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Some People Hate Self-Checkout

There’s a myth out there that helpdesk companies like to perpetuate about customer service automation — that it will save you time, that all your competitors are doing it, and you need to have it too so you can go work on more important things.

Except this it isn’t true.

As our friends at Buffer like to say about social media automation, “It’s not a rotisserie oven. Please don’t set it and forget it.” The same goes for customer service automation.

All awesome technology requires equally awesome people and processes to build it into a meaningful competitive advantage.

Automation is the technology component of the wonderfully productive golden triangle of people, process and technology. Each requires the other two to make a tangible impact on business.

people process technology

Take people and process out of the equation, and it looks a lot like the modern-day self-checkout.

48% of people don’t love self-checkout

The Mindy Project, a FOX sitcom, captures at least half of humanity’s sentiments about the self-checkout.

Mindy’s childhood love has just come back from a long stint in the army, miles away from any supermarket innovation.

Things have changed. There is now self-checkout.

mindy1

Yea, if the future is a fiery dystopia. She puts it in the bag like the machine says.

mindy

The machine totally melts down.

mindy

It’s like automation gone rogue: the machine is going nuts, there’s no store associate around to help. They don’t even end up getting what they came for – they bail without that shampoo.

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Useless, right? You might as well bark over the intercom:

“Good afternoon customer, we are replacing the privilege of human contact at the checkout counter with robots. You will now interact with a robot that you’ve never been trained to use. We will task a single associate to supervise the whole self checkout section, so if you run into a problem while checking out during rush hour, you’re on your own. Good luck thumbing through our massive directory of fruit and vegetable codes to find ‘heirloom tomatoes’. You would think it’s under H, but it’s actually under T. Thanks for shopping with us today.”

Some people don’t like self-checkout.

Check out the line at Whole Foods

Only 52% of consumers prefer self checkout. This automation innovation is by no means a runaway success.

Another 48% are opting for the human checkout experience probably for the same reasons as tech writer Farhad Manjoo:

The human doesn’t expect me to remember or look up codes for produce, she bags my groceries, and unlike the machine, she isn’t on hair-trigger alert for any sign that I might be trying to steal toilet paper.

Best of all, the human does all the work while I’m allowed to stand there and stupidly stare at my phone, which is my natural state of being. (WSJ)

Look at how differently Whole Foods manages its checkout lines at some of its busy urban locations.

whole foods self checkout

Customers stand in one long line and walk to their color-coded counters when it’s their turn.

This is a great example of how automation can be used to assist — not replace — human employees. 

The benefits are worth it. Customers enjoy the personal attention of a store associate and more importantly, they don’t have to work the register to be able to walk out with your groceries. Oh, and how about those nice last- minute impulse buys?

whole foods self checkout

Stick to your (automation) principles

There’s a general principle that successful customer-centric businesses tend to follow. We call it The Automation Principle.

kayako automation principle

Here’s where that comes from: some businesses believe that automation exists to free up their time. But better businesses use automation to reinvest their new free time in better human-to-human service.

Automation should support your support. If you’re automating any personal interactions, you’re doing it wrong.

With that in mind, here are little “human hacks” that are total winners:

Automation is your little helper

Follow up on a ticket

The scene: You’ve provided a fix to your customer’s problem. Now it’s up to them to implement the fix.

What to automate: Schedule a follow up date.

The human hack: Write a unique and personal message to ask if they resolved the problem or need extra help.

If several members of the team were involved with solving an issue, the initial point of contact should schedule a follow up to check in: “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Build your knowledge base engine

The scene: You’ve been answering or resolving the same issues over and over again.

What to automate: Run a report linking tags + priority level to see which inquiries are the most frequent and pressing.

The human part: Now that you know what’s tripping up our customers most often, prioritize those help articles first.

Celebrate customer milestones

The scene: Your customer has just been through a milestone with your product: it could be their first 10 followers, completing a level, referring you to a friend, or trying a new feature.

What to automate: Set up an email trigger to notify you of the customer’s milestone.

The human part: Sure, send a personal email, but could you work on something bigger? Invent a way to take the relationship offline.

creativemarket

Creative Market, a marketplace for designers, is seriously raising the bar. Every time a seller makes their first sale, it triggers an email. Then someone on the team sends across handwritten card along with a dollar bill. How’s that for inspiring?

The Takeaway

It takes time to find the right balance between automation and human-to-human engagement.

But you’ll find that if you’re doing it right, your customer service team will be busier than ever: upping their game, building new ways to engage your customers and the new face of your company. Like an unstoppable machine.

When in doubt, be human.

This post was originally published by Kayako at Medium.com

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How to Structure Sales and Marketing in a SaaS Business

PlaybookRTThe discussions continued post-lunch in the Playbook Roundtable led by Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and founder of Freshdesk, organized at the Freshdesk office in Chennai. During the extended session, Girish outlined the sales and marketing structure in a SaaS business. While this may be only taken as a pointer to setting up the sales and marketing teams, each business owner needs to focus on the appropriate strategy that brings him the maximum number of customers. As explained in the last report on this roundtable, firming up the business model after iterations and adaptations is very important before a SaaS business would scale. Remember the product is the key. And when the celebrated investor Andreessen Horowitz featured in his blog Mark Cranney’s “If SaaS Products Sell Themselves, Why Do We Need Sales?” it kicked a lot of debate on why Cranney is right. Some strategies outlined by Girish might be of great help in not only positioning your product but also making sure that customers continue to use it after they buy it. The Q&A format continues.

How do you structure the sales function?

The sales function has two components: inbound sales and outbound sales. For inbound sales, the ability to identify good people to fill the position is absolutely essential. If they have capabilities of researching on the customer and can write personalized mails, that works better than lifeless common mailers. Further, the response rates increase in case of personalized mails although it might not convert into sales immediately. The inbound sales guys should be able to identify themselves with the customers and a “We” pitch infuses confidence into the customer’s mind. In all, inbound sales people should be able to make the customer feel special about interacting with the product and the organization behind it.

Outbound sales is a pure arithmetic in one sense. Read Predictable Revenue by Arnold Ross. If you invest x amount of money, you harvest an amount y (usually as multiples of x) as revenue. To be able to achieve this, you need to have a structure sales organization inside the team. It could be divided into market research team (which identifies potential target sectors and customers), sales development team (which continuously interacts with the customers to understand their requirements and explains to them how your product can address their needs), and an account executive team (which specifically oversees one or more specific customer accounts). This should be supported by the pre-sales team.

People are key to all the roles mentioned. It’s important for the CEO or the senior management to identify who is good at what and then placing them at the position they can perform best. If someone is capable of creating a good rapport with the customer, move that person to pre-sales. Some people show an inclination to solve problems. Put them in the support team.

A small hint about shifts. Keep the people in the same routine, which means keep them in the same shift they come in. Some people like night shift and if they want the night shift, keep them there. Rotating shifts might need to unnecessary resetting of biological clocks of the shift people that might show up as poor performance. Be wary of this.

Should you hire a salesperson in the US?

This question continues to create varied views in the minds of SaaS entrepreneurs who find the US market attractive for their product. The right answer is it depends.

