Building a Killer Sales Presentation: Tip #4A

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Once you’ve succeeded in turning your sales presentation from a one-way monologue into an engaging discussion, the key is how to start moving the discussion—and your prospect—in the desired direction. This begins with a process that, without being too touchy-feely, we call Empathy 101. As you’ll see here and in the next two blogs, this is a three-part process.

Step One in the Empathy Process is to show your understanding of the overall market that their company—and they—are involved in. NOTE: You’re not trying to create the impression that you know their industry or market better than they do, just that you know enough about the space to be offering an industry-specific solution, not a generic one.

Again, the goal is to make this as interactive a conversation as possible.  So, even though you’re trying to show your knowledge of their industry and the issues and problems it faces (we call this part of the process “you’re screwed”), you also want to create openings for the prospect to jump in. Ideally, they’re going to be nodding at the issues you raise, but then stop you. “You don’t know the half of it,” they say in an ideal situation, and then they set the table for you by taking the conversation deeper.

One last note: In all three phases of the Empathy process, NEVER mention your company or solution. Back to Rule #2… This is still about them.  We’ll get to you later.

Tip #4A: Begin the Empathy 101 Process by Demonstrating Your Knowledge of Their Industry/Market

Startup Marketing- New Words For April

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It’s time once again to learn some of the new terms and vocabulary of startup marketing.

Spin-In– This is the opposite of the familiar business process of spinning a technology out from a company in order to create a new venture. The “spin in” is seen as a kind of star system of top engineers, who work on what is a corporate-sanctioned product, earning a payout several times their normal salary. It can be a real challenge to internal morale across corporate engineering teams, but management sees it as an advantageous approach to accessing and incorporating technology innovation quickly.

Slacktivism– This derogatory term applies to supporters of causes who take a lightweight approach to their activism by “liking” an issue and showing their support by sharing their outrage via email, but they will they will stop short of substantive support of money or action.

Channel Blending– Instead of multi-tasking, this is about how groups of friends or families freely use different channels of communication and mix together content and interactions across different places and devices all while they are having a single coherent conversation.

Newsjacking– Politicians from one party do it to their opposing party all the time. When press coverage of your long-planned product announcement gets diminished by competing announcements, your company is a victim of newsjacking.

Mnemonic Passwords– Security experts recommend users learn new, tougher passwords to protect their data online. One approach is to take the first letter of each word of a sentence and substitute numbers and punctuation marks where possible.  For example, “Too much food and wine will make you sick” becomes “2mf&wwmUs”.

Do you know of other new, hot words are worth sharing? We’d love to add them to our vernacular.

Startups and Positioning – Are We There Yet?

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The foundation of our work with tech startups is the positioning workshop we lead with the leadership team at the beginning of our engagement. That workshop takes place over several sessions with the startup team and is a process of discovery, discussion, compromise and consensus that yields real gold and serves as the bedrock for the development and implementation of the marketing plan. But one observation we have about positioning is that it’s not fixed. Or permanent. Let me explain…

In addition to the process of positioning there is the positioning document (10-15 pages, single-spaced) that comes out of the workshop. That document captures the group consensus on a number of issues and guides the marketing plan, programs and budgets. It also serves as a blueprint for the vendors we will use, to build their deliverables that constitute the marketing plan (everything from content to web design to SEO.)

But it’s inevitable that the positioning (and supporting document) will change. Frustrating but true. Sometimes it happens as you develop the website; other times it’s after Sales reports back from their initial calls. What sounded so good in the workshop doesn’t ring true in the marketplace. So you change your positioning. Or, more accurately, you evolve it.

Sometimes that evolution includes a shift in message. And sometimes that evolution is a shift in market focus. What typically happens is that the evolution of positioning is a result of observing and listening to the customer. We find it extraordinarily helpful to make fast friends of the client sales team and to listen to how they pitch the company value and how the customer responds. Iterations to the positioning (and ideally captured in the roadmap of the positioning document) are the natural course of things for a startup. In our experience, if you don’t regularly evolve you’re positioning, you’re either incredibly lucky (meaning you nailed it during the workshop) or incredibly stubborn.

How New CXO’s Are Taking Hold In Startup Marketing

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Five years ago, the title “CMO” didn’t exist. Now it’s a more popular title than “VP of Marketing”. Now we’re seeing a raft of new “C” titles… the most recent being “Chief Revenue Officer” (a new version of “VP of Sales”).

The three “C’s” that we preach in startup marketing are: content, conversions and competition. While they may not merit a “C” title yet, they’re headed that way, since they’re priorities for any startup.

Content:  You can never have enough content. It’s the way you articulate your vision, value proposition, benefits– everything. It’s so essential to mobilizing sales and marketing that it’s the priority we place ahead of designing a client’s website or their logo. As many web designers will tell you, finishing a website for a new startup never seems to wait on design decisions.  It’s finishing the content that’s often the hold up. Content is so critical to the engine of inbound marketing that powers the growth of startups today, many companies are beginning to name a Chief Content Officer. Often part of the marketing organization, the Chief Content Officer is the go-to person for creating, repurposing and delivering content. Do you have one (either in title or function)?

