Everybody Wants Change, Nobody Wants TO Change

Change Comes From Challenge In the words of Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, “Change is good…you go first!” For most of us, this resonates. We all want to see it, but many fewer want to do it!

In Sales & Marketing, the impact of this reality is having devastating effects as their messages fail to compel prospects to break from status quo.

Spoiler Alert: Presenting benefits does not qualify as a compelling reason to break from status quo.

The Problem…

In a recent survey from just a few years ago, CEB researched the commercial impact of the rep’s message with senior executives and decision makers from a variety of industries that regularly interact with sales representatives.

Astonishingly, the results showed that 86% of the time, the rep’s message had no commercial impact whatsoever. This meant that only 14% of the time, the rep communicated their message in a way that suggested a reason for change.

Executives and Decision Makers from this survey commented that the reps they deal with believe their biggest enemy is their competition when in actuality, their biggest competition is what prospects are currently doing.

Tim Riesterer from Corporate Visions describes it by saying, “You walk in and throw up all over me about your products and services, but I’m not ready to hear about that yet. Your trying to convince me of ‘why you’ and I’m asking myself, ‘why change at all’?”

It Happens All the Time…

Some time ago, I was working with a rep that had called in to report on his progress after meeting with an important prospect. Our coaching in the previous week stressed the importance of making the case for change with the prospect. His style as a relationship builder was to encourage prospects to buy based on benefits and opportunities, but this was failing to yield meaningful results.

The minute I answered the phone and heard his voice, I knew that he had not succeeded. He proceeded to describe how “deeply entrenched in status quo” this prospect was, and therefore how impossible it would be to get him to change.

“Bringing about change is difficult,” I said. “Tell me what you said that specifically suggested there was a detriment to his business because of a circumstance or condition he previously didn’t understand or anticipate until talking to you?”

After 5 very uncomfortable seconds for the rep, he replied, “I wasn’t really focused on that. I was trying to get him to see how much better his business could be if he used our services.” Sound familiar?

There were a number of problems that needed to be corrected in his brief reply, but I pointed him to the fact that if the prospect had no idea how bad the problem was, he had no basis from which to evaluate “how much better his business could be.”

I also refocused him on the fact that his prospect was not alone in not wanting to change. He too, was failing to make a change that would bring him better results. I reminded him that it wasn’t this ‘opportunity to do better’ that initially caused him to engage my services. It was the imminent threat of him going deeper into performance counseling followed by separation of employment if he wasn’t willing to pursue a new way. He knew this was true and assured me he was serious about pursuing a new path.

UPDATE: To demonstrate his seriousness, the next day, he followed up with the same prospect, apologized for dancing around some things he wanted to share that concerned him about the path the prospect was on. The prospect gave him “5 minutes to make his case” over the phone.

That’s all he needed, so the rep took it, and showed the prospect how based on his current action, they were likely experiencing increased and unnecessary costs in an area that most companies don’t think to look. He gave the ranges for underperforming companies that experienced this, then directed the prospect to where he could find this data and validate for himself.

He then requested that if the prospect found his own company’s spend to be outside the acceptable range, to invite him back to make a more compelling case to the technology review board for a different way to eliminate the spend within 45 days. He received a call back that afternoon from the prospect confirming the findings [which were worse than they thought], and within 2 weeks, penned a 6-figure deal.

A Better Way…

You and I both know, not all stories like that have as happy of an ending. There are, however, three key points to doing this better and increasing your likelihood of success that apply equally to Sales AND Marketing.

Reframe Thinking. For any change to occur, the prospect must think differently about their current problem or situation. Often times they’re not even aware of a problem until you present them with one. The key to effective reframes is to focus on how they should think differently about their circumstance/condition. Many make the mistake of working on getting prospects to think differently about their product or solution. Focus them on their problem, not your solution.
Make a Rational Case. If you have successfully gotten your prospect to think about their circumstance, business, condition, etc. in a different way, you now must make a rational business case for why. Whether it be statistics, research, ROI calculator, or all of the above, it is critical you know the prospect’s economic drivers and make the intellectual business case for change. Identify in advance the specific outcomes they are seeking to achieve that are at risk.
Make an Emotional Case. The old adage suggests, people buy emotionally, but justify the purchase logically. The previous step gave them the logical reason to rationalize their purchase, now you must connect emotionally. This is the critical place for making sure that the story your telling is the prospect’s story. One effective way to do this is to share a recent example/story based on what you’ve learned from your prospect. When done well, I often times have the prospect finish my story with their own. In other words, they are giving me the punchline for how the story ends, because it just happened to them.

