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Rebranding Your Organization – Change Management At Its Finest

Imagine your future: Your brand identity has been in place unchanged since the organization was founded in the 50s; the marketplace has shifted; your brand characteristics are diffuse and have drifted and meandered virtually unguided for decades; your organization offers different benefits than it used to, because that’s what the membership has dictated; and the membership base has shifted away from the traditional manufacturers and service suppliers to a full range of peripheral industries around a few core large members. It’s time to rebrand! Now what?

Rebranding can offer your organization many things, almost all of them good. But to take advantage of them, you have to actively and proactively manage the change process. To do that, it all starts with research, planning, education and communication within your organization, almost all of it between your marketing department and the executive staff.

Start at the Top

Getting good data is key to making good decisions – that’s an axiom that few can argue with, but that very few organizations take to heart when making strategic decisions. Rebranding is a very strategic decision, so in order to do it with the greatest positive impact, some critical research is in order. A good, old-fashioned SWOT analysis will lead you down the right road in almost all instances if done honestly and thoroughly, with a little imagination thrown in.

Knowing your members’ needs, desires and concerns is also critical – it’s their club after all, and without them there is no need to have a brand at all! If you have a stranglehold on what role your organization plays in their personal or professional lives, you’re a good way toward the goal of crafting an effective new brand around that group of members.

Knowing where your organization stands in the competitive spectrum in their professional lives, and what goods and services they turn to you for, puts you even further down the right road. Ask the tough questions – if you can use a rebranding to jettison unsuccessful programs because your research shows that no one uses that program or doesn’t think of you as offering that, you form a tighter brand identity, and create an opportunity to offer something similar but better later.

The last piece of research should be to hunt for similar or related brands in your own and other related industries. If the one you want to use is taken, you need to know that before you get too far down the path, to avoid infringement of trademark problems later.

Create a Plan

Rebranding is an organization-wide event and it touches everyone in the organization to one degree or another. Some elements will take longer to prepare than others, so your action priorities should be ordered upon implementation times and logistic concerns, so that all the pieces come together at a specific point in time at the end. You’ll want to launch the new brand in a short, intense period of activity, to discourage backsliding and create impact. Some groups have tried to sneak the new brand in under the radar, with no fanfare or celebration. Those types of soft launches usually take longer to enter and become retained in the public consciousness among your audience, and ultimately cost your organization time, money and credibility.

Knowing your members’ needs, desires and concerns is also

critical – it’s their club after all, and without them there is no

need to have a brand at all!

Derive a set of newly-generated brand characteristics from your member research, and task your marketing department to create a summary statement describing the new brand in those terms. Use that statement to graphically craft a representation of its meaning and create the new brand. If done properly, it will carry all the critical information and translate those characteristics into an image that communicates them clearly. Your plan should map out these steps and give a rationale for each of them that makes concrete sense to the internal audience. That plan is the basis for your communication both internally and externally.

TEST, Test, Test

Most organizations don’t get it right on the first try. And most don’t know they’ve got it wrong until it’s too late, because they don’t test. Internal and external reviews, focus groups and first-hand interviews will give you tremendous insight as to the accuracy of the image in projecting your brand’s characteristics, and will give you insight as to the level and speed of acceptance you can expect among your target audience. If you meet with resistance, or it’s not memorable or not accurate, you can waste precious resources trying to correct it later. Research is relatively cheap insurance against launching a poorly-crafted new brand. Done correctly, it can give you the confidence to launch the new brand with pride and have it met with predictable success. This type of research has some nuances to it, and many organizations don’t have the specialized knowledge and skill sets on staff to do it justice. For them it makes good financial sense to hire out to the experts for this portion. Most cities have a selection of reliable research firms that would be happy to help you launch your new brand correctly.

Communicate, Early and Often

Once you have what you feel is the definitive brand identity nailed down, a little preliminary education is in order. The mantra that good public speakers and presenters follow will work well here as well: “Tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell them what you said.” That first step, the advance alert is important, so that there is some warning, and the launch isn’t completely cold. It lets the audience know that there’s a change coming and they can brace for it. It gives you a chance to set the stage, set expectations and show a little of your rationale behind the change, show the advantages it offers and show the benefits of the change in a positive light. The better you prepare the audience, the faster your adoption curve will evolve, and the higher your acceptance level will be – and that saves you time and money. The more easily they accept the new identity, the less time and money you have to spend to convince them.

“Tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell them

what you said.”

Repetition and consistency are two great keys to success. The more places they audience sees that new brand, and the more consistent that presentation is, the higher your acceptance will be. The repetition is largely a budgetary issue, but operations needs to get in on the game here too. As part of your planning, you should have conducted a brand inventory, showing each and every instance where your brand appears and in what context. Pull out that inventory and review it now, so you can order the list of changes in priority order.

