I have to tell you; some of the “closes” on their list are 75 years old. Can you believe that in 2011 there are still sales training programs that teach these antiquated scripts?

The answer is that today’s B2B sales people need to learn a Collaborative Selling Solution that is non-manipulative, non-abrasive, that engages the prospect in the assessment of the needs or problems and includes them in the development of the solution.

In our next post we will describe our 7-Step Collaborative Selling Solution and contrast it with the old Traditional Selling Techniques and even show how it is better than Consultative Selling Processes that you may have seen or been taught. It is quite simply the best sales process ever created!!

“Looking Like a Fool”

Those who watched American Idol last season saw a 62 year old man named Larry Platt audition singing a song he wrote called “Looking Like a Fool With your Pants on the Ground”. Legend has it that Larry wrote the song, which became an Internet sensation, after seeing an adult man walking down the street in Atlanta with a child in his arms and was dressed like so many of today’s youth with his pants well below his waist and lot of his underwear sticking out of the top of his pants.

While I don’t see any business men and women dressed that poorly, I am often shocked by the attire that I do see in offices all over the country. I am sure that most of it has been brought on by the advent of “business casual attire” that has gotten totally and completely out of control.

Recently, I called on a prospective client and was greeted at the front desk by a receptionist with an extremely low cut blouse, and, as I found out later when she stood to walk across the lobby, she was also wearing shorts. Just to let you know this was not an industrial plant or some Internet company filled with Gen X’ers or Gen Y’ers, but is  a relatively well known company here in San Diego in a mainstream industry.

I have also recently encountered a host of sales people and middle management people who’s attire shocked me to my core.

A couple of years ago I began mentoring a couple of sales people, a man and a woman, who when they came to me, were dressing totally inappropriately to be calling on senior executives and business owners, which they were doing for their jobs with a national firm selling high tech gear. Both indicated that they were not closing many sales and that they were having some difficulty building relationship with clients.

The man of the duo was dressed way too casually when I went on my first sales call with him, in wash and wear slacks and a golf style shirt with a company logo. And, I won’t even start to describe his shoes, but let’s just say they looked like a couple of big clunky boxes on his feet.

More problematic in my view was that he wore his hair in a longish spiky “Rod Stewart Style” that screamed immaturity and lack of respect for his job and the people he called on. When I asked as we were driving to the appointment if he styled his hair this way on all sales calls he smiled sheepishly and said yes. When I asked why he had chosen that particular style he said because his girlfriend liked it. I next asked him how many customers or prospects he called on had a similar style…. He advised me that none of them did.

When I later asked why he thought he was having trouble building relationships he responded that he thought it was because they were all so much older than him and so he had a hard time finding any common ground. Upon further questioning he admitted that sensed that his customers and prospects seemed uncomfortable and did not always give him adequate time.

It was clear to me that his prospects did not take him seriously because he looked like a person who did not take his job or his client’s needs seriously and looked like a kid playing at being a grown up. To prove it to him after our sales calls I went so far as to contact his clients to conduct an “audit” of their satisfaction with the company, the products and their sales rep.

Here’s a sampling of the comments I received on him:

• “He seems to know his products pretty well but I don’t think  he has the experience to understand how we use them in the real world”
•  “He’s a nice young guy and takes me out to play golf occasionally, but he always pairs me up with other young guys his age, I wish he would pair me up with other senior managers in companies similar to mine so that I could share the challenges we all face and how they are working through them. I think he thinks the golf outing is just supposed to be fun and a day out of the office. I can’t afford that time out unless I am getting something more from it.”
• “He’s a good young kid, checks in with me every month and keeps me updated on new products”

What I heard was that his customers generally like him but they think he is a young guy who is not astute enough yet to realize that they want his help in solving their issues and challenges, not just selling them something. Would it surprise you to learn that this “young man” was 37 years old and had been with his company for over 10 years? I’ll bet you thought he was at least 10 years younger based on the image he had created and I was describing to you.  

I encouraged him to make a couple of changes in his appearance before his next sales calls and told him that I thought those simple changes would dramatically impact his customer’s perceptions of him and ultimately would also impact his sales.

First I encouraged him to get out of the golf style shirts except on days he was actually taking a customer to play golf. Moreover, I encouraged him to mirror his clients dress and that being over dressed will always be better than being under dressed. So if as an example he called on a client in the morning that wore suits he should wear a suit…tie and all. If later in the day he called on someone who wore slacks and a dress shirt (or even more casual)  all he had to do was slip off the tie and the coat to mirror their dress. I encouraged him to buy a couple of pairs of traditional dress shoes. And I really more than encouraged him to change his hairstyle to be more professional and to “mirror” the majority of his clients. And, if he didn’t know how the customer would dress to wear a suit or sport coat.