If you are able to close the deal through online and telephone interactions, it’s good and some big deals might also happen. But it’s not a scalable model. A salesperson in the proximity of the customer at times becomes necessary to go after big-ticket size deals and close them. Customers feel confident about having a support person near them. It also involves cultural and mind-set issues and the customers become comfortable with the organization present in the same country as them. It would be better if you would hire a person after you are sure that big ticket size deals would happen. The salesperson should be capable of going after big deals and closing them. One note of caution: Make sure your sales person is working full-time for you and not moonlighting. What is the final word? Again, it depends. The best option is to hire a full-time sales person in the US for closing big-ticket deals. Beware of the cost of the sales guy and the difficulty of getting sales out of them. There have been bad experiences for some. Maybe learning about that helps and also get tips on how to hire the sales guy in the US. There is no one strategy that works and it’s largely your own learning curve. But some pointers from people who already have a sales team or a sales organization in the US helps.

Identifying the right sales people

Sales people are either hunters or farmers. Hunter sales people hunt for new customers and go after new domains aggressively. Farmers have the ability to nurture the existing customers. It’s important to identify a person’s skill and decide where they fit in the sales organization. Read Jason Lemkin’s interview on SaaStr.com.

Retargeting customers can be done through Google mail. Don’t overdo mass mailers. You run the risk of Google labelling you a spammer. Write personalized mails.

Remember, a closure of sales that results in a recurring revenue (for example, through subscriptions) converts into a higher revenue over a period of time, without the need to add new customers for an increase in the revenue.

What is the role of marketing in a SaaS business?

The marketing team should generate qualified leads, which the sales function also should do. Both of this converts to good sales.

Once you identify your target, make sure you gather a valid e-mail address and a valid phone number. There are ways to do it. Learn them.

Social media helps a great deal in lead generation. Customer acquisition happens. If you are looking at competitor social media feeds, you at times spot an unhappy customer, who wants a specific feature or has a need, which your product fulfills. Instant connectivity on Twitter facilitates this connect. Trap them and convert them into your customer.

A step-wise filter for tracking leads works wonders. Right from a prospective customer approaching your product through your website, keep track of the customer to see what is he interested in the product. If he shows more than a mere curiosity interest, track him to see the various levels at which he interacts with the product. Sometimes, customer might return after sometime. Help the customer in whatever ways possible to convert him into a buyer of your product.

How free should be the free trial?

Various strategies work. The free-trial period varies between 6 and 11 days. Look for an optimum number. Any amount of free trials is not going to hurt your business. Think of a longer horizon of the free trial. Say 30 days. This is a feel-good or hygienic factor that keeps the goodwill of your business with the customer. Provide support during free trial and try to educate the customer in what he doesn’t know. You will earn respect and convert a doubter into a customer.

Be disciplined to knock off “parasitic” customers. Keep track of customers on free trial nearing their free trial period. If your plan is to close their account, send a polite mail announcing that their account will be inactive after x amount of days. Make it as if it’s your company’s policy to delete accounts that are dormant for a period of time. Sometimes surprises spring up. The customer might sign up. Periodically getting rid of customers who don’t bring any value to your business is a good idea.

The sales strategy and expanding into new geographies

If you want to expand into a new geography, do your homework thoroughly. Study the terrain in depth before setting your foot in. You must know where you are getting in and what segments you are targeting. Understanding the culture and business practices in that geography works immensely. For example, Australians want you to call them, whereas the English wouldn’t encourage that.

Acquiring a big customer at the beginning is thrilling. But weigh your options clearly before signing on the dotted line. If your sales and support would not be able to cater to the needs of the large enterprise customer, you are better off saying “no” rather than change your business model and focus your energies on one customer. You may not be able to scale instantly on demand. Never significantly or drastically alter your business model for one customer or for one big breakthrough. It would eventually hurt.

Seal the lower end. But the lower end is always going to be cannabalized. Beware of competition and remember you can’t be cheaper than free.

Onboarding the customer

Normally, there is a problem of customers falling off after, say, a couple of months. So it is better to have a customer onboarding team to track sign-up. Live tutorials can handhold the customer for the initial period of using the product. Videos are helpful for non-tech customers.

Don’t disturb the core tech team for small technical glitches. Customer Action Response Team (CART), which fixes small bugs, is a great strategy. Focus on fulfilling customer expectations. Remember, when you solve a customer problem, you earn a happy customer.

To take a cue from Jeff Bezos, hire people who are not able to say “no” in customer development and hire people who say “no” in business development. Empathy is a great trait. Empathize with the customer and their problems and see how best you can solve them.

It’s always best to “farm” the first top 100 customers or key customers who bring 80% of your business. Remember, 20% of the customers bring 80% of your revenue. Focus on them.

With everyone in the room taking away valuable lessons with them, the roundtable wound up on a happy note.

 

 

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Telling stories to establish credibility [template]

In today’s world, there are a few realities that every sales professional is acutely aware of. The first is that there are many alternatives available for every prospect you have. Not only are there alternatives that are competitive to your solution, but you are often fighting for capital to even have your solution on the purchasing agenda in the first place. The second reality is that in most cases, our prospects are beginning their “buying process” without us. They are searching the web for alternatives and researching viable options without a sales person getting involved.

This poses a challenge for many sales professionals: How do we establish our credibility online?

unnamed-5Effective sales professionals have always been effective communicators. One way to communicate is through storytelling. We use well-crafted stories that build our credibility with prospects, and we capture not only their interest, but also their belief in our capabilities and our ability to relate to their world. Telling stories is a valuable way to connect with prospects and illustrate how our products or services can positively impact their business. We want to share stories that communicate our credibility and expertise in the field, whether they are in the form of an email, social media post, or webpage. Today, we not only need to be able to tell our stories in a conversation, we also need to be able to tell our stories online to capture the interest of our prospects.

Let’s dig into the best practices for telling stories that establish credibility.

1.     It’s not about us. It’s not about our products, our services, or our company. It’s about the prospects’ world, their challenges, and their business challenges. Our stories should start and end by focusing on the prospects’ situation, with our solutions playing a supporting role to them. What are the prospects’ current situations? What business objectives or imperatives can we contribute to? How will things be better when we’ve helped them fix their problems? Putting prospects in the starring role of our stories helps them see how our solutions can make a difference in their unique situation.

2.     Reasons to do business. The best stories we can tell are ones that resonate with prospects and show them how we can solve their business issues. By knowing our prospects and their needs, we can adapt our stories from working with past clients to highlight similar circumstances in the present situation: what business issues did we solve in the past that the current prospect is facing now? What led the past client to select us? We need to work these reasons into the story.

3.     Core components. What turns good stories great is delivering key story elements that resonate with prospects and establish credibility every step of the way. Remember that we need to change what stories we share with what prospects, depending on their situation and needs. To ensure we’re telling great stories, we need to ask ourselves:

    • High level of emotion: Do our stories capture prospects’ attention with a high level of detail and rich description?  Does our story not only have a business message, but also resonate at an emotional level? Examples of these emotions can include fear, anxiety, doubt, frustration, or excitement.
    • Summary of challenges: Have we effectively summarized the business issues our prospects face in this story?  What changed in the customer’s business as a result of partnering with us?  Keep in mind that if we expect a prospect to agree that our solution is the right one, we should first gain an agreement on the problems that our solution will address. We need to use the story to surface the likely problems we can solve.
    • Uniqueness: What sets this story apart from other stories our prospects are hearing? Our stories should highlight our differentiation from other products and services on the market.  Why you and you alone are the best alternative.
    • Measurable impact: Can we prove the impact that we have had?  Numbers resonate, and big numbers get a business professional’s attention.  What was the measurable impact, the result, the bottom line? Why is your story so impressive?

