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Tag: revenue

  • Engagement Is Good, Revenue Is Better

    Engagement Is Good, Revenue Is Better

    There is a lot of buzz among marketers about fostering customer engagement, building engagement with apps and websites, creating communities with blogs and social selling. It all sounds great on paper, we should all work together, share your purchases socially, everybody knows everything you do, everyone’s on your side, we’re all a village, cumbaya . . . But when you’re standing in the aisle at Wal-Mart deciding what frozen dinner brand or dog food to buy, I don’t feel that my level of engagement with Purina’s website is the deciding factor. Marketing is about raising awareness in a positive way to influence and drive SALES. I can be as engaged as can be with a brand, but if a similar product is in front of me, and they are largely the same, engagement doesn’t trump quality, availability and price, and the sale will go to the one who fits those three criteria the closest. Even with B2B sales, I’ve been “engaged” with a number of websites and businesses prospecting my business via e-mail and other devices, but haven’t actually bought anything from any of them – I’d score really high on their “engagement scale” algorithm, but they haven’t made a dime off of me, and may never do so.

     

    Brand engagement is a long-term play. It needs to be tied to other awareness vehicles, timed promotions, backup media, and ongoing evolution of product benefit awareness in order to really be effective at driving sales. This is not a new idea, but it’s one which has risen to prominence recently along with the ubiquity of social media platforms, which provide the ability for person-to-person communication in a way heretofore not possible on the current scale. I can now tell thousands of people what I’m doing, what I’m interested in, what I’m buying, what I’m eating, cooking, enjoying, drinking, and more on a moment’s notice in real time. That means that if I’m sharing it with others, it’s boosting their awareness as well as my own for a particular product, service or item. That kind of organic, exponential awareness spread at that speed was unheard of just 15 years ago. Epidemiologists are familiar with the concept, but marketers only recently began to apply it to their efforts – indeed the term “going viral” is borrowed from the disease spread specialists, as information, or awareness, can spread a lightning speed unseen from the outside, like a virus.

     

    Just because I’m aware of a product or service that I’ve engaged with it on the Internet, does not mean that when the time comes I’m actually going to make a purchase. It may increase the odds some, but as we learned with the recent Powerball drawing, odds need to be changed significantly with a supreme effort in order to really affect the outcome. Social media engagement or website engagement is like buying 100 lottery tickets instead of one. It seems like you’ve boosted your chances of winning by 100 fold, but in reality, those other 99 tickets didn’t even move the needle.

     

    By all means, do A/B testing, make adjustments, formulate campaigns that include a mechanism for increasing engagement, but depending upon it to drive significant revenue could be a mistake. The basics of building ongoing awareness through media your audience utilizes, timing your efforts to coincide with that target’s needs or life-stage position, matching your demographics and psychographics and messaging to that of the prospective customer, are still the linchpins of successful marketing efforts, and enhancements and refinements to these, along with some boosts in awareness through effective promotion of specialty offers, benefit driven messaging, and creative imagery, will drive revenue upward on a consistent basis as the brand evolves and the audience grows. If you’ve got all those bases covered effectively, engagement is a nice to have, the icing on the cake, and a good set up for the upsell and cross sell to that customer base, due to the added time allowed for an opportunity to develop.

     

    Unless I miss my guess, the folks dwelling on engagement (which is notoriously hard to measure with any accuracy) don’t have all the basics in place and need a buzz word and a crutch to help them explain why things on the sales side aren’t moving as far or as fast as expected.

     

    Dwell on the basics of marketing, make sure all the right pieces are in place and working together efficiently, and keeping the pipeline full, then worry about engagement.

  • And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor . . .

    And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor . . .

    Are you really getting as much value from your sponsorship activity as you were lead to believe when you entered into the agreement? Have you ever tried to measure the gains, results, or revenue generated from a sponsorship opportunity?

    It’s tough, isn’t it? It’s difficult because there were no metrics or measurement tools built into the sponsorship, and likely no real activation point with which to leverage the value of that sponsorship into more sales opportunities. Sounds like gobbledegook, but there’s a fundamental truth buried in all that jargon: You can’t elicit or assess value if you don’t have a way to measure the return, and you can’t take advantage of visibility unless you find a way to make it turn into action by the viewer.

    Let’s take the activation portion first.

    Creating activation for a sponsorship, be it a meeting, a sporting event, a team, a radio program or other media opportunity is not easy, and it’s often not just a one-step process. Companies who’ve had success with sponsorship have found ways to really turn that awareness generated by this type of activity into action on the part of the viewer.

    Modern technology can help. The QR code is one way, the photo submission contest is another, with cell phone cameras being nearly ubiquitous in the US. The idea is to give event attendees or viewers a reason not only to interact with your brand, but to extend that interaction beyond the context within which it started to outside the venue, to incorporate it into their daily activities. Technology helps you give viewers a channel through which to interact with the brand that is new and fun and engaging, and if you do it correctly, they will become evangelists for your brand and pass their experience along to the others in their personal network, extending your reach even further.

    Now with modern technology, viewers have a method to engage, but you still have to provide a motive. They’ve got to WANT to interact with your brand, hopefully in a positive way. Motivating emotions for sponsorships tend to be the need for individuality (only people who attended in person get this shirt), aspiration to be an early adopter (be the first on your block to have one), greed (something for nothing), and the need for attention (winner gets his picture on our product box) these can take many forms in terms of the offer and the audience.

    Clearly, the brand/venue/activity/audience match-up is critical to making the most of your sponsorship, always has been, and technology hasn’t changed that much. Making smart selections based on your brand character, and your goals for the sponsorship are still critical exercises. But the need to engage, not just raise visibility for a short time, is higher than ever as message clutter has risen and attention spans have shortened.

    Now, on to measurement. Not coincidentally, engagement and measurement go hand in hand. The more actively engaged your audience is with your sponsorship activity, the more easily measured it is. Engagement involves action, and actions can be recorded, measured and assessed. If you put up a banner in a sporting arena as part of a sponsorship, that doesn’t inspire much engagement. But if you put that banner at eye-level in front of the entrance to a famous venue gate, and ask people to take a picture in front of the gate and send them in to your website for a prize, now you have engagement. The more photos you receive, and the wackier they are, the higher the engagement and the more value you get from the sponsorship.

    More sophisticated measurements can be taken if you have the need and the use for the data. There is tracking technology, built into ticket stubs, bracelets, and the like that can track attendee movement and dwell within a venue passively, over time. The readouts in aggregate can show you roughly how much exposure your physical representations got that day or that week, and give you a target number to benchmark against for future events in that venue. Connect the two methods, and you set up a sort of Where’s Waldo scenario that can lead to an avalanche of engagement, at least within the venue, for more bang for your buck.

    However you choose to do it, the basics are the same: Give them a reason and a way to interact with your brand in a positive way, and then measure the activity and benchmark it against the cost and the value of the sponsorship to assess ROI and renewal decisions. With a little extra effort, you can reap huge benefits from your sponsorship opportunity.

  • Selling Is Not About Relationships

    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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