I even took him to my hair stylist and asked her to shape his hair in such a way that he could spike it on week-ends or if he is going out after work, but so he could wear it in a more professional style during the workday. Master stylist that she is she created an outstanding cut that she demonstrated both ways. He left at least satisfied that he could spike it without waiting for it to grow back if he hated the new work style we had created.

He waded into his sales calls the next week with new clothes, new shoes, a new hairstyle and filled with trepidation that his customers would find him “dorky looking”. But the immediate positive feedback that he received was startling to him. He received a compliment or two on his new clean look every place he went and admitted he felt like his customers gave him more of their time and more attention. And, more importantly his sales begin to climb.

Today, he is a sales manager at the same company and spends a portion of his sales training time teaching his reps to not “look like a fool”…. Oh, and the woman who was his peer who came to me for mentoring at the same time also changed her attire and appearance to look more professional and she is now the top sales rep working for old “Spiky Hair”

A very good friend of mine who has become a millionaire many times over and could get away with dressing however he wants almost always wears a suit to a business meeting no matter how the audience will be dressed. When people say “oh we are business casual” he always says thanks for  letting me know and shows up in his suit anyway. When asked why he doesn’t also dress Business Casual he always replies the same way, “Dan, there’s nothing casual about business.”

I will admit to not always wearing a suit, but you will seldom if ever see me at a meeting when I am not dressed in at least a pair of slacks and a sport coat. I figure that there is a reason why “Dressed for Success” has remained as one of the top selling business books of all time.

Many of us are familiar with the Whole Product concept  which was developed by the Partners at Regis McKenna.  However, like many ideas and concepts, it has its roots in earlier work.  In this case, it was the work of Ted Leavitt, a professor at Harvard Business School who outlined something he called the total product in his book “The Marketing Imagination” one of the titles in my top 21 high technology marketing books.

The Total Product

Leavitt drew attention to the fact the consumers (B2B or B2C) don’t just purchase the product itself, but rather, the product and other expected and augmented attributes, which were often intangible. The total product was Leavitt’s vision of how less tangible elements could be added to a product that had certain physical attributes, imbuing it with other dimensions that were often more valuable than those physical attributes.

To completely understand the Whole Product concept, we will need to meld Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation with the Whole Product in another post.

The Whole Product

The principal augmentation by the partners to the Total Product was to collapse the outer layers of Leavitt’s Total Product and divide them into segments representing other key factors that influenced high technology purchases.  Otherwise, why would you pay say, $200 for a Mont Blanc pen, when the same refill will fit in other, much-less-expensive pens?

How to Identify the Sectors

The sectors actually break down into two groups: What you actually provide that is tangible and everything else the customer needs to make the product acceptable to them as a solution.  The number could be small or it could be large like this, as suggested to a large B2B telecommunications equipment manufacturer :

Whole Product Elements

• Shared vision
• Open systems structures
• Best of breed
• Support (system administration, network management, facility control)
• Flexibility
• Value for price
• Reputation
• Track record
• Relationships
• References
• Cultural fit/compatibility
• Force in technology
• Financially stable/growing
• Service
• Creative and innovative,
• Good migration path
• Complementary fit (to existing infrastructure)
• Ability to scale to meet our needs

Although the list in the above case is daunting, it’s because the market segment was relatively mature.  As such the number of factors often increases.  The closer you are to the Chasm (presuming you have crossed it), the shorter the list is.

How Do I Identify the Sectors?

Talk to your target market and your existing customers.  Research the real reasons why they purchased.  Even better, find out why prospects bought a competitor’s solution, or postponed the decision entirely.  Look at what successful competitors are doing … But …. Don’t blindly copy them. You have different resources and product portfolios.  look for inspiration not duplication.

Proper product and corporate positioning is critical for high technology companies and their marketing teams.  It sets the stage for messaging in all of its forms: PR, Web Site Design and Content IR, Advertising, Tradeshows, Collateral Materials, Presentations, Telemarketing Scripts, and Social Media. All on a single page/sheet of paper.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that it can take concerted effort and a major investment in time from the company executive team and the marketing team to “iterate towards the truth”.

So What is a Position?