We need to include all of these components and best practices to take our stories from good to great – from clicked-away to credible. In this social-selling world, credibility trumps flashy every time, and credibility will ultimately seal the deal.

To gain people’s interest, we must be interesting!  Where can you tell your story today to attract a potential buyer?  Does your online profile and footprint demonstrate the value you can bring to your potential prospects? Now is a great time to fine-tune your personal message online.

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Competition – Research and Share

As we build (software) products, the competition is something that we need to stay ahead of, but how?

competition1

 

Especially building products for different markets, you always have others building similar products for probably same or different markets. There are already established products that you have to compete with, there are other products that are getting built as you build your product, there are new technologies that throw up new opportunities or challenges that will help new products to build that could surpass yours.

How it’s different from services ?

In services business, you just have a few competitors that you are competing for “a customer”.  You know what this one customer is looking for and its often not very difficult to create a competitive strategy. But in case of products, it’s a huge challenge to identify first of all who could be your competitor and if you are lucky to identify all of them, how your products stand out in the market, not just a customer.

So what you need to know to stay ahead of competition ?  I try to share couple of key elements that I have focused on in this area, as part of building software products : Research and Communication

Competitive Research:

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As software product leaders or product managers, one of the key activities that we need to be focusing on is Competitive Research.  This cannot be optional and has to be mandatory task with clear deliverables. If you are lucky, especially working with larger enterprises, there are focused research colleagues who track and share insights about competition. If not there are external agencies that you can engage who can research a bit and share insights about competition. But personally I feel that as the product owners, its best for product leaders or product managers to be closely doing their own research as the expertise that you carry or the interest to get your products successful lies with you.

Tools, Tips and Techniques for Competitive Research:

  1. Don’t cross legal boundaries – while researching your competition, one of the most critical and important aspect of what you can find out should be based on publically available information and within the legal boundaries of access. This is super critical, while it’s a no brainer, its best to understand legal guidelines laid out by company and if you are startup, better to get some legal advise or attend a course to understand the Dos and Don’t
  2. Competitors website  – Thanks to internet, there is already enormous information available about the competition, especially if you are looking at existing established products.  Checking the websites of the competition helps a bit, taking at their value proposition and what customers are talking about the products are very important.
  3. Social media – This is an interesting channel in last few years where we get lot of information about the competition. From youtube, linkedin, twitter, we can follow and understand what the competitors are doing, what leadership in the competition are doing as well as some of the key stakeholders involved with the competition are saying. From whom they are hiring, which location they are talking from and tit bits are very valueable information you can know about the product
  4. Community and Blogs – Another great channel to understand competitors is through communities and blogs written by users, partners and employees about the competitive products. There are forums where products are discussed and there are blogs that are written that helps get an informal view of the products
  5. Analyst – IT industry analyst are a great source of information to understand competitors and their strengths and weakness. Its always better to understand different perspectives of the industry analyst. Your product may still not be in the overall review in the space, but you may want to analyze the market potential through whats being said about the analyst reports.
  6. Partners website – partners or implementors of software website is key source of information for research. This helps us to understand products better as partners are typically very close to the products and often share some details. Typically a demo of the product posted by partner is often more detailed and really very helpful
  7. Knowing and following competitor key people – one of the opportunity we have with internet is to know the people better. From a competitive research perspective, one of the important aspect would be to know and follow the key people who are involved in the competition. It could be the CEO of that company, few of the key technology folks there who are involved in the solution area. This gives a great perspective on what they are trying to do and help understand whats in store
  8. Involving in sales cycles – One of the best way, especially if your product is already out, is to involve in sales cycles. Talking to sales /presales as well as customers. You definitely get insights on how your competitor products is addressing the problems. This can also be done by listening to sales calls as well as just being part of some of the meetings or conference calls. Sometimes customers give you direct feedback on how your products fare and at other times you may get indirect inferences. Participating and contributing in some of the win loss analysis can help take back some of this information.

Having done the research, what do we do with this information to use this effectively as you build your products. While you can have a structure way to incorporate this information into your knowledge base, the important aspect of sharing and communicating this information. Often I have noticed that we share one set of information for different stakeholders, which may be not a good approach.

Prepare and Share

1. Sharing with Sales and Field : Sales organization in your company would like to know exactly how your products are better from your competitors products. What is the key value propositions and some differentiations. This could be addressed at different levels, at the overall product strategy level, on product feature /functionality and the fit with respect to solving key business problem in a better way, and based on customer usage.  How competitive fud can be resolved with a capability that exists or likely to addressed in the road map.

The communication here needs to be very broad based, especially if you are selling to different markets or user base. Some                   information of the regional competitors may also be very useful

2. Sharing with Development : Product Development including product managers are very emotional and close to their products and its often difficult for them to digest to hear that the competitive products are better than your products.  But here the communication and comparisons should focus on where the products are weaker then competition, don’t have to be highlighting the strengths but focus on where differentiations can be fulfilled, or how products can catch up with competition. Even an equally good product could be very successful due to other considerations such as price, market and geography focus, as well as mere ability of sales people. So its important to compare and highlight lagging product areas, and get to focus on competitive catch ups or differentiations. Some of the information collected from Analyst could be very useful as it could lead to good insights of competitive products.  All of this information also helps in prioritizing backlogs.

3. Sharing with Top Management: Assuming you are not the founder, its important that competitive insights are regularly shared with top management in order for them to get a feel of specifics that competitors are doing in this area. This will help getting the attention for investment into those areas, potential acquisitions as well as help them engage better in their customer/investor interactions.

Competitive Research and Sharing is a key activity that needs good time investment to stay ahead in the race as make Software Products.

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Why product startups need to pay serious attention to brand name and logo design

A logo is one of the most visible faces of your brand. In other words, the logo is most likely to be your most frequent and most visible brand representative.

Ideally, a logo should clearly state the following:

  • Who you are
  • What you do

How the logo is designed and how well the messaging is in the tag line will create the first impressions about the brand’s personality.

Right from the time you exchange business cards, or when you release an ad – in print, TV or online, or when someoen sees your logo on the app store or when someone visits your site, it is often the name of the company, represented by the logo + tag line  that will be noticed for the first time, and that is what starts creating the story about your brand in the users mind. While a badly designed logo may not necessarily send the wrong impression, a well-designed logo will most certainly create a favorable impression.

If your logo and UI is not good, and therefore if the assumptions about you start off on an incorrect note, it is usually very, very hard (and certainly very expensive) to change that perception.

For startups, it is critical that the logo and the tag line be designed well. This is because when you are new, most people would not know what you do and who you are. Hence, when they interact with your brand for the first time, it is usually the logo unit that will set the first impressions about what you do.

