Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
The biggest mistake I see with inexperienced salespeople is talking too much.
They come in with the idea that to sell, they have to be the one talking. They don’t listen because they’re talking and not asking questions.
An effective salesperson is a detective. To be good at what I do, I need be Columbo. Some of you probably don’t remember the TV series Columbo, but it starred Peter Falk as the title character – an unassuming, humble detective with a keen eye for detail. The series was different from other detective stories because most episodes started by showing the perpetrator committing the crime. The show’s creator described it as a “howcatchem,” rather than a “whodunit.” It centered on Lt. Columbo figuring out who the criminal was by asking questions and examining overlooked evidence.
So the philosophy I impart to my sales team is to focus on being like Columbo.
I investigate an enormous organization and find the person whose business problems I can solve. When I identify the prime suspect, I go in and discover the evidence to see if I can indeed really solve his or her problem.
Telling the potential customer what I think they need at our first meeting is no more beneficial than it would have been for Columbo to tell a suspect his theories before he had asked any questions. There is no humility in that. It would be arrogant to assume I know how to solve problems before I even know what those problems really are.
Instead, I ask potential clients about their businesses, their challenges. I follow up with questions like, “When that happens, what does your department do then?” and “Is there a financial impact?”
A good salesperson’s job is to ask tons of open-ended questions to understand the client’s business – to collect the evidence.
“What’s the impact on your company if you’re not listening to what your current customers are saying? Is that a risk to your business? What kind of risk? Have you had anything bad happen? Have you ever used information like that to improve? What strategies do you have to grow your business? What types of things have you tried?”
On the flip side, when I’m asked a question. I offer massive transparency. Ask me a question, and I’m here to publish it for everyone to see.
Therein begins our relationship, a relationship built on honesty.
To find out how Biz360 can power your insights, visit us here, or get started here.
Thanks for visiting!
Tags: Biz360, Community Insights, keyword monitoring tool, Media Insights, opinion insights, pr monitoring tool, reputation management tool, sales
Posted in Biz360, advanced PR technology, brand monitoring, case studies, measurement, media analysis, social media | 1 Comment »
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
Eric M. Israel, VP of Sales
In short, my answer is yes.
After 17 years in sales and seven with Biz360, I’m now the VP of Sales and have been working on developing within my team the trust equation idea – the concept that we should be focusing on things that are not necessarily good or bad for us, but are genuinely good for our clients.
Frankly, it can be scary, but I truly believe that is the basis for a long-term business relationship and in this economy, relationships are more important than ever. Having a sales team that focuses only on generating revenue destroys your relationship with the client and breaks the trust equation from the very get-go.
Instead our goal is to truly understand how our clients’ businesses work. We should strive to understand their challenges and how those challenges impact their companies. That’s really nothing new – it’s pretty basic research. But then I guide my team to go even further. We should be finding out how the clients’ challenges are affecting them personally. How do these challenges affect their workload? Their careers? Their stress level? Even their families.
We help because it’s the right thing to do — not so Biz360 gets another deal. It works the other way around. The more you do for the client, the more those clients enlist your help. Those clients develop the longest relationships with you and they end up being the most profitable.
Each and every time we meet with our clients, our goal is to figure out more about their business, and how we can help them get further down the path toward their own success.
For the next few weeks, I’m going to use this forum to tell you how the sales department works here at Biz360. I’ll be honest. I want potential clients to compare the experience they have had with our competitors, and hopefully, decide they’d rather work with our team.
And I welcome feedback. As you’ll find out in my next post, feedback is essential.
Tags: Biz360, Community Insights, keyword monitoring tool, Media Insights, opinion insights, pr monitoring tool, reputation management tool, sales
Posted in advanced PR technology, blog monitoring, brand analysis, brand monitoring, sales, social media, social media analysis | No Comments »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
ReadWriteWeb is one of the most influential blogs in social media today. In a time when a lot of companies are struggling to figure out how individual relationships present in social media affect the bottom line, ReadWriteWeb always presents information to help them stay ahead of the curve.
The field of leveraging and fostering these individual relationships via the web is often called Community Management. Many people vow to be experts in the space, but very few of them have been involved in social media as heavily and early as ReadWriteWeb’s Content Editor Marshall Kirkpatrick. I asked for his advice on how companies who may be struggling with social media can get started or become more effective with it:
MICHELLE:
When did you first get involved in social media? How has the social media space evolved since you first engaged in it?
