Timothy Riesterer's Blog, page 18

It Takes More Than a Technology Stack to Drive Demand

aka…if your content sucks, technology just speeds up the sucking.

It’s crazy. At last count there were something like 1,800 tech companies in the so-called “martech stack” – the multi-layered collection of automation, tools and systems designed to drive modern marketing.

Given the heightened focus on the stack and the continued explosion of technology players, it’s tempting to imagine that vetting the vast array of first-class solutions and investing in the best option for each step of the buyer’s journey will solve your most pressing marketing challenges.

Granted, if your marketing process is broken, an optimized stack may be what you need, next. But, if your message and content sucks, a great martech stack will only speed up the sucking – and broadcast that sucky story to more people.

No offense.

All of these technologies work as advertised. In fact, most of the companies I get the chance to work with are not worried or complaining about their technology stack. They fret about whether the stories they are putting into their demand generation engine will actually incite actions that lead to pipeline.

That was the message of a recent keynote I delivered to the Digital Sales Camp, an online conference focused on digital selling strategies. Below are some of the key points I focused on in that discussion (along with a link if you want to hear a free recording):

Answer the most important prospect question: Why Change?

If you’re creating demand generation content, and using digital interactions to create leads, the question people you’re engaging want an answer to is “why should I change?” In other words, they want vendors to make a compelling case as to why they need to leave their “status quo” approach, and do something different. If you can be the company that engages prospects by answering this critical Why Change question, you will dramatically improve your odds of avoiding the dreaded no decision and winning the deal. Forrester Research found that 74% of executive buyers give their business to the company that’s able to create the buying vision and only 26% to the winner of a fair-and-square competition. A great “why change” message is essential if your marketing content is going to be the good enough to disrupt the status quo and create a buying vision.

Have a Point of View, and Make it Distinct

To accomplish this you need to deliver a message that gets customer to see their status quo as unsafe and commit to a new safe path, which is you. Those conversations don’t happen when you’re responding to known customer needs discovered through voice of the customer research. They only happen when you introduce “unconsidered needs” they may not even know about. Unconsidered needs are business problems or challenges that prospects are unaware of, or whose size, speed and impact they underestimate with respect to their business.

Creating a distinct point of view message and content, requires you to create some risk by identifying and introducing these unconsidered needs, and then resolving them with your “unexpected strengths.” (These are those capabilities you used to tag onto your old VOC-driven messages and call them value-added capabilities.)

My company, Corporate Visions, has conducted research that found leading off your demand generation messages with unconsidered needs—versus starting off by responding only to the known needs—can give you a statistically significant boost in perceived uniqueness, to the tune of almost 50% and a 10+% increase in persuasiveness to change.

This is also supported by research called “loss aversion,” coined by social psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They proved that humans are 2-3x more likely to make a change, make a choice or do something different in order to avoid a loss than to attain a gain.

Go Beyond Introducing Risk

It’s become very popular today to talk about providing insights to your prospects in your demand generation content. Most people think an insight consists of some surprising data or factoids that “set prospects’ hair on fire” to emotionally engage them and incite them to take action.

But according to another study we did at Corporate Visions, you make a much bigger impact on emotions and behavior change if your insights messaging includes a bucket of water to douse the flames.

In other words, creating risk with your insight-based message is not enough. You must combine risk and resolution in your messaging and content. The research showed that you stand to gain a statistically significant improvement in your emotional impact (12 percent) and behavioral impact (9 percent) by pairing risk and resolution in your message, versus just presenting risk alone.

The technology platforms will continue to proliferate, and companies will continue to invest in the best point solutions for each stage of the modern marketing process. But it’s your core message that will determine the success of these investments, not the other way around. For a deeper dive into the messaging concepts above, check out my recent keynote presentation at Digital Sales Camp, and feel free to share it with your messaging and content creators.

This article originally published in CMO.com.

The post It Takes More Than a Technology Stack to Drive Demand appeared first on Corporate Visions.

How Are You Responding to the Biggest Training Challenges You Face?

Four out of five companies are unable to their train reps on the skills they think they need, according to the results from Corporate Visions’ State of the Conversation Report. What does this mean, potentially? It means companies are at serious risk of falling short in what two-thirds of marketing and sales leaders believe is the most important factor in creating differentiation: your customer conversations.

By taking a pass on training, you put your team at risk of underperforming in the most crucial skills areas. And, by relying only on scheduled, classroom-based training formats—valuable though they can be—reps could wait months before addressing a skills gap.