Similarly, with tag lines. Tag lines should be used to communicate clearly what you do. E.g. “Online fashion store” or “Analytics for SMEs”.

Often entrepreneurs make the mistake of using a tag line which is nothing but a smart set of words with no reference to what you do. This is of little use in brand management. E.g. for a healthcare brand, if the tagline said ‘We care for you”, it really means nothing to anyone and does not establish what the brand does. Instead, if the tagline were to be specific saying “Your neighborhood childcare clinic’, there is specificity in communicating what the promise is.

It will be ideal if your tag line can also communicate your value proposition. E.g. “Affordable cardiac care.”

Likewise for brand names too. Decide on the name for your startup very, very thoughtfully. Give it as much importance as a parent would give to naming a child. YOU will have to live with that name for life… even if the startup fails and shuts down.

Ideally, a name should give your intended users/customers a clear idea of what you do. e.g. Make My Trip or Naukri.com. It should be easy to pronounce for all people across geographies and it should, as best as you can research, mean the right thing in all languages.

Name

Ideally, it should be short, and should sound nice.

More importantly, the domain should be available. If not, trying to create a ‘compromise url’ (e.g. abc-info.co) is not very useful.

The sound should be relevant to your audience. E.g. if it is an enterprise solution, it should sound very professional and solid. If it is a fun thing for teenagers, it should sound fun.

Likewise, the logo design for that name should also reflect the personality that is relevant for the intended audience.

All this is expecially more relevant for product companies, as unlike services companies who often have the opportunity to sit in front of the customer to help create the first-impressions and communicate the value proposition, product companies depend only on the customer’s self-analysis of who you are based on what your touch points look like. And logo and brand name are often the first touch points. After all, marketing is the art of managing stakeholder perceptions.

 

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3 Reasons Why Start-ups Should Invest in Content Marketing

Today, a stream of regular and engaging content can get people talking about any organization.

Content MarketingWhile this is definitely good news for start-ups, the reality is that they often don’t have the time, resources or know-how to turn their organization into a lean, mean content marketing machine. Just like that, developing content often gets relegated to the bottom of the team’s to-do list, or simply isn’t a priority at all. However, the cost of missing out on the content marketing game is high: start-ups are essentially forgoing an opportunity to attract customers.  In fact, The Content Marketing Institute says “the idea of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by creating and curating relevant and valuable content.”

Here are three reasons how content marketing can help your emerging organization succeed:

Announce your existence and develop brand recognition

A successful, responsive and targeted content marketing strategy can help an emerging organization capture a prospect’s attention even when the market is crowded with bigger and more established names. Valuable and unique content – and this could be anything from a white paper to a video – is always appreciated in the form of shares, likes, retweets and/or comments. You can even repurpose long-form content into social media content for Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. This goes a long way in establishing your organization’s presence online.

Encourage and enable product usage

A key objective for many start-ups today is to of course attract more customers, but also get existing users to actually use the product. After all, if a user sees value in the product then there’s a higher chance they’ll talk about online and in turn influence more people to try the product out. Quality content that’s sent out on a regular basis can help users make optimum use of the product’s features and improve their overall experience. As an agile start-up, consider creating Vine videos on your mobile devices  — you can capture great testimonials and product reviews.  You can also record conversations and monologues, if you’d rather not write all the time.

Understand market requirements and act as a funnel for ideas

Response to your organization’s content can give you a clear idea of what your target audience feels about relevant issues, the industry they operate in and their wish-list for the future. While actually eliciting a response may take some time, the end goal is worth it: you’ve got an active “idea catcher” for future product enhancement and new product ideas! Consider creating LinkedIn forums about topics that are related to your start-up, and engage in conversations with your target audience

It’s essential that start-ups focus on getting the right content marketing strategy into place, and this involves understanding your target customer, the right content “tone of voice” and more. If you’d like to understand how emerging organizations like yours can leverage a successful content marketing strategy to drive brand awareness, click here to download this free eBook titled “How to propel start-up growth with content” by Yorke Communications.

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When you lose the business in B2B sales

When you lose the business in B2B salesIf we only understand sales, we’re just salespeople to our prospects and nothing more. We can’t just be experts in selling. We need to be experts in our customers’ industries, too. When we understand the overall industry, prospects’ business, and their specific issues, we become business experts. That’s the key to selling value, and that’s when a sale can start to happen.

Sometimes we get so focused on selling a product that we fail to show how the product fits into people’s lives and adds value. We get tunnel vision and forget about anything outside our scope of view – namely, the business at large.

It’s time to change that.

There are three steps to securing our position as business experts:

Understand our prospects’ business in depth

It’s not enough anymore to just have some understanding of our prospects’ business. We need to have much more than that, and until we have in-depth understanding of the whole picture at hand – the industry, the competitors, the issues faced – we won’t be seen as experts providing value to the business. We need to dig deeper and do the research. What do industry sources say about this business? What do the trade press, news, and other resources suggest are issues they face? What’s going on in their world? Gaining full understanding of the business and situation at hand helps us know what to expect when we do begin communication with prospective customers.

Prepare to effectively communicate with prospects

Once we have done the research, it’s time to prepare for our communication with a business-like approach. That means having data on hand, deducing how prospects will respond to us , and being ready to speak the language of business. We are business-salespeople bringing sales into the business world.

Maintain expertise in the industry

Once we’ve learned an industry in-depth, it’s time to follow up. That means staying up to date on what’s current in both our prospect’s business and their industry. Have issues changed? What new issues have come up? Read the news, keep an eye on trade press, and rely on sources that specifically serve that industry. When we maintain strong industry expertise, we are prepared to face prospects  as business experts, and that’s how we bring value to the table every time.

As the sales industry becomes increasingly “sales-y,” we can’t forget the business in B2B. Stand out from the crowd by being an expert in business, sales, and value.

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Product Evangelism for B2B Startups

Product EvangelismIf you are a B2B startup building an innovative enterprise product, it’s the dream of millions of users that keeps you going in the initial days. Sometimes however, as you acquire early customers and users for your product, it seems that the demands they make and attention they seek is almost distracting you from your dream! And they are not even using the coolest and most innovative features you designed. Sounds familiar?

Here’s how you can draw the best out of your early customers, help improve your product and revenue, while ensuring user delight. 

Customer Empathy to Customer Delight

Product evangelism is NOT about your product. It’s about your customers’ needs. Your product fortuitously happens to be the right medium to fulfill those needs. A customer-centric approach to building a product has been espoused by many. However, customer delight involves more than just validating your MVP and beta versions with early customers. Customer empathy is putting users at the center of your product development. Customer delight is beyond that – everything you build should be to enable your users to derive more, faster and better from your product.  If your product has the WOW factor that elegantly meets the customer requirements while making it a joy to use, the users will almost certainly come! 

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

Next to a strong business case and measurable Return on Investment (RoI), your customer relationships are a critical aspect for your product’s adoption and success. Customer relationships do not imply idle socializing (who has time for that in a startup, anyway!). You need customer-side advocates who will not only vouch for your product in their company, but champion it internally as if it were their own. And that involves building and nurturing strong relationships with your early adopters.