Rosser Reeves, who co-founded, and later became Chairman of the Ted Bates agency (and the model for Don Draper in Mad Men), coined the term “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP).  His idea came from research done by the agency in the early 1940s into why certain campaigns were successful and others not so much.  This was the same approach the Partners at Regis McKenna used to develop the concept of “The Chasm” and how to cross it.

His conclusions were simple:

1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.”
2. The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique—either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
3. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.  At Regis McKenna, we called this the “Compelling Reason to Buy”.

He more thoroughly explained his ideas in his book “Reality in Advertising”, 1961.  Unfortunately, it’s out of print and used copies go for $60 and more.

It’s important to note that in FMCG markets advertising is the principal method of moving consumers along through the purchase decision process, which may only take a few weeks and often involves only a single person.  Most high technology products involve longer time frames and more influencers as we have, and will, discuss in additional posts.

The Positioning Statement

Other outlines and approaches have been proposed and are in circulation, but I like this one the best:

• For (Target Market)
• Who Want/Need (Compelling Reason to Buy)
• (Company/product) is a (Category)
• That provides (Key Benefit)
• Unlike (Primary Competition)
• Who/Which (Competitor’s Main Benefit)

Positioning is especially important for high technology companies because it is easy to lose focus and be swayed by your last customer, or a sales person’s last loss, or the CEO’s next great idea, or that “secret” project engineering has been working on without marketing knowledge or guidance while a critical product or improvement has been sitting on the back burner because marketing did not give enough guidance.  But that never happens … right?

How Do You Develop One?

The short answer is VERY CAREFULLY.   A positioning statement drives the overall company strategy: marketing, manufacturing, engineering, the product roadmap, sales channels and investor relations (private or public).  The first three elements are the most important.

Target Market

It is as important to identify whom IS NOT your target market, as it is to do so for your best targets.  Also, identifying the first of those targeted segments is critical.  Especially smaller companies need to be laser-focused, since you are going up against larger, more well established competitors with substantially greater resources at their disposal (as any Microsoft competitor knows all too well).

Sometimes referred to as the “Bowling Pin” strategy (your chances of knocking all 10 pins down is significantly higher when your ball hits right between the front two pins) or Beachhead Strategy, this entails finding an identifiable sub-segment of your target market that you can “own”, where other competitors will not be able to displace you very easily.  For example Silicon Graphics focused on 3D Molecular Modeling when entering the CAD/CAM market a number of years ago against IBM and DEC who dominated the workstation market because the graphics performance of SGI’s workstations was so superior.  Once successful, you can then look to adjacent segments where your USP is of measurable benefit as well.

Compelling Reason to Buy

Whether or not you call this the Unique Selling Proposition or, as I have, the Compelling Reason to Buy, stay strictly to the intent of the terms.  What is unique about your product/service that will make your target market change their behavior, without changing their behavior?  The first ‘behavior’ is what they might be buying today, the second refers to deeply ingrained habits, or behavior patterns which are much harder to change.

Still not clear?  Here’s an example.

When I was at a wireless messaging company we were ready to launch a new hand held product and a $500 million 2-way network.  Amongst a myriad of activity, the new wireless device, the new network type, new compression algorithms, custom market research and focus groups, media planning for a regional roll out, brand name development, logo development, packaging, sales training, collateral materials, filming TV commercials, creating radio spots, newspaper advertising, billboards and many more things … something almost slipped through the cracks.

Since the advent of numeric pagers, after you entered your ‘digits’, you concluded by pressing’ #’ on your telephone keypad.   Unknown to anyone at our company, the infrastructure supplier switched the protocol to pressing the ‘star’ button after you left your message.  We were just a month from launch when I found out.  Why was this so important?

Muscle memory is the most ‘hard-wired’ of all behaviors.  The first users of the new device were going to be existing users, right?  Yes BUT …  Of more importance were those leaving messages for these customers who were accustomed to pressing ‘#’.

We had the change made back to # and, at least that problem was taken care of successfully.  There was more ‘fixin’ needed that I’ll cover in additional posts.

Category

If you can create a new category (where yours is the first product of its kind) that links to an existing one that is familiar, you have a leg up on the competition.  First there were supercomputers, and later mini-supercomputers and super-minicomputers.  I’m sure you can think of more.  What many miss however is what we have, and will say, over and over again: because hi-tech marketing is different from consumer marketing, a number of players in the communications infrastructure need to “buy in” to the term you use because it needs to be used by others to become accepted.  Otherwise it’s just more of what we called at Gartner SSVH (Self-Serving Vendor Hype).  If you are creating a new category, start with those you can trust (or from whom you can ‘buy’ silence under NDA) and gauge their reaction.  How fast do they ‘get it’?  Does is seem stupid to them? Or do they wish they had thought of it first?  Don’t go forward unless you pass the ‘no puffery’ test.