To address the training shortfall and overcome some of the core challenges limiting training quality and accessibility, companies are going to have to think differently about the way they train their sales teams. Our State of the Conversation Report, “Beyond the Classroom: New Trends in B2B Sales Training,” looks at the trends and challenges in the current skills training landscape, and explores some new approaches to training that could help companies improve the way they train their teams today. Some of those new approaches include:

Leveraging a competency model focused on core selling skills, instead of relying on a generic roles/responsibilities curriculum.
Creating custom learning paths based on need and performance indicators, not “arbitrary learning plans.”
Delivering training in a flexible format, offering virtual modules that allow you to deploy training when and where reps need it without removing them from the field.

Download Corporate Visions’ State of the Conversation Report to learn more.

The post How Are You Responding to the Biggest Training Challenges You Face? appeared first on Corporate Visions.

Webcast Recap: Becoming a Sales “Triple Threat”

Pipeline, proposals, profits—those are the three “Triple Threat” skills areas your salespeople must excel in if you want to drive growth. To create pipeline, your reps need to defeat the status quo bias and differentiate your solutions. To deliver business proposals that pass muster with executives, you need to link your business value to your prospect’s initiatives in a way that’s CXO-relevant. And to close more profitable deals, your reps must have the skills to protect your pricing and expand the size of your deals.

In this webcast, Tim Riesterer outlines each skill area, and explores how a competency-based training model can help your team articulate value in the three critical moments where you need to make an impact to win.

 

The post Webcast Recap: Becoming a Sales “Triple Threat” appeared first on Corporate Visions.

A Corporate Visions webcast: Becoming a Sales “Triple Threat”

 

Pipeline, proposals, profits—those are the three “Triple Threat” skills areas your salespeople must excel in if you want to drive growth. To create pipeline, your reps need to defeat the status quo bias and differentiate your solutions. To deliver business proposals that pass muster with executives, you need to link your business value to your prospect’s initiatives in a way that’s CXO-relevant. And to close more profitable deals, your reps must have the skills to protect your pricing and expand the size of your deals.

In this webcast, Tim Riesterer outlines each skill area, and explores how a competency-based training model can help your team articulate value in the three critical moments where you need to make an impact to win.

The post A Corporate Visions webcast: Becoming a Sales “Triple Threat” appeared first on Corporate Visions.

Who Doesn’t Love a Good Underdog Story?

I’m sure you’ve heard that we are in a new era of buying and selling–how it’s all about the buyer’s journey (not the sales process) and how the buyer has all the power today.

The question for you is this: Do you know how to message and sell from your “low-power” position in a way that is most effective?

What The History Of Wars Can Teach Marketers And Sellers

In his book “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell discusses an obscure study by Ivan Arreguín-Toft, a political scientist. The study reviews every war fought in the past 200 years in which one side was at least 10 times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent.

In the study, these “Goliaths” won 71.5 percent of the time. Somewhat expected. But what makes this really interesting and applicable to marketers and salespeople is what he discovered when he went back and reanalyzed the data, looking for what happened when the underdogs acknowledged their low-power position and chose an unexpected, counter-intuitive, unconventional strategy. Amazingly, in those cases, the “Davids'” winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6 percent.

In other words, when underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t,” according to Gladwell.

So how does the underdog story play out in complex B2B sales conversations?

Prospects and customers come to you with a list of what they want based on their research and then expect you to simply fill the order and meet their price. They expect you to do battle on their fields, using their weapons of choice, according to the terms of engagement they set.

But negotiations research shows this is exactly the wrong approach. It’s called dominance complementarity, which is a fancy word for saying that when the low-power party in a negotiation tries to match power with the higher-power party, the outcomes are much worse and more often end up in no deal.

However, and most importantly, the research also shows that when the low-power party embraces their low-power position, they are free to bring more creativity to the conversation. The good news? The study showed that this element of creativity was proven to generate more value and better outcomes for both parties.

Here are three unexpected, counter-intuitive ideas for marketing and salespeople to embrace the low-power position and view it not as a detriment to success, but as a low-power advantage:



1. Identify and introduce “unconsidered needs” to expand the value of—and the need for—your solution: You can do this by showing clients the problems or missed opportunities that are off their radar, then linking those challenges to your unconsidered strengths. This technique represents a huge opportunity to create urgency and differentiation. In fact, a recent study my company conducted with Dr. Zakary Tormala, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, found that prospects will view you as 41 percent more unexpected and unique if you follow this unconsidered needs-based approach, compared to those who follow traditional value-added or voice of the customer approaches.