A Message for Marketers…

It is common for Marketers to dismiss this approach as there can be a real reticence to create too much negativity or concern in the Marketing. Following are two different visual examples of companies that aren’t afraid to go there, and as a result, are causing people to think differently about the problem their products/services solve.

Example 1: Ameriprise Financial

Example 2: TaylorMade Golf

In the Ameriprise example, they ask a simple question that terrifies many people – those that are nearing retirement…and those that weren’t thinking about it at all.

The TaylorMade example does a great job of showing how everybody, including themselves got it wrong when trying to solve the problem of more distance off the tee.

In Conclusion…

While there is certainly more to the process, the key for this article is to call attention to the often overlooked cause for reps failure to progress in the sales cycle.

If you don’t challenge the status quo and make a case for change, the prospect’s dollars will be spent later with the competitor that actually does make a case for change.

To prevent this, it is critical that you learn to bankrupt their status quo account. Doing so will bring about very different results in intentional, predictable and repeatable ways.

For more articles on similar topics, follow me on Twitter Follow @IntendedResults

#SMM: Stop Talking, Start Learning

The chorus to the Lifehouse song, “Nobody Listen,” describes many marketer’s approach to Content and Social Media Marketing these days…“Everybody talk, but nobody listen.”

The amount of content produced is staggering. According to Gary Vaynerchuk, New York Times best-selling author, he cites that there is more content produced in 48 hours than what has been produced from the beginning of time to 2003.

The strategy of just ‘being present’ in content and on social media has not worked, and will not work.

Change Your Social Media Strategy

If you are finding your engagement to be low in social channels with the content you are sharing, it’s time for a different approach.

As Marketers, we are all susceptible to becoming enamored with our own point of view, and as a result, we end up doing all the talking. When people don’t listen, we talk louder. In marketing, “talking louder” takes many forms, such as email blasts, Facebook posts, Tweets. This even shows up in our retargeting efforts.

These approaches are what I refer to as Bumper-Sticker Marketing. The premise of the ‘bumper-sticker marketer’ is that it is one way communication that shouts a point of view, but fails to engage others in meaningful ways, and certainly fails to persuade.

One of the common struggles I hear relative to producing content is lack of ideas for what content to produce next. If you find yourself struggling with what to talk about, you may not be as close to your customers as you think you are.

If that’s the case, time for a change in your social media strategy, which will benefit you in your content strategy as well.

Listen to Learn

Assuming you know where your customers are spending their time on Social Media, pay attention to what they are talking about. Listen for the key words and phrases they use to describe their problems, concerns, and struggles.

We are listening and learning so that we can speak their language, rather than trying to get them to understand our own language.

One strategy I use, that may be helpful to others is to do the following. Use your favorite social monitoring tool(s) to identify the keywords your customers use to search your competitors sites.

Additionally, I look at large, non-industry sites like Reddit or Mashable, then filter down to the category in my field/industry to see what people are searching for and talking about.

For example, if I filter by Internet and Telecom, I find the top trending words in their keyword cloud are ‘web2.0,’ ‘blog,’ and ‘social networking.’ (See below).

This 60-second process gave me three different topics from which I can produce content about that will be relevant to my audience. When content is relevant and valuable, your audience is more likely to engage. What’s more is I now know the specific words to build my SEO strategies around with HREF, H1 tags, etc.

Looking for keywords is one thing, but remember, we want to understand our customer’s concerns and speak their language. Therefore, I take the keywords of interest listed above and search conversations in Twitter and Facebook to try to ascertain what their intent is behind their searches.

In searching #web2.0 this morning, for example, I quickly learn that areas of interest to multiple groups is measurement, collaboration and applicability to SMB.

Take the time to listen and learn for a better content and social media strategy. As my mom used to say…”Talk less, listen more!”

Guilty of Bumper Sticker Marketing?

