SalesVPI

Improve Your Connect Rates

I continue to hear from sales people who still try to use email as a prospecting tool. I contend email is no longer a communication tool -- especially when unsolicited -- it's primarily a delivery vehicle.

Those who use marketing automation to track email open rates know it's probably on the low end of 1% to 5%. Even if it's "opened," unsolicited emails might not be read, let alone have the message internalized. And this is what I mean by communication.

In the email solicitations I receive I continually see "selling" in email messages. The objective of a prospecting communication must be to gain attention and to get a referral, meeting or conversation. Period. To accomplish this, the message must be compelling and relevant with a focus on the customer's problems or opportunities.

I know most people read emails on Blackberry and other portable devices. Therefore I have to write differently with a compelling title and a very short -- three to four line -- message.

I am finding the inclusion of a tailored multimedia vignette to be an important addition to this tactic. The vignette is a short, relevant, introductory streaming multimedia program that makes it easy for the person to hear our story, quickly and conveniently. Done well, it adds an emotional quality that adds to a motivation for the viewer to take action. If a referral is appropriate, the vignette makes it easier for the person to forward the email by eliminating the need to add an explanation.

These are two of several situations we've identified when sales people need a "second voice". The first is when they can't speak directly to a person. The second is when a message must be delivered through a third party -- a referral or customer sponsor for example.

Now, this is a critical point. Given the volume of emails most people receive, especially those at higher levels of an organization, you MUST call and leave a voice mail with a compelling, customer relevant message, requesting the prospect find the email. Unsolicited emails, even those with compelling titles (who's to say), requires the attention prompted by the phone message.

The message should also explain the presence of the vignette. This piques curiosity, removes any anxiety regarding what is behind the link, and entices viewing because it's a different and more interesting way to receive information. This technique will make a big impact on your connect rates.

Finally, remember the importance of timing. It might require five to eight attempts with various combinations -- voice mail, email, regular mail and ideally a referral -- to make the connection. Persistence is key.

In our business, we seldom send unsolicited emails unless we have the opportunity to make the call and leave the message. Email is the delivery system for our vignette and compelling message, not the primary prospecting tool. All three factors -- message, vignette, voice mail -- are required for maximum likelihood for success. Otherwise we know ours will be just another unread and un-acted-upon email.

Email, Newsletters and Portable Devices

We sent our September newsletter out today. We've done major work on our content, database, website and lead management system. That effort has delayed the release. But it's interesting to see how all these things are integrated.

In appreciation for the fact that most of us have two different email viewing devices, Blackberry/iPhone and computers, we've adopted a practice of writing our emails for viewing on portable devices. This means NOT sending newsletters directly as an email.

Think about how people consume information on each device. On my Blackberry, it's very transactional. I'm checking, sending quick responses, noting incoming mail to deal with later. I'm literally on the go. My mind is mostly focused on other things. I seldom read an article, blog, newsletter on my Blackberry. And I really don't want people reading my important content, or viewing my multimedia vignettes, in that situation. For that, I want them able to focus, concentrate, listen and reflect.

I have certain times for computer viewing of blogs, articles, downloads, whitepapers, etc. My mind is in learning mode. I am focused on taking on new information. I find I retain it better, and link ideas with other ideas or problems I'm working on.

To deal with this reality, we send a very short email with a link to the newsletter.

With our marketing automation system, this has the additional benefit of telling us who actually looked at the newsletter and for how long. This is not the irrelevant "email open" indicator that comes from many email tracking systems. These often give false positives due to the "preview" window in Outlook.

People who are interested in our newsletter must click to view it. It opens as a separate web page. Those pages link to additional resources. The articles can be read on a portable device. But viewing videos, vignettes, downloads or longer articles is not practical today for most of us on most devices.

Here is our recent newsletter email and link:

Content Rubik's Cube Newsletter -- Your content marketing strategy

“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors” -- Clay Shirky

Lead management, marketing automation, content marketing and a plethora of social media technologies are changing behaviors.

But the content engine to drive these initiatives with quality, consistent content is often lacking.

A content strategy, supported by a well defined and implemented "publishing" process, is the key to unlocking the full potential of lead management and sales enablement initiatives.

The Avitage "Content Rubik's Cube" September newsletter addresses these issues with a rich compendium of insights from customer engagements, videos, whitepapers, articles and links to additional resources.

Click here to view.

 

Think Like a Publisher

Marketing automation for lead nurturing raises the stakes and the complexity of the content creation process.

Buyers want to view relevant content based upon their: role, specific needs or issues, stage of the buying process, industry, alternatives, and information purpose (attention, general education, customer stories, vendor point-of-view, vendor capabilities, proof points, technical explanation and more.)

