Over the past few months, I have been delivering quite a few presentations on social media to groups (conferences, conventions etc.) of business leaders.
One aspect of embarking into the waters of social media that seems to give most of them some sort of tick is the idea that you have to relinquish some control.
You can't take advantage of the connectivity, reach and viral nature of he beast without also being willing to connect, reach many people and let others share. It's like wanting to enjoy the sensation of flying over the water in a boat at high speed but without the engine noise. It' the "other people" part of social media that provides its power.
Here's what I think of as social media's price of admission:
You have to be willing to spotlight and amplify other people's voices:
Many business owners seem to want to mute their employees and customers. That doesn't work in social media. Not only do you need to "let them" talk but you need to invite it. You have to allow comments. You are the topic of conversation somewhere. This is just about allowing it to happen (and encouraging it) in your digital home.
You have to be willing to be imperfect:
You need to be willing to be imperfect (like Dominos). You need to be transparent and that takes some courage. But let's be honest here. Everyone already knows you're not perfect. And...will actually respect and love you all the more for just admitting it. It's not how or whether you screw up. It's what you do next that matters.
You have to be willing to let others change your direction:
Viral means letting go. It means tossing an idea or program out into the social media space and inviting other people to pick up the ball and run with it. Sometimes, they go where you think they'll go...and sometimes they'll surprise you.
I'm pretty sure the FourSquare folks (a location based social network) hadn't anticipated that Marcus Brown would create the International Day of the Toilet -- and encourage his worldwide network of friends to all create "water closet" venues on Foursquare. The interesting thing is -- will FourSquare shudder at the news or help promote the idea?
There are plenty of other things you need to do to create a successful social media presence. But...if you can't swallow these three, don't even get started. Social media is nothing if it's not about inviting other people into the party.
Which of these three is toughest for you?
January 25, 2010
Making Your Channel “Product-Friendly”
Guest article by Al Morgan, Channels Performance, Aventi Group
A few months back Sridhar discussed the importance of tailoring your product or solution to the channel. It’s a vital step to ensuring that you will maximize the revenue opportunity through channels. An integrated program will ensure initial mindshare AND pave the way for initial success.
Your channel partners have lots of products, and shifting attention to your solution will take focused effort. At Aventi, we have been assisting a major IT vendor roll out a major, worldwide, program to channel partners over the last few quarters and I’d like to share a few lessons learned.
Initial outreach. This can be multi-level. If you are working with a master distributor, start with a multi-partner webinar. At the close, don’t just point them to your partner portal, offer a follow-up deep-dive training for their sales team.
In-depth training. Deliver a one-on-one training to resellers that show interest after the intro. These can be 20 minutes at a sales team meeting, a 45 minute overview, or a 90 minute in-depth. Whichever path you are offered, take it and tune your presentation to fit the time and the audience. Sometimes the key takeaway is simply, “Call us, we can help!” Most sales teams have varying competence with your solution. For the top 20% of performers, you webinar may not add much. But if you can motivate the other 80% to get started, you’ve quadrupled your feet on the street!
Coaching. Sales reps that are new to your solution can often benefit from talking through an opportunity before proceeding. Setting up a “channel sales desk” to support those calls can pay big dividends in revenue, and provide you with early reviews of your solution selling program. While solution sales will never be “paint by number”, coaching can concentrate knowledge and accelerate success. Don’t expect that a portal will be sufficient. In truth, it can seem like just one more burden that stops that rep from acting.
Scorecards. To be explicit when describing your target opportunity, create a scorecard that maps to your ideal prospect. In the early days, it is better to have channel partners qualify out marginal deals quickly, and focus on prospects directly in your sweet spot. By using deal scorecards as part of the coaching process, you can ensure that solid deals get fast-tracked and poor fits are eliminated early. Plus, they are great training aids for getting newer reps on board quickly.
Demand generation. There’s no better training follow-up than solid leads. These get partner management motivated during the critical first few months, when you are building mindshare and selling habits with the reseller sales force. At this stage, consider running the demand gen campaigns directly, as the reseller is unlikely to have the resources or skills in-house, even if you supply the funding.
Resellers are very enthusiastic about this approach. It helps them be efficient and get into new markets quickly. It also helps them bring up the capability level of their sales reps without taking them out of the field for expensive training. Our client has seen tremendous success and a major renewal in interest since the program has been put in place.
Aventi’s Vector Marketing provides a powerful framework for supporting all of these elements. It ensures that consistent messaging and tools are constructed and that these in turn support successful demand gen and rapid, consistent, deal qualification. Keeping to the Vector framework for subsequent programs also lowers the “new learning” on the part of the channel partner.
In summary, giving your channel partners integrated and consistent tools, training, coaching and leads can differentiate your solution and build mindshare. That will increase your value, and make your channel partners more receptive to the follow-up programs in your pipeline.