The highest time priority should be awarded to the most visible instances, the places with the highest volume and widest impact. Letterheads, envelopes, business cards, forms, newsletters and other items that number in the tens of thousands used per year, and distributed in large numbers on a regular basis should come first, as those will give you the highest penetration for the dollar. Items like shipping crate stencils, and the sign on the building can come a bit later. Fax cover sheets, e-mail signatures, and meeting signs are often overlooked initially, but those are fairly high-priority items. Brochures, membership kits and the like, while produced in high numbers, aren’t distributed in high numbers, and have relatively low impact initially. Websites, blogs etc. change instantly (virtually) and should be high on the list as they are often the destination for many of your other marketing efforts. Take the ego out of your decision-making and use impact sphere to guide your priority decisions.

Out With The Bad, In With The Good

One of the resistance points you’ll likely encounter is the so-called “waste” that goes along with a rebranding. Backsliding and phasing in the new brand as supplies run low or out will slow adoption and give mixed impressions to the audience. Make a clean break, and dump everything that carries the old brand – don’t use it. Part of your planning and communication process should have been to influence decisions by those who resupply the organization, to help minimize waste. In the long term, getting rid of the 22 leftover tradeshow tchotchkeys with the old brand on them isn’t really a waste if it prevents an diluted message from being transmitted to your audience. Dump it all!

“. . . items that number in the tens of thousands used per year,

and distributed in large numbers on a regular basis should

comefirst, as those will give you the highest penetration for the

dollar.”

Timing Is Key

The decision on the timing of the new launch will differ from group to group, but one tried-and-true solution is to use the Annual Convention or other major meeting as a platform to launch the new brand. This type of timing gives you more bang for your marketing buck, and allows you to reach a greater percentage of your intended audience at once, in a controlled environment over a limited time span. It forces you to hit deadlines, to create a definitive point of impact and allows you to create the kind of repetition and consistency required to make this effort work.

Do The Paperwork

Don’t forget to record the date of first use for your new brand, you’ll need it for your new trademark application, which of course you’ve been preparing all along the way, to protect your new brand. File the initial paperwork as soon as the first use and three subsequent public uses can be shown. Launching at the Annual Meeting makes that easy, as the initial and other uses are all virtually concurrent, and you can show the quantities distributed and the reach of the new mark very easily.

Rebranding is a challenging process, but one that can drive all sorts of positive change throughout your organization. Handled thoroughly and thoughtfully, it can pay significant benefits in both the long and short term.

October 8, 2014
E-Mail: B-to-B Marketing’s Secret Weapon

We use e-mail for a number of purposes, both for our own marketing efforts and on behalf of clients or as part of their plans for growth and retention. I’ve always thought it was a very flexible, very effective medium when used properly. Unfortunately, some among the marketing community have overused, abused and hijacked this wondrously inexpensive way of reaching out to customers, prospects and others in a personal, accountable way, and given it a bad rap, not to mention fatiguing the general public somewhat, and cutting open rates.

A good copywriter, with a good list and reasonable data skills can make tremendous in-roads using e-mail in several ways.

Outreach

Creating a small community of purchasers or converting good warm leads into sales is what makes e-mail shine. It’s personal, it’s flexible, it can carry text, graphics, imagery, color palette, brand, everything you need to reach out to your audience, qualify the top responders, and keep providing them reasons to buy. It’s also fast, and fairly innocuous – if you receive one and it’s not for you, simply delete it – no waste, no environmental impact, no anger necessary. It’s also fast! You can get an e-mail campaign planned out, written, tested, set up, and sent out in a matter of a few hours at fastest, maybe a day or two if you have more elements to put together.

Customer Relationship Building

Now that you’ve created your own little “community” of customers, extending, building and broadening that relationship is a task that e-mail does very well, and most of it can be automated. Small shops, service-sellers and sole proprietors can keep in touch, spread the good word and keep customers up to date on changes, new offerings, schedule changes and availability changes, discounts, and a host of other semi-transactional communications with customers, keeping your brand top-of-mind, upselling, cross-selling, incentivising referrals and keeping your relationship alive and active, which directly contributes to the top-line, and moves the bottom line in a positive direction. What’s not to like? These types of activities used to take hundreds of hours a year, and the scope and frequency was limited. Now, not only can these messages be automated to be triggered in response to a contact, a purchase, a query, whatever, but they can also be tracked, quantified, monitored, measured, and the data can be sliced and diced any number of ways, letting you constantly test, tighten and improve your outreach and customer contact far above and beyond what used to be possible.

Prospecting

For those folks who’ve never heard of you, imagine their surprise when they hear from you not once, not twice, but weekly for a couple of months, each time refining and improving the relevance of the message until curiosity gets the better of them and they open and read your mail – score! Cost? No more than a phone call with a bad script, and more effective then you can imagine. According to Marketing Sherpa, 85% of CEOs have an expectation that e-mail will increase lead conversion/sales revenue, when only 65% of them put those goals as a high priority. In nearly every category, and there were 10 in total, e-mail beat expectation of CEO’s in terms of meeting business goals for which it was used. I can’t think of any other medium that can boast that kind of success rate and still stay under the radar!