I was speaking with a CFO this week about his organization’s content marketing strategies and the role of social media, as his impressions of Social Media in marketing was that it has little to no business impact.

He cited some Gallup statistics from a recent Wall Street Journal article as proof points for his belief that it’s not all that it is cracked up to be:

94% use Social Media to connect with friends and family
62% say Social Media had no influence on their buying decisions
30% say Social Media had some influence on their buying decisions
Brands reached only 6.5% of their fans with Facebook posts in March

Are the numbers wrong? I don’t think so. At a glance, many might be quick to agree with this CFO, that Social Media is ineffective with regard to having direct business impact. Perhaps there is a different explanation for the numbers.

The Problem isn’t Social Media…

Simply looking at the first statistic cited above starts to hint at the problem when we consider why 94% of people [not consumers], use social media.

Both, Marketing and Sales have been guilty of looking at these huge pools of people in social arenas as prospects, and leading with their products and/or solutions in highly intrusive and interruptive ways. This problem isn’t limited just to Social Media.

Bumper Sticker Marketing

When we look at our content marketing strategy as a whole (inclusive of print, online, mobile, social, etc.), we have a specific ‘end’ in mind – drive a profitable customer action. But too often, we start with our own end in mind…“drive a profitable customer action”…rather than starting with your target audience’s end in mind.

I call this bumper sticker marketing. Similar to the picture above, we shout our own point of view, trying to call attention to ourselves, our products, solutions, etc., irrespective of what the end-user really wants or needs.

Furthermore, similar to bumper stickers, our marketing too often is a one way “push” message, that fails to truly engage with others. As a result, Marketers fall into the trap of heeding partial advice from content strategists, by delivering content more frequently and consistently. Frequency and consistency is the easy part.

The more difficult [but responsible] purpose of content marketing, according to Joe Pulizzi, is described as follows:

A few key words to pay attention to in his description are, relevant, valuable, and changing or enhancing…behavior.

Food for Thought…

When was the last time you read a bumper sticker and subsequently changed your behaviors or beliefs as a result of reading the sticker? For example, when you see the mini-van proclaiming, “My child is an Honor Student,” do you believe your child is inferior? Of course not. Similarly, do bumper-stickers change your:

Political affiliations or votes?
Religious beliefs?
Moral convictions?

Probably not. That said, how might this apply to your own marketing approach? Are you trying to change someone’s beliefs or behaviors through one-way marketing?

We ALL are susceptible to being a bumper sticker marketer, unless we are intentional in determining who we are bringing value to in our marketing. Change your aim to change your results.

For more articles on similar topics, feel free to follow me on Twitter Follow @IntendedResults

3 Minute Rule for Customer Insights

3-Second Rule for Customer Insight I am going to take a guess here that if you are reading this post, your reason falls into one of two groups. The first group believes that no meaningful customer insights can come within 3-minutes, and you are reading to confirm your belief. The second group is hoping against all odds that insights truly can be gleaned that quickly.

The 3 Minute Rule for Insights

When speaking with your current customers, ask them this simple question…

“What are you doing three minutes before using our product?”

The answers you receive may be quite different from what you expected. What I have found over the years is that this very question gives specific insights into the circumstances that customers find themselves in when preparing to use a product, service or solution. As I would continue to ask the question of different customers across a variety of industries, similar patterns began to emerge. Let me share a few examples.

Example 1: Computer Accessory Company

In working with one organization that made computer accessories, one of their products was a Presentation Remote. I conducted a number of in field interviews and focus groups, and one of the most common responses to the ‘3-minute’ question was that they were looking for their flash drive with the presentation and loading it onto the laptop, then ejecting the drive to replace with the dongle for the presentation remote.

The result not only led to a better understanding of how customers used their products, but it also resulted in a whole new product that turned the presentation remote dongle into a flash drive as well. The perceived value was huge, and subsequently led to further points of separation in the marketplace.

Example 2: Curriculum Resources

Once again, applying the same process with another organization that creates Sunday School curriculum, I was leading a workshop at a national event and asked the ‘3-minute’ question to a room full of teachers and leaders. A pattern emerged in that one of the most common activities they do right before using Sunday School curriculum is to scramble to the supply closet to gather all the supplies necessary for the lesson.