MARSHALL:
I’ve only been doing this for about five years. I came from the nonprofit world and thought social media tools would be good to learn about so I could help bring them into that sector. I blogged as I learned and eventually started getting work blogging, more than the consulting I originally envisioned. When I got involved in all this it was a lot more marginal, we were all very scrappy. There were a surplus of freaks all trying to get or create a relatively small number of jobs in the field. Now social media is far, far more mainstream. Everyone’s more professional and there are far more marketing and PR people involved. On the up side, I did get to meet Neil Young once because of all this. I didn’t see that coming. So I guess you could say it was always weird, but now it’s getting really weird.
MICHELLE:
Blogs and Twitter are integrating marketing, product development, customer service roles for companies into one Community Manager role. In a large company, what is the most efficient way for a Community Manager or Managers to delegate these tasks so as to make the customer happy?
MARSHALL:
I think it’s best for all the traditional roles to stay intact and for a new position to be created that bridges all the different departments with social media as the glue. The Community Manager contributes to almost every department in a company but needs unique social-media specific skills and experience.
MICHELLE:
What steps should companies take to best empower their Online Community Managers to make the best decisions?
MARSHALL:
Let them speak freely in public. Let them spend their time however they see fit, as long as they are getting results. Expect a lot from them but understand the way they are being pulled in many directions on both sides of a wall – inside and outside the company. Understanding their job is helpful. Reading our Guide to Online Community Management is a good way to accomplish that.
MICHELLE:
I find a lot of larger companies’ social media efforts to be somewhat “gilded”, where the negative comments get ignored and the positive comments get rewarded. What are your thoughts on this?
MARSHALL:
That’s probably not a sustainable strategy for too long. Even if you can maintain it for a while – it’s no way to make the most of your engagement with social media. That requires as much authenticity as you can muster, in order to build relationships, in order to harvest the gains. This isn’t just another broadcast medium to push your marketing message through – this is people baring their hearts and minds to each other. (Really!) There’s good business development opportunities there, but only if you connect meaningfully with other people.
MICHELLE:
Can you name a great example of how a company capitalized on an opportunity presented in the social media sphere?
MARSHALL:
Smart people strengthen relationships between themselves and sales leads, vendors, possible hires, analysts, press and other people of business interest through social media all day every day. One of my favorite stories is about Lucia Willow, Community Manager at Pandora. Twitter is larger than Pandora now, but for most of the time she was on the site that wasn’t the case. Lucia says that she’s used every social network out there but Twitter offers her “the best bang for the buck.” When Pandora was facing a possible end to their business because of rising licensing fees, Lucia was able to mobilize scores of people on Twitter to engage with Congress over the matter and pass it on to their friends. It ended up saving not just that business, but potentially many other innovative small companies at risk as well. Twitter users are unusually fast-acting and engaged, Lucia told us. That’s just one of a number of case studies included in our Guide to Online Community Management.
Tags: Biz360, Community Insights, community management, community manager best practices, effective social media, managing social media, marshall kirkpatrick, readwriteweb
Posted in Biz360, Uncategorized, blogging ROI, brand monitoring, buzz marketing, measurement, media analysis | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
Mark Hopkins is Editor of the tech blog Silicon Angle and the former editor of the social networking blog Mashable. He has built the online communities for Mashable, Blip Media, 5Tribe and Intel.
From the time you were Associate Editor at Mashable to now running SiliconAngle, you’ve followed social media technologies very closely. How have tools like Twitter made blogger’s voices so much more powerful?
Twitter has been a great equalizer for content producers, making individuals the ultimate wielders of the power, as opposed to the larger organizations. Twitter became a ‘thing’ for content producers during my tenure at Mashable. When I signed up for the service, I was the only guy at Mashable utilizing it, and quickly became the one with the largest social graph. I had caught a tweet from Marshall Kirkpatrick stating that the last few scoops he blogged had come from Twitter, so that made me start paying better attention to it.
Interacting with others and syndicating my Mashable and personal blog posts to the service gave me an edge up against the other users in terms of capturing attention and engagement that they didn’t have, which is what ended up getting Pete to start looking into utilizing it for the blog. The end of the story, obviously, is that Mashable is getting a large majority of their site’s considerable traffic from Twitter retweets now, and when they look for new talent, they set minimums to the size of the social graph on Twitter a potential contributor has before they’ll even consider their other qualifications.
The bonus is, though, that after I left the company, I was able to take my readers with me. Part of the meteoric growth of SiliconANGLE has been due to my readers following me from place to place. I rarely update my personal blog these days, but whenever I do, I simply need to tweet that a new post is up, and my traffic returns to pre-staleness levels. In other words, people are paying attention to me, and where I put my thoughts (in terms of what site those thoughts reside on) is more or less inconsequential as compared to the fact that I’ve said something.