Other Elements

By the time you get the first three buttoned up, the last three should almost fall into place:

• That provides (Key Benefit … Boil it down to something short and memorable)
• Unlike (Primary Competition … Don’t say there isn’t any. At the minimum it’s the current way of doing things)
• Who/Which (Competitor’s Main Benefit … If you didn’t study your competitor first you shouldn’t be here)

That’s all there is to it! It will take a lot of work, over a few months of concerted effort, to get an acceptable working draft, but I can assure you it will be worth it.

Where Do I Start?

A strong suggestion …  Begin by asking key executives in your company/division, SBU, etc. a set of up to 10 of identical open-ended questions, in the same order, that you can compare and contrast with each other.  Find out what is in agreement and where opinions diverge.

Here’s a beginning:

• Who is/are our target markets?
• Why do customer buy/why will they buy our product/service?
• What would you call the segment of the market we might be in?
• What is/are our key benefits?
• How are we different from the competition?
• How are we different from how our target market does things today?
• What is our main competitions best feature/benefit?

Sound famiiar?  Once you get your results, you’ll have a good start on “Iterating towards the truth” (Skip Bushee, founder of InfoCorp, later acquired by Gartner Group).

Like the diffusion of innovation, we have Dr, Everett M. Rogers to thank for this critical understanding of how adopters behave.  In his writings, he talked about how the adoption of a new innovation occurs in 5 steps:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Evaluation
4. Trial
5. Adoption

I have used these categories to develop (and actually use!) a practical model to help me understand how to adjust the marketing mix in high technology companies and I will discuss that model in a later post.

But again … Wait … There’s More!

Rogers examined what he referred to as “perceived characteristics of innovations”.  These are the things that potential adopters consider when they look at innovations and they affect how likely they are to move from awareness through the other steps listed above to adoption:

• Relative advantage (the ‘degree to which an innovation is perceived as being better than the idea it supersedes’)

• Compatibility (‘the degree to which an innovation is perceived to be consistent with the existing values, past experiences and needs of potential adopters’)

• Complexity (‘the degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to use’)

• Trialability (‘the opportunity to experiment with the innovation on a limited basis’)

• Observability (‘the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others’)

Innovations that have greater relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, and observability, along with less complexity, generally will be more widely adopted over innovations that do not.

So What?

Well … This is another difference between consumer goods and high technology marketing.  As we discussed in an earlier post, in most consumer goods markets, the risk of purchase is low and the degree of referencing others is also low. Advertising is employed to create awareness and is (or should be … the lack of a “call to action” in most advertising is appalling) focused on getting consumers to go to a store to try the product.

Differences in High Technology Product Marketing

So we know the risk is higher and the degree of referencing is higher in high technology purchases, but what can we do?  The short answer is “keep your powder dry” because the time from awareness to purchase is also much longer for high technology products whether they be B2C or B2B.  That timeframe may be even more extended based on product complexity, the number of decision makers and price.

The key is to identify all the layers between you and the customer including employees, channel partners, industry analysts, investment analysts (Yes, the two are different. Lump them together at your peril), the press (including bloggers!) and the consumer.  Once you have done this you can set your plan of attack to maximize the impact of your time and money spent, especially when advertising is important, since it is so expensive.

The next step is to find who each of these layers reference.  Where do consumers go to get information (TV?, Radio?, Magazines?, E-Zines?, Trade Magazines?, Newspapers?, Google?, Friends and Family?, Peers?, etc.) and which affect them the most?  Where will they go to try the product? Who influences those who write about and speak about high technology? Who do they source for stories? Keep doing this until you have go back to your company and make sure you include it in your analysis.  Many a product has suffered at the hands of a sales force or customer service team that was not familiar, or excited about an offering.

Then get you key points, messaging, positioning and initial target markets down in easy to understand and brief form so you can work on moving forward through the layers toward your customer.

If you do this well each dollar you spend will have a greater effect.  Some people call it leverage. It sometimes seems to be like pushing a rope through mush, but the more your efforts yield something like laser light rather than incandescent light, the better off you’ll be.