Chris Brogan - Home Base in your Social Media Strategy

One of the biggest voices in Social Media Chris Brogan has a new post up today which includes the above diagram that Chris put together which is one of the most illustrative and on point I have seen.  The diagram, and Chris’s post, clearly articulate his theory of Home Base and Outposts.  Check out and comment at Chris’s post and pick up his book Trust Agents which is a must read if you are interested in this space.

Sit down and try to diagram you or your Company strategy and tactical plan for SM and share it!

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Lesson #2 – Sales Reps – The Changing of the Guard

My thoughts on Sales Staffing has less to do with anything in the book and more to do with my experience.  Interested in your comments, thoughts, experiences as it relates to Sales staff.

Like many functional areas in your business as your market matures and as you are crossing the chasm the skillsets of your employees will need to change.  Sales is a bigger challenge than most due to the Rock star culture and image that good sales folks earn and carry with them.

In the early days as you are trying to sell your product, service, solution one of the biggest jobs your sales rep has is to convince your customers that they need something that they don’t even realize that they need.  This is NOT easy and takes a patient yet persistent sales rep that is prepared to invest the time and build a really trusted relationship over a frustratingly prolonged period of time.  After they have done this they still need to be a more traditional sales rep and manage a process and close.  This is more of a patient farmer personality than a pure Type A aggressive sale type personality.

Now the problem.

The person who is successful at doing this and who closes absolutely critical sales for your business in its early critical days is more than likely NOT the right person to be selling as and  after you cross into a more mature selling environment.

As the market for your solution matures people start to understand that they do in fact need what you are selling.  They are probably building RFP’s to address those needs and you probably have more competitors than you have ever had since inception.  The main task for the Sales Rep now is not to convince prospects that they need what you sell but rather it is to be a trusted advisor of the prospects and to aggressively, competitively outsell the competition.

It is hard to change the horses that brought you!  As Jim Collins has taught us though it is critical that we have the right people on the bus and as difficult a change as this can be it is imperative that you make it.  Given the breadth of experience, history and knowledge that the original sales rep has it is often advisable to try to find a position within the company for them BUT I am NOT a fan of making up positions for people.  If the original Sales Rep wants to sell it may be best for you and for them if they can go find another company that is in a market still in its infancy and repeat their success their.

As you recruit for your new sales rep profile there are some considerations and this is where I am really interested in other experiences because there are a couple trains of thoughts but the main crux of the argument is…what is more important domain knowledge or pure sales skills.  If you sell a solution around physical asset performance do you NEED to have someone with specific knowledge and contacts and background in that space OR are you better off going and finding the best pure sales person around regardless of what they sold???

There are definite arguments for both but I tend to prioritize the must haves in this order:

1. Industry/vertical experience – given you need to be on the front end of RFP’s and you need to have trusted relationships to successfully close deals I think having existing relationships in your target vertical or geography are critical because you may not have time to build them in a mature market.
2. Pure sales skills – demonstrable experience that you have sold over quota consistently in your past and you can walk through and articulate, debate with me and convince me that you are a rock star.
3. Functional/domain expertise – I rated this last because there are numerous other areas in the company where this type of support can come from if the candidate has #1 and #2 above

Love to hear your thoughts and experiences and what has worked for you??

What do you do in bad meeting...

Lots of comments on this twitter post "Ever have(non-internal) meetings w/ someone & u know 5 min in that it isn't going to work..do you stay, be courteous or bail, I've done both" I thought I'd move th dialogue here.

 

My concern in bailing is as @mbertulli mentioned some people just don't make good impressions or don't articulate well what they are trying to convey and there actually may be a very good fit that takes a full  hour or a couple meetings to ferret out.

 

The flip side of that is if there really is no fit and you see it before they do then there is no point in wasting both your and their time.

 

Any examples of either approach working because in the moment I really just want to politely excuse myself and get to other productive work.

Interested in your thoughts?

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Fail TO Succeed!!

Jordan on Success

"'I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot... and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that's precisely why I succeed''."

-Michael Jordan

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Great reminder from Seth's Blog Today

In today’s post from Saul he says “If Wal-Mart or some cultural shift has turned what you do into a commodity, don't argue. Find a new place before the competition does. It's not easy or fair, but it's true”.  It is something I hear a lot of complaints from folks about but I think we all need to realize that personally, professionally and for your business, if you are not moving forward you are moving backwards….there is no standing still.  Markets get commoditized as they mature, it happens.  What separates the good from the bad (companies, leaders, people) is that they constantly innovate, constantly look forward and are prepared to cannibalize their own work in order to create a sustainable, dynamic, growing business or career.

