Biz Dev

I had what was ultimately a positive tech support experience with Dell over the weekend, but there was one jarring moment of poor (and poorly timed) salesmanship that’s been sticking in my head.

Since I know you’re burning with curiosity, the issue had to do with Google Chrome crashing a lot. Turned out to be a virus that corrupted the files and it required more than uninstall/reinstall of Chrome to fix it.

Anyway, when you’re on tech support there are long periods when you’re just sitting on the phone while the rep has remote access to your computer. Usually, that’s just dead silence (or heavy breathing if he forgot to hit mute).

When the rep is waiting for something to happen, they appear to be trained to look for an opportunity to sell something. Great idea, and I’m sure it brings in some nice cash to Dell.

Most of the time, they try to sell some variety of an extended warranty or service package.

In this case, he was trying to sell me on an upgrade from Microsoft Office 2007 to Microsoft Office 2010.

His premise was sound. The newer version of Office would, theoretically, have tighter protections against viruses. I was on the phone with tech support due to a virus problem.

Oh, and you were doing so well!

He lost the sale because his understanding of what he was selling could not advance beyond the script in front of him.

“It will give you the latest protection against viruses up to the level of your anti-virus software.”

I asked for a translation of that gobbledy-gook three times, and all he could do was re-read the script.

Lost sale.

The idea was to couch a sales pitch into a legitimate piece of technology and computer security advice. All he had to do was rephrase the script into human speech and he would have had a nice little commission.

Tip for the masses – Selling from an expert positioning can be powerful, but you need to know your product to pull it off.

I read an article the other day in the Wall Street Journal about an extension of the Google Chrome operating system that will compete head-to-head with Microsoft Windows.

The logo stares at you from any angle. Try it!

I think the Chrome browser is awesome (despite a recent crashing tendency). I switched to it about six months ago because of its far greater speed and simplicity.

I have to say I’m skeptical about the viability of a Chrome operating system. At the inauguration Google presented it as a platform that just provides the Internet. That’s great, but the Internet isn’t everywhere.

I have a mobile account with Clear, which has some geographic limits for now, and I’ve had one in the past with AT&T that was nationwide so I’m plenty comfortable with remote Internet access. Even with that, there are often times when I just don’t have a connection and having a computer that is useless unless online just seems like a major limitation.

They also suggested that people can use tools like Google Docs to get the work done that used to be on Microsoft Office. Google Docs has a long way to go before it gets to that point.

For all Microsoft’s flaws, it does provide a consistent, common backbone to the business world.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out in the next few years.

I bank at PNC. This is a recent switch based on their Virtual Wallet product – a creative combination of a checking account, interest-bearing checking and a savings account.

Stop selling and just take my money!

Anyway, the other day I stopped by the ATM to deposit some checks and had an odd experience with PNC’s sales process.

Depositing to an ATM is an act of faith. I’m feeding checks into a machine hoping it all turns out okay. Now, I’ve been doing this for 15 years so in most cases I don’t even think about it. It’s normal.

That’s not true for everyone. I occasionally come across people who are just not comfortable with technology. They don’t use ATMs. They don’t do anything online. It’s not common, but the is a wide range between that person and someone like me (who uses ATMs exclusively and does most of my banking and bill paying online). Most people are probably comfortable using an ATM for deposits, but …

In this case, I went through the process. I fed the machine my card, typed in my PIN and had set everything up for the deposit. The next step was feeding the envelope to the hungry machine and moving on with my day.

That’s when PNC decided to pop an ad into the process and ask if I was interested in learning more about some new service they’re offering. I don’t even remember, so you can see how effective the ad was.

The main problem is that the timing of that ad caused me to have a moment of doubt about the deposit I was about to make. It broke my routine and suddenly I was wondering if I had entered the deposit information correctly. I almost cancelled the transaction and started over.

The point here is that upselling and cross-selling is important, but there is a time and place for it. Watch out that your efforts to increase the deal size don’t interfere with your efforts to close the deal in the first place.

The family has been watching season 1 of Little House on the Prairie on DVD the past week or two and I find it interesting how an adult mind connects with that show.

First off, I am truly amazed at the people who went out to homestead back then. We whine today about challenges and threats, but back then they really had to put everything on the line to get that farm going – life, limb, everything.

They don’t go into the mechanical details, but as I recall from history class when new areas were opened up for settlement people would have to get there and stake a claim. That meant putting everything into a wagon and trudging the family to get there.

What do you mean there's no Internet?