Used thoughtfully, correctly, and politely, e-mail can carry the day for marketers, both b-to-b and consumer, at a lower cost per customer acquisition than almost anything else other than social media, and is more accountable and more directed that even the most powerful platform out there. Let’s hope the mis-users have moved on to something else and e-mail can return to business of business as we move forward in the new economy. Now, if we could just find a better launch pad than Outlook . . .

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September 11, 2014
Digital Marketing is Direct Marketing in Electronic Clothing . . .

With some prodding from Eric Mohr (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ebmdirectmarketingservicesllc )I gave some thought to the reputation of Direct Marketing in the digital age. I read and absorb hundreds of electronic messages every day in the marketing sphere, everything from blog posts to group discussion posts, to e-mails promoting upcoming webinars on marketing topics touting digital marketing techniques, ad nauseum . . .

What that gives me, besides a huge headache from message overload, is a good scan overview of what’s up in the marketing space, who’s promoting what and what techniques marketers and consultants are using to help their clients succeed (usually). After all that reading, there was something in the back of my mind that bothered and irritated me about most of the promotions and webinar topics – and it finally dawned on me that they looked eerily similar to the promotions and conference topics I was seeing two decades ago pertaining to direct marketing techniques!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand that the new digital marketing sphere isn’t a straight rehash of direct marketing – there are many differences in delivery, technology and targeting operations. What bothered me is the approach that new marketers took, the tone if you will, of the communications, which tends toward the downward focused and toward a certain smug word choice that hit me as an experienced marketer from a bad direction. The underlying meta-text in many of these messages tends toward something like “Gee, you haven’t figured out how to use e-mail effectively? We’ve known about it for a long time, here’s what we ‘experienced’ digital marketers have learned in the last two years”.

Guess what, digital marketers, direct marketers who are experienced and have applied their experiences to the use of e-mail, video marketing, targeting and social media, have had it figured out for nearly half a century! There still needs to be a good headline(read: Subject line), the offer has to be compelling to drive response (read:traffic), you can still break up the copy sentence length to help improve readability (read: chunking), you still need to send the message to the ‘right’ people on the ‘right’ list (read: geo-tracking for local promotion, keywords and webtracking for global campaigns), and most importantly, you still have to have good data, and use it appropriately, to reach out to the audience, engage their attention, and prompt a response (read: drive click-thru).

Clearly, good DM skills, like copy writing, offer formulation, list selection and data mining still have a place in the success of digital marketing, regardless of what the new label for them is. So, why have the large consumer companies tended to gravitate toward the “new digital marketing” agencies to set up e-mail campaigns, social media programs and the like, if those skills reside in abundance at their usual DM agency? Because, like everyone else, hanging the “modern” or “digital” moniker on something makes it the new, shiny, spiffy cutting-edge ‘thing’, that everybody feels is the magic bullet that will solve their marketing problems. What the digital folks have going for them is the carefully crafted perception that digital marketing is “cheaper” or even “free” compared to all that paper, printing, postage, nixies, BRE accounts, etc., and in some respects that’s true. But I don’t know anyone who selects a major agency or marketing firm based on whether they use the cheapest methods. They select them based on creativity, skills, and innovation of approach, passion and inspired thinking. So how did the less experienced (by their own admission and by historical fact) agencies end up capturing this business that the old, experienced guys are perfectly well suited to capture?

Two reasons, I think.

1) The old guys failed to adapt, like saber-toothed cats. When digital was developing, these more experienced marketers often doubled down on their traditional skills, beefed up their relationships with traditional clients and grew them, rather than branch out and create digital divisions or think tanks to investigate and develop talent and expertise in those areas.

2) The younger guys were deeply steeped in computer skills and culture, and saw the opportunities computers represented based on a comfort with the new paradigm in a very hands-on way. It’s a short step from sending e-mail instead of printing and mailing business letters to bulk e-mail and social media promotion, when you already spend a majority of time behind a terminal out of knowledge and curiosity. If a computer is your greatest tool in life, everything starts to look like a good digital adaptation.

The downside is, much like the shift in the publishing world from printed books and magazines (done by professionals) to desktop publishing in the late 80s early 90s – having the tools doesn’t impart the underlying skills and abilities to make the final product effective. Many a butt-ugly company newsletter was produced by unskilled administrative help, involving many unusual fonts, bad design, poor use of things like bold and italics, bad rules and underlining, and a host of ills that the pros learned to avoid in their formal training. But they could do it cheaper, get it out in ‘good enough’ form and move on to something else.

Same is true here – the digital guys understand the delivery mechanisms and constraints being used today much better, avoiding spam filters, enhanced delivery, subject lines that conform and pass through firewalls, embedded imagery and the like – but that doesn’t make them copywriters, or graphic designers, or impart understanding of consumer purchasing behavior or emotional engagement – ever talked to a computer geek at a party – not the height of emotional involvement in the conversation, was it?