So many big companies set up a company blog or a community and then fail. What has to be set up in place in order for these to succeed?
This is a tough question – mostly because it depends on the type of engagement you’re trying to encourage, and what sort of clout the company has coming into the game.
In most cases, though, there are three parts that need to be available for engagement to happen:
Fire needs oxygen, heat source or ignition, and fuel to burn.
For engagement, you need conflict, utility and people. This is a gross simplification, but the metaphor maps pretty well to the fire pyramid.
Conflict doesn’t need to be as negative as it sounds. Something for people to quibble with, clarify or ask questions about can qualify as conflict. If a blog post is too complete or authoritative, there is no reason for a member of the audience to interact, thought they may pass it on to their friends. There’s a fine art to being less persuasive than you can possibly be without being disengenuous. It’s best to regard a blog post as a game of chess (or checkers, if you will). Leave some ammunition in your persuasive argument to fire off in the comments when you interact with the readers. It gives you more talking points, and lets the audience know that you’re available to interact with.
Utility is simple and complex at the same time. By utility, I mean the tools of the trade – blogs, microblogging, Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, et. al. You shouldn’t expect to engage on all social platforms for all blog posts. Not only is it unrealistic, but it’s inappropriate. Each tool carries it’s own set of cultures and memes, and not every message you may have is appropriate for all toolsets. It is, though, important to engage on utilities and communities outside your own because the biggest reason your corporate blog is failing to engage is that you’re hoping that the community comes to you.
… which brings me to people. If you’re just launching a blog, you have no people. There are dozens of tricks to getting more folks to your site, but you must engage a few of them at least to start, because everyone begins with zero audience. If you’re not syndicating your content to outside communities, you’ll never be discovered in a significant way. Engagement, by definition, requires there be more than one person. Go out and find them, and if you have the other elements to your content I’ve described, engagement will follow.
Corporate culture dictates that marketing efforts should have tangible ROI. What advice would you give to a CMO struggling to convince higher ups that monitoring and participating in the online space has tangible benefits in the end?
Every audience member who engages your online content is a monetizable lead. If you’re a marketer that’s been around Internet technology for five to ten years, you remember opt in email lists. Engagement is the new opt-in list.
Engage the same audience member enough times, and they are considered part of your community. It’s important to have the tools in your social media presence to hook them in meaningfully, be that a discussion group, community driven website, or niche brand social network – because that’s the path to ROI on your social media content. Simply having a successful blog is half the battle – if your strategy ends there, you will never see tangible ROI from your efforts, even if it benefits your brand and company in largely intangible ways.
Aside from leading your audience into becoming registered fans of your company, there are dozens of intangible benefits that large companies spend millions and billions of dollars a year to achieve through traditional media that can be achieved through thousands of dollars a year with social media – including branding, evangelism, customer service as marketing, and technical support as marketing.
This is something SiliconANGLE is attempting to do with a number of large Silicon Valley brands in the chipset and networking arena – taking what are essentially lifeless technical support forums for devices and software development packages, and turning them into thriving communities for interaction, thought development and leadership, and brand representation.
How quickly has social media technology evolved just in the past five years?
By leaps and bounds. The social media mojo (as you put it) that I have now would not have been realistically achievable for me five years ago. Tools like Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook create ecosystems of people who actually care what I have to say for whatever reason (be they connected to me geographically, topically, or by relationship) that I can syndicate my content to.
Five years ago, finding audience was a hit or miss situation where you must explore manually the blogosphere by topic or region and hope you could usurp some of their audience as your own.
These days, it’s as easy as interacting with people, regardless of their influence or station, and letting the merits of your ideas capture them.
How can large companies evolve technologically so that someone monitoring the social media space can communicate effectively with other team members to solve problems presented in the social media sphere?
Much of the top tier social media and public relations consulting firms counsel their clients on what is essentially (in netspeak, anyway), a strategy of lurking… that is to say, “just listen.”
Listening is only part of the equation. Tools used for mining the social media ecosystem for useful data are great, but they’re nothing if you take no action on them. The biggest technological step a company can take is to shift, psychologically, their attitude towards these reports. Useful data isn’t useful unless you use it. Develop strategies to engage those speaking up about your brand or about the ideas useful to your company, and create a net to capture those folks in, be it a blog, community site, discussion group or other social media tool that allows one easy access to those folks again.
Engagement is the new opt-in, and understanding that is 80% of the battle. Once you get that and understand the machinations of the various utilities in the social media toolbox, the path to ROI becomes obvious.