  • Treat them as true partners, not just as your paycheck!
  • Share your product roadmap with them and listen to their feedback. It will give you early insight into how your next-gen features will be received
  • Pay attention to their product complaints and resolve them to closure – not just in the early days of the deployment, but throughout the lifetime of the engagement (which, if things go well, can be forever!)
  • Ask questions and understand their industry-specific trends. Everyone loves to talk about their domain and you will gain valuable insights for your product 

Involve your customers to grow your business

If you have spent time and effort delivering customer delight, it can pay off in ways much beyond steady revenue. You can leverage your happy-customer network to expand market-reach and get even more business.

  • Request for references to other prospects. A warm reference from an industry peer or colleague is likely to open doors that no amount of cold-calling can. Plus, they can talk about how your product is already benefiting them, helping you establish a stronger business case with the new prospect.
  • Ask for quotes and customer testimonials. Video testimonials work even better.
  • Publish joint case-studies. Let numbers and your product RoI be the central theme. Nothing sells like hard numbers, anyway!

B2B products are hard to build and enterprise customers are even harder to acquire. Nurture them and listen to their needs; they are the ones who will eventually fulfill to your million-user (and million-dollar) dreams.

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The Changing Landscape of Inbound Marketing and Why Should Marketers Care!

Traditional Marketing – including advertising, print media, branding and corporate communication – isn’t the same anymore.

Physical subscriptions have significantly dropped. People now handle all their bills online. Interruptive cold calling is a big no-no. And yes, more marketers are rolling their eyes than ever before.

With access to a wealth of information literally, only a click away, the former ‘loyalty’ driven state of consumer’s mind has given way to a more fluid (movement marking) thinking; wherein all buyer decisions are taken, often though the internet, after referring to several online sources such as authority blogs, articles,  word-of-mouth social recommendations or customer reviews.

Besides, the new social media paradigm has changed the way traditional marketing communications once functioned. The 4 Ps marketing elements which involved a systematic gathering of data from customers to identify their needs simply won’t work for someone wants to do Facebook marketing.

If that’s not enough, consider the following statistics-

86% of People Don’t Watch Television Ads. (The Guardian)
44% of Direct Mail is Never Opened. (The EPA)
Nearly 60% of marketers and business owners have adopted Inbound strategies. (HubSpot)
87% of B2B marketers use social media in some form. (Aberdeen Group)
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Forrester Research)

So what is Inbound Marketing, anyway?

The Boomerang Effect called Inbound Marketing: When Customers Come to You

Like the boomerang, getting customers to come to you, takes skill and strategy. ‘Inbound marketing’ refers to a series of marketing activities that gets you customers in when they are ready, rather than you going out and bombarding them with ads to grab their attention.

Unlike print and TV ads, inbound marketing requires the right dedication, commitment and resources to have a significant impact on ROI. Its rightful execution depends on building and staying true to your core customer personas while relentlessly tracking you lead goals. SEO is a classic example of inbound marketing. It typically works like this:

  1. A woman is looking for a nice photo frame to gift to her loved one.
  2. She goes online to research frames that can be delivered at her place. She Googles to search for {best photo frames}.
  3. She decides on one and orders it.

If you are a dealer in photo frames, this is great news for you, since you didn’t need to head out or cold call people who might be looking to buy photo-frames. You also didn’t have to spend heavy bucks advertising about your frames on print or radio. Actually your target customer found you online when she was looking and was ready to buy.

With inbound marketing you can match product related content, educational content etc. into a customers buying process, thereby increasing leads for your business. Lead nurturing keeps you at the top.

The Process

Inbound marketing is a holistic, data-driven process. Not only it involves creating personalized, content-rich and customer-driven strategy for each and every stage of customer interaction – not interruptive messages – but also looping them through ongoing engagements that pulls interested customers to your company and deepens their connect.

Why Should Marketers Care?

Marketers have heralded inbound marketing as the next must-do activity. A necessary integration in order to reach customers in the right channels at the right time, is keeping it folded into larger business planning. Content that is created for consumption form the backbone of all inbound efforts and must be supported with other paid, owned and earned tactics. Companies are finding these efforts worth because:

  • It is more consumer-focused.
  • It’s cost-efficient than traditional, outbound marketing
  • Inbound forms better long-term customers than short-term sales
  • Inbound creates better brand-building
  • Inbound is global. Yes, you can reach out to customers anywhere
  • Customers best interests is the guiding force for all inbound activities

While it is encouraging to look at companies increasingly adopting inbound marketing techniques, its full potential cannot be realized until its efforts are threaded through – and success measured by ones – larger marketing goals.

Can Inbound marketing help Software Product companies create demand on their websites?

The answer is “Absolutely,Yes !”.

Here is an upcoming free webinar on how you as a software product company embrace inbound marketing to its fullest potential.

Register Now for FREE webinar on “Inbound Marketing for Technology Companies.

Good luck and let me  know if I can be of any help !

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Up your sales in a down economy

Given the slow worldwide economic recovery, it’s an appropriate time to review our core tactics. Many of us are finding our clients and prospects are risk averse. Here are some effective strategies you can proactively use to increase your sales, no matter what the economic climate brings.

You might be asking “Who will buy from me now?” when so much seems to be at risk.
The ValueSelling Framework® has strategies to help you make the sale, even with timid prospects. While the temperature of the economy will dictate some change, companies are still in business and work is still getting done. So the real question is, “What can sales professionals do right now to position themselves for success?”

Sales

ValueSelling Framework basics that will help you exceed your quota:

  • Focus on the positive: It’s very easy to be overwhelmed with negative messages, and bad news always gets more interest than good news. To be successful, however, your attitude is essential. Tune out all the information that isn’t helpful to you right now. Turn off the 24-hour news cycle and the minute-by-minute updates from your smartphone. There is always a lot going on in the market that’s outside your control, so instead focus on what you can control. We are not suggesting that we put on rose-colored glasses. Rather, we should simply find opportunity and positive news wherever we can. Maintaining that positive attitude will help you defend yourself against constant bad news.
  • Focus on empathy: The best salespeople in any industry are the ones who know how to solve their customer’s problems. In uncertain times, people become much more risk-averse, sticking with what they know to be secure and stable. If you’re a problem expert, your job will be to get in tune with your client’s fear of uncertainty. Their fears may manifest in multiple ways, including taking a longer time to make decisions and involving more people to make them. Empathize by offering customers increased understanding and flexibility, and they’ll recognize the security you offer.
  • Focus on real value: Prospects and customers need to understand the real value you offer. When they are uncertain, they spend more time making the decision to buy, and they are concerned about real monetary gains from their investment.  Focus on the real value you are providing to them. Are you positioned to save them money or grow revenue?
  • Focus on preparation: Sales executives are most successful when they’re purposeful, customer-focused, and ready to execute. Spend more time understanding your clients, their industries and markets, and building creative solutions with them. In the end, you’ll spend less time fixing problems in the sales cycle that arise.
  • Focus on qualification: Companies with sales team that excel have customer-centric processes that leverage best practices and repeatable strategies. Their prospect qualification is a multidimensional process, and it doesn’t focus on who has the budget. Just because people can make a purchase – doesn’t mean they will. Your prospect qualification process should be reverse-engineered from how prospects will make decisions:

a.    Should I buy this?

b.    Can I buy this?

c.    Is it worth it?

d.    Am I convinced?