 

Thanks for the reminder Seth….don’t complain…ACT!

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EXECUTION – GET STUFF DONE IN 2010

A topic I could spend hours talking about but a good reminder as we plan for and head into 2010.

Success in improving business performance is not in the blinding brilliance of your strategy, but rather it is in it’s execution. It is important to work efficiently and make sure you are squeezing every ounce of productivity from your team but it is equally important, and oft not focussed on as much, to ensure YOU have your team DOING THE RIGHT WORK.

Make sure you close the Strategy – Execution gap before you refine strategy. Being an organization that listens, learns and iterates is absolutely crucial to be an innovate, market leader. But if you are not good at executing the tactical details of your strategy, further refinement of that strategy will be of little value.

In small companies this is tough in most (not all) cases the person is a really creative, strategic thinker is NOT a detail oriented, nose to the grindstone executor. Know what you are good at and what you are not and make sure you get someone involved in your business who will focus tactically on absolutely driving the day to details of getting stuff done. Implement some process, use technology, do whatever works for you to ensure that you can not only execute really well but also sustain the execution of the many iterations that will inevitably come to your strategy. Execution is not a once and done proposition. A learning, changing organization needs to be able to do this CONSTANTLY. The challenge is that EXECUTION IS REALLY HARD WORK AND TAKES TIME! Strategists don’t appreciate how hard execution is and tactical operators don’t appreciate the big picture perspective and how hard it is to bring all the pieces together and build a cohesive strategy.

Understanding the effectiveness of your strategy is very important as you look to listen, learn and iterate to ensure you are modifying the right things and to make sure you know that the strategic changes will in fact be implemented and delivered on day to day.

This year focus on your execution and make sure you are comfortable that YOU or someone you trust is doing the hard grunt work executing.

Crossing The Chasm - Lesson#1 – Marketing In The Early Days

Where Do We Start??

Initial Assumptions:

1. I'm going to assume you have a business concept, a strategy, some funding (bootstrapped or otherwise) and a product in some stage of development.  You may have some customers or you may be looking for your first but you are fairly early on in your company's life but perhaps beyond pure start-up.

2. I am writing from a B2B perspective but most of this is applicable to all businesses.

3. While Crossing The Chasm ("CTC") focuses mostly on marketing and selling I will touch on product planning and development as well.

4. Lastly, I will assume you have read the book and are familiar with the concepts without reviewing and reiterating the great teachings in the book.

Given you can see as clear as day how you are able to solve some of businesses biggest problems and help them save or generate huge amounts of dollars it is only fair to assume that someone closer to that business (the customer) will see your solution as the answer to all their prayers, right?  WRONG. 

Education is one of the single biggest portions of  a sales cycle in the early days.  In most cases you are trying to sell them something that they don't even recognize that they need yet.  I know in my situation we spent countless hours and dollars trying to educate prospects on the basic NEED for what we do.  We also spent untold amounts trying to build awareness and lead generation marketing campaigns through the years.  In hindsight I would have ENTIRELY cut out these programs.  Money is tight and intuitively you think getting your message out to the masses will build brand awareness and will mass educate the market on your fantastic approach to solving their problems.

RECOMMENDATION #1 - DON'T SPEND WASTE MONEY ON MARKETING PROGRAMS IN THE EARLY DAYS

If I had to do it again (and by that I mean, the next time I do this) I would spend all those efforts on tracking and speaking to established bleeding edge early adopters within the target verticals/customers that have the most strategic value to me as a reference.  Finding bleeding edge early adopters should be the single focus of marketing efforts.   I want to be clear that when I say target early adopters I am talking about PEOPLE NOT COMPANIES.  People lead the early adoption of new technology.  Yes Corporate culture and willingness to take on these types of projects is important but in my experience, even in a let’s say less than progressive industry or company, you can and MUST find people who are visionaries and those are the people you need to market and sell to.  Seems pretty logical but tactically how do you execute against this?  Here’s my lesson’s learned for your consideration:

1. Regardless of the type of solution you are offering and the functional area of the organization your solution is applicable to it is usually easier to find someone in the IT group than on the business side simply because of their background.  This person will be your sponsor, your advocate and it is important that in the early days you really view them as a Partner more than a Client.  Many of these people can be found using bleeding edge technologies as that is their disposition, so social media tools, SXSW type events is where they will be hanging out to try to get info about the newest and shiniest things happening in their world.
2. Look for companies that have already crossed the chasm selling into the general space you are in and reach out to them.  They will have lessons learned that will be as and more valuable than what I am telling you here.  The most important thing they will have is the name of PEOPLE that they dealt with at the companies they sold into.  Early adopters typically don’t change, even when unsuccessful.  Finding a person inside a target company that sponsored/led/bought another visionary offering was critical to our success.  This is the person you need to contact, court, and convince that you can help them.  They will understand more than anyone else the problem you are solving and the evolutionary way in which you are going about solving it.
3. As you look into your target industry for ideal strategic candidates, in my experience the ones who are most likely to be open to your message as Company’s are the ones who are in the Top 20% of the industry and the ones who are in the bottom 20% of the industry.  The top 20% are there for a reason and have a couple things that are very important to you as you look to sell/partner with someone.  First, they probably have access to cash more readily than weaker companies in the space and second they also have an interest in staying ahead of everyone in their space and are willing to invest in new technologies that will continue to push their performance and create further distance between them and the middle class in the industry.  Bleeding edge people are attracted to these types of companies and are given more flexibility to thrive in this type of an environment.  Companies in the bottom 20% come at it from the opposite end but are viable for a different reason.  Finding a bleeding edge person is harder (but not impossible) in these companies but the culture of the company is more open to leading edge change because in many cases they have fallen so far behind the industry leaders they know that they need some game changers to get back in the game and in a lot of cases they have tried all the “non-evolutionary” solutions available to them with little or no effect.  Both of these are good customers for different reasons which I will get into in another post when I talk about “Sales In The Early Days”.  The middle performing companies are much harder to get into when Crossing because the risk of them investing in something new and having it fail from a personal perspective is very high.  The company is performing OK and often the culture of (the risk of) failure in a mediocre company does not support individuals stepping out and taking risks where in successful companies this risk taking and failure potential is accepted and frankly expected!

SUMMARY-KEY LESSONS

• DON’T SPEND PRECIOUS FUNDS ON MARKETING INITIATIVES
• KEY IS FINDING EARLY ADOPTERS…PEOPLE NOT COMPANIES
• FIND PEOPLE WITH A PROVEN HISTORY OF SPONSORING LEADING EDGE INITIATIVES
• RESEARCH OTHER TECHNOLOGIES THAT HAVE BEEN ADOPTED IN YOUR TARGET BUSINESSES AND FIND OUT WHO SPONSORED
• FISH WHERE THE FISH ARE…USE CUTTING EDGE TECH/MEDIA TO FIND CUTTING EDGE PROSPECTS
• OFTEN EASIER TO LOCATE IN ‘IT DEPARTMENT’ THAN IN THE BUSINESS
• TARGET COMPANIES THAT ARE TOP OF CLASS LEADERS AND BOTTOM OF CLASS LAGGARDS IN THEIR INDUSTRY

Agree, Disagree, please share your experiences.

Crossing the Chasm - The "Lessons Learned" Series

For starters, if you have not yet read "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore please beg, borrow, steal or buy (link attached) a copy and read through it. This book is one (of the two) most influential books that I have read in my time in small technologies companies.

Crossing the Chasm is a book about the journey, the trials and the tribulations in taking your product and company from one where every sale is a missionary sale to a place where there is a broader market acceptance of what you do and the business need to solve the problem that your product solves. The transition from one side to the other requires different approaches to almost everything you do as a business. In this series of posts I will walk through each of the functional areas in a business and the external influences on each and from my experience what worked and what did not work. For most businesses despite the brilliant guidance provided by Geoffrey Moore, this trip is one riddled with trial and error. Like anything not everything will work for everyone but in this series of posts I'd like to provide what I learned and where I failed in and effort to assist others in completing a journey that many (some may say most) companies never actually complete.

Follow along as I hope I am able to provide you with insight and the ability to avoid the 1 misstep that prevents you from Crossing. If you agree, disagree, have additional stories, thoughts please add in the comments so others who read can learn from all of us as much as possible.

Let the journey begin...if there are specific areas, topics you want me to cover please let me know. Hope you enjoy.