January 22, 2010
Is Thought Leadership Necessary?
“They told me I had to become a thought leader or I’d never achieve great success as a professional.” This is what a leader at a professional services firm told me recently that a marketing consultant told him.
He didn’t say this to me matter-of-factly either. He said it with a mix of fear, skepticism, sadness, and hope.
- Fear. Because he can’t write and doesn’t have much “new” to say, and neither do the rest of the folks on his leadership team.
- Skepticism. Because he didn’t think it was true that thought leadership was now a requirement, but he was starting to hear it so much he thought maybe the tide had turned and it now was.
- Sadness. Because he liked his job selling, delivering, and managing and didn’t want to become, as he put it, a “professor type”.
- Hope. Because he was hoping I’d say what he wanted me to say: that it was not true.
He was…
…right! It’s not true. Ludwig Feuerbach* noted, “A being without suffering is a being without being.” Given the drumbeat of advice to professionals to become thought leaders, you might be convinced that a firm without thought leadership is a firm not worth a damn.
Some industry watchers and consultants these days are downright dogmatic in their belief that, to achieve all you can achieve as a professional, you have to become a thought leader. And to differentiate your firm, you have to become a thought leader. Same for generating leads, raising prices, and competing for the best clients.
False. Not true. El wrongo.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of thought leadership, partly because as a member of the faculty at Babson College I am a “professor type”, but mostly because of what good thought leadership can do for a firm.
Thought leadership helps with:
- Lead generation
- Fee maximization
- Branding
- Winning deals
- Drawing the best candidates to work at your firm
- Repeat business
- Confidence of the thought leader
And the list doesn’t stop there. No question, thought leadership is helpful, but is it necessary?
Let’s say you need heart surgery. All you know about your two potential surgeons is that one pioneered and is most widely published regarding the surgery you need, and the other is in the prime of his career and has performed the surgery 1,500 times but has never published.
Let’s say you need much greater efficiency in your supply chain. One consultant wrote the book on it, and while the other hasn’t written a lick about it, she and her firm have a long track record of success getting done what you need to get done.
Let’s say you just got word that another company stole your patent. Which lawyer do you hire, the one that writes most often about winning the type of case you want to win, or the one that has won the most?
It’s likely most buyers would prefer the latter in each. Perhaps you might have said to at least one of them, “Well, I don’t know!” In either scenario, you prove the point: thought leadership isn’t necessary. As some of you might have hoped, you may not have to devote time, energy, and money into becoming the leading thinker in your space!
But you probably do have to spend time, energy, and money on something else if you want to outfox the thought leaders and benefits that thought leadership bring to them. Here are a few thoughts that can get you started on how you might do it for your firm.
1. Most buyers aren’t persuaded by thought leadership per se, they’re persuaded by authority. The concept of thought leadership implies originality in thinking. Not only does good thought leadership not have to be original, you really don’t have to add anything at all to your field to establish yourself as an authority. What you have to establish is expertise in the subject, and proof of your ability to perform successfully in the subject area. You can do this through publishing case studies. You can speak at conferences and events with your clients at your side about the work you’ve done and the value it delivered. You can become a leader in a professional association and be seen as a fixture in the industry. All these things create authority, and you don’t necessarily have to have one original thought in your head to do them!
2. Buyers buy helpfulness. Perhaps you’re an innovation consultant, or compensation consultant, or a lawyer. In your marketing process you can demonstrate your helpfulness through a host of methods such as case studies, client testimonial videos, clear and logical service descriptions and packages, email newsletters that highlight (but don’t introduce) new thinking in the industry, professional development seminars, and so on. In your selling process you can demonstrate your helpfulness by listening, uncovering needs, crafting a strong solution, and delivering value even before they start working with you. You can do all of this without a book, white paper, or article to your credit.
3. People buy consistency and quality. I don’t know about you, but many times I’ve simply wished a service provider did what they said they were going to do, and did it to a high standard. We don’t always need new thinking, but we need to trust that people can deliver when they say they can so we don’t have to worry about it or do it all over when it comes out poorly.
4. People buy who they like best. In Mastering Rainmaking Conversations, we tell a story about how a CFO friend of ours chose one of the Big 5 (at the time) accounting firms to take a company public. The long and short of it is that, while he publicly justified it with an analytical argument, he told me privately that he hired the firm whose staff he liked best.
Another key argument in the you-must-be-thought-leadery-or-else camp is that you can’t differentiate without thought leadership. I agree that thought leadership is a good means to differentiation, but it’s not the only means.
For example, imagine you’re all of the good things (consistent, likeable, helpful, etc.) noted above. Develop a reputation for these and you’re setting yourself apart right there. You can also develop a compelling service package that will seduce people with your value and stand out from the crowd. As we wrote in Professional Services Marketing, Bain uses the Profit Hunt service well in this regard. We use the Revenue Growth Benchmark Assessment. There’s no reason you can’t offer your own.