Knowing your prospects’ answers to these questions is essential before you begin investing time and resources in a sales cycle. If your prospect is not qualified, let that one and find someone who is.

Remember, your competitors have the same difficulties that you do. Stay calm, stay focused, and look for their vulnerabilities in the marketplace. You should be playing both defence and offense with your current customers to defend your position. By staying focused on the customer, you won’t be outsold, and you can win the customer’s business and loyalty.

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Making your sales engine succeed in North America

Like many other technology entrepreneurs in India, I am the founder CEO of a software product company. We make a Global Human Resources SaaS product EmpXtrack and have over 300 customers in 20+ countries.

Many of us face challenges to scale up our US Sales and explore options such as relocating to the US, hiring a US based sales team, offering free trials, converting the product to a freemium model, an inside sales approach etc.

We recently faced this dilemma too. To find answers, I requested introductions to a number of successful software product entrepreneurs who were selling in the US market. Wanted to understand what they were doing differently such that we could replicate that. My discussions with them are documented here and hopefully it will help you in your product journey too.

Does direct sales work?

This largely depends on the ticket size.

Since our deals are roughly in the $8-$12K range per year, here is the maths behind this:

  • Cost of a local sales person: $150K (including commissions)
  • Cost of travel: $50 – $100K
  • So for a single person team, you spend approximately $200-250K per year.
  • No of deals required for break-even (@$10K / deal): 20 – 25 or 2 per month.
  • No of deals required if your sales cost is 25% of the total revenue: 100 or 8.5 per month.

Conclusions

  • It is virtually impossible for a single sales person to close about 8 deals per month
  • The direct sales model can only succeed if you have much higher ticket size ($100K or so)

If not direct sales, what else?

For smaller deals, inside sales (selling by phone) is the only approach. The following is required to make this succeed

  • A strong lead generation capability
  • A strong qualification capability
  • A strong closing capability where the sales team can close deals on the phone.
  • A knowledgeable support team that can assist the customer during implementation.

If you have all of these, there is no looking back! If not, refer to the next question.

What are CEO/founders responsibilities?

Everyone who I spoke to said that the key responsibility of the founder was to build teams that could address each of the points above.  “At a startup stage, you are perhaps the only one who has indepth knowledge of your product, how you want to target and acquire customers, how much you can discount, what extra features can be added, how much to deviate for an implementation and so on”. Hence, you need to be intimately involved in every facet of the sale.

Some interesting thoughts I heard were

  • You need to be involved in every conversation, communication and implementation till you reach a certain scale (aka a few million dollars of revenue). You will discover how many things were going wrong once you do that.
  • You need to talk to customers. “I still talk to important customers and was the first person in my company doing that”, was shared by 2 entrepreneurs.
  • You need to write marketing collateral, give demonstrations, build proposals, negotiate, close, provide support and do all customer facing activities to understand the challenges being faced by your teams.
  • You constantly need to mentor your team members and provide them feedback. They need it. While you may have rockstars, it is very unlikely that there may be a huge number of them.

So for all of you entrepreneurs, focus on customer facing roles and continuously mentor (and monitor) your teams! This is your only job.

How to do lead generation?

  • The best and cheapest leads are inbound. Create great content and use SEO aggressively to attract potential customers. This takes time and should be a part of your product development cycle and never to late to start if you are not doing it already.
  • Use PPC, paid directories etc. to generate more leads.
  • At a certain point, the cost of acquiring the next lead (through SEO and PPC) may yield negative returns. Around this point invest in a cold calling team.

What kind of people are required?

  • Key trait: Aggressive selling capability with very strong communication skills. Should be focused on closing. Hunters!
  • Pre-sales team: That can qualify, provide customized demos, research contacts, create great proposals and solutions. These can be added when you are sales teams are reaching their limits.
  • Qualifications: MBAs not required for sales and may not work out. IIMs/IITs not affordable! Graduates with a hunger to succeed are a must. Available in plenty from BPOs and other IT Services firms.
  • Experience: To start, 2 mid-level hires with background in US sales (with 5 – 8 years of experience) and build teams of freshers below them as the next layer. Mentor everyone continuously.
  • Approach: Each team should compete with the other

What kind of changes are needed in the organization?

While you may be a company in India you have to operate in the US time zone – both physically and mentally. This includes not only the sales team but also the executive management (Founders included), the pre-sales team and the support teams.

The R&D and implementation teams may still work in the day-hours but they will have to follow a rotational shift model of working at least 1 week per month in the US time zone.

Do I need to raise money?

Completely your choice! While two entrepreneurs that I talked to raised VC funding at an early stage, three did not. Once your product is developed, it takes very little to sustain new release cycles. Implementation teams should pay for themselves.

Since your sales team is based in India and you are generating leads efficiently, you can control spends and be very efficient to maintain a positive cash flow. So you can bootstrap to success.

We have sustained ourselves for 7+ years, have positive cash flows, are growing on a YOY basis, are profitable, own our own premises and have over 75 FTEs and have done it by bootstrapping.

Can we succeed by selling in India first and then going to US

Unanimous view: Unlikely for a B-B product!

India is a very cost conscious market where decision making is long and value for technology is low. Assuming you are replacing a head with your product, at best the value for the same in India will be between Rs 3-7 lacs. Compare this to about $60K cost anywhere else in the world and there is a much higher value for your product.

I know this is controversial, debatable yet unfortunately true!

Do I need a great product

Yes you do! Especially if you want to sell in the US market. The market is big but very competitive. ‘Great’ can have many different interpretations such as value proposition (read price), capability to customize, integration with other platforms and so on.

Whatever your edge may be, you need to repeatedly send across the message in all your communication, aggressively work on sales and you will find customers.

Does this model apply in other regions and geographies

Mixed thoughts. Some people are doing a good job in APAC and are getting their feet wet in ME but I could not identify a pattern. Some things unique to the US

  • US is very-very big. Small ticket buyers understand that their vendors cannot travel for small deals. Hence the purchasing is geared towards non F-F channels.
  • US firms are more experimentative and willing to bet on startups.
  • The country has consistent rules with a common language.
  • Value for automation is high.
  • US has a positive feel about Indian technology and India in general.

So let us all work hard to make India as a Product Nation. Please share your thoughts.

I am grateful to Aneesh Reddy, Suresh Sambandam, Ketan Kapoor amongst many others for their helpful insights and sharing their experiences and to Avinash Raghava for his introduction to all the great entrepreneurs.

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When Should Push and Pull Marketing be Used?

Have you put a lot of time and effort into making your website rank higher, or invested in advertising on search engines, but seen no increase in the number of leads? If you are a startup and you have, it might be time to revisit your broader marketing strategy.

Two Strategies in Marketing

There are two broad strategies in digital marketing – push and pull (also called outbound and inbound).

Pull Marketing

Pull or inbound marketing is analogous to opening a store on a street corner. People walk past the store, and if they have a need for what is being sold in it, they walk in and make a purchase.

When it comes to digital marketing, of course, the store is any online presence. All pull marketing methods are therefore intended to help increase the number of visitors to digital properties.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and Content Marketing are examples of inbound methods.

