I have read some really important books this year that expanded my view of the World and gained valuable insight and I wanted share my top reads in 2009 with you and include links to either Amazon or to my reviews. Please feel free to recommmend any of your favorites that have a base in science and serve to expand our understanding of the sales and marketing sphere.
4 min read
Holiday Reads for Hi-tech Entrepreneurs, Marketers and Salespeople
Topics: inbound marketing killer products book review
2 min read
A Marketing Messaging Guide to Effective Sales Conversations
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
Topics: killer products consultative selling value creation
3 min read
Using a Whiteboard to get your Killer Product Across the Chasm
Early adopters of new technology are prepared to accept more risk when buying technology than the majority of buyers.
Topics: killer products whiteboarding lean startups
3 min read
Selling with IMPACT: a guide to selling disruptive technology.
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”.
Topics: killer products selling early adopters lean startups
9 min read
The B2B Buying Process and How to Influence it pt. 1
The B2B Buying Process - and how to influence it.
Buyer behavior has changed radically in the past 5 years; sales process unfortunately in most companies has not adapted and marketing has been slow to adapt.
I first noticed these changes 10 years ago, when buyers would come to meetings knowing more about the products and competitive approaches that I did. I began working on aligning buying and selling processes after meeting Dominic Rowsell, author of "Why Killer Products Don't Sell", on which much of this work is based.
This article is the second in a series of articles on aligning marketing and sales with buying behavior and it will be of value to sales and marketing professionals who wish to adapt their process to align with buyer behavior. Last week's article "A Guide to Aligning Marketing & Sales Engagement with Buying Process" discussed buyer behavior and how it is affected by risk.
The beauty of this approach is that it's universal, simple and based on actual buyer behavior. When you understand each of the steps, you can ask buyers where they are in their buying process. Salespeople typically think that the sales opportunity is one or two steps in advance of where the buyer actually is in the buying cycle and this is a primary contributor to forecasting inaccuracy.
Topics: killer products buyer-seller alignment B2B selling buying behavior
2 min read
Selling your Solution to Early Adopters - Visual Stotytelling Video
This Selling Early Adopters video was created following a joint Webinar with Dominic Rowsell, co-author of
Why Killer Products Don't Sell. The original sound-track was unusable, so I captured the elements of that Webinar and added more meat into the following two-part, narrated whiteboard video.
The following Flash videos are a 2 part series and run about 7 minutes.
This video introduces the four buying cultures and how they map onto the Technology Adoption Life-cycle. Will be of interest to sales and marketing professionals selling B2B technology solutions or professional services based engagements.
This series offers insight into buyer behavior and the process of getting your challenging idea/solution through the buying process.
Buying Behavior is dependent on Risk Tolerance
Early adopters of new technology are prepared to accept more risk when buying technology than the majority of buyers. Despite the success of SaaS as a concept and the wholesale adoption of cloud based applications, the vast majority of SaaS software fails to achieve commercial success because the innovation never makes it across the chasm from the early adopters into the early majority mainstream market. The consequent massive uptake of the SaaS innovation has eluded all but a small percentage of aspiring entrepreneurs.The following Flash videos are a 2 part series and run about 7 minutes.
Part 1. The Four Buying Cultures and the Technology Adoption Life-Cycle.
This video introduces the four buying cultures and how they map onto the Technology Adoption Life-cycle. Will be of interest to sales and marketing professionals selling B2B technology solutions or professional services based engagements.
Insight Selling is Value Created Selling
This series offers insight into buyer behavior and the process of getting your challenging idea/solution through the buying process.
Topics: killer products selling to early adopters visual storytelling
7 min read
Recruiting SaaS B2B Sales Channels and Getting Sell-through
I responded to a comment on LinkedIn last week on the topic "Marketing and Selling SaaS is hard!!!" on the difficulty in recruiting B2B sales channel partners and getting them to sell-through and I thought I’d expand on the subject with the help of my former colleague Bob Langer. Here is the original article Marketing and Selling SaaS is hard
This is a hot topic - not only for the new cohort of SaaS solutions providers, but for every entrepreneur with visions of channel sales success as well as medium sized companies wanting to sell innovative products through an indirect model.