If you survive the trip and stake a claim, you now own a big patch of grassland. You have no money to buy supplies like plows, seed, building materials … nothing. Goal 1 is survival. Find a source of water. Find a source of food and build some shelter.

Once you have that, you have to find some way to plow through centuries of thickly grown grassland roots to open up productive farmland.

In the premiere, Charles Ingalls accomplished all that and had to barter services to get a plow and some seed. He then worked himself to exhaustion getting the fields ready and planted in time. It worked out well, of course, or that would have been an amazingly short TV series.

The magnitude of that task is amazing. It’s even more incredible when you think about the millions of people who went out to do it anyway despite the risks.

I had a consulting meeting with a startup firm last week where we started shaping out the marketing plan for the company. This is a firm entering a crowded marketplace with several established competitors, although none of the 800-pound gorilla type.

The company is led by a long-time salesman. He’s a good one. Long track record of success. Conscious of the habits he’s built that made him successful and will continue to do so in the future.

The difference is that he’s responsible for more now than just sales.

I am carrying you people

Like many salesmen, he has the attitude that marketing is what those semi-useless people over there do to generate sales leads. He’s polite about it, and to be honest only about half wrong judging from how I’ve seen marketing operate in many other organizations.

The attitude is going to lead to trouble, however. A company built on sales and … other stuff … is an inherently unstable beast. The only thing that will drive success in such an organization is raw muscle work. It’s simply a question of out selling the competition (note that I said outselling, not chopping prices).

Based on what I’ve seen of his sales skills, I believe he’ll be able to take the new firm to a respectable level of success. However, he’s not going to get further than that because sales can only go so far. You can’t always assume that you’ll have a superstar on staff to pull everything else through. If you’re the CEO, you can’t always be the superstar because you have too many other decidedly non-superstar duties to attend to during the day.

That’s why marketing matters. Yes, we generate leads and that is critical to the company’s growth. However, what’s really important is for us to fill in the institutional gaps that sales alone can’t fill.

If you have a marketing program, you can flub a sales call and still get that customer later because next month’s white paper will click in a way that you didn’t. If you have a brand, you can survive a goof-up in the service area. Assuming that those two scenarios are relatively rare events,

On a semi-regular basis I work with clients to develop content-based, thought leadership marketing programs. That’s a really fancy way of saying that I help them regularly write articles, deliver presentations and share their ideas.

You know what I tell them?

Consistency beats perfection every time.

I declare a Do Over!

You are much better off producing something of acceptable quality once per week than you are producing something of unparalleled perfection once in a blue moon. Write out an editorial calendar. Keep your publishing commitments.

As you may notice, I’ve written nothing in this blog for over a month.

So here’s the other half of that lesson that I teach my clients:

You can always declare a Do Over.

Coincidentally, that’s what I tell salespeople as well. They’re supposed to set goals – calls, meetings, close deals, etc. Sometimes, they miss those goals and sometimes, they miss those goals for unacceptable reasons like just being lazy.

The choice at that point is to deliver a regular round of self beatings … or simply declare a Do Over and begin fresh.

One of those options is productive. The other is not.

I declare a Do Over!

I’ve been doing some biz dev work lately that involved calling on marketing and advertising agencies. Try to identify this one:

“We’re refugees from the typical ad agency because we just wanted to work our own way”

Stumped? Try this one:

“We’re passionate about the client work, not the ladder climbing, so we founded … “

Ok, I’ll make it easy:

“[Fill in the blank] years ago our team ditched the typical agency world to chart our own path.”

Yeah, tricked you. Those are boilerplate descriptions of the unique industry rebels that seem to have founded every independent ad agency in the country. That includes the ones founded as a spinoff of the great ad agency behemoths of the world.

I don’t think its the sort of thing you’d notice unless you found yourself reading the same About Us page over and over and over. For some reason, our UNIQUE, INDEPENDENT, PASSIONATE ABOUT THE WORK ONLY friends all look, act and talk exactly the same.

Remember those Deadheads back in college?

The ones who pretended to be hippies (on daddy’s credit card – well, actually, that describes the real hippies too). They were rebels. They didn’t follow the rules. Tie-dye every day. Baggy jeans. Some attempted the white guy dreadlock look.

This is what your creative, freethinking ad agency looks like to me

They really stood out, didn’t they?

Well, until you went to a Grateful Dead concert.