This is a distraction from what they are supposed to be focused on…and with distractions, comes opportunity. Once again, I was able to gain valuable insight into the circumstances customers find themselves in when using the company’s products. These customer insights are what led to the creation of a Curriculum that includes everything they need “in the box.” The marketing reinforced this message and drove the point home by saying that, “The only thing you need to prepare is your heart.”

Summary

When you understand the nuances of the circumstances in which your customers are dealing day in and day out, you will find that you have increased your credibility when speaking with prospects.

For the aspiring Challenger Sale rep, if you are going to have any chance at getting prospects to think in new ways about their status quo (i.e., Reframe), establishing credibility (i.e., Warmer) is critical. Without credibility, even the most brilliant Reframe will be dismissed as quickly as your introduction was.

Challenger Tip: The Problem with “Good Fit”

Good fit, bad fashion A colleague of mine, is often counseling his sales team away from using the expression ‘good fit’ when working with prospects. His point merits repeating.

His counsel usually starts with, “Just because something ‘fits’ well, doesn’t mean it looks good or is something you should wear.”

One look at the picture to the left brings that point home, doesn’t it?

We as a society have become very accustomed to using the expression “good fit,” whether we are talking with prospects, or considering candidates for a position.

The Problem with “Good Fit”

Addressing this simply from a sales perspective, when we talk with customers or prospects in the same manner, by default, we are opening up the possibilities…and subsequently the defining criteria, to include any product or solution that also ‘fits.’ Why would we do that to ourselves? Why broaden the selection of possible suppliers to any and all that might ‘fit?’

For those that know me, you know I am a fan of CEB and their Challenger principles. One particular aspect that they continue to drive home is the necessity of delivering Commercial Insight.

In short, they speak of the progression of what is communicated. On one end is General Information, or noise that gets tuned out, and on the other end is Commercial Insight.

By definition, Commercial Insight not only disrupts [or Reframes] the prospects view of their business by juxtaposing the cost of current behavior against the potential of an alternate action, but simultaneously leads the prospect exclusively back to the supplier.

A New Way

Reps believe they have done well to truly uncover pain and save their solution to the end of the discussion. Indeed, they are doing better than many of their peers according to the statistics, but this can all fall apart if they fail to uncover the problems they are uniquely able to solve, and exclusively able to do better than any other supplier.

The link to my post on “Where are you leading?” will aid in the steps you can take to resolve this. But let’s all agree to avoid aiming for “fit.”

Is ‘Status Quo’ Perception or Reality?

sta•tus quo

/ˈstātəs ˈkwō/ – Noun: The existing state of affairs, esp. regarding social or political issues: “they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo”

“Status Quo” – The condition we all are describing these days. Whether talking about sales, marketing, innovation or strategy, our aim is always the same…to “disrupt the status quo.” But, this is commonly misunderstood.

While my aim for this post will center around salespeople disrupting the customer’s status quo, I believe you will find this relevant in all of its uses.

The Current Use and Understanding

Many of us in the Sales and Marketing community refer to ‘Status Quo’ quite frequently, and I would argue rightfully so. In fact, two of the foremost thought-leaders in this area, from my perspective, are Corporate Visions and CEB as their research and descriptions of the conditions and need for change are quite compelling.

When we talk and read about the status quo as our biggest competitor in the context of customers, we can misunderstand what is really meant. There is a tendency to infer that the customer has two choices – stay the same or change. I would like to reframe how we view status quo, and more importantly how we help prospects understand there is no such thing as staying the same.

A New Understanding

To properly understand Status Quo, let’s reorient back to the original Latin definition – “An existing state of affairs.” What this is speaking of is a condition at a particular point in time. In other words, there are literally hundreds of thousands of things that took their course to lead a customer, prospect, business, etc. to the point where they are now…at this point in time. This all has led to an “existing state of affairs.”

Where this tends to be misunderstood, whether by the sales rep or the prospect, is to treat the status quo as a condition that will likely stay the same unless acted upon. This is a wrong understanding. In fact, the image I used above has it exactly right…Status Quo has a downward trajectory, but is most certainly not level.

