For real though... stop pitching over email

As a leader in a marketing oriented firm, I get a whole lot of cold email.

I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth highlighting again today.

Pete posted an article yesterday that (among other things) included the titular advice, “Stop pitching over email.”

Too many salespeople prematurely pitch over email. They describe the features and benefits of their products and services, what they do and how they do it. As should be evident by the low response rate these types of emails get, their pitch is falling on deaf ears.

So that’s the problem…

But what should you, salesperson, do instead? It ain’t that difficult folks. Caputa goes on in his article to say:

What should you do instead? Determine whether a prospect has a need before pitching anything.

Is there a better way to determine need?

So you may have decided that email isn’t the best way to start, and be asking if this means you should be diagnosing pain on the first phone call…

Well, hold the phone partner…

I have personally spent this week with some really smart people in the sales profession.

One of them, had something like this to say about the first step of the sales process: “The only objective when you first connect with a prospect (in this context; inbound or outbound) is to establish a real and meaningful connection with that person. If you can’t do that, it isn’t worth pitching anything.”

My Grandmother Rule

or How to Stop Worrying and Love Social Media and the Fact That Nothing We Say Is Ever Private

I often speak with folks who are afraid of social media. They are afraid people will say bad things about them or share bad things or leave bad comments.

My take on this, is that if you run your business as if your Grandmother were in the room; you should have nothing to fear.

You can't control others behavior, you can only control yourself. If a man on a bus says lewd remarks to you about women outside, you can either participate, or decide to not participate. It's up to you. But do assume that your choice will end up on the national news one day.

I approach social media and business situations (and life for the most part) as if my grandmother were in the room. I was taught "Yes sir, No Ma'am" type chivalry and do not consider it a burden to hold the door open for people.

I also try my damndest to stay out of disparaging conversations unless something really needs to be stood up for. Because it is important to be polite in most cases.

Though I can be direct, I try not to be hurtful or rude. Businesses who can take a similar course have nothing to fear on social media.

Hi Grandmother! Thanks for the chicken dinner the other night.

Are your managers halting innovation in favor of inner office politics?

Oliver Hart of Harvard split this year’s No­bel Prize in eco­nomics for his work on incomplete contracts.

Imag­ine an in­ven­tor who needs to dis­tribute a new prod­uct. Suc­cess will prob­a­bly ride more on the in­ven­tor’s choices than on dis­tri­b­u­tion. So it makes sense for the in­ven­tor to have the power to make the big de­ci­sions. The way to do that is for the in­ven­tor to be what econ­o­mists call the “resid­ual claimant.” That is, the in­ven­tor has the rights not only to the in­ven­tion but also to the dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels.

What happens in a company when the managers do not have the incentive for overall firm success, but rather are rewarded on things like profits?

I’ve seen many folks in these positions focus so much on the short term that they often miss opportunities to gain traction by taking a leap that might require a temporary stall in operations or retooling of something internal.

Sometimes you have to give the machine a tuneup or even buy a new machine, and if managers aren’t incentivized in the right way, they can “leave that worry for the next person” who will fill that role and let an opportunity to leap forward pass them by.

All employees at the Ritz-Carlton are famously empowered to spend up to $2000 without managerial approval to solve a problem.

Can we apply this same thinking to innovation? I’ve worked with many companies where employees and managers have great intuition in marketing, but never float the necessary ideas to the top in favor of politics and “picking battles”.

If you are at the top, I implore you to design compensation around encouraging successful innovation; and encourage everyone to speak up when they have these intuitions.

The culture of “They’ll never approve this.” Is of your own making. It’s yours to unmake.

When you get home and everybody’s already fast asleep. Except for Lambie. #HanginwithLambie

Helps customers buy, so they can do some selling for you

Marketers and salespeople get a bad rap sometimes. It's mostly from folks who have had a bad experience.

But most people I speak to can recall far more positive commercial experiences than negative ones when really asked to consider this.

I think it is because the bad experiences stereotype are just hard to forget and the satisfactory ones that meet our expectations are easy to forget.

That doesn’t make it any easier to produce a pleasant buying experience. It’s hard. You have to really think about how the consumer wants to interact with you, your product and the purchase process.

You have to make sure your people are properly trained and in the same page.