We’ve got the tools on the digital side that traditional direct marketing could only dream of even ten years ago – the ability to track audiences down to the individual level based on behavior, not just transactional history – a huge boon to experienced marketers! Now if we can just get the two camps together, to use those tools effectively based on years of tried and true techniques of engagement, not just delivery, marketing can rise to the level of a pure science and really drive revenue and loyalty like never before – something to put on your Christmas list for this year, gang . . .

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September 5, 2014
More Isn’t Always Better . . .

How many of you receive more than 200 e-mail messages per day? How many of you receive more than 50 text messages per day? How many of you read more than 200 entries on social media platforms per day? Add to that radio and TV messages, Internet pop-ups, banner ads, product packages, direct mail promotions and other “input” and you have a perfect recipe for sensory overload. Studies have shown that while most people think they can multi-task well, nearly all of them showed reduced focus and performance standards on tests that required them to concentrate on as many as three tasks at once. The tasks got completed eventually, but not always with the level of quality required, and in approximately the same amount of elapsed time as would have passed if they had done each task individually in serial fashion. So where’s the gain?

With that many messages coming into our consciousness, none of them receive the attention they deserve, to the point where we actually spend as much energy prioritizing them as we do comprehending them and acting upon them.

Too many choices, too much information, not enough filtering or discrimination between input sources leads to inaction, dilutes the impact of each message, and slows progress and productivity. As marketers, we need to constantly be aware of the environment in which our customers and prospects function. Bombarding them with messages doesn’t necessarily lead to action, but does lead to saturation, and that saturation point is far more quickly reached today than it was even two years ago.

That’s actually good news for intelligent marketers. It means that spending more money on higher insertion frequency, broader media buys, longer ad schedules, and higher print and circulation runs won’t get the desired results, and that knowledge allows us to focus on greater message positioning, greater relevance, tighter targeting, higher impact, and better value in our communications. Less is more, and better is less.

Make it perfect, make it relevant, make it resonate, make it accessible on many platforms and through many channels to allow for preference, but don’t bombard or carpet-bomb in order to achieve penetration – the shields are up and it won’t work!

Spend the savings in increased production value, higher creativity, better thought processes, higher levels of innovation, originality and transparency – it will pay off ten-fold in the long run.

If you think this makes sense, or would like more information on this topic or others, Pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” – a great addition to your professional library.

August 27, 2014
Engaging Customers – Modern Thought on Reaching the Current Consumer

Recent economic indicators describe a consumer climate that is different than virtually any in recent history, and consumer product and service businesses are having a tough time closing sales and encouraging sales traffic, both brick-and-mortar and online. This enforced stinginess on the part of consumers is wide-spread but not universal. Some products fly off the shelves and some companies are wildly profitable, while the majority seem to be pushing a rock uphill.

Consumers are caught in a vicious cycle economically, have been since 2008. Profit is down on a per unit basis, write-downs and charge offs notwithstanding. Employment is down from knee-jerk reactive cost-cutting measures trying to stem the tide of red ink, the unemployed numbering in the many hundreds of thousands, and the underemployed doubling that. Equities in general have been stumbling along the bottom of the trough for the last two years, with a 3% growth number putting them back at break-even since before the crash. Spending is down, savings are flat, foreclosures are restarting their relentless march, debt is way too high, both consumer and governmental, and consumers are cautiously nervous.

For retailers, this is the perfect storm of nightmares. Consumers are too scared to make those bigger purchases due to income uncertainty. Retailers won’t or can’t hire due to low margin, and can’t add jobs, reducing the unemployment numbers. Investors get lousy returns, and therefore can’t invest in riskier companies, so they can’t expand and add jobs. Consumers who have jobs are unsure they will keep them, but are doing the work of three and trying to keep their own head above water, cutting back on discretionary purchases. So, as a marketer, how do you break through the fear and engage consumers? In a word, “Trust”.

If you scan the list of most profitable or growing consumer product corporations*1, you’ll notice that they don’t have a common theme in terms of product offering, or price point or position in the marketplace, although they all tend to be number 1-4 in their category. The common thread among them won’t likely jump out at you from the list itself, but if you dig a little deeper, the theme becomes clear. These growing, smart, stable companies have been conservative in their growth plans, aggressive in defense and development of their brand, and firm believers in keeping their brand promise, leading to outstanding customer loyalty. They make products that people want and need no matter what their economic circumstances, and maintain loyalty through consistent quality assurance, product development speed and flexibility. In short, they give their customers what they want, and have done so long enough and consistently enough to have garnered long-term customer loyalty, and more importantly, trust.

1 List compiled by Seeking Alpha, copyright 2010

As marketers, we can’t often affect many of the attributes listed above that these firms have in common, but the few that we can, need to be the very best expression of the brand promise to establish that trust. We can’t affect QA directly, for instance, but we can certainly pitch the promotions to the correct consumer level and keep public perception on the right aspects of the product if QA is spotty or suspect. Product development is sometimes seen as Indian territory for the marketing department, but in these high-profit companies, our studies show that marketers are deeply involved in not only accumulating consumer data to feed product development, but provide assistance and expertise on consumer preferences, brand extension and alignment, and even assessing product features and elements, to be sure they meet consumer preference and demand. Perhaps this characteristic above all others may be the critical element in the continuing romance between these companies and their customers. In almost every case, companies that get the marketing staff involved early in the development process and have a defined process for creating, developing and launching new products are more nimble, responsive and profitable than those who simply launch and market products after the fact.