Push Marketing

Push or outbound marketing, on the other hand, is analogous to carting products around town to wherever buyers may be found, in an attempt to initiate one-on-one interactions with them that could lead to sales.

There are two variations in push marketing: one that invites one-on-one interaction from a buyer, and one that forces one-on-one interactionon a buyer.

The former approach is analogous to an ice-cream cart ringing a bell to advertise its presence. The sound of the ringing bell is welcome to those interested in an ice-cream. And it is easy and effortless to ignore for those who are not interested in it. This approach is used in many social media marketing tools.

The latter approach is analogous to doing door-to-door sales; the salesman knocks on doors and pitches the product to anyone who answers the door. This approach is usually very annoying to those subjected to it since it distracts them from more pressing tasks and it takes effort to decline the interaction. An example of the latter approach is unsolicited email marketing.

Now that we have understood push and pull marketing, let us take a look at where pull strategies may not work and push strategies need to be used. There are four broad competitive positions that a firm typically maneuvers itself into, and the choice of marketing strategy depends to a large extent on the competitive position that a firm finds itself in.

Four Kinds Of Market Players

In their book “Marketing Warfare”, Al Ries and Jack Trout proposed the concept of a strategic square in terms of competitive positioning.

The four corners of the square consist of four types of players in a market: 1) market leaders 2) the followers 3) small players and 4) local and regional players.

Market Leaders

The market leader is the firm with the biggest share of a market and a clear lead. Taking the U.S. automobile industry as an example, the Ries and Trout say that General Motors with a 59% market share is the market leader (all the other firms in the fray don’t add up to its share of the market).

Followers

The follower is the No. 2 firm in the market. For example, Ries and Trout consider Ford to be a strong No. 2 in the U.S. automobile market with a 26% share.

Small Players

The small players are firms with a much smaller share of the market than the top two players, but with sufficient resources to challenge the big players in sizeable segments of the market that the main players may not ignore. Ries and Trout considered Chrysler with a 13% share of the market to be the small player.

Local or Regional Players

These firms are very small firms that do not have the resources to challenge the big players in any market segment large enough to interest them. American Motors with a 2% share of the market (they manufacture the Jeep, a category of vehicle that has too small a market to interest the bigger players) is a good example of a local or regional player.

Marketing Strategies and Competitive Positioning

Now, we can take a look at the marketing strategies that firms in each of these competitive positions should use.

1. Marketing Strategies for Market Leaders

A firm that is creating a market needs to use content marketing. Content creation is essential because of the need to educate people about the new product or service.

The goal of pull strategies is being found. When a market is created, people who benefit from the ecosystem being created will be likely to link to content from the firm creating the market, if such content is available.

The back links to their content will make the content rank higher in searches, which in turn will help make the market originator and leader the firm most likely to be found by prospective customers when they search for solutions to their problems.

So, content marketing becomes a great defensive strategy for market originators and leaders, helping them maintain their lead.

Once a market matures and people no longer search as much for information on a product category, but more for vendors and comparison shopping, because the benefits and manner of use of the product are now common knowledge, then it becomes important to rank ahead of competitors in search results.

This can be accomplished through the use of SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) for the main keywords associated with the products being sold by the market leader.

Push strategies are not needed by the market leader since pull strategies are sufficiently effective in helping them maintain their lead.

2. Marketing Strategies for Followers

Followers have a far lower failure rate than market creators (because most of the risk associated with market size and discovery of solutions to address the key pain points have now been eliminated).

So, it pays to attack the market originator. However, if a follower merely puts out content to attempt to attack the position of the market leader, they are likely to run into the “findability” barrier. The follower’s content will almost never be organically found because the market leader’s content ranks higher on account of the in-links that it has already accrued.

So, the follower will have to focus on finding ways to distribute their content. One method to distribute content is SEM (search engine marketing). This involves taking out paid ads on search engines. Another strategy is SMM (social media marketing) which can involve taking out ads on social media platforms.

Since the follower’s advertisement will be ranked on top for a small percentage of searches, this would give the follower a chance to be noticed ahead of the market leader by a certain percentage of customers.

Followers can also use push strategies to distribute content and get noticed by prospects at times when they are not actively searching.

Over time, as followers get noticed by the ecosystem that has developed around the new market, especially by parts of the ecosystem that would like to have or offer an alternative to the main vendor, more people in the ecosystem will consume and link to the follower’s content.

As a result, the follower’s content will rise in rankings and eventually with sufficient investment of effort and money can lead to the follower becoming more findable than the leader with all the attendant benefits.

Once the follower’s content ranks high enough, it will be sufficient for the follower to fall back to using pull strategies just like the leader. However, as long as there is not sufficient awareness about their alternative and its benefits, followers will have to utilize push marketing in its various avatars.

3. Marketing Strategies for Small, Local and Regional Players

Ries and Trout recommended that small players do something innovative to create new market segments, so that they become the first to enter that new market segment. Clayton Christensen also spoke of this category in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” where he called them firms that bring about “disruptive innovation”. Most startups fall in this category (it is not every day that startups get to create and own a new market).

Unfortunately, disruptors will not be able to use pull strategies alone. This is because they, like the followers, have neither the audience nor the volume of high-ranking content required to be noticed by people searching for keywords belonging to their product category.

Moreover, being very small, they do not have the funds to pay for effective SEM at very high volumes. Just as SEO favours market leaders, SEM favours bigger firms because they have the funds to pay for a higher ranking for their ads on search engines than smaller firms do.

For small and local firms, push marketing is often the only way to create awareness about their existence and about their innovations, and ought to be used until a critical mass of audience members for their content is built. Once there are enough social media followers, email newsletter subscribers and partners, it might become possible to switch to pull marketing strategies.

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Driving the conversation: The fine art of questioning

As sales professionals, you probably know a lot about the capabilities of the products and services you represent. However, being a “solution expert” alone is not enough to differentiate you from your competition. If you are perceived as a trusted advisor AND a solutions expert, you are in much better position to win their loyalty and business. And gaining that trust means demonstrating that you can listen and intelligently reflect back what you learn.

We like to compare good salespeople to good physicians: Before good physicians prescribe a solution, whether it’s medication or a treatment, they fully understand and diagnose the condition. As a matter of principle, they do not recommend treatments without knowing whether or not the patient actually has a need for them.

Asking the Right Questions Likewise, skilled sales professionals will diagnose a situation, and then demonstrate more value to their prospects through the questions they ask…not the answers they give.

How do you go about using questions to diagnose? You must integrate purposeful questions into your conversation, while not interrogating your prospects. You begin by asking the right types of questions at the right time. Understanding how and when to ask the right questions is critical.

Here are three types of questions you should ask at every phase of your prospect qualification process:

1. Open-ended questions

Open-ended questions are our vehicle to learn what the customer thinks about their business issues, problems and solutions. They tell you what value means to them, who makes decisions, and what words you should use when you repeat back what you’ve learned. Open-ended questions don’t have a yes, no, or right answer. They demonstrate that you are seeking to understand your prospect’s world and perspective. An ideal open-ended question triggers an expansive response that, ideally, is wide-ranging and may cover many areas.