Consistency and ease of purchase are the building blocks of success

You have to try to keep each experience consistent from one to the next.

The continued success of McDonald’s is not built on quality of the product; it is built on consistency in product and purchase experience.

“Marketing in an interactive world is a collaborative activity—with the marketer helping the consumer to buy and the consumer helping the marketer to sell.” - Seth Godin

You can’t expect the consumer to help you sell through word of mouth referrals (or even incentives) if they have to qualify the recommendation with: “It’s kind of a hassle”, or “For the most part, you get what you came for.”

Helps customers buy, and they can do some of the selling for you. You can’t quite get rid of your sales staff, but if you want word of mouth referrals, you need to focus on these fundamentals.

Are you making it hard for your customers to buy?

Have you had your customer stand in front of you, card in hand, and not allowed them to buy?

There’s an annual art festival in my neighborhood. It has gotten huge over the years.

Folks from around North Texas flock to a closed off thoroughfare and peruse art, listen to live music, eat food from trucks, and sip on wine in the streets.

We took our little family out there, as we like to do, yesterday. It really was a blast. My daughter of 19 months downed an entire gyro and danced.

I noticed some troubling things about vendors, though.

One of the fundamental things that this event is.. is an art show. Vendors sign up to come to things like this to show their art. Many come from very far away in the hopes that some of that art will be purchased.

They spend time putting together elaborate displays, and spend many hours in the hot sun engaging with customers.

But… it seemed about half of these folks forgot to think about how buyers buy.

We should all look at the following as a case study and reflect on whether or not we are adding any unnecessary friction to our own customer’s buying process.

If you have a price tag of $300+ on your artwork, and you are cash only… you might have a disconnect with reality. Who carries that much cash?

“Check” is not always a great second option. When I put together my camelback, sunscreen, keys, extra bottled water, and diaper bag for the arts festival…. checkbook is not typically a part of that essentials checklist.

I should really remove the 300+ qualifier. I don’t carry that much cash these days. It’s pretty much a card only society at this point. Food truck vendors know this. They all have those little phone credit card swipers and are ready to trade you a swipe for as many tacos (or vegan meat patties? i saw a truck for this. count me out.) as you can handle.

With all the effort that the art vendors and artists put into the production of showing up, they should really look into the free option of ordering a reader from somewhere like Square. These kind of processors take a fixed percentage of each sale and no monthly fee. They even send you a free little swiper to plug into your phone.

[caption id=“attachment_237” align=“aligncenter” width=“700”]I'm not stumping for Square here. Just showing how easy it is. Lot's of similar options. I’m not stumping for Square here. Just showing how easy it is. There are many similar options.[/caption]

I’ve heard some objections to this in other environments about the percentage. I usually use 3% as a rule when thinking about this variable cost of doing business.

It’s a question you should ask yourself: Is 97% of something better than 100% of nothing? What hassle are you trying to save yourself that making it harder on your customer? Should you accept a burden to enable the sale?

I did see another issue with some of the artists I’ll talk about in another post. Engagement. I’ll link that here when it’s posted.

Priorities

Last week, I realized I had bit off more than I could chew.

I had put one (probably more than that) too many things on my plate and had to let one go.

I looked up and realized that there was one “urgent” obligation that was completely voluntary, optional, and not important.

It reminded me that I need to step back and assess things every now and then.

By dropping that task and staying closer to the II quadrant, I was able to gain a bit of sanity back, and spend a little bit more quality time with my daughter.

She rode a pony, and I might have missed it otherwise.

“There is so much bad in the world… and then there is Harper.” - @handybethany on #harpershashtag

This pony’s name is Cowboy. #harpershashtag

Say it with fewer, simpler words when possible.

Essential tips on writing for clarity.

This is an email I received from one of my Professors in my MBA program. I now share this with you. Single space between sentences. Back in the old days you double spaced on typewriters, but printers now adjust for periods so only one space is needed.

Edit down, edit down.

Typical problem is verbosity. When you edit, read a couple times just thinking about sentence structure itself–not the substantive content.

Say it with fewer, simpler words when possible. Delete needless verbiage. Hemingway is an example of a great writer–short simple sentences with simple language.

Paragraphs tend to be too long. People are put off by that. Paragraphs should begin with a simple sentence that lets the reader know what the paragraph is about.