Then all those free-thinker individuals who tried soooooo hard to be individuals looked like they were walking around in uniforms. Snappy, impressive uniforms with big Cat in the Hat top hats on their stringy hair.

The lesson here is that before you strike out into the world with your unique identity, you might want to sneak a peak at your competitors to see if they’ve already staked out the exact same territory. If so, maybe some deeper thinking is in order.

In answer to your next question …

No, I will not be naming names.

I’m doing biz dev work and I’d like to sell something to these free-thinking, creative, unique agencies. I’m only making fun of the ones who don’t book meetings.

I’m in the market for a Bluetooth headset and a computer mouse. I know … the nation’s GDP owes me a debt of gratitude.

The point is that I know exactly what I want (product if not a specific brand). I know exactly where to get it – Office Depot or OfficeMax. I have cash in my hands. Well … I have a debit card in my hands at least. I’m simply looking for which of these two fine establishments will get my money.

But first – I want a deal. Give me a coupon. Give me an offer. I demand the illusion that I’ve conned your retail store out of a few dollars.

I had a coupon that would have been perfect, but it expired yesterday. Damn.

I’ll go to each company’s website and look for coupons or offers. The products and prices are pretty much the same. Whomever woos me with the greatest ardor (is that a word?) gets my cash.

Oh Office Depot, why do you torment me so?

Hmm, Office Depot intrigues me with their offer of a mobile text coupon. I’m an Internet Marketing guy (because I capitalize those words) and you offer to let me live by what I do! I send the text message. I get the reply. And nothing else.

Office Depot just got a text from someone looking for a coupon – a sure sign of an impending purchase – and they don’t have the system primed to send me a coupon. I have to wait around for the “up to 5 a week” I’ll be receiving now. Well, I’m irritated and the first of those 5 had better be good or I’m going to slap you with a STOP reply. Because I’m a badass.

OfficeMax, you have your opening. Impress me.

Hmm, nothing in the online flyer fits my need, but it is fun to pretend to be flipping pages with their little Flash app. Wheeee!

Ah, here we go. All I have to do is give them my email and zip code and they’ll give me offers exclusive to my local store. Small price to pay. I enter my info and …

Um. There are no offers. No coupons. I gave away the store (or my email) and got nothing. You promised you’d call me the next day! I feel so dirty now.

The lesson here is to make sure you think through processes from your customers’ perspective. Yes, both OfficeMax and Office Depot have online couponing programs to drive traffic and business. My snark aside, I’m sure those programs drive a significant volume of track-able revenue.

However, a new prospect doesn’t live according to your publishing schedule. I want to purchase now. I want my coupon now. You are free to pop me into your regular outbound marketing schedule, but don’t forget to feed the need that drove me to your website in the first place. I came there to buy something.

Maybe the direct mail marketers will treat me better. I think I hear the mail truck.

There are about 1,001 different opinions on how to design and build a website.

In my opinion, which I assume the world is waiting for, there are three elements to worry about, and most people start off by focusing on the wrong two.

The three elements:

1. Content
2. Technology
3. Appearance

Yes. I do mean to imply that the correct order puts appearance in last place.

There is no point to a website that looks pretty and runs on the most amazing technology ever if it doesn’t have anything to say. The prettiness wow will last for 0.5 seconds. The technology can either get in your way or help, but no one is coming to the website because it has a keyword cloud.

Start with the content. What do you have to say? How can you communicate that message?

That second question is actually a fairly new addition to the philosophy. It used to be that the Internet was a text place with pretty pictures. Now, we can clearly communicate with video, audio, graphics, presentations and text. Or all of the above at the same time.

If you’re going to spend time on building a website, invest the most in the content and ideas.

I’m putting together a pair of presentations for Roosevelt University to help alumni navigate the world of social media. This one is a bit of an evolution of the presentation I gave a few weeks back for Catalyzing Collaboration in two ways:

1. Focus on Job Seeking
2. Build a questionnaire follow-up

Iteration 1 of this idea is going to be more low tech. I imagine there’s a module for polling that lets you build a questionnaire. I’ll simply have that send me an email and I’ll produce a short assessment by hand. Longer-term, maybe I can automate it.

Obviously, the idea is for this to serve as a lead generator. I provide useful information and ask for permission to add the recipient to a newsletter list. I’ve counseled several clients to do something similar. It’s about time I did one for myself.

The details aren’t yet worked out, but the presentation will be on August 4 (downtown campus) and August 5 (Schaumburg campus).

Note - View the recording of the Social Media for Job Search and Career Needs presentation.