Conversions: If startups spent more time focused on how their website is converting than on its design, we might be out of a job. There are many functions for a website today, and so there are many ways to measure its success. But the number one reason every company has a website is to convert visitors. Whether that’s converting a visitor into a paying customer, a trial, a demo, or a follower, the key metric is conversions. If you don’t have someone on your team waking up every morning thinking about how to improve your website conversions, consider naming someone your Chief Conversion Officer. Seriously.  As we always say, once you name it, you can begin to measure it.

Competition:  We’re not going to suggest that a young company needs a Chief Competition Officer. But we regularly find it useful to remind our clients to make that deliberate and focused shift from focusing inward to the product features, enhancements, testing, and UI fixes to focusing outward to the market response and customer feedback.  As part of that shift of focus, we stress the need to always keep an eye on “the enemy” that is your competition. Intel’s Andy Grove famously said “only the paranoid survive.” That sentiment dominates the culture of Intel and has been consistently credited as being a valuable part of the success and longevity of Intel. We maintain that the CEO carries in his or her job description the role of Chief Competition Officer, and with their words and actions they can ensure that their team never loses sight of the competition.

Pink Slime — Words, Virality and Lessons for Startups

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Every naming agency and marketeer involved with startups is regularly challenged to find a name that can build a lasting brand. But the secret wish of every marketeer today is to find a name that catapults the brand above the noise and into the Twittersphere.  And unfortunately for the beef industry, “pink slime” has done just that.

The media storm over “pink slime” is really interesting for two reasons…

1.  The term “finely textured beef” sounds perfectly harmless for an ingredient. Whatever you want to call the “beef additive,” it’s been in use for decades and has been part of U.S. food policy overseen and approved by the USDA. But once you re-label it as “pink slime” and attach it to something that most Americans eat on a regular basis (and is the most American of foods– the hamburger), you’ve got a brilliantly and explosively viral name.  (Check out that Wikipedia entry on “pink slime” created in March 2012.)

2.  The term has been around for years. The whistleblower food scientist who came up with the label “pink slime” did that more than 3 years ago. It was reported on in a New York Times story at the time. But it wasn’t until broadcast media and then consumer activists on social media channels got wind of it that the frenzy over “pink slime” went wild. Twitter accelerated and amplified the outrage so quickly that food providers from national grocery store chains to fast food restaurants have been put on the defensive to respond.

Like many scandals, it’s the confluence of circumstances that ends up being the gasoline on the flames. But those two words “pink slime” are a huge part of what turned a food policy from the 1990′s into a media firestorm today. Bottom line, words matter.

** Want some handy examples of really great names?  Check out the CAN (compendium of amazing names) from our friends at Zinzin http://www.zinzin.com/compendium-of-amazing-names/ **

How To Shop for a PR Agency (Part 2)

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A couple days ago we gave you Part 1 of “How To Shop for a PR Agency, which included the first 3 areas you should evaluated when reviewing potential PR agencies for your B2B or B2C startup.  Here are the remaining three:

Meet Your Actual Team  

When an agency comes to pitch, they can sometimes put their more experienced, savvy, impressive team in front of you to pitch but then you find out later that two of those folks really aren’t available to be on your team.  Insist on meeting with the actual team.  No bait and switch.

Metrics

Historically, PR has been more of an “art” than “science”, but today there’s a lot more quantifiable components to it.  Require any candidate PR firm to describe to you how they measure results.  It will be noteworthy if they have built measurement into their proposal or if it’s an afterthought that they offer only in response to your query.  Many startups are savvy about data and they want measurement built in.  If that’s your management team, then insist that your PR team is made of the same stuff.

Location

A local firm is ideal because that means face-to-face meetings with your team will happen more often and that is vital for a PR firm to understand the “voice” and “culture” of your team.  We’re big fans of mobilizing virtual teams.  In fact, it’s part of the Crowded Ocean formula.  But, increasingly, we are recognizing the huge value that face-to-face meetings have in making crucial decisions during the positioning and messaging stages prior to company launch.  That’s a critical foundation period for your startup, and if your PR team is part of that foundation, you want them on site.  Be mindful that part of this decision is really up to your startup’s leadership team.  For example, do you want a PR agency that sits downstream of your management decisions and then responds to your directives.  Or, do you want a more active upstream agency that sits “at the big table” with you and helps set strategy and comes up with creative, new ideas on their own.  Our experience is that every agency tilts one way or the other–and it’s important that their approach and your expectations mesh.

Shopping for a PR agency should be a deliberate process that can help solidify the consensus and commitment of your leadership team to PR itself and can help forge a long-lasting partnership with your agency.  But like every successful shopping experience, you need a list.  Don’t leave home without it!

How To Shop for a PR Agency (Part 1)

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Whether you’re a B2C or a B2B, there’s a startup marketing ‘checklist’ that we recommend you follow when you’re shopping for a PR agency. Over the next two posts, we’ll be talking about the top 6 areas you should be evaluating, starting with these three:

 

Domain Expertise

This needs to top your list; you don’t want to be paying to teach your agency about your market space. Domain expertise ensures your PR agency brings media relationships that are relevant and current to leverage on your behalf. But you also want your agency to know the analysts and bloggers, culture, venues, and industry forums of the players in your space.