Delete needless adjectives. The word “very” should almost never be used.

Is the content organized properly? If you say you are going to cover something, does it get covered?

When you read yourself for substance, then just think about the content, ignoring the English. Is it organized logically and get the key points across?

As I noted, you should use the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) as a guide for level of explanation and how to make a topic a bit more interesting to a reader.

Editing for clarity and content is noticed by the reader. Lots of smart people never go anywhere because they cannot tell others clearly what they know, so it is a skill worth developing.

Best,

RM


I hope you found as much value in these words as I did.

The “Field of Dreams” Fallacy and Inbound Marketing Myths

If you build it, they may not even know… Are you waiting on Shoeless Joe?

Are you taking the “Field of Dreams” approach to inbound or content marketing? Many folks I speak to are… and it’s killing them.

I have to tell you, it frustrates me to see folks working hard to create some content, and then no one ever sees it.

Often, this lack of “splash” is that makes quitters out of some really otherwise tenacious people.

Well, Im here to tell you that you can’t just publish an article on your website and expect that people are going to:

  1. know about it.
  2. care enough to read it.
  3. care enough to “like” it on Facebook.
  4. care enough to comment on it.
  5. care enough to share it.
  6. be moved enough to take action.

If you aren’t getting the response you had hoped for, ask yourself: Is there a chance I didn’t ask for that response? In many cases, people will do what we ask.

I’ve seen people’s feelings hurt when their stuff didn’t get found, but they didn’t spend the time to promote it themselves.

I’ll ask:

Did you email it to your group of close advisors? Did you even share it on LinkedIn? I usually don’t even need to ask whether or not there was a promotion strategy in place.

There are a lot of times when content can be found in Google searches if you are truly trying to serve the customer (more on that in a future article, maybe this weekend. I’ll link it here when it is done). But you can’t count on that, especially in the beginning, because it takes time to show up there for certain phrases.

So start focusing on how to get your stuff seen as you create it. For more on that, here’s a selection from Jay Baer’s piece on marketing your marketing.

They marketed their marketing. You have to consider that when you’re attempting to break through the enormous amount of digital clutter, and it’s where social media and content really work together.We often think about content and social media as different, but they are really two sides of the same coin. Content is fire, and social media is gasoline. It’s much easier (and more effective in many cases) to use social media to promote outstanding content, than it is to promote your company.

Read the rest of Jay Baer’s piece here:

www.convinceandconvert.com/content-m…

 

 

Does your business communication sound like a human speaking?

It might be time to stop pretending that your business was built by some kind of brand entity without flaws.

If your website reads like a robot wrote it, no one is likely to “connect with your brand” in a meaningful way.

I read an article yesterday about how writing an audiobook changed a traditional fantasy novelist’s writing outlook. It really made me think about this in a different way.

Writing an audio-first story also had its challenges. “It makes you pay attention to things like dialogue where you really do want to make sure it sounds reasonably like humans speaking,” Scalzi says. One of the changes he made was in how he used dialogue tags such as “he said / she said,” which work in written books but aren’t necessarily useful for a listener. “It sounds like a small thing, but when someone is speaking what you’re writing, those small things add up.”

Could speaking your copy out loud first be a better way to create it in the first place?

I know creating audio content has helped me out of writer’s block many times and it has helped me build an audience in my podcast.

I haven’t really gone in on it all the way though until recently though.

Lately, I’ve been writing a whole lot more like I speak because I’ve had a lot of practice speaking and cutting out filler words.

The practice I had in creating content with my voice might have made me a less terrible writer, or at least a more human sounding one.

Take a look at your website copy and read it aloud. Does it sound like it was written by a human? Does a voice or point of view come through?

So many business schools and PR departments teach smart people to turn their language into a robotic mess.

Take a cue from Scalzi (the writer) and write like you talk. I am trying to get better at this every day, ya know?

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13160550/writing-audiobook-john-scalzi-the-dispatcher-audible

 

The choices our customers make, and the choices we make

Fifty years ago, there wasn't much choice. Relatively, anyway.

Let’s just look at how a customer might have become aware of our business in 1960.

Well, There has always been verbal word of mouth. Direct mail was always an option, and quite an effective one when done properly.