To create physical documents to respond to this requirement would require hundreds, perhaps a thousand documents (4 variables for 5 factors is 4 to the 5th power). Daunting, if even possible.

Business publishers need content to be available immediately when buyers, or their sales staff, require it. But budgets are tight and quality standards must be preserved. Volume and the ability to tailor content -- perhaps even personalize it -- really ups the ante.

Business publishers need to shift their thinking from re-active, event or project driven initiatives, to a planned and continuous process to create, manage, deploy and deliver content for the new digital era.

Sales messaging is dynamic so content must also anticipate and accommodate constant iteration and updating.

And content can be delivered in many more formats than before: text, audio, Flash and video. To personal devices, through web conference technology, streaming, downloaded and more. So content must be created in anticipation of, and to enable delivery using ALL practical media.

Publishers use databases, templates and a process that is considerably different than the traditional "production" process to produce quality output, quickly and affordably.

I recently did a podcast with Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor in which we discussed specific principles and practices that can have you thinking like a publisher right away.

This link is to a page with the source podcast and transcripts, as well as a link to a BtoB magazine webcast featuring Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 talking about Content Management. In the webcast Joe recommends thinking like a publisher, but is limited by time in delivering specific prescriptions. This webcast and his book, Get Content, Get Customers are highly recommended.

We've used this page to create several examples of thinking like a publisher. You will see how just a 20 minute podcast can be turned into many different content elements for different purposes. In fact, we'll be adding to this page over time.

Here is a starting checklist of what it means to "Think Like a Publisher":

1. Shift thinking from a traditional production process that is event or project driven to a continuous "publishing" process
2. Develop and document a process to create, manage, update, deploy, assemble and deliver content for multiple purposes and delivery modes, and to collect and iterate feedback
3. Define standards, policies and procedures, templates
4. Have a methodology: map your customer's buying process, customer needs, issues and interests, by stage of buying process, industry, their alternatives (your competition) and primary communication scenarios
5. Develop "value maps" and "message maps," the business equivalent of an editorial plan
6. Think of content as assets -- continuously acquire, edit into modules, convert into multiple formats, store in a database base for sharing and re-use
7. Pre-produce content based upon your message map so it is ready for instant use and delivery
8. Produce content for multiple purposes: train, remediate, share knowledge, market/promote, educate, support the buying/sales process
9. Organize deliverables as modules that can be easily and instantly converted into final work products
10. Collect feedback, track, report, analyze, learn, iterate

What techniques have you found to think and work like a publisher?

Using Twitter to Sell

Maybe there is something to this Twitter thing, even for sales professionals.

I've dabbled with Twitter for over six months, mostly as spectator. Last week I listened to a streaming audio conversation hosted by John Jantsch, Taking Your Brand Online, with Guy Kawasaki, David Meerman Scott and Chris Brogan, and it's worth checking out.

In response to the question, "what 2 or 3 things should a small business do first with social media?" Guy Kawasaki resonded, "Twitter, Twitter, Twitter!"

Co-incidentally, I read Dave Stein's blog on using Twitter. So, I took a couple of hours for additional research.

My specific selling interest was to find people at key companies who are running virtual events or virtual shows. I used Twitter Search with those keywords and instantly discovered several people with whom I wished to connect. Given the several weeks spent trying to accomplish this objective, this was a major achievement.

But, my story doesn't end there.

Next, I created a short multimedia vignette from my Avitage Collection. In this vignette I invited the person to try one particular feature of our service -- iNgage Presenter -- a live streaming audio and video communication console that also delivers visual support during a conversation.

Within two hours, I conducted three online conversations, responded to two email requests and had two phone conversations. I have three immediate follow on meetings scheduled. It was truly an exciting and mind blowing experience. And, did you hear me? TWO HOURS!

Lessons Learned

First, a little context: To me, marketing and selling is all about resolving some fundamental communication challenges:

• Find interested people


• Capture their attention


• Capitalize on attention with compelling, relevant content


• Enable viral communications to make sharing easy


• Deliver the right information, the right ways, at the right time -- timing is everything


• More marketing and sales "conversations" are conducted over the phone, through email or on the web, especially at the early stages of the customer buying process


• In a complex sale, a key communication challenge is to enable third parties to carry our messages: customer sponsors, partners, referral sources, etc.


• Even after live meetings, we need ways to sustain and extend conversations and deliver our messages

This objective is significantly enhanced by using multimedia programs, and this is a main part of our business.

Now, my Twitter lessons:

• Twitter can help find individuals and companies at the time they are focused on a specific topic


• Twitter provides a direct, personal way to deliver a targeted and well timed message


• Today, people on Twitter are eager to receive appropriate messages through this medium


• Like all good communication tools, Twitter can accelerate the selling process by helping us find and engage people who are interested, and possibly ready to buy.