Capacity

You want an account team that is not spread across too many other accounts. You want mindshare of the team so that your startup gets their “unfair share” of the attention, good ideas and thinking of the PR team you’re paying to support you. Our rule of thumb is that no member of your PR team should work on more than four accounts, including your startup. You also need a single person (and you should interview and be comfortable with that person) who lives and breathes your startup– that one go-to person for your account.

Full Program

Some agencies do “great launch” but fall short until the next launch. Most startups need a full PR program that includes a balance of strategy, media relations, article/speaker placements, writing, social media, etc. As you’re vetting candidates, you’ll want to ensure that the proposed team (preferably 2-4 people) has the full experience and skill set to deliver a full program.

More to come…

Building a Killer Sales Presentation: Tip #3

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Previously, we talked about the first two steps to building a killer sales presentation:

  1. Don’t waste the opening slide with pabulum and bland titles.  Be provocative from the get-go.
  2. It’s not about you, so don’t kick things off with an ‘About Us’.  They know about you already (your website, Google, etc.)

Step 3 is somewhat obvious– if it’s not about you (and it isn’t), then it has to be about them.  This means turning the sales call from a monologue into a dialogue—or better yet, a conversation.  And to do that you have to connect with your audience.  Only after that connection is made, and they feel like you know a bit about them—and care even more— do they want to hear about what you can do for them.

Once the conversation is under way, you can ease the conversation towards the issues at hand, which is where the Sales Funnel comes in.  Over the next few posts we’ll drill down into the funnel’s separate components.  Without giving anything away (but continuing the Sales/Dating analogy), the end goal of the Sales Funnel is to from opening the restaurant door to getting lucky.

Tip #3:  Make the Connection and Start a Conversation

Building A Startup – What’s In A Logo?

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A favorite part of the Positioning-Messaging-Branding (PMB) workshop we conduct with startup founders is the branding exercise.  For founders, this is about expressing the qualities, aspirations and values of their startup in a way that can be translated into the words, design aesthetics and qualities (like boldness, approachability, responsiveness, etc.) that will be carried through their marketing and embodied in their culture.  Defining those brand qualities can become almost a mini therapy session for founders.

But how important is your logo to your brand?  Does it really matter if the logo mark is a symbol or a letter?  Will your customers value your startup more if the logo is red instead of green?  If one of your board members thinks you need to be “corporate blue” in order to sell to Fortune 1000 customers, will you acquiesce?

It’s easy to get so caught up in design issues that you can forget that the logo is actually a small part of your brand.  Your brand is the sum of a customer’s impressions of—and interactions with—your company.  That includes visiting your website, your product’s interface and performance, your lobby’s look and feel, and an applicant’s experience when applying for a position.  Charting this full range of experiences—then creating a blueprint to implement and live by—is a part of the PMB workshop.  That examination can help reveal valuable insights to the startup team while helping us to define a consistent and coherent identity.

Which brings us back to those questions about the logo.  We think the logo is important, and therefore we recommend working with a professional designer who can translate the findings of the PMB workshop into choices.  You will want to be able to consider different logo design directions and color studies so that you have options to choose from that can be carried through every application of your logo.

If you want to go the quick-and-dirty route, there are “logo generators” out there, some of which are even free.  It’s certainly not our first recommendation, but it’s an option:

http://www.logogarden.com/

https://www.logaster.com/

http://www.logosnap.com/

http://www.logomaker.com/

http://logoyes.com/

Add to that list, a couple of popular crowd-sourced logo houses like 99Designs and crowdSPRING and you’ll find that there are a lot of ways to get a logo created for your startup.  Just remember that the logo is just a small component of your brand and the start of a strategic, ongoing process that can define and enhance your business.

Feeling Lucky? Try Out Some of These New Words for March.

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Creeping – whether you call it low-buzz stalking, cyberstalking or the unsettling new term “creeping,” this is the habit of people who crawl around the edges of their former significant other’s life just a bit too much on Facebook.

“Dead Air” Calls — Some telemarketers place many calls at once guessing how many people will answer the phone; if more people answer than there are operators, the result on the receiver’s end is often the silence of a delayed response, hence the name “dead air calls.”  New rules by the FCC now restrict such calls.

Social Seating – New airline programs like KLM’s “meet and seat” or Malaysia Airlines “MHBuddy” invite passengers to share their LinkedIn or Facebook profiles to fellow passengers to choose your seat mate.  Access for some programs is via Facebook, making Facebook even more of a destination site for business and social.

Online Disinhibition Effect – Why you can be on the receiving end of some harsh criticism when it’s online, even via the so-called intimate environment of a social network, but you’ll not receive the same direct information face-to-face or via telephone.  Previously, the thinking was that the anonymity or distance of the online world would encourage dishonesty, but the reverse is today’s reality.  Watch for inhibitions to disappear and to be surprised by the candor of comments and criticisms from your friends and followers.