If we are looking at mediums of communication, we had three TV networks, radio, the newspapers, and books.

There were outdoor advertisements like bus benches and billboards, but not as many as there are today.

The choices one had to make in the ‘Mad Men’ era had started to become more complex. In later seasons of that show, subplots developed around which agency had the biggest computer to drive with media buying decision-making.

A megacomputer has arrived at (the agency). “What man lay on his back counting stars and thought about a number?” asks Don (Draper), framing it as a battle between philosophy and bean-counting. - The Slate's review of "The Monolith" Mad Men, Season 7, Episode 1

This fictional struggle, in 1969, between a creative director and the robot machines is still relevant today.

With the limited set of choices above, it was of great value to many to have a computer help drive decisions.

To someone who is used to going by gut feel, data-driven decision making can be a tough pill to swallow.

Imagine how we are to react to today’s set of choices when it comes to ad distribution alone. I can’t list them here. We aren’t limited to time slots. We are pretty closed to ‘audience of one’ capabilities for targeted ads being served to single member audiences.

Your customer has an ever-growing number of choices when it comes to how to spend their time.

But you do not have an unlimited budget, and you must make choices on how to best spend your time, creativity, and coveted ad budgets.

I suggest you allow the data to creep in a little to help inform these decisions.

But Don was right about one thing, you shouldn’t let data stifle creativity.

You have to balance the art and the science. It’s a choice you can make every day.

A reminder to design things for the customer, not your CEO

I think we often build sales and marketing materials more for ourselves, our competitors, or our egos than we do our customers.

Sometimes we are more concerned with our stuff looking more “whizbang” than our competitors, that we forget to address the needs of our customers.

Sometimes we forget that our customers don’t know our lingo. Sometimes we just forget what is most important to our customers.

The following post found on Reddit reminds us to consider the customer, no matter what business you are in.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/55krp8/a_note_to_those_who_design_restaurant_websites/

What mistake might you be making in your industry? What kind of information that your customer is laser-focused on are you hiding?

Could this be breaking trust before they ever reach out? Not even the best VP of Sales can warm a cold prospect who ruled you out before calling.

Empower all your employees to contribute knowledge and reap rewards

It's a simple idea. Hand your employee the keys and allow them to share their knowledge on the internet.

Your customers will get better and more consistent support materials that they can access without waiting on you, and it’s there for anyone to forward in response to email inquiries.

Your prospects will get better answers to their questions because you’ve answered them proactively, and shown that you aren’t hiding the answers behind a “sales call”. Again, you’ll have better and more up to date documented answers to send in email replies to prospects.

When confronted with the idea, I hear pushback from some business owners and managers. They rationalize against the idea by saying something like, “What if they decide to post something ugly? We can’t have that. This probably isn’t for us, because our industry is different. We can’t just have any old person posting what they ate for lunch on our website; or worse, if they got mad at us and decided to post something unfavorable and we got into a PR nightmare. We should let the competition make this mistake.”

This kind of mentality is blind to a few things.

First, I often see really smart people revert back to thinking all content on the internet is about what people had for lunch.

While, there you can find lunch content on Google, that doesn’t make your business any less of a candidate for creating helpful content based on your employee’s tribal knowledge.

Secondly, the idea that your employee is going to “go postal” and decide to post hateful or unfavorable content on your website is kind of silly for a couple of reasons.

  1. They can post this kind of content anyway; with or without you. A disgruntled employee doesn't need your website as a stage for their rants. If they are mad at management, they are likely to go post on Glassdoor or a social media site you have no control over.
  2. They don't need to post anything, anywhere to have their unfavorable judgement or actions show up on the Internet and hurt your brand. Case in point:
FORT WORTH, Texas - A popular restaurant chain is taking action after two customers in Fort Worth say their lunch included racial slurs.

I saw the following post on the Fort Worth, TX SubReddit community (a sort of local social bulletin board)

https://www.reddit.com/r/FortWorth/comments/55c1uf/ft_worth_sonic_customers_shocked_over_racist/

The headline from the news story in Los Angeles, CA was “Ft. Worth Sonic customers shocked over ‘racist receipts’”.

