A couple of months back, my colleague Andrew Kent wrote a post around what not say in your pitch deck, and that got me thinking in terms of what you should say.

Luckily, we periodically run customer surveys where we ask our members’ customers to tell us whether or not certain brand statements resonate with them. Unluckily, the reports are generally sobering: only 19% of brand statements resonate with more than 50% of customers. Most of the time, customers simply don’t agree that a given statement represents the company more than it does one of its competitors.

Worse, there also turned out to be a long list of “true but unimportant” statements with which customers agreed, but that did not appear to drive preference (that is, there was little to no correlation between how companies were scored in these attributes and between whether or not the customer stated a preference for the company). Somewhat challengingly, these statements tended to be about delivery and fulfillment. The message to companies here is that there is no unique virtue to having made it easy to order your products through various channels: customers assume that all their suppliers can do this.

But things get more interesting when we looked at what does drive preference. And here a few things stood out: Read More »

WD-40, the famed degreasing and rust-preventing agent, is widely known for its versatility.  As the story goes, it was originally designed and sold in the aerospace industry to aid in airplane maintenance. But through the years, thousands of new applications for it were found and problems solved.  Everything from lubricating door-hinges to de-squeaking bedsprings to freeing tongues stuck to frozen metal in wintertime. 

The value of a can of WD-40 has undoubtedly increased in the mind of customers as its perceived utility increased.

And the thing is…most companies can discover unintended uses for their products if they let their customers guide them.  One example that we’ve found of a company recognizing new value drivers for its products based on customer use is Dow Chemical. 

Like many B2B companies, Dow has a broad array of products and services and interacts with their customers in many different ways.  But, through surveys and conversations with their sales reps, they’ve found that there are often pockets of customers within every customers segment that tend to value a particular part of Dow’s offer far more than other customers in the same segment.

So why does this happen?  And what opportunity does it present?   Read More »

(This is a guest post by Whitney Satin of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for senior marketers.) 

American Idol has dominated the airwaves for a number of years now.  While Simon Cowell’s outrageous lambasting of singing hopefuls is a draw for some, sales reps and marketers should pay attention for another (somewhat surprising) reason: Idol’s crowdsourcing of talent through multi-round competition is a powerful way to improve the delivery of your sales pitch. Sound far-fetched?  Stay tuned…

Sales and Marketing pay close attention to how customers consume their message, often engineering a learning journey so customers gradually internalize how the supplier’s unique benefits solve their major pain points.  This journey includes the sales conversation between reps and customers, which we’ve found should follow a specific sequence that builds emotional commitment to the supplier’s vision and solution.  The following three principles should serve as the backbone to any sales pitch:

1. Provoke: Reframe the customer’s initial assumptions or expose areas of underappreciated risk.
2. Expose: Break down the underlying problems behind this previously unknown or underappreciated issue and show how they impact the customer’s business objectives.
3. Resolve: Build back the customer’s confidence with an eye to how your products and services solve the exposed issue.

Of course, the effectiveness of the pitch rests squarely on the shoulders of the reps who actually have to deliver it … but not all reps are created equal.  The ability to deliver the same pitch while setting the appropriate tone will likely vary from rep to rep, and your organization needs to look for ways to hardwire certain delivery cadences into the pitch.

Enter American Idol.  Read More »

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I just read a blog post on HBR that raises an interesting point (What Really Matters in B2B Selling). The author argues that prospect quality is more a product of prospect interest rather than fit.

Those of us in a solution-selling environment will likely be among the first to argue that fit is tremendously important, particularly if we intend to win revenue- and margin-maximizing solution sales with a client. In a purely transactional selling world, this may be less a concern.

And yes, there is a large degree of truth to the statement “you don’t have a strategy if you’ve never said ‘no’ to a customer.”

In reality, many ‘interested’ customers have self-opted as good fits, and naturally you’d expect interested customers to be decent prospects. But let’s put fit aside for a minute and focus purely on customer interest. Read More »

By Andrew Kent

Take a close look at your standard pitch deck, the “about us” section on your corporate home page, or your PR material.  Highlight every instance of the words “leading,” “unique,” “solution,” or “innovative.”  And especially find all instances of the phrase “we work to understand our customers’ unique needs and then build custom solutions to meet those needs.”  Then hit the delete key.  Because every time you use one of those buzzwords, you are telling your customers, “we are exactly the same as everyone else.”

See, unlike Journey, you and your competitors aren’t “worlds apart.”

The more we try to play up our differences, the more things sound the same.  PR expert Adam Sherk recently analyzed the 98 most common sales, marketing, and PR buzzwords used in company communications, and the results are hilarious and devastating.  Here are the top 10:

It’s eye-opening, really.  By definition, there can be only one leader in any industry—and 205,900 companies all think they’re it.  75,500 companies think they’re the “best” or the “top.”  30,400 think they’re “unique.”  “Solution” also makes an appearance at #7—so if you think that calling your offering a “solution” differentiates you, think again.

So if everyone’s saying they’re the leading solution, what does the customer think?  “Great—give me 10% off.”  Read More »

Through our research of what drives customer loyalty (willingness to buy, willingness to continue buying, willingness to recommend), thousands of our members’ end-customers have told us that the thing they value most…is for a supplier to challenge their thinking.

Customers value a supplier that provides them with a different way of thinking about their business and how to compete more successfully.  Essentially, customers want to be taught.

