What CIOs hate the most about getting cold calls from I.T. vendors

The results are in from a survey co-conducted by CIO Magazine and us.   Seems that I.T. executives are fed up with the lack preparedness by cold-callers who are becoming more ever more aggressive.   It’s their number-one gripe.  And the calls are flooding in these days at a greater rate than ever. Sixty percent of the 277 CIOs who responded to the survey, representing the likes of DuPont, MetLife and Bank of America, say that cold calls are the most annoying thing they experience with vendors. Seventy percent complain that the calls, and the email spam, are becoming more prevalent.  The survey will be the subject of a teleconference moderated by CIO Magazine on Wednesday, February 10 at 1PM (ET).   It will feature some of the execs who surveyed, and a panel of vendors.  It should get interesting.  An exec summary of the survey is available from Turner DeVaughn Network.

It’s Apple’s Tablet but you’d think it was coming from Moses

The guy’s amazing.  Just freakin’ amazing.  Every year, same thing.  Same buzz that builds to a deafening roar.  Same anticipation. Same spontaneous-combustion hype.  Don’t get me wrong.  When Steve Jobs is no longer part of the tech scene there will a void out there like a black hole. May he live long and be part of the landscape for at least as long as I’m around.  Otherwise, what/who is there?  Marc Benioff? Carol Bartz?  Eric Schmidt?  The Twitter dudes?  Not exactly the same league.  I love Apple.  The value prop, the hype, the joie de geeq.  They get it right.

The future marketing agency

The results of a recent survey of CIOs reveals some things that vendors probably won’t like but need to face.  The fact is that unsolicited sales inquiries annoy the hell out of I.T. buyers more than ever today.  It’s bad enough that cold calls are intrusive by nature and that spam clogs their inbox.

But the problem goes deeper.  It’s the lack of preparation and research that galls them the most.  But wait  minute.  Aren’t these same CIOs who bemoan the fact that telemarketers don’t do their homework the same ones who refuse to offer pertinent information to begin with?  Well, yes they are.  Which leads to an interesting quandary.  In an ailing economy, with buyers having no budget to make purchases and sellers more aggressive and desperate than ever, what’s the answer?  Maybe it lies in a whole new way of thinking about the buyer-seller relationship.  Which is what we did when we wrote the book on B2B marketing in the digital culture.

But this isn’t about our book or our theories.  It’s about the practicality of how to make sales transactions more valuable for buyer and seller alike.  If the problem is that vendors forget what it’s like to be a buyer, and buyers refuse to understand the reality of selling, perhaps it’s time for a disinterested third party to intervene as a honest broker.   That third party would operate on behalf of the buyer as an unpaid agent who takes the calls and the email and reports back to the buyer.

From here it becomes an iterative process.  The basic value proposition of the seller is documented and the buyer decides if futher information is desirable.  Then the vendor is given the option of subscribing to the interpretive services of the third-party which is supplying the platform by which the seller can represent himself.  The buyer can appraise the sellers offerings more conveniently an thoughfully while the seller knows that his value proposition will be given a fair hearing.  A more valuable transaction is enabled.  Anyway, it beats the hell out of making or taking cold calls.

Five biggest mistakes made by salespeople, marketing people, job candidates, and presenters of all kinds

With apologies to Carmine Gallo and Steve Jobs, below are the five biggest mistakes that salespeople, marketers, job candidates and presenters of all stripe make when they’re at bat.

Trying to sell everything except the most salable (read: imagination-capturing) thing.
Gallo observes that Steve Jobs doesn’t sell products. He sells “tools to unleash your creativity.” Tell your prospect how you can help them reach their goal.   And keep it simple.  Jobs has a one-sentence description — or vision — for every product he introduces.  Just as every product or political candidate needs a vision, so does every salesperson or job candidate.

Breaking the rule of three.
Researchers have found that people think in “chunks” and remember no more than three or four characteristics of anything.  That’s why the best presentations have no more than three leave-behinds.  Make it easy on your audience.  Think about the best speeches or pitches you remember. Chances are, the speaker kept it pretty simple.  It’s why you remember it.  Which leads to the next mistake…

Making things complicated.
DaVinci said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.  Whose gonna argue?  Seriously, clutter clouds thinking and memory.  You want to stand out. Be memorable.  No one was ever bored into buying anything.  Strive for simplicity in oral communications, presentation design (read: Powerpoint slides) and everything else.  This includes your resume.