Here’s a little lesson in restaurant operations. When you sit at a table, or pull into a car space at Sonic, there is usually a table number or car number associated with your location. But when order at a crowded bar or you come to the interior patio area at Sonic on foot and press the button, the employees try to give you some kind of visual identifier and enter that into a field on the ticket in the POS system.

This is where it went wrong for a local Sonic franchisee. An employee used this space and entered offensive language like a racial slur and used generalizations around ethnicity as the identifiers. These fields also showed up on these customer receipts.

It sounds to me like could have been a few things likely going on that might have caused this.

  1. The franchisee hired the wrong person. The employee may have just been a bad apple who did not care about how he made people feel. You can't show everyone the way.
  2. The franchisee might have not given proper training. The employee might have genuinely thought at first that he was the only one seeing the slur, and could have been ignorant of the receipt bearing the label. The employee might also have not been given a process for how to use the labels and where to source the identifiers from. Perhaps there couple be a shared order that all employees use to make it easy to remember. E.g. Color/material of hat/shirt & pant style.

However you want to look at it, it is job of management to ensure continued success for their employees. This may not have been the right person for the job in the first place or it might have been a training issue.

One thing that is clear though, is that this employee had no access to the company website; but was still able to make a PR problem for not only the franchisee, but the parent company at Sonic.

You can not manage to the exception any longer.

You have to expect that folks are going to use common sense. If you can’t do that, then you have the wrong people.

My suggestion is that you open the floodgates and shine a light on your employees and their expertise.

Let them share the tribal knowledge that would otherwise go undocumented and you can increase employee retention and build a better and more productive workforce that do not spend as much time reinventing the wheel in Microsoft Outlook with similar replies to the same questions.

Centralize knowledge with the power of employee generated content.

Your employees, customers, and prospects will be empowered to have a much better experience.

Don’t let fear get in the way.

Is this what the Fort Worth Facebook Data Center will look like?

In a recent post on Facebook, Zuckerberg shared pictures from inside the Luleå Data Center in Sweden.

www.facebook.com/FortWorth…

It’s pretty cool looking. Literally, cool looking. It looks like my memories might need a jacket.

We might not realize that when you upload a photo or share something on Facebook, that file is actually stored on computers somewhere(s). The trick with Facebook is that they have it stored in many many locations at once, which creates redundancy. That’s a fancy for lots of duplicates and backups of the same stuff.

As you flip through the pics, you can see that they are protecting privacy by wiping, and then physically destroying outdated hard drives.

With the Fort Worth Data Center looking like it’ll be ready around the same time as George R.R. Martin’s next novel, The Winds of Winter; it appears our climate will be a bit milder in the next couple of years.

If you are looking to read more posts… check this one out.

handythinks.com/stories/h…

Until later…

UTA Fort Worth Campus this morning

Bon Iver's new album has me skipping back to tracks 8 and 9.

I am a full album guy. I typically listen to albums from artists like Bon Iver all the way through. But Bon Iver's new album just dropped, and I keep skipping back to tracks 8 and 9.

Read More →

How I fell prey to curse of knowledge

I have messed up our company messaging in the past and it took me a long time to understand how and why it happened...

In my business, I have people who are not that familiar with the marketing world come to me and ask me how I might be able to help them. I think I've confused a lot of them in the past.

I’ve used too much jargon, and I’ve made their heads spin. 

It’s funny, because these kinds of things (like jargon prospect are likely to not understand) are easy for me to spot in one of our clients' elevator pitches or on their website, but it’s harder to see in the mirror.

The reason why is an example of a “cognitive bias” we have as humans. There are many of these biases that hamper our decision-making abilities. The only way to avoid these traps, is to study them. So that is what we will do together.

The Curse Of Knowledge

An example of the curse of knowledge is demonstrated in a classroom setting, where teachers, or subject experts, have difficulty teaching novices because they cannot put themselves in the position of the student. A brilliant professor may no longer remember the difficulties that a young student may be encountering when learning a new subject. - Wikipedia
When I have run into problems with this in my own business, I found I was no different. I had my head way up my own ass.

The folks who understood the language I was using had no problem understanding me, and deals got done. But I tended to have a harder time beginning relationships with complete newbies to inbound marketing marketing communication & strategy.