That’s great for companies that create a range of new products regularly or update their flagship product routinely. But what about some of those firms who have been riding the same product year after year? How do they engage their customers and engender such loyalty to the brand?

Many established and older brands that have let research and development languish, either through lack of resources or short-sighted thinking, find that they need to create or establish a new angle, a new application, a new extension of the existing product to create interest from new customers and renew interest from existing customers. Clorox might be an example of this, especially 10-15 years ago. Household bleach is a staple, has few innovations or moving parts, and aside from updating the package, and not much of that, it is basically unchanged since the 50s. Recently, they have innovated within the category, created new applications for the product and formed partnerships with other products to bundle or reinforce their products. Adding their product to other cleaning products gets the brand into households that might not welcome them otherwise, and sets or reinforces the expectation that bleach is an enhancer of cleanliness. Making the product “portable” in the form of a stain removing stick was a recent innovation that was launched in response to consumers’ increased mobility and need for instant gratification. Yet despite it’s age, Clorox continues to move off the shelves in predictable and growing fashion and avoid becoming a commodity, despite strong shots from competitors, generic versions manufactured overseas, and reduced profitability from price increases on raw materials and distribution challenges. A marketing team that can come up with a new angle for a 50+ year old product is a strong, flexible one indeed. What has kept them going is strong customer loyalty, and trust in the quality and integrity of the product to perform as advertised day in and day out over many years.

But engaging customers doesn’t always mean product innovation, or even marketing innovation. Sometimes it has more to do with taking the appropriate approach based on customer’s expectations.

One of the companies on this list, Harley Davidson, is a champion at delivering it’s message in the most appropriate medium for it’s audience’s digestion. But that hasn’t kept them from being innovative in order to engage the customer. Over a century old, Harley’s target customer is also getting older, and that demographic is populated by notoriously slow adopters of new technology. Harley does much of it’s marketing through the dealer channel and through event and sponsorship presence.

They host rallies, rides, and other gatherings of product users through an extensive network of dealers and repair facilities coast-to-coast, and know their customer well. They have a huge array of licensed products and aggressively protect their brand in each of these arrangements, selecting only the highest quality materials, workmanship and designs to put their name on. This is one of the most traditional marketing models out there, and it still works very well. You would not expect them to have a huge online presence or use internet resources extensively to reach a 50+ age audience. Yet they have taken advantage of the social media phenomenon to help spread their message via word of mouth among their vast network of customers, creating Twitter accounts, a strong presence on Facebook with nearly 2 million friends. Other efforts include each dealer’s own FB page and own website, all of which have access to the manufacturer’s site, news, product info, dealer locator and more, plus license holder sites. All of this is used to promote new products, showcase product innovation, and get customer feedback, monitoring the electronic conversation and reacting quickly to customer input, engendering even greater loyalty and trust. It’s the message, not the medium that counts.

Engaging customers also has to do with relevance. Being relevant to your customers may seem like everyone’s goal, and indeed it might be, but these profitable companies seem to have it innately present in their corporate DNA. These companies constantly seek ways to enrich their customers’ lives, and find new ways to be part of them. Coach, Inc., might be a good example of this. The luxury brand has innovated a number of approaches to meeting the needs of its niche market’s need for upscale handbags and accessories, leveraging their brand strength over a series of related products. If you purchase a Coach bag, with its famous lifetime warrantee, and it’s likely you’ll be informed about other Coach accessories, and often buy them, with the assurance that each product, either direct manufacture or licensed, will be made with the same level of care and quality, and at the same price point in the market. If you are a Coach-level consumer, you make it your business to show it, by buying the branded products that prove it. This elite, exclusive approach works very well for them, as it ramps up the relevance in their customer’s lives.

As marketers, we have a huge volume of information and research data available to us regarding consumer trends, preferences, and behavior. It is up to us to responsibly use this data on OUR customers, to craft innovative, trustworthy, relevant outreach messaging to engage our customers to create brand trust, and drive sales and profits to where they need to be. Most of that trust and relevancy comes from the correct and appropriate use of that data to craft messaging that resonates with the target consumer. Transparency, honesty, relevance and trustworthiness are key to achieving these goals, and you can see the results of such activity reflected in the marketplace and the bottom line.

This article can be downloaded in PDF form as a white paper.

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August 22, 2014
Selling Is Not About Relationships
Reposted courtesy of HBR, copyright 2011

Matthew Dixon is Managing Director of the Corporate Executive Board’s Sales and Service Practice. Brent Adamson is Senior Director of the Sales Executive Council, a division of the Sales and Service Practice. Their new book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, is forthcoming November 10, 2011 from Portfolio/Penguin.

This post, the first of a four-part series, is also part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line.