Consider it from a financial reporting perspective. If you were looking at a P/L statement or Balance Sheet, you would have a snapshot of your business at ‘a particular point in time,’ which describes the existing state of affairs. While there could certainly be some predictive qualities inferred from either of those financial reports, it does not guarantee that doing things the same way will produce the same results.

On a side note, this is one of the biggest problems I encounter when working with businesses whose growth has stagnated or declined. They tend to look back to more lucrative times and conditions and subsequently try to repeat what they had once done. This doesn’t work unless all of the other variables that were existent at the time years ago are exactly the same today. As you can imagine, this is rarely the case.

Don’t confuse what I am saying with companies that return to the fundamentals. Returning to fundamentals is often a good thing for organizations…provided their fundamentals were appropriate in the first place. I am referring more to organizations that try to recreate their past like the ‘no-longer popular’ college student that desperately tries to recreate his high-school glory days.

A Different Kind of Conversation with Prospects

With the perspective of financial reports not being a guarantee of future results, consider changing your perspective on what you are truly trying to “disrupt” when talking with prospects who are afraid to change.

Their perspective is most often one in which they believe what they are doing today is known and has some predictability that will lead to predictable results. Your conversations should help them understand that if they are not currently leading to improvements they were hoping and expecting to see, things will only get worse. You already know that if they are entertaining a conversation with you, that they are not seeing the results they had hoped for. Your proof points should be inserted at this point in your conversational choreography to bring the point home.

In Summary

If you are struggling to disrupt the prospect’s status quo, it most likely due to your failure to help them see the consequences of not changing, and leaving the prospect with the impression that what they are doing today will still work going forward. Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Corporate Visions, often shares the following comments based on CEB’s research conducted with 5,000 buyers and decision makers that speak with salespeople:

When you speak with prospects, does your communication suggest any reason for change?

6 Causes for Marketing Misses

Are you finding that hitting your target market is increasingly more difficult? Especially in the age where so many aspects of marketing are changing and evolving such as content management strategies, SEO and social media.

Marketing is playing an increasingly critical role in organizations these days for a variety of reasons, one of which, as Sirius Decisions describes is that “67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.”

This puts even more pressure for marketers to be well-branded and ever-present in the places where prospects are looking, then the top choice when they click thru.

Now sales is even being encouraged, appropriately so, to engage in more top of funnel (ToFu) activities in the form of micro-marketing due to this very same phenomena with the buyer’s digital journey.

As if navigating these new times wasn’t difficult enough, CMOs must be also able to demonstrate tangible, positive returns on their marketing efforts. That alone is enough to send some CMOs over the edge.

While these challenges are certainly real and legitimate, there are some more basic areas of marketing that are falling short, perhaps due to the reasons aforementioned. It’s understandable for marketers with tight budgets to cut some corners while navigating new areas like Social Media…but it is certainly not acceptable. The consequences can be quite substantial.

Therefore, let’s look at six filters that marketing tends to overlook or ignore in its marketing efforts when pressures on their time and budget mount:

6 Overlooked Causes of Marketing Misses

Regardless of your marketing vehicle, whether direct mail, email, web or other, grab a recent campaign piece and evaluate according to the following six filters or litmus tests:

Clarity Test. Your marketing piece should be clearly targeted at a specific segment or customer as time pressed marketers can fall into the trap of generalizing who the marketing is aimed at versus narrowing the focus (e.g., IT versus System Administrators). Test: Can any person readily identify the intended audience of your marketing?
Resonance Test. Your marketing piece will resonate more with customers when it identifies their pain points and quantifies the risk of not solving the problem or pain points. Test: Will the customer know after reading your marketing piece, the risk or cost of their inaction?
Differentiation Test. The marketing piece should tap into the customer’s felt pain points by focusing on benefits or outcomes, not product features, and lead uniquely to your own solution. Test: If your logo were removed from the marketing, would the solution still point distinctly to your organization?
Insight Test. Engaging marketing should grab the reader’s attention with an insight about their industry, category or business. Test: Does the marketing piece provide an insight and if so, is the insight one which could only be obtained by your experience working with many other customers like the target of your marketing?
Teaching Test. Whether email, direct mail or other, the best marketing exposes or teaches the customer something about their business that they didn’t understand or had underestimated before, thus leading them to your solution. Test: Can you clearly identify the teaching point in your marketing piece? More importantly, can your customer?
Advocate Test. Finally, one overlooked area of marketing is that in an era where more buying is done by committee or consensus, the marketing piece should easily enable the advocate to share internally. Test: Does your marketing evoke a desire to share with internal influencers and decision makers without explanation?

