtual Presence for salespeople. From this interview we concluded that the majority of salespeople worldwide have a long way to go before they reach an acceptable level of virtual presence where they are creating Mojo for themselves and their brand in meetings with buyers.

CEOs, marketing, and sales leaders are likely unaware of the opportunities their sales and customer success teams are missing to contribute to their brand Mojo.  In fact, if they knew how badly some of their team members' online presence looked, they would be alarmed and call for immediate action.

Every new year there are myriad articles published by analysts, pundits, and pseudo-experts looking back on the prior year and expounding on the future.  I have captured key points from a number of articles on what happened in 2020 and what to expect in 2021 and beyond.

Mergers and acquisitions hold promise for owners and investors of combinatorial synergies to reduce costs, increase profit, extend market and product coverage, as well as accelerate innovation.

2020 has been a banner year for mergers and acquisitions, with 5500 deals so far. This record volume may be partially due to the Covid-19 outbreak forcing the liquidation or disposal of underperforming non-core or struggling investments. However, mergers come with a great deal of risk as reflected in failure rates that are reported to be between 40% and 70%.

Despite best-laid plans and executive oversight, human factors present the greatest risk and sales-force integration is the toughest merger issue to overcome. 

This article will be of interest to salespeople, sales managers, sales enablement pro's, SE's and anyone interested in improving the outcomes of remote B2B sales meetings. The ideas in this article aren't new, but are largely unknown.  I learned the Sales Prologue for opening meetings from Enableocity partner, Jim Burns of Avitage and he learned them from Rob Scanlon.  We have adapted some of Rob's ideas to match our Remote Selling 4-Box Qualification Model.

How Salespeople Learn

Learning is the most important skill for salespeople to master in the second decade of the 21st Century. Unlike medicine or law, selling is a profession that is learned by doing. The more calls you make, the faster you learn, and the more you learn about what works and what needs to change. Already in this decade, we are seeing the effect of combinations of exponential technologies that are profoundly and permanently disrupting the marketplace. Salespeople must learn how to learn and apply new knowledge quickly to contribute value to buyer-seller interactions.

I have been working in complex B2B sales enablement consulting and as a sales enablement practitioner for the past 16-years. Right from the first engagement where I rode-along on sales calls, to the conversation I had last week with a sales leader, a consistent problem persists: salespeople do not know how to effectively communicate value with buyers.

If your sales team is not using content like this to engage buyers they are missing a trick. Even if you are not in Cybersecurity, this article is instructive and comes with a proforma spark-email

The Mandiant M-Trends 2020 Report published last week is compulsory reading for cybersecurity professionals and salespeople selling into the cybersecurity market.

In my previous post, How Much Does a Whiteboard Story Cost to Create?, I discussed the cost elements associated with developing various types of whiteboard story.

Microsoft PowerPoint has been installed a billion times on Mac and Windows systems since launching in 1990. With an estimated 95% market share of the presentation market and more than 500 million users, Microsoft PowerPoint is a behemoth in the market and their collective competitors, mere minnows.

FREDERICKSBURG, VA. (PRWEB) DECEMBER 05, 2018

This post is a review of Anthony's excellent second book, The Lost Art of Closing.

In 2003 I was working in a Silicon Valley tech startup. Google was just 5 years old, the iPhone was a glint in Steve Jobs’ eye, and Blackberry was the king of the smart-phone market.

I’ll never forget one meeting at the disc drive manufacturer Maxtor; the buyers in the meeting knew nearly as much as we did about our product and they knew more about our competitors product (Google search) than we did. 

The following is my Icebreaker talk delivered at my maiden Toastmasters speech in June this year. I will comment on the value for salespeople in completing the 10 projects in Toastmasters "Competent Communicator" manual in another post.

Brian Krebs is an investigative journalist and former Washington Post staff reporter, where he covered Internet security, technology policy, cybercrime and privacy issues for the newspaper and website.

His first book SPAM Nation chronicles the activities of two leading Russian figures of the Pharmaceutical SPAM racket, Igor Gusev and Victor Vrublevsky, who leaked detailed information about the other in an effort to destroy the other. 

Recently I met with a top sales enablement professional whom I'll call Bob, to exchange ideas.

During the meeting I was introduced to the concept of the Three Humped Camel. Bob wishes to remain nameless as he started a new job and does not wish the camel phenomena to be tied back his prior employer.

13% of Salespeople produce 87% of Revenue

According to Sales Benchmark Index, now 13% of salespeople are selling 87% of the business.

When I asked Bob to draw the quota distribution graph for his old firm, he drew something that looked like this.
 