Ask any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you’ll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It’s a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organization has a few stellar performers. Who are these people? How can we bottle their magic?

To understand what sets apart this special group of sales reps, the Sales Executive Council launched a global study of sales rep productivity three years ago involving more than 6,000 reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries.

We now have an answer, which we’ve captured in the following three insights:

1. Every sales professional falls into one of five distinct profiles.

Quantitatively speaking, just about every B2B sales rep in the world is one of the following types, characterized by a specific set of skills and behaviors that defines the rep’s primary mode of interacting with customers:
- Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers’ every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.
- Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team.
- Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, the rule-breaking cowboys of the sales force who do things their way or not at all.
- Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the customers’ standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up, ensuring that service issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly.
- Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers’ business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.
2. Challengers dramatically outperform the other profiles, particularly Relationship Builders.

When we look at average reps, we find a fairly even distribution across all five of these profiles. But while there may be five ways to be average, there’s only one way to be a star. We found that Challenger reps dominate the high-performer population, making up close to 40% of star reps in our study.

What makes the Challenger approach different?

The data tell us that these reps are defined by three key capabilities:
- Challengers teach their customers. They focus the sales conversation not on features and benefits but on insight, bringing a unique (and typically provocative) perspective on the customer’s business. They come to the table with new ideas for their customers that can make money or save money — often opportunities the customer hadn’t realized even existed.
- Challengers tailor their sales message to the customer They have a finely tuned sense of individual customer objectives and value drivers and use this knowledge to effectively position their sales pitch to different types of customer stakeholders within the organization.
- Challengers take control of the sale. While not aggressive, they are certainly assertive. They are comfortable with tension and are unlikely to acquiesce to every customer demand. When necessary, they can press customers a bit — not just in terms of their thinking but around things like price.
We’ll discuss each of these capabilities in more depth in our upcoming posts, but just as surprising as it is that Challengers win, it’s almost more eye-opening who loses. In our study, Relationship Builders come in dead last, accounting for only 7% of all high performers.

Why is this? It’s certainly not because relationships no longer matter in B2B sales–that would be a naïve conclusion. Rather, what the data tell us is that it is the nature of the relationships that matter. Challengers win by pushing customers to think differently, using insight to create constructive tension in the sale. Relationship Builders, on the other hand, focus on relieving tension by giving in to the customer’s every demand. Where Challengers push customers outside their comfort zone, Relationship Builders are focused on being accepted into it. They focus on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likable and generous with their time. The Relationship Builder adopts a service mentality. While the Challenger is focused on customer value, the Relationship Builder is more concerned with convenience. At the end of the day, a conversation with a Relationship Builder is probably professional, even enjoyable, but it isn’t as effective because it doesn’t ultimately help customers make progress against their goals.

This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organizations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win.

Here’s how one of our members in the hospitality industry put it when he saw these results: “You know, this is really hard to look at. For the past 10 years, it’s been our explicit strategy to hire effective Relationship Builders. After all, we’re in the hospitality business. And, for a while, that approach worked well. But ever since the economy crashed, my Relationship Builders are completely lost. They can’t sell a thing. And as I look at this, now I know why.”

3. Challengers dominate the world of complex “solution-selling”

Given the first two findings, it might be reasonable to conclude that Challengers are the down-economy reps and that when things return to normal, Relationship Builders will once again prevail. But our data suggest that this is wishful thinking.

When we cut the data by complexity of sale — that is, separating out transactional, product-selling reps from complex, solution-selling reps — we find that Challengers absolutely dominate as selling gets more complex. Fully 54% of all star reps in a solution-selling environment are Challengers. At the same time, Relationship Builders fall off the map almost entirely, representing only 4% of high-performing reps in complex environments.

Put differently, Challengers win because they’ve mastered the complex sale, not because they’ve mastered a complex economy. Your very best sales reps — the ones who carried you through the downturn — aren’t just the top performers of today but the top performers of tomorrow, as they are far better able to drive sales and deliver customer value in any kind of economic environment. For any company on a journey from selling products to selling solutions — which is a migration that more than 75% of the companies I work with say they are pursuing — the Challenger selling approach represents a dramatically improved recipe for driving top-line growth.

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July 31, 2014
Are Accuracy and Grammar Important in The Era of Social Media?

OK, I’ve about had it with poor language skills being forgiven under the pretext that “as long as you can read it, a few mistakes are OK” on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

If Social Media platforms are ever to achieve true legitimacy as a business communications and marketing tool, we have to learn to respect our audience, respect the medium, and respect the message, just as we would any other channel. Would you leave typos and bad grammar in your direct mail, or in a print ad? Production designers, copy writers, proofreaders spend hours poring over copy to ensure accuracy and eliminate errors, and just because it’s presented electronically, it’s OK to have mistakes published for the public to view? I don’t get it, can someone explain to me why this is so?

If these errors, omissions and poor usages are a reflection of the use of language in this country, maybe we should cast a critical eye on the elementary education system. If our kids are being taught that this is the way to speak and write English, then some body’s asleep at the switch and should be replaced. If we as a society condone such poor talent, then we are to blame as well – silence is tacit approval, and as such, saying nothing out of some misplaced sense of decorum is doing us all a disservice.