Yes, thought leadership can help you stand out, but you don’t need thought leadership to stand out. You can convey, without being a thought leader, what sets you apart from others as well as how hard it would be to substitute your firm with another provider. I’m not saying it’s easy to convey these things, but then again, anything that’s worthwhile to pursue is likely not to be easy.
The truth of the matter is that not everyone can or should be a thought leader, and that does not make them second-class professionals. As helpful as thought leadership might be in the right situations, you can achieve fabulous success without it.
* Everyone’s favorite Marxist philosopher, of course.
January 21, 2010
Tap Into the Love Affair with Rewards Programs
We all know it’s more cost effective to keep the customers you have rather than attract new ones to your business.
But do you offer any incentives to the upper echelon of your customer base through a points, rewards or other loyalty program to encourage them to continue their already good behavior? There is a lot of power behind points and loyalty programs – as attested by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
When several hundred frequent flier mile fans learned that there was a free shipping offer on presidential Native American $1 coins sold at face value by the U.S. Mint AND that they could earn frequent flier miles in the process, they ordered more than $1 million in coins. They charged the coins to a credit card that offered frequent-flier miles and then took the shipments straight to the bank. Shoppers' keychains are flush with "loyalty" passes that offer discounts and deals from– the average household has 12 loyalty passes, according to a study by Colloquy.
While these are more sophisticated examples of loyalty programs, they are a testament to their power. In smaller doses, these programs are great for furthering loyalty to any size business. They’re also a wonderful tool for obtaining information you can use to create products and services that meet customers’ needs and wants. Without cutting prices (a move that all too many businesses have taken in the current recession), you can spur purchases and reward customers in the process.
The reality is that there is a small percent of your customers who do most of the purchasing from your business. In the grocery store realm, the top 10 percent of customers account for nearly 40 percent of a store’s total sales, according to an analysis by Concept Shopping Inc. The study also found that these most valuable shoppers tend to remain very loyal to the store, with 95 percent continuing to shop there throughout the year. Hence, it makes business sense to focus time, effort and promotions on those top-spenders.
A few parameters to consider:
- Tell customers how they will be rewarded. Create reward cards and stamp them each time customers make an eligible purchase. You can use a frequent purchase card/punch card for purchases of anything from sub sandwiches to airport parking. Options could include: Buy five, get one free, spend $100, get a $10 gift card or earn 100 reward points with each $10 purchase and receive a 10 percent discount. Consider what these retailers do:
- Zane’s Cycles in Branford, Conn., offers its customers free bicycle maintenance for life if they take the time to answer six questions, which store owner Greg Zane then stores in his customer database. Then, Zane targets the true cycling enthusiasts with relevant offers and special care.
- Neiman Marcus InCircle – This “circle” continues to exceed its high-end members’ expectations. Members can redeem points for gift cards, airline miles and unique gifts not found elsewhere.
- Harley Davidson’s Harley Owners Group (H.O.G.) leverages the bond between Harley owners and their bikes with a loyalty program that masters soft and hard benefits. It offers an exclusive “kinship” for members. For example, the Mileage Program awards pins, patches, and motorcycle medallions to H.O.G. members just for riding their Harley-Davidson® motorcycles.
- Choose rewards that have tangible value, offer choice and provide an aspirational value. If a restaurant plans to provide a free meal, be flexible in when and what the customer can choose. Having the opportunity to win a trip to Hawaii has greater aspirational value than a free cappuccino.
- Consider your budget. How much will rewards cost? Calculate financials up-front.
- Determine how you will attract people to join your program. Will the cards sit in front of your cash register? Will you advertise?
- How will you track and record transactions?
- Determine restrictions up-front.
While retail loyalty programs have many purposes, the greatest value to business is ability to identify individual customers, measure and understand their individual behaviors and engage them. In doing so, you’re more apt to keep them as customers.
The Future of Social Media: Being Everywhere (a Steve Rubel Interview)
In this video I interview Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President at Edelman Digital. Steve advises some of the biggest names in the world, such as Dannon, Hewlett Packard, Pepsi and Microsoft, on social media.
Watch this video to pick up some of the nuggets of social media advice he gives his clients. One valuable tip Steve gives is about “shared mutual gain” and what it means. Steve also explains why he quit blogging.
You will also learn why Steve believes digital is mandatory and not optional. And here are a few other takeaways:
■Why you need to have a presence on all social networks where your customers are spending time.
■How to use mixed messages to tailor your stories to different venues.
■How to measure social media metrics.
■Why the different vectors of reach, engagement and reputation lead to trust.
■Why it’s important to understand people & understand business.
And Steve also shares some insights about why he stopped blogging on Micro Persuasion and started lifestreaming on Posterous.
What are your takeaways? Do you agree that blogging is old? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.