Failing in any one of these areas will have some level of impact to your marketing effectiveness. Failing across two or more of these areas will guarantee suboptimal returns.

Time and budget constraints are real for most marketers. What many fail to realize is that the shortcuts taken to get marketing out more quickly without applying these filters and tests to the piece first, has a compounding effect on marketer’s time and budgets. The ineffectiveness of any campaign requires more to be done to make up for what the last campaign failed to produce.

Conversely, putting these six filters to every one of your marketing campaigns will take major steps towards your marketing effectiveness. Greater effectiveness leads to less pressure on time and marketing spend.

Case Study: Is the Problem Marketing or the Marketer?

The Phone Call…

“Am I going crazy?” Having just answered the phone, I had no idea who was calling and asking such a question of me. I responded with a courteous, but cautious chuckle saying, “Well…I think I’ll need a little more to go on. With whom am I speaking?”

She paused, told me who it was, laughed rather distractedly, then proceeded to dive right into describing her dilemma from today’s meeting with the Marketing Director from her “problem division.” She is the Sales Director of a firm in which I knew a bit about, particularly with the company’s background and this particular division’s struggle.

In summary, sales were strong across all of her other divisions and lines, each of which had their own marketing leader, while she led the Sales across all divisions. Things were great, that is for all but this one division. Sales continued to decline year over year and had high lead dependency from Marketing, thus her concerns.

The Rest of Her Story…

The sales model is B2B with an outbound sales team that sells consumer products ranging from $200 – $1,000. As described earlier, they are highly dependent upon Marketing to deliver leads.

The Division Head and Marketing Director were both new to this division in 2011 and had stepped in with a new, radical, $1M cost-reduction strategy for marketing. The new marketing mantra became for the next two years, “Less Quantity, More Quality!”

This strategy resulted in lead reduction of 60% in 2011 compared to 2010. In 2012, the leads dropped another 40% from 2011. Not surprisingly, sales had correspondingly declined steeply, more so than any other recent period. While sales did have a dramatic decline, it was nowhere near the rate of decline for the lead volume.

The Sales leader saw neither quantity nor quality from marketing, and as she describes it, the numbers supported her version of the story. Despite the numbers, the Marketing Leader and Division Head remained committed to defending their original strategy a year and a half into it with major revenue losses, and subsequently showed no openness to a different, or better strategy.

Towards the end of 2012, she managed to get a commitment from Marketing for substantially more qualified leads in 2013, although to the Marketer, ‘qualified’ apparently meant email, number and “Request for literature.”

Additionally, the Marketer’s commitment was simply to an aggregate number of leads on a monthly basis, but not by geography, firmographic, demographic, product type or other. His tactic? Email marketing….it’s part of the ‘cost-reduction’ plan.

Today, prior to the call and after her meeting with the marketing team, she made her plea for more qualified leads as the current lead quantity left her outbound team with capacity in excess of 60% going into their largest quarter of the year.

After her meeting, she shared that in addition to the quantity of leads being a third of what they needed, 80% of them were for two of their 10 product lines. This meant that they had on average a half-lead per rep to call on each day for the remaining products….not enough to meet the sales plan.

“A Lead is a Lead is a Lead!”

Through frustration, the Marketer responded to her plea for more balanced and qualified leads with saying, “A lead is a lead is a lead. We know that regardless of what product type we market, more than half of the prospects will want something different anyway. We could collect leads on just one of our products and it wouldn’t matter. All that matters is that you have leads of any type, then your team can determine what they really need.”

Again, the sales exec says to me…this time through tears…“Am I going crazy? Do I have my expectations set too high? Is it unreasonable to ask marketing to know the customer well enough to hit who they’re aiming at? Maybe I am the problem. I don’t feel like I am but it just seems like we need to change our approach to marketing.”