Failure to prepare.
Ever notice how the best musicians, actors, athletes, dentists or carpenters always make it look easy?  Author Malcolm Gladwell reminds us that the Beatles, before their debut in the U.S., had thousands of hours of gigs–essentially rehearsals–performing the same tunes night after night for months.  It took them many years to become “overnight sensations”.  Hey, if Steve Jobs thinks he has to spend weeks rehearsing every segment of his keynote presentations, it’s probably worth it.  How many hours a day does Tiger Woods practice putting?  How much time should you put into rehearsing responses to questions likely to come from a prospective customer? Interviewer?  Member of the audience?

Indifference
If you’re not excited, animated, and/or energized to the point of visible passion about your subject matter, how the hell can you expect anyone else to be?   Put yourself in the shoes of your listener or interviewer.  If you were them, to what would you favorably respond?  What would have you (a) wanting to hear more or (b) resisting the temptation to look at your watch?  What would make you want to buy from, hire, or sign up with you?

Selling to CIOs

Couple of months ago, I weighed in on topic familiar to just about all of us: B2B cold calls epitomize the gap between sellers and buyers

CIO Magazine agrees with the premise and takes it a step further with a survey of chief information information officers. The intent is to use what they learn from the survey to formulate guidelines for vendors on how to sell more effectively.  Good idea.  It’s also an attempt to make life just a tad easier for beleaguered CIOs who are having to do a lot more today with fewer resources.  (Hey, a lot of us can relate to that.)  The thinking is that if suppliers were hearing it straight from the people they’re trying to supply, it might help them use everyone’s time more wisely.  No knock on a vendor trying to make a buck.  It’s that in today’s economy, “aggressive” doesn’t always equate to “productive”.  And aggression is the order of the day when it comes to trying to get the order, as in sales.   A little background on the survey explains this, too.  Studying the survey can help anyone trying to sell anything today.

Getting people to say nice things about your brand. Or about you.

The people at HubSpot (“In-bound marketing”) do a nice job of explaining, teaching, and generally being a useful resource.  They also delivered one of those the-more-things-change-the-more-they-remain-the-same moments for me today.    What I mean is, long and ago and far away one of my advertising professors at San Jose State defined public relations as “getting people to say nice things about you”.

On today’s HubSpot, the following:  “Today, it’s not what you say about yourself that matters, but what others say about you. Dominos put millions into advertising this year, but it was the stories that came from their employees that did the most to define their brand.

“Chest thumping doesn’t work on social media. You have to do the hard work — the cultivation — that gives other people reasons to talk about your brand on social media for you.”

In fact, “chest-thumping” never did work.  At least not to the extent that the chest-thumpers wanted to believe.  Thus, the invention and growth of effective PR in the first place.

Read this HubSpot piece to get their take on the steps can you take to encourage other people to talk about your brand online.

How to write case studies that attract leads and generate sales

“Success stories”. They’re a staple of PR and marketing.  But most of them are useless. Case studies that resonate with your best prospects and drive the most qualified leads contain key ingredients.  Omit any of them, and it’s recipe for failure.

Most case studies, no matter how well written, fall short.  They don’t contain the content–the specifics–that prospective customers require to take the next step toward giving you the order.

The right ingredients inspire the right response from the right people.  How do we know? We did the research and wrote the book.

The ingredients: a quantified benefit, the adoption costs, and pricing.  To turn suspects into prospects and prospects into customers, you must justify the price of your offerings in terms most relevant to the real needs of the people you’re talking to.  

NET Value: How to Profit As the Digital Culture Changes Your Value Proposition reveals for the first time what the most successful marketers do to make their case studies incredibly powerful tools for marketing, selling and boosting revenue. And the simple and often overlooked things they all have in common.  Things that drive more qualified leads to their web sites and  generate sales.