There are those especially in the previous generation to mine, who value their language, and prize it’s correct usage and accurate representation. When you read a book or magazine or newspaper and come across a mistake or a typo, doesn’t it downgrade your opinion of the whole publication, reducing it’s credibility, and altering your perception of the accuracy of the information being presented? If they missed the basics, how accurate can their statements or research be?

I wasn’t an English major in college, not even liberal arts (whatever that means), but I’ve had my homework and essays and reports and papers corrected by a professional publication editor according to Chicago style manual since I was eight, and after swimming in red ink for years, finally realized the importance of accuracy and correctness in the use of our common language. After a while, the ink started to recede and become more rare, and now with that training firmly embedded, I could focus on the message and how to craft it effectively, and not on the mechanics of producing the work.

If everyone had this level of training (and if our teachers were willing and able focus on it, rather than being glorified babysitters and disciplinarians trying to escape each day with their skins intact, we might manage it), then such things as poor word choice (their vs there), bad grammar (where are you at), lousy spelling and other grammatical gaffs wouldn’t be present or tolerated, no matter who the poster is – it’s up to society to set the acceptable standard for word usage and language skills.

It’s time to raise the stakes, lower the tolerance levels of bad language use, and revive the love of language that is the hallmark of great civilizations throughout history. The US is already working on becoming a second world nation, economically, educationally, in the areas of business and scientific innovation – let’s not add language skills to that list as well.

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July 20, 2014
Ten Tips & Truths For Marketers

For those of you who are marketers, or if you’re a business owner or solo practitioner who acts in a marketing capacity (and who doesn’t), here’s a few things I’ve picked up over the years – they don’t have anything to do with social media, channel support, SEO or anything to do with a particular media.

10) If you’ve worked hard to evoke an emotional response to your product in an ad or direct mail piece, for goodness sake give people a way to actually buy it! Make the response mechanism obvious, it avoids delay in responding.

9) Put your address and phone number on your website, in an obvious place – not everybody trusts everything they see on the internet, and sometimes you just want to send somebody something or talk to an actual person. Why make me work at it?

8) ASK for the order. Don’t assume that the audience will understand what you want them to do, no matter how obvious you think it is.

7) Take the offer seriously in your ads and direct marketing communications – the audience will, and they will hold your feet to the fire for every possible interpretation you can imagine. The more transparent and clear you make the offer, the less confusion you’ll receive from the audience, and confused audiences tend not to buy things.

6) Treat your house list like the gold that it is – you’ll never find a more receptive set of eyes and ears for your message than someone who is already predisposed to hear it. Respect the power it represents, and the people behind it.

5) You can never know too much about the people you’re trying to reach – but you can interpret data incorrectly. Trust but verify, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, and vet your data with real people and anecdotes – you’ll be glad you did.

4) Make your copy simple enough that your 80-year-old grandmother can understand it. People’s attention spans are increasingly short, and they don’t have time to analyze your obtuse copy to extract your message.

3) Sales letters should be long enough to compellingly tell the story, and not a word longer.

2) Lists, design, artifice and devices don’t sell products and services, feelings do. Evoke an emotional response in your audience and you’ll move the needle.

1) A target audience never bought anything – PEOPLE buy goods and services – whether it’s online, through the mail, over the phone or from a billboard. Reach out in an accessible, human way, meet a need or solve a problem, and the sales will follow.

Seems like basic common sense, but ignore such simplicity at your own peril. You’d be amazed how many top flight professionals can’t apply these basic tenets to their everyday work and score a good number.

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July 18, 2014
Fundamentals Can Save Your Advertising Program

As a consultant, I read – a lot – every day, about different marketing approaches, different angles and aspects of marketing, from social media trends to mobile, to automated e-mail, to article marketing, and a huge variety of other things that bombard my in-box every day, both electronically and in the snail mail and online. With all that reading and absorbing comes some inherent sense of how current corporate professionals in the marketing field are going about their work, what they focus on, what they feel is important, what’s hot and what’s out of fashion.

In all that absorption, I get to analyze how those marketers work, and how effective their efforts are. I also get called upon to critique their work from time to time, and let them know how a “knowledgeable” audience might view their performances. I was judging a series of ads the other day for a survey of magazine ads and their effectiveness, and I was amazed at how many of the B2B ads didn’t incorporate even the most fundamental, basic elements that should be in all advertising. Top professionals at high-priced agencies were creating ads read by, and hopefully responded to, by other professionals – and there were lousy headlines that were far from compelling if there was one at all, lists of product features with no associated benefits, copy that was difficult to decipher, let alone read and be persuaded by, and a host of other ills that most college-trained marketers have a good handle on by year two. I was amazed and astounded that large, profitable companies with marketing departments staffed with educated, qualified professionals were paying for this level of performance from their agencies, or worse, producing this kind of product themselves!

