You are here: Home / Archives for Sales

Openers to set you apart in RFPs, sales conversations, presentations

June 21, 2007 By 2 Comments

One way to quickly grab attention and set your organization apart is to use openers that challenge assumptions or offer contrarian points of view. Openers that smack people in the face and make them think, “gee this company is kind of interesting; let’s pay attention to this one.”

Here are some examples we’ve been helping clients use to distinguish their RFP executive summaries, open sales meetings and make executive presentations more interesting.

  • “We don’t believe in quality control.” (If you create the right operational process you build in quality, drive out costs.)
  • “All the products in this category are commodities.” (The value comes from new types of service around the products.)
  • “Customer service should be eliminated or cut way back.” (Companies should invest more in creating a great customer experience, eliminating problems that jam customer service organizations.)
  • “Customers don’t want a relationship with companies. “ (They just want your product or service to consistently deliver as promised.)
  • “Successfully building this new airport isn’t about engineering. It’s about relationships.” (Changing the context of an RFP so the decision making committee looked at an underdog engineering firm in a new way. The firm won the bid.)
  • “The most creative marketers are scientists.” (The right data helps you target, trigger and activate.)

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Sales, Word of mouth Tagged With: , ,

New study: what builds customer trust not what companies think

May 30, 2007 By 1 Comment

Customers buy based on trust, but there’s a gap in what companies think builds trust vs. what customers say builds trust, according to a new study of 366 financial advisers and 500 customers, published by State Street Global Advisors and Knowledge@Wharton. The study found that many financial advisers overestimate clients’ trust, or erode that trust over time.

“Nearly three quarters of both groups cited trust as the most important characteristic of a financial adviser, but the big discrepancies were in performance and cost-per-service. Just 4% of the advisers thought performance was the most important selection criteria, compared with 10% of the clients; only 5% of the advisers voted for cost, versus 12% for clients,” reports Forbes’ reporter Brett Nelson in an article, “Do Your Customers Trust You?”

Especially interesting was the differences between what customers and companies thinks is important in a business relationship, assumptions I see in sales organizations across industries.

  • Just 26% of advisers surveyed felt that “knowledge” was the most important element of customer service, compared with 47% of clients.
  • 38% of advisers thought “personal factors” took the day, only 14% of clients agreed.

To build trust with customers, constantly share knowledge and advice they can benefit from. Starting in the sales process. And look for sales people who are truly consultative. As this study indicates, the soft “let’s play some golf” personal factors matter far less than most companies think.

Filed Under: Research Tagged With: ,

Lucent Conversational Marketing

November 17, 2006 By Leave a Comment

At yesterday’s annual ITSMA Conference in Cambridge, Mass., Barbara LaGuarida, marketing communications director of Lucent Technologies, explained why and how Lucent has turned to a conversational marketing approach to increase sales effectiveness.

Lucent Worldwide Services, a $2 billion business with 10,000 employees, realized that to sell services it needed more of a consultative than transactional sales approach. The new senior sales executive told Barbara that he saw one major obstacle to being able to move to consultative selling: lack of tools.

“I was shocked,” said Barbara. ” I thought he’d say the issue was talent or training. But tools? After all, we had 1,00o different pieces of collateral available to the sales reps.”

After analyzing what existed, Lucent found that its sales tools were not helpful in facilitating conversations with customers, were weak on differentiation, and were too product oriented. The company overhauled its sales tools, going from 1,000 different documents to just three Engagement Marketing tools:

1. A customer discussion document for engaging prospects in meaningful conversations. This document focuses on the problems that Lucent is seeing in the prospect’s industry, which gets the prospect talking about his or her view of the issues and problems. Information about Lucent is at the back end of this selling tool. At least a third of the presentation is about talking about issues. Not selling service solutions.

2. An executive proposal that highlights the customer’s key business challenges and Lucent’s proposed solution The purpose of this brief document is to make it easy for the prospect to shop it around internally to get feedback and build support.

3. A statement of work — a short, clear document linking Lucent’s proposed solution to the prospect’s objectives and problems.

While Lucent has only been using this conversational marketing approach for a year, the results are impressive.

  • 56% of the sales reps say that the find the customer discussion document a valuable and effective tool.
  • 51% of the sales reps say they can customize the customer discussion document without a sales engineer, which is a big deal in technical sales situations.

Other results:

  • Lucent has reduced sales cycles by 20%
  • Sales and marketing productivity is up 20 – 30%
  • The expense to revenue ratio for services marketing communications has improved 20%

Prospects don’t want to have to sit through a PowerPoint all about a company and its solutions. They do want to talk about their issues and needs, and see if you’re the type of company that they would feel confident in working with to address those needs. Follow Lucent’s lead and create conversational marketing sales tools that make it easy to get people talking. You, like Lucent, will shorten your sales cycles and reduce the cost of sales support.

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Smart company stories Tagged With: ,