Read most of the stuff on corporate web sites that passes for success stories and you come away thinking that the writer’s main objective was to get the approval of the customer.  Sorry, but the main objective of a case study is to attract the right readers and nudge them toward a sale.

Getting a job at Google. Leaving a job at Google.

Silicon Alley Insider is obsessed with the so-called exodus of brains at Google, as though the mere thought of leaving the Googleplex is, ipso-facto, is unthinkable.  What’s the big deal, I ask?

People, especially in The Valley, have been departing really, really great jobs at great companies for a generation.  H-P, Fairchild, Intel, Apple, which long before Steve Jobs was a cult hero, employed defectors from H-P, Fairchild and Intel. And Cooper Laboratories and National Semi and Procter&Gamble and lots of other places.  Intel spun out of Fairchild.  Dozens of upstarts were begat by Intel.  So it goes.  A lot of folks have made tons of money at Google and devoted years of their young lives there.  They now leaving for the same reason they were attracted: because they were brilliantly talented, ambitious and inclined toward uncharted waters.  How do you think all those aforementioned companies got started in the first place? It’s the natural order of things.

B2B cold calls epitomize the gap between sellers and buyers

When you think about it, it’s pretty obvious.  Seven out of ten B2B customers say they need to understand a vendor’s value proposition before making a purchase.  Which, to those customers, means one thing: they want justification for the price they’re being asked to pay.  Seven out of ten.  In electoral politics, this is a mandate.  Know how many vendors convey this kind of a value prop today?   Nine percent.

We’ve done the research. It’s all here in our book.  And it’s not anecdotal.  We plowed through hundreds of commercial web sites across a number of industries and questioned hundreds of customers.   Another way of looking at it:  only one out of ten vendors is imparting the knowledge wanted most by seven out of ten customers. Seems like a few opportunities are being missed here, doesn’t it?

Problem is, when a buyer starts asking questions, a vendor reflexively starts reciting from the company hymnal.  The buyer wants to hear about a benefit and gets a lecture on features.  Buyer wants to know what the product’s going to do for him/her and how hard (or easy) the process will be to get there.  Vendor keeps repeating variations on the “better, cheaper, faster” mantra.  In other words, the buyer and the seller are not only on different pages, they’re reading different books.  In different languages.  What we have here is a failure to communicate.

To us, it begins with the whole concept of what a value proposition is: simple math.  It’s the quantified value the buyer perceives in the product’s benefit minus the cost of adopting the product and the price paid.  The greater the positive difference, the stronger the “value” proposition.  It is a measurable quantity. And therein lies the problem. To a lot of vendors, their “value proposition” becomes an elevator pitch about the product’s competitive advantages and subjective superiority.  It’s qualitative.  And wholly inadequate.

So what does this have to do with cold-calling?  If you believe that your “value proposition” is simply the right combination of words and effective delivery of them, you’ll assume that interrupting someone with a plea to listen to you is as effective a means as any to start the selling process.  If, on the other hand, you understand your target well enough to know the relevance of your proposition to his perception of value you’ll know exactly how that target is best approached.  And it’s probably not a phone call out of the blue.

"Finish that brewskie and make a few more cold calls."

Satmetrix’ view: customer loyalty trumps “satisfaction”

I sat across the table from Satmetrix boss Richard Owen the other day and got an earful about the difference between a satisfied customer and loyal one.  You want to cultivate the latter.  Aiming merely to satisfy doesn’t cut it anymore.  In fact, it never did.  Loyal customers will lead your cheers.  Evangelize on your behalf.  Sing your praises to friends and family.  In the parlance of Owens and Satmetrix, they will become “Net Promoters”. Best of all, they’ll be back, more often, to buy more. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.  A satisfied customer?  Meh.  May not even return.  “Satisfaction” is a low bar.  Satisfaction is unsatisfactory.   Zappos knows how to create loyalty.

Loyal customers always run back to Zappos

Apple, of course, has done it repeatedly for years. Best way I can describe it is to strive to offer the kind of experience you want everytime you’re shopping for something.  Anything.  What kind of experience would it take to inspire you to tell a close friend how cool it was?