Sample open-ended questions:

  • “Can you explain why…?”
  • “Would you tell me more about…?”
  • “How would you describe the problems related to…?”

2. Probing questions

Probing questions allow you to dig deeper into details and uncover more specific information, based on the information you learned by asking open-ended questions. For example, if your goal is to learn more about the issues that could put your prospect’s profitability at risk, you would begin by probing for the typical ways they lose profit.

Probing questions also establish your credibility by offering you a chance to demonstrate your knowledge of their company, industry, and likely problems. Probing with purpose can help you uncover specific areas — recognized or unrecognized by your prospect — which can showcase your ability as a problem-solving expert.

Sample probing questions:

  • “Is it because…?”
  • “Do you find…?”
  • “What if you could…?”
  • “Have you ever experienced difficulty with…?

3. Confirming questions

Confirming questions simply confirm that we understand what our prospects just told us. They demonstrate that we understand our prospect’s issues. They help to uncover what might have changed as we check in with our clients throughout the sales life cycle.

The art of asking excellent confirming questions is by using reflective listening techniques: Reflecting back the actual words our customer uses and offering  them the opportunity to elaborate. Don’t assume you understand their meaning. Always ask for understanding.

Sample confirming questions:

  • “So, what you’re saying is…?”
  • “Is it correct to say that…?”
  • “Did I hear that…?”

The most successful salespeople I know are also the most curious. They are able to influence the conversation and demonstrate their credibility and knowledge by asking good questions. The better you are at asking the right questions, the better you become at uncovering needs that your products and services can address, and the better you’ll be at integrating your solution(s) into the context of your prospects’ businesses.

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A little thought goes a long way

My kids attend a public speaking course called “Think and Speak Up”. The main idea behind the class is that in order to be an effective public speaker, you need to think before you speak i.e. be prepared before you speak. A recent conversation with a very action oriented CEO who wants to launch in the US got me thinking that the “Think and Speak Up” approach applies to companies as well.

It takes a certain personality to go and strike out on their own. Small business owners and startup founders are generally action-oriented folks who want to get stuff done. This tendency, while admirable, can be costly especially when entering new markets. While it is very tempting to just go out and hire some people and just start selling, it is usually counterproductive in my opinion, unless you have gone through and analyzed the following.

The Market –  When selling your product/service, you need to have a clear understanding of what else is out there. For example, what do the options look like to your buyer? What trends would they be seeing that you need to factor in? Are there compliance directives in place or coming along that would impact your customers? In short, you need to understand the lay of the land.

The competition – The buyer is probably doing something internally to address the problem that you are proposing a solution for. In addition, there are probably other companies in your space doing something similar to you. Both internal and external solutions are potential competition for you. You need to understand what you are up against before you go out and sell.

Positioning – Given the market and the competition, where do you need to be? You need to figure this out well in advance of hitting the streets. If you don’t you will waste time and money chasing after the wrong prospects. Keep in mind, your positioning in a foreign market could be very different from your domestic audience. Also keep in mind that you may need to change your positioning based on market feedback aka pivot. However to enter the market without a positioning hypothesis is folly.

Value Proposition – Once you have a clear idea of the market, the competition, where you want to be, you need to come up with why you? What makes you unique. We are not talking bells and whistles here, we are talking about real value to your buyer. The value proposition has to be in the context of where you are operating and it could vary from geography to geography.

People say the difference between success and failure is perseverance and a deep pocket. I would argue there is a third factor that is at play here and that is thought. Action without thought might make you feel like you are getting somewhere but like a hamster on a treadmill you might be moving fast but not getting anywhere.

Agree, disagree or have another opinion? Would love to hear your thoughts.

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Are you missing out in Digital Marketing?

mullen-marketing-ecosystemThe way that we have done business in the past and the way it is now have undergone a transformation, a digital revolution indeed.   A few years ago, Facebook was hardly known; LinkedIn’s presence was not felt.  But today digital is all over the place.  With marketing undergoing major transformation, and will continue to evolve as we move forward, as a CEO or a CMO, have you utilized the ‘Power of Digital Marketing’ in your business?

This article could help uncover areas that your businesses should explore to make your company stand out, improve upon your brand image, reach out to more customers and building a solid foundation to your business.

Business buyer is today a lot sophisticated, and they have a need to buy.  They now have plethora of information, lot of data to analyze, and more so, their purchasing decisions are influenced by the complexity involved in the buying process.

The first step is to define your Digital Marketing Strategy.

  •      What are we trying to sell?
  •      Who is the target audience?
  •      What is the message that we would like to share with the audience?
  •      What are your marketing objectives and how do you plan to track the ROI through these efforts?

It is essential that the management and marketing team addresses the above questions so as to have clarity and objectivity.  The message needs to be consistent across various channels.  Hence integrated messaging is the key and it should flow across both ways, both from your company and from your audience.

There were days when the buyer relied heavily on information from a manufacturer or a service provider, in order to buy.  Today the customer has more than enough information at their finger tips.  So treat the ‘Data like a King’, and ‘Content like a Queen’.  The crux is that the context should be relevant to the customer.  Proper use of information and analytics will help weave a perfect story which your audience wants to see or know about.

Another disruption in marketing has come up in the recent past, which is the ‘Mobility’.  Organizations need to have a mobile strategy in place.  Web and mobile strategies must meet, and it is becoming mandatory to have a mobile site that renders the website well across desktops/laptops, smartphones, tablets and e-readers.

Digital marketing is measurable, customizable, and can be executed effectively at a lower cost.  It has various components and each of it needs to have a specific objective and results tracked.  It starts with the website that should have a good design (good UI), clear messaging, ease of navigation and speed.  SEO, SEM and Social media are some of the components one needs to pay close attention to.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization helps to optimize your website.  It also increases visibility of your content through proper usage of keywords.  It helps in ranking up your site based on your keywords, its density, etc.  This is organic and cost effective, but takes time for results to be seen.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing is ad based where you bid for keywords.  You can play with your budgets but sometimes minimum bid amount can itself be higher.

Social media involves social groups, networks, blogs, videos, reviews, etc.  Most popular amongst them are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.

Companies can derive significant benefits if they are able to leverage the power of Online Marketing.  It can be further classified as ‘traditional’ and ‘gorilla’ marketing.

Email marketing and banner advertisements can be classified traditional where as gorilla marketing helps to generate inquiries and close sales through cost per acquisition deals, affiliate programs, CPC (cost per click), etc.

The points discussed above are just the tip of the iceberg, and the marketing team needs to include a well thought out Inbound and Outbound digital strategy.

Inbound marketing can be done through blogs, videos, social media, SEO, discussion forums, whitepaper, etc.

Outbound marketing includes email campaign, webinars, virtual conference, display ads like Google adwords, etc.

A right mix of inbound and outbound marketing is the key, when you are looking at targeting prospective buyers for your product or a service or a solution.

Customer today has multiple touch points before they make their buying decision.  Hence it is essential that we provide one integrated message, across all channels of communication.

With so much of avenues to reach out to your customers, and with lots of action happening in the marketplace, be conscious to cut the noise, make yours stand out, and fish where the fishes are.

Guest Post by Shyam Sekar S, Chief Mentor & Strategist at Startup Xperts