Invest in Your Community for the Compound Interest

So I was talking to someone who had the following story for me as we discussed social media and it’s important role in brand building and community & employee engagement.

Associate:  Social media is a waste of time!  I started a Facebook page for my business, I did some blogging, I twittered…heck I even went to a SM focused conference and I have not had one lead come from it yet.

Me: How long have you been active in your community?

Associate: ALMOST 6 MONTHS (read with disdain and frustration), and I don’t have forever to wait to get an ROI, I only have so much time & I don’t see how this is helping me grow my business?

Me: You’ve barely even started!?  SM is not a lead gen program and is not a short term tactic.  Marketing through and participation in SM is an investment in your community, your space, your employees, your business, your customers, etc.  Think of it like a bank or any other long term investment.  Investing your hard earned money in an interest bearing bank account is not done because you need more money next week or next month.  It is done as a long term strategy and to leverage the power of Compound interest.  The reward is not immediate and your “investment” in time and effort contributing authentically to your community in a regular, repeated, valuable way will pay dividends for you and for your community over the years.

Associate: I need to drive business & cash immediately, don’t you know what is going on in my market right now?  I invested my time in this to turn my business around and sell through this medium.

Me: Then you didn’t understand how this medium worked before you engaged, you didn’t do your homework.  If you have short term business issues I can work with you on some tactics to preserve cash and sustain your business but this isn’t one of them.  You need to keep investing in SM but it isn’t your short term saviour.

Have you had this experience?  How have you handled it?  What guidance would you give an associate?

Too many people in my opinion are looking to capitalize on a short term lottery win through jumping on tools like twitter and thinking it will immediately turn around there business.  I empathize with many than NEED short term fixes but encourage you those people to address short term business issues aggressively and effectively while still participating in and building their community over the long haul.

BE Authentic & Caring with your community

BE Patient & Persistent with your contributions and willingness to help others

BE a Trusted Advisor that people can go to and follow for genuine guidance and real feedback and support

DO NOT be a used car salesman or a pompeous ass

DO NOT be condescending and arrogant

Some will disagree and I have no doubt that there are some examples of short term surgical tactics that have utilized SM tools to disseminate and drive promotions and programs with short term impact but don’t blog, twitter, vlog, FB, etc for a short term fix.  Compound your interest over time and lead your community towards a better ecosystem for all.

REMEMBER- A RISING TIDE LIFTS ALL BOATS

David Meerman Scott has a great example of a some relatively short viral programs including one that Universal Orlando did with their Harry Potter Theme Park.  I’ll discuss David’s thoughts in a later post but I highly recommend his new book World Wide Rave!

Seek Out The Truth…

As you engage with your community and especially your customers, prospects and trusted advisors ALWAYS seek, ask for and encourage the truth. Too often people meet with others in their industry and have drinks and chat over how great everything is going and how wonderful their respective companies are. It is nice to meet with friends and exchange pleasantries but DO NOT mistake these meetings for confirmation that you are doing the right things. If you want to get better YOU MUST seek out the truth.

Here is what I believe…

If you are not getting better every day you are getting worse. There is no such thing as standing still.

In order to improve your business you need to understand your strengths yes but you also must understand your weaknesses either real or perceived. If you are not meeting the needs of your community and fulfilling your deliverables than someone else will. Engage in REAL conversations with people who are friends and foes. Here are some of the people you should seek out:

• customers
• employees
• industry experts
• competitors
• business partners
• lost customers
• customers on deals you lost

Some of the questions to ask and data to acquire about your company:

• Did you end up purchasing a solution to assist with your business needs ?
  • if so who and why
  • if not, would you consider doing business with us in the future, why or why not
• How would you describe your experience in dealing with us
• What could we have done differently in the sales process
• Were there aspects of our product/solution functionality that did not meet your needs
• Were there aspects of our implementation/methodology that caused you concern
• Was our pricing competitive
• Was our sales representative professional and effective at addressing your questions
• What is your perception of our Company
• How would you describe us versus our competitors

It is important that you talk to many different people and get many different viewpoints. What you are looking for is a pattern that comes across from several non-related sources that become themes. It is this data that you need to assess and evaluate as you look to steer your business forward and become the better tomorrow than you are today!

Don’t let people tell you what they think you want to here DEMAND the truth. Good luck and let me know how it goes.