I responded, “Being crazy and unreasonable is not your problem, although your 2-year tolerance may be a part of the problem. It sounds to me like there is a much larger issue at play here…”

Change the Marketing, or the Marketer?

I speak with people in Sales and Marketing roles from all over the country. From executives to analysts to reps. Lead generation and qualification is by far, one of the most common frustrations I hear.

No matter who I am working with or from what field, I am pretty quick to keep the responsibility and accountability with each respective group I am working with. Most companies needing my help typically don’t have their respective ‘houses in order.’ Therefore, I keep Sales concentrated on their own responsibilities and Marketing, theirs so I don’t create an all out Game of Thrones. I work with the executive leadership on cross-departmental improvements before circling back to the departments.

For these reasons, offering up an anecdotal recommendation to this Sales executive to “change the Marketer” after merely an hour-long conversation would be ill-advised, no matter how apropos that may seem. There is always more to the story, especially when it comes to Sales and Marketing alignment.

What Advise Would You Give?

Given the very limited facts we all have here, what advice would you give and to whom would you target your comments? The Marketing Director? The Sales Director? The Division Head? Who would you love to spend 15 minutes with and what would you tell them?

Marketing Benchmarks: Has marketing missed the mark?

What makes a great Marketer?

The best marketers are thought-leaders. Not only are they acutely aware of the drivers of their results, but they have a deep understanding of consumer behaviors and point the organization forward to be prepared for trends and shifts in their behavior.

They love [useful] metrics, as this guides their efforts to show better returns over time, not the same or worse.

Great marketers are aware of these consumer behavior shifts before they are even perceptible to most in the organization.

As a result, you see this most quickly reflected in the marketing in ways that connects deeply with consumers and resonates more so than the common marketing in the marketplace.

Good marketing takes work, but what does it take to be best-in-class? Furthermore, how do you compare against your industry?

Find out with HubSpot’s latest study, Marketing Benchmarks from 7,000 Businesses.

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This brand new report dives into how you can increase your traffic and leads by improving a variety of marketing assets, including:

Get a clear idea of how much more you need to do to see the results your organization needs. Download the report to see if your marketing is hitting the mark.

LinkedIn: Are you in the Top 1%? If so, bummer!

LinkedIn recently reached out to 10 million of its members with a ‘Congratulations’ for having one of the Top 1% [or Top 5%] most viewed profiles in 2012. This was their way of ‘thanking’ those that contributed to its 200 million member milestone.

Great news, right? Not so fast. That all depends on why people are seeking you out. For many, I suspect they are down right proud of such an accomplishment…one in which they had no idea they were shooting for until LinkedIn said, “Congratulations.”

As for me, I am a bit more cynical on why people are looking at my profile that often. Is it because I am special? Can’t be. I know me. So what, then?

With social selling becoming a much more significant way to prospect, what LinkedIn may actually be calling out is that those in this elite group are getting the top 1-5% of the solicitations from hungry sales people. So my special notification from LinkedIn would have been more appropriate, had it said…

Of course, I am over-generalizing in terms of how this is used and I certainly realize the many benefits of being found where people are searching, but it is interesting seeing the different perspectives on the topic.

For instance, the other day I read a post of one SEO Consultant on his achievement of the Top 1%. I was surprised to see Mr. SEO quickly cite his top reason to how many first-level connections he had. He went on to share that he receives 15-20 connection requests from strangers per day. His subsequent reasons then pointed to Keywords and frequent Updates to his LinkedIn status.

One of his readers commented on his post that they too made the top 1%, but have less than 10% of the connections he has, and spends little to no time at all on their LinkedIn profile. He responded by saying, “I believe if you had more connections you would definitely do even better.” Hmm?!

So what gives? How do two people with completely opposite profiles and far different behaviors in their dedication to their LinkedIn profiles end up with the same result of a top viewed profile?

Turns out that keywords are pretty important, after all. Even more so than number of connections, Mr. SEO.

So, if you are looking to increase solicitations from prospectors, make sure to research trending keywords that relate to you and include them in your profile. Do this, and YOU TOO can join the ranks of 10 million other members to balance the load of solicitations you are sure to receive.

Repeatable Success

Creating Intentional, Predictable, Repeatable Successes