Posts Tagged ‘opinion insights’

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!

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.

Key issue with marketing research.  Overcoming a common, but frequently overlooked, weakness in many marketing research studies — many marketing research professionals go to great lengths to discover what are the right issues andthe right topics for their research studies.  Such exploratory research may utilize tools such as focus groups, diads, or simply chatting with the right people or examining the right blog. 

Unfortunately many other researchers do not make this level of investment beforehand.  Instead, they draft their questionnaires or moderators’ guidelines, plunge ahead, and then proceed to analyze the resultant data and make a myriad of recommendations.  Results which may turn out to be entirely off the mark or just plain wrong in key respects.    This reminds me of a play on an old adage:  “Garbage in and gospel out.”   Partly, this is why many marketing and business professionals who need and value this kind of insight have such a low regard for expending resources on marketing research – a low ROI.

A good beginning.  Beginning in the first half of the 20^th century, marketing research began to take on the guise of science, employing sophisticated sampling techniques, strict screening of study participants, well-designed questionnaires, and complex statistical techniques that produced accurate results.  But the latter part of the same century saw the growth of dual working households, the spread of telephone answering machines and of mobile phones.  All of these new-found obstacles to interviews were coupled with a proliferation of telephone surveys and direct marketing callers which dramatically and adversely impacted people’s willingness to participate in a survey. 

The end of the beginning.  In part, to keep up with the need for marketing research information, comparatively easy to arrange online focus groups and online surveys arose followed by the growing construction of large panels of people who would participate in research studies for a fee or reward.  .  At the same time, marketers grew leery of “professional participants”, people that marketers were unsure of who they were or their appropriateness in participating in their studies.  And concerns grew for the reliability, accuracy and projectability of information derived in this manner.   

A new opportunity to derive consumer insight is emerging.   Never before has the voice of the consumer been so accessible and transparent as that contained in online social media and product reviews.  Now actual buyers of products and services are talking with the online world in general, other prospective purchasers in particular, and you, their marketer – if you will listen.

These “hand-raisers” will freely provide you  the strengths and weaknesses of products, your competitors’ products, the means to better position these products with them via their own language used in their conversations, and a host of other valuable competitive differentiators.  Recently, in October 2008, I was involved in an Opinion Insights research study for two prominent builders of the latest craze in notebooks, the light-weight, inexpensive, “netbook”.  We were hearing early on that many of the first wave of purchasers were displeased with the significantly under-powered systems (RAM and CPU) in spite of the low prices and extraordinary portability of their new netbooks.  The manufacturers of these new systems were essentially unaware that a brewing adverse backlash within the marketplace could be building.  Product marketers are beginning to introduce newer, more robust netbooks albeit with trade-offs at least in terms of higher price points.

Marketers and researchers are only just beginning to tap into this new source of consumer information.  By consolidating the thousands of online opinions, researchers can lay much of the groundwork and enable traditional research and product planning to be as pointed and efficient as possible.  We are at the early stages of effectively promoting a dialogue between consumers and marketers and maintaining the trust and convenience that existed for all before the end of the beginning of marketing research described above.