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 »

(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 »

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 »

I love summer reading lists – they give me ideas and it’s fun to see what other people want to learn more about. With that said, below is a reading list of books somewhat related to Sales. This is a personal selection and I’m hoping that everybody will chime in with their own ideas below.

Though it’s nice if the book has some relevance to business, that isn’t necessarily the most important thing. In fact, I find it’s often things that are only tangentially related to Sales that provide the most stimulus for me.

First, I’m going to recommend some older books. These seem especially relevant because of the current economic environment in which we cannot rely on continued private sector growth and where sales organizations have to work hard to get customers over their fears.

1)      Everybody in Sales and Marketing needs to have read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini. This is one of the best-known books examining how we make decisions and how we prioritize different kinds of information. It has some obvious implications for how to position and leverage the sales process, but it’s also a great read. And once you’ve read Influence, you can skip the mountain of related books such as Nudge or Predictably Irrational, all of which, to greater or lesser degrees, are based on the idea that we are all systematically prone to making the same mistakes over and over when it comes to making decisions.

2)      Similarly important is “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Ries and Jack Trout. While the stories and anecdotes are beginning to show their age, this is probably the single best book on Marketing that I have ever read. It ties in nicely with the Cialdini book because the authors leverage many of the same behavioral insights, though theirs were substantially derived through practice rather than formal analysis; and the book is none the worse for it.

Moving on to some newer books, here are a couple that recently stood out for me – and please use the comments section to add yours below.     Read More »

Sometimes the things you don’t find in a study turn out to be as interesting as the things you do find. One very consistent “non-finding” concerns the effectiveness of the classic ROI message. We’ve asked customers to rate the effectiveness of the ROI pitch they hear and assessed reps and managers on their effectiveness at delivering this pitch, trying to link the effectiveness back to a variety of commercial outcomes.  To our surprise, we’ve never found the delivery of the ROI message to have any significant explanatory power.  And since zero correlation means no causation, this is a finding that deserves some exploration.

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with business owners at a software company, who developed a new way of thinking about certain data problems.  Though customers generally agreed that this was a better way to handle the data problems, the solution spanned many departments, and the software company couldn’t convince customers that the hypothetical returns were worth the extra coordination efforts. Failure to generate a positive emotional response likely explains our non-finding with regards to the effectiveness of the ROI pitch.

It’s not that customers aren’t influenced by ROI calculations; it’s just that few people make complex business decisions based entirely on somebody else’s ROI calculations. Senior buyers are pretty savvy people – they know their own ability to derive a set of returns that will look sufficiently attractive. They also likely recognize that they are constantly pitched things that they are already inclined to like.

In other words, buyers become perfectly cynical about value at the point at which the entire conversation becomes dominated by claims about value. It’s a subtle notion, but the hypothetical existence of value simply doesn’t challenge the customer.

This finding has profound implications for how Sales needs to think about building and delivering messages, and reinforces many of our findings around commercial teaching:   Read More »

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

History is ripe with famous feuds: the Capulets and Montagues, the Hatfields and McCoys, Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Burr.  Enter Sales and Marketing to the fray: often at odds, though truly dependent on one another for the successful operation of any given company.  If early results from our sales and marketing alignment diagnostic are any indication, the two groups have managed to find at least some common ground: commercial messaging is crucial … and it’s something we’re not very good at it.

The pain points are many.  On the one hand, sales reps say that the messaging and positioning they get from Marketing is largely irrelevant.  More often than not, reps bypass Marketing’s collateral altogether, opting instead to create their own campaigns they believe will more quickly move customers through the purchase funnel.

On the other side of the floor, marketers often gripe that Sales fails to tailor messages to address the unique needs of different customers.  Once armed with a pitch, reps go on autopilot—or so the theory goes.  This results in missed opportunities to make the company’s given solution truly resonate with customers, which ultimately translates into missed revenue.

Finger pointing aside, it’s safe to say we must have a pretty broken machine when it comes to delivering consistent messages across the slew of interactions we have with our customers.  From advertising to product information to tradeshow collateral, the opportunities to send mixed messages are many and, as companies explore social media facets, still growing.  Read More »

Last week, Boeing scored a major coup when Northrop Grumman withdrew from a contest to provide the U.S. Air Force with a new fleet of tankers after the Pentagon refused to revise elaborate rules that appeared to favor Boeing’s smaller, 767-based tanker over the larger Airbus A330 that Northrop planned to bid.

Turns out that Boeing managed to get the US Air Force to rewrite the bid to take into account the life-time expenses of operating the aircraft, as well as the cost to retrofit Air Force runways and hangars to accommodate the new tankers, potentially penalizing Northrop since the larger A330 would burn more fuel and wouldn’t fit into current parking spaces.

Although most of us aren’t bidding on decade-long, $35 Billion tanker orders, we’re likely facing many of the same challenges as Boeing and Northrop: customers with a limited view of their needs, multiple decision makers and influencers, buyers who try to commoditize our offer, and internal politics.  Read More »