Sure, it’s easy to rely on others to cover the basics, and you hope that the high-paid pros know better and they shouldn’t need much supervision. And it’s easier still to simply look at last year’s or last week’s effort and say, “yeah, good enough, run that one again” and perpetuate the poor construction, bad design, lousy and ineffective headlines, poorly-written copy that is neither persuasive or compelling. If it wasn’t, we’d be out of business. But the truth is, if these pros had simply focused on the fundamentals, their work would improve in both effectiveness and creativity.

1) Get me involved. Write a real headline, one that compels me to read further, that poses a problem a challenge, asks a question, declares a position or benefit.

2) Write and design it so even I can read it. Real type fonts, in a decent size, in a contrasting color, either in columns, wrapped around an image, bannered at the top or bottom, somewhere that my eye can track it and make sense of it. Make it compelling, readable, persuasive, tell me how it will make my life easier, faster, better, lighten my workload, solve a problem, keep me sane, let me sleep at night, beef up my paycheck, cut my expenses. Tell me the benefits of the product or service, not just what it includes or is comprised of. Tell me something to make me feel I “need” what you’re selling, hopefully leading me to . . .

3) Include a call to action I can respond to. I get through the headline, it drives me to read the copy to learn more, it ends, and . . . nothing! Give me a phone number, a specific web address, an e-mail or physical address, an offer of some kind, a place to go to learn more, see the product, make a purchase, someone to call to order one, something!

4) Lay it all out so it naturally drives me to that offer. Americans read left to right, to to bottom, its deeply ingrained in our psyche to do so, so that we may all absorb information in uniform fashion. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken, start at the top, (it’s called a headline for a reason) and work your way down. Leave the collages for grade school, keep the fancy special effects for the YouTube video – just design it in a way that is pleasing to the eye and supports the other elements.

5) Make the images and the text support each other and work TOGETHER to get your point across. I can’t tell you how many ads I reviewed that contained an image that had virtually no bearing on what was being sold or discussed. It was either a product shot with no identification or name, no branding, or known function or relevance to the headline or offer, or a shot of some landscape or character that had no real bearing on what was being discussed. You’ve spent a lot of time and money finding, modifying or creating that image, make it work to your advantage to help sell the concept or idea you’re conveying.

Just following these five guidelines will improve your publication and print advertising immeasurably, and put you ahead of 70% of the highly paid agency professionals that crank out B2B ads on their lunch hour . . . you might even make a sale!

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July 17, 2014
Tradeshow Promotion Requires Strong Planning

Recently we’ve been approached by several tradeshow organizers to review, upgrade, or revamp their marketing efforts, for a variety of reasons. With all the visibility and power perceived by marketers who use social media, often tradeshows get put on a back burner. Often there are misconceptions about the cost, value and ROI of exhibiting in a tradeshow, and those impressions are what the organizer is fighting when they try to attract new exhibitors, or build attendance. There are other aspects of working tradeshows into your marketing plan that are misunderstood or poorly perceived that present challenges to the organizers.

We’ve been working with exhibitors, and organizers, to eradicate some of these misconceptions, and to maximize the value of the tradeshow marketing channel as a viable means of penetrating a new market, launching a new product, or raising awareness of a new application to a new vertical.

When we work with organizers, its often to open up the shows to include new markets, to add new exhibitors and expand the show, or shift it’s focus. This involves building a strong marketing platform, and a focused sales effort, working in tandem, to approach new exhibitors with a fresh angle or a new spin to show them the value of the show to their sales efforts. Creating a solid prospectus that tells the story accurately and gives the exhibitor a feeling of confidence that the organizer speaks their language, that he understands their market, and that they are competent to make their experience a good, profitable one, is one of the first steps. As always, there’s a lot of research involved in creating that element, to gather data on the buying audience, demographics of the attendees, the market as a whole. Once that trust is established, then it’s a matter of making contact with the correct individual to work through their issues, concerns and needs to prove to them that the organizer will be with them every step of the way.

When we work with exhibitors, it’s usually to help the exhibiting company break into a new vertical market and to make an impact, to raise awareness of their firm within the industry at large. In those cases, its a matter of getting the attention of the audience, and even of the other exhibitors, be they partners or competitors. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of buying a sizable piece of real estate and designing a flashy display. We’ve worked with some companies where it was appropriate to do exactly the opposite – purchase the minimum size space, install a low-key display, but participate heavily in other parts of the overall marketing opportunity, like sponsorships of events, banners in the halls, kiosks, hospitality suites, press conferences and publication ads in directories, maps and schedules. These kinds of activities require lower levels of human resources, help present a unified and ubiquitous-appearing presence, while not spending on expensive floor space and having to furnish it with a large staff and display.

No matter who we’re working with, it all starts with research and planning to maximize the opportunity presented by the show. Solid planning and a knowledge of the audience can make even a marginal show a resounding success, generating revenue, growth and partnership opportunities, and helping markets expand and driving commerce. If you work in the tradeshow space, let me know what challenges you’re facing – we’d love to hear from you.

July 15, 2014