Consider the communicaton tools that were in use in this example:

• Twitter


• Multimedia vignette for dynamic, but asynchronous communcations


• Email


• Phone


• Web site -- everyone checkout out our website before contacting me


• Real time web-based communcations using streaming video, audio and graphics (aka PowerPoint).

I'm sure there are many other selling uses for Twitter I'm not yet familiar with, please share your insights.

Sales Conversations -- Set Up the Listening

I spent the day yesterday with my executive coaches from GAP International. This group works with executives and their organizations to create "breakthrough organizations". A breakthrough is an extraordinary and important outcome for which the way of achieving it is not known. It is not predictable from a projection of the current state of the business.

The GAP concept is, extraordinary results are produced by extraordinary actions. Extraordinary actions are produced by extraordinary thinking. Most people, most of the time, take ordinary and predictable actions based upon "business-as-usual" thinking.

Therefore, to create breakthrough outcomes, and especially to create an organization that consistently produces extraordinary outcomes, requires a transformation in people's thinking. The "access" to this thinking is people's language.

By listening carefully to the conversations people conduct, and specifically the language they use in conversations, we can identify people's thinking. This will indicate the kinds of actions they will take, and can even become a predictor of the results people will create. We can change individual and organizational behavior by changing people's thinking in very specific ways.

Our specific conversation yesterday related directly to my work with selling, and one of the principles we work on regularly: sales conversations can create value for customers and become a key differentiator and competitive advantage that will result in higher win rates and margins (less discounting).

The GAP consultants defined conversation as both speaking and listening. I get the speaking part, and that I am responsible for what I say and how I say it. What is a new idea for me is that I am also responsible for how I am heard! Let me say that again, I am responsible for the listening of my audience.

This means I must "set up the listening", "shape the way people listen", and "attend to how people hear what I say". This is a critical concept for sales professionals, as well as marketing, executives and any business communicators.

We always speak "into an environment". Environment is "the sum of all the conversations people are having." These conversations produce a background of ideas, biases, priorities, areas of focus, etc. that people bring to any conversation. We're always listening "from something". We are pre-disposed to hear certain things or certain ways.

Before we begin speaking into an environment, it helps to know what is shaping people's thinking.

This week my colleague and I had a conversation with a prospective customer that illustrates this directly. It was the third conversation with the customer, and we were about to start the discovery stage of our process. My colleague offered a classic checkpoint question toward the beginning of the conversation that initially seemed very appropriate: "Nancy, how did you feel about what we discussed in our previous conversation?"

Nancy's response was, in effect: "Well the ideas were very interesting, but of course I haven't had time to check out your competition and I have a lot more work to do before I can make any commitments ..."

What happened here? My colleague was simply looking for what might have resonated with her, to confirm we were discussing relevant issues, or if she had any questions. What was shaping her listening? "I'm talking with a couple of sales guys, sales guys are primarily interested in completing the sale (little to do with helping me with my business problems), and I've heard this kind of sales checkpoint, or trial close, question before".

How might we have "set up her listening"?

How about: "Nancy, as we discussed in our last meeting, we're committed to helping customers address their primary business and sales communications needs and opportunities. Before we ask you some questions to delve deeper into this, I want to make sure we're on the right track and focusing on the primary issues you want to address."

"We discussed "issue 1" and "issue 2" as two of your most important concerns (or opportunities). Could you share how you felt about our previous conversation on these issues, and are we focused on the right ones?"

This approach would have:

• Re-stated our commitment to her as our primary intent (continuing to build trust, separating us from typical "sales guys", and shaping her listening)
• Focused her onto the primary issues we uncovered, which she might not even have remembered from the previous conversation,
• Kept her from becoming defensive and going off on the tangent that mis-directed our conversation and required us to spend valuable time re-directing (as well as prevent the re-inforcement of her negative stereotype)

When we set up people's listening we impact accuracy and speed. The conversation is more accurate, focused and on topic. It is efficient, so we move quickly through the topics we want to cover, and avoid tangents and distractions that have to be repaired.

So, how do we set up the listening. First, start with your own listening. Tune in to your environment and the listening you are bringing to the conversation. Check in on your pre-dispositions. Clear your thinking to get aligned with your intent for the person and the call.

Next, get people "present". Make sure they are really with you and not still thinking about what immediately preceded, or another significant person distraction. Get their full and complete attention and don't begin until you have it. This seems especially important with conversations over the telephone.

Then, create context. Tell people what to listen for, and what not to listen for. I find a clear statement of my intent to be a good starting point. It builds empathy and opens up people's listening.

Sales conversations are the key to selling success in the complex, consultative, or solution oriented sale. Effective converstaions are the result of the sales professional taking responsibility for both their speaking and their audience's listening.