But it’s not enough to teach customers simply because they value it.  You’ve got to get PAID for it.  The last thing you would want is to teach customers to value something that your organization is not uniquely positioned to solve.  One of our members accurately described that as “teaching the customer into the desert.”

Instead, you need teaching that reframes the way the customer assigns value.  Teaching that leads customers to value the areas where you uniquely outperform your competitors.  Teaching that leads to a commercial result.  Hence the term we’ve coined here at the Council, commercial teaching.

Now, to teach in this manner, you first have to have the knowledge around how you’re uniquely different from your competitors.  After all, it would be impossible to lead customers to value your unique strengths if you don’t even know what they are in the first place.  Read More »

When talking with members recently about their current challenges, lots of conversations have centered around the consensus-based sale – these days, you need to convince more people with different interests to agree on any purchase.  But how do you get everyone to agree to a purchase, especially if it’s the slightest bit disruptive?  Clearly, we have a stronger need for advocates inside an organization than ever before.

But how can you make people want to share your content and advocate on your behalf?

It turns out two Wharton professors already looked at what makes people share, with an investigation of what makes people share New York Times articles.  Independent readers described articles using a number of adjectives, and then the professors looked at how likely the articles were to be in the list of top shared articles.

Short answer?  The most shared articles are those that inspire awe.

(In case you’re interested — number two: things that inspire anger, three: practical utility, four: emotionality, tied for five: anxiety and surprise, bringing in the rear: positivity.  Things that inspire sadness are much less likely to be shared.  You can find much more in the – ironically – widely shared New York Times article about the paper here).

So what does it mean to be awe-inspiring?  In the New York Times, this generally meant it was a complicated, intellectual article about science, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.”  As one of the authors says, “You’d see articles shooting up the list that were about the optics of deer vision.”

At the highest level, here’s how the authors defined awe-inspiring: “Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way.”  Read More »

No matter who I talk to around the world, I hear the same thing:  2010 is about a return to growth.

For many of us, the dark days of 2009, frankly, were a world where flat was the new up, and survival was success.  Heading into the next 12-18 months, however, no one is likely to get a second round of forgiveness for turning in a flat performance. 

I often quote the head of sales at a global manufacturing company who simply told his sales force this year, “In 2010, it’s not OK, not to grow.” Period.

But for many sales organizations, that emphatic message isn’t backed by clear direction.  Sure, we want to grow, but how do we do it?  And what I’m finding is, this year, more than most, sales leaders are “placing the customer first.”

The term “customer centricity” is back this year in a dramatic fashion.  The idea being, if we want to grow in 2010, we’re going to have to ensure that everything we do delivers maximum customer value.

But what exactly does it mean?  What should we actually do?  And more importantly, how do we do it in a way that drives growth?

After all, there are several ways to be customer centric that are actually bad for business—discounts, terms, and conditions which undermine profitability in exchange for little long-term gain.

To answer those questions, we surveyed over 5,000 individuals across Council members’ customer organizations—c-suite executives, end users, procurement officers, key influences, you name it—and we found one conclusion in particular to be consistently true regarding what customers value most in a supplier.    Read More »

By Andrew Kent

The Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe is quickly spiraling from “worst oil spill in US history” to “one of the worst man-made disasters of all time.”  Scientists worry that massive undersea plumes of oil could kill plankton and cause a collapse of the Gulf of Mexico food chain. 

We all know hindsight is 20/20.  Still, according to the Wall Street Journal, there’s some evidence that all this could have been prevented by a US$500,000 “acoustic trigger”–which rig owner Transocean opted not to install on its rig to backup the supposedly failsafe blowout preventer.  Which makes you wonder, what did the Transocean procurement rep say to the acoustic trigger sales rep?

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying an incredibly complex, highly engineered transaction, the tragedy in the Gulf may just bust the most cherished myth in all of business: “the customer is always right.”

In fact, the customer is often wrong – and it’s the job of Sales to teach the customer why.

For example, with BP and Transocean, it appears they grossly underestimated the chances of catastrophic failure of the rig’s blowout preventer.  CEO Tony Hayward recently called the device’s failure “unprecedented,” praising the blowout preventer as “the ultimate safety equipment on a drilling rig.” In reality, an AP investigation based on Minerals Management Service statistics found that blowout preventers “have failed or otherwise played a role in at least 14 accidents, mostly since 2005.”  And a 2003 report coauthored by Transocean’ executive Earl Shanks warned of blowout preventers’ “poor reliability.”  That’s the type of data a sales rep needs.         Read More »

Unless you’re stuck on a remote island with no means of communication with the outside world, you have likely witnessed the recent public outcry for President Obama to display more emotions when dealing with the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  As the media continues to debate the pros and cons of rational versus emotional decision-making, I started thinking about how much discussion I’ve seen around emotions recently in the business world.

Recently, two of our sister programs conducted independent studies on completely different topics  yet came to a similar conclusion that emotional arguments often trump rational ones.

-    The Customer Contact Council focused their study on identifying the drivers of customer effort as a way to mitigate customer disloyalty in the service channel. The study revealed that customer effort is largely driven by how customers feel during their service interaction versus what they do.  The breakdown is one-third “do” and two-thirds “feel.”

-    The Communications Executive Council studied what makes different stakeholders more likely to actively support the company and found that “emotional connection” with a company far outpaced all other factors, including actual company experiences, corporate citizenship, and business strength.

So, what about Sales? When trying to close a deal, are we missing the point by focusing on such practical arguments as “we offer the highest ROI” or “we have the lowest prices” instead of targeting customers’ right side of the brain?   Read More »