I’ve had people tell me they “just aren’t ready to tackle all this”, and some have said things like they just straight up “don’t get it”.

What I realized after one such conversation earlier this year, is that there’s just a bunch of junky words that had to go. Since then, I have mostly thrown out any of this language in my sales conversations.

Going Airborne

Take a look at this instruction on the inside of a Boeing 737 airplane. 6158611608_7b6e6e17d6_o

The photographer entitled it Technical Writing for a reason. These were clearly written for other engineers and not passengers. To me that door reads, “Don’t ever touch this!”. So, to a certain extent, I guess its doing the intended job.

But, let’s pretend we had to warn passengers about that door and explain more than Which is how I read that currently How would you word it?

Well, I don’t know… I was asking you. I’m not an engineer.

The lesson here is that you have to balance technical knowledge with being able to put yourself in the intended audience’s shoes. You may need to bring in someone who isn’t as close to your stuff as you are to translate your version of the signs above into human English.

Attacking the Curse of Knowledge in my Business

The CEO of a manufacturing company doesn't care about content marketing, social media marketing, or even lead generation.

She cares about creating more valuable and profitable long-term relationships with customers because this brings in more revenue and makes her company more profitable. Those jargon-filled words above only lead to more confusion about the overall process.

What I have learned is that when I frame some of the things my company helps folks figure out in way that is relevant to their world-view, they start to get it.

Time for some Jargon Surgery

So I am tearing down our company website over the next week and we are updating our messaging to try to eliminate some of these biases.

I plan to validate these changes with real prospects, and just folks who aren’t intimately familiar with the day-to-day buzzwords and pulse of our world.

I hope you will join me in doing the same.

Are you in?

  • Take a look at your own company website or other collateral and show it to people who do not know your space.
  • If you have customer service or sales reps, do a ride-along. Listen for their use of jargon, including intra-office abbreviations that are absolute gibberish to the customer. Eliminating these and using the customer's words for these things/roles/processes instead will make a world of difference when it comes to retention.
Photo Credit: Michael Coghlan

Who is coming to eat your lunch?

Disruption is one of those words being thrown around like Halloween candy these days.

So much so that you might start to ignore it and take your place in the market for granted. A recent WSJ headline reads: Amazon’s Newest Ambition: Competing Directly With UPS and FedEx

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Executives at the freight giants are skeptical, and so are analysts and logistics experts. They say it would be difficult and costly to build a domestic delivery network to rival the big U.S. players, especially after the failed multibillion-dollar attempt by Deutsche Post AG’s DHL Express in the 2000s. (WSJ - 9/27/16)

Are they nuts? Did they forget the drone video?

www.youtube.com/watch

That was published last year on Nov 29, 2015.

They have loudly and boldly declared war on UPS and FedEx and they don’t even seem to acknowledge it. They must be wearing rose colored glasses. ?

How can we forget the story of Barnes & Noble?

One of my favorite tales from this saga was when the Nook was released in 2009. This was two years after the Kindle was released.

The Nook also features integration with Barnes & Noble's retail stores. Users who bring the device into the store will find that special offers, content and discounts pop up on the Nook's screen. Eventually, the company says, customers will be able to read entire e-books for free inside the physical store. (WSJ - 10/21/09)

Kind of missing the whole point of the eBook now weren’t they? These folks don’t want to come to the bookstore to read the book.

What a stark contrast the Nook’s “retail store integration” is from the intuition brought to the design and intent behind the Amazon Kindle.

In 2007, when the Kindle was first introduced, smart people had this to say about it.

"I like the Sony Reader, but it was built by technology people," says Evan Schnittman, vice president business development, rights, academic & USA divisions, Oxford University Press. "The Kindle device was clearly built by readers." (WSJ- 11/20/07)

The logistics giants better wake up and smell the Bezos. Because they are about to lose a big account. I wont be surprised when Amazon decides to use their distribution network to mail my letters to Grandma.

If Bezos can buy the Washington Post, why not the US Post Office?

So after having said all that… who is coming to eat your lunch? Are you seeing the disruption coming from hidden competition?

The record companies didn’t expect a computer company to come after them. The cabbies didn’t expect an app to break them. No one expected the Internet.

Who or what will change your business seemingly overnight? Might you be able to see it coming now if you step outside your bubble?