This is obviously just a quick hand-drawn sketch from memory, but the point Bob was making is that the majority of the sales team were not making their numbers and were dispersed around 40% of quota achievement, with a smaller hump around 100% and another hump at around 150% of quota achievement. 

I wrote this article having attended a sales kick-off and sales enablement event for a major technology company.

This event, while similar in many aspects to a traditional kick-off, varied greatly in the take-aways for each individual sales attendee.

Dear prospective customer,

Apologies for the many times we salespeople have sat in front of you - selectively (not) listening, interrupting you and telling you what you needed, before you had finished your sentence.

Image by Aoki Tetsuo

I read with great irritation this morning of the Experian T-Mobile hack

I just bought a new iPhone from T-Mobile and as part of the lease process, they ran credit with Experian   

Immediate thoughts were of unauthorized credit card transactions, canceled cards. Identity theft. Inconvenience and the sense of violation from a “trusted” 3rd. party, Experian.

The Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday this week was well attended, had excellent speakers and a new crop of hot sales effectiveness and incentive applications. This post provides highlights of topics presented as well as links to some of the coolest apps.

If you subscribe to current research, buyers are contacting vendors at somewhere between 60-70% of the way through their buying process.  What this research fails to mention is this only applies to mainstream technology that is in established markets and where there is an identified and known set of competitors. 

Buyers enter the buying process depending on technology maturity and buyer risk tolerance. I like to use the IMPACT mnemonic to describe buying cycles because I think it more accurately reflects what is actually going on in the buying organization

IMPACT The six phases of the buying process are easy to remember as they will have an enormous IMPACT on your company’s performance:

There are the Early Adopters (EA) who are happy buying innovative solutions. There are the Early Majority (EM) who want to buy the market leader. And there are the Late Majority (LM) who want to buy a commodity at the cheapest price. Here is where the buyer starts to engage in terms of the IMPACT process.

Early adopters will enter the buying process at 10-20% of the way through a buying process and laggards will wait till they are 90% of the way - and all they care about is price or the service discount.

Successful entrepreneurs, marketers and salespeople selling disruptive technology must learn to recognize early adopters, understand how early adopters engage with innovative technology vendors and how they manage a buying process. 

This is the subject of a new eBook from authors of “Why Killer Products Don’t Sell”, Ian Gotts and Dominic Rowsell, and Adrian King, entitled “IMPACT - the technology executive’s guide for selling B2B disruptive and innovative solutions”.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article why-marketers-must-lead-in-making-content-findable was published on Inbound.org today.

Finding, using and reusing sales, marketing and technical information resources should be simple and quick.

But isn’t in most companies.

64% of enterprise search practitioners in Findwise 2014 Survey believe information is hard to find. In Findwise 2013 survey, 79% believe that finding the right information is critical to business success. 

Sandhill.com, published "Don't Just Curate Content - Harvest it" last week, which I co-wrote with Jim Burns of Avitage.

Remember the old egg in the frying pan image for the big
anti-drugs campaign in the late 80’s, this is your brain, and now this is your brain on drugs?

Your brain on story is the complete opposite, as both hemispheres are engaged, neurons are firing, and listening and retention of information are at peak levels.

Visual Storytelling is part 3 of the Your PowerPoint Sucks Webinar Series.

Part 1 of the series Visual Perception outlines why images are so essential to communication and for your ideas and story to be recalled. 

Part 2. of the series, Basic Storytelling discusses the elements of story and how engaging emotions and adding  contrast are what makes a story memorable.

Editors, journalists, marketers, sales operations and sales enablement professionals, who curate content for readers to share, should always give it a content header to create value for the receiver.

A content header is an explanatory summary that precedes the content body or link, to help the reader to quickly determine if the content fits their requirement, is useful in other ways, or will work for their customer use-case.

The job of content is to get shared and passed along. A content header multiplies the likelihood that a piece of content will get shared, by an order of magnitude.

A Content Header has 3 Purposes

1. It helps the person creating or preparing the content to think clearly about the purpose of the content, the audience and the key themes so it will resonate with the content consumer.
2. It helps when requisitioning content from marketers, agencies, and external writers.
3. It helps people to deploy the content more effectively, so that it will get shared and read. 

When someone creates a piece of content in most businesses today, it may get used once or twice and never see the light of day again.

When content is prepared in a collaborative content ecosystem, it gets created once with a content header, and is available for consumption and reuse by marketing, demand management, sales, channels and support.

Content header enables a fast and convenient, single point of access to enterprise content, regardless of content type or where it is located.

While there are no standards for content headers, this is the one that we use... feel free to use it in your content operations.

Content Header Template: 

Thanks to Jim Burns of Avitage for this short content header.

Content Type and Title:
Author:   
Source:   
Date:   
Topics:   
Target Audiences (Segments/Roles):