2. Lead with insights followed by provocative questions for a more persuasive, unexpected approach to discovery: In another study with Dr. Tormala, we tested this approach against the traditional “diagnose-then-prescribe” model and found that delivering an insight before a question, rather than after, makes prospects sense more urgency about their current situation while giving your message a 9 percent boost in persuasiveness. By sharing an insight first, you can capitalize on an academic principle called the “anchoring effect,” which serves to anchor your audience to a position more favorable to your goals.

3. Make the first offer: It may seem counterintuitive, but when you’re in front of prospects and customers, you stand to gain a negotiating advantage by making the first offer, rather than letting them broach pricing matters first. This allows you to anchor your price higher and expand your prospect’s range of reason, giving you the negotiating foundation you need to protect your margins and close more profitable deals.

To learn more about the advanced negotiation skills you need to capture more value in your deals, check out this infographic.

The post Who Doesn’t Love a Good Underdog Story? appeared first on Corporate Visions.

Going Beyond the Brand with Starbucks

 

Having a great consumer brand doesn’t always translate to success at the enterprise level for B2B relationships. Learn about some of the key challenges that even premier brands have to overcome to be relevant with executive decision makers.

The post Going Beyond the Brand with Starbucks appeared first on Corporate Visions.

How To Convince Customers To Stay

Provocative messaging and insights-based approaches are all the rage as companies seek to disrupt the status quo, create the urgency to change, and get companies to choose you. Yet often people who work for companies that have significant market share ask me, “What happens when you are the status quo?”

When you’re the outsider looking to unseat an incumbent competitor, a disruptive approach is essential for overcoming the status quo bias. My company actually conducted research showing that introducing “unconsidered needs” to surprise a prospect and create uncertainty with their status quo is far and away the best approach creating the urgency to change and differentiating your offering.

But sometimes you are the insider. You have a large installed base and spend a lot of time and effort ensuring renewals and protecting existing customer relationships. So it’s natural to question whether your “why stay” messaging needs be different than your “why change” messaging.

‘Why Stay’ Test

We never like to answer these important questions with an opinion or “feelings,” so we created another test with Dr. Zakary Tormala, a social psychologist with expertise in persuasion and social influence. It was designed to compare various messaging approaches to renewal conversations. What we found was very interesting.

Turns out that to get current customers to renew requires you to actually reinforce the causes of status quo bias as opposed to new customer acquisition approaches that must deliberately disrupt those biases.

It sounds like a “no duh,” but in this era of challenging and provoking customers, our latest research shows that using this same aggressive approach on existing renewal customers will actually decrease their loyalty and increase their willingness to shop and possibly switch.

Experiment Design

The online experiment involved 402 individuals who at the outset of the study were instructed to imagine that they ran a small business and that about two years ago they had signed up with a 401(k) provider to help promote their company’s retirement plan to employees. The hope was that getting more employees signed up would boost employee satisfaction and retention.

Participants imagined that two years ago only 20% of their employees subscribed to the 401(k) plan. Their goal had been to increase participation to 80%. Now, two years later, participation had risen to 50%, which was a jump from 20% but short of the 80% target. Meanwhile, employee retention rates had improved, but it was difficult to know how much of that was attributable to promoting the 401(k) plan.

After being provided with this background information, participants were told to imagine that they were trying to decide whether to renew and continue working with their existing provider. When participants clicked to continue to the next screen, they received a message—the pitch—from their provider. What they didn’t know is that they were being put into three different pitch examples.

The opening paragraph of the pitch was identical for all participants. But then each of the pitches varied in crucial ways:

In the status quo reinforcement message condition, participants received an encouraging description of how the plan was working to date and that the company was making progress toward its goals. They then read an additional message designed to reinforce the causes of status quo bias, emphasizing how much effort went into selecting the current provider in the first place and highlighting the risks and costs associated with changing providers at this point.

In the second condition, the provocative pitch, the message documented the results to date, but switched gears and introduced a new idea that challenged their current approach. In this case, the message noted that it can be harder to move from 50% to 80% participation than it was to move from 20% to 50% and that doing so might require different tactics—in particular, switching the plan from an “opt in” approach to an “opt out” approach that defaults all employees into participating in the 401k plan. The provider would help make this change, which would push the company toward achieving its goals.

Finally, in the provocative pitch with upsell condition, the message was the same as the provocative pitch just described, with the addition of offering a series of online tools for employees that ostensibly would increase their engagement in reaching their goals. But these new tools would add 5% to 15% to overall program costs, with an anticipated payback in less than 12 months.

After hearing each message, participants answered a series of questions assessing their reactions to the message and its persuasive impact. These questions focused on participants’ intention to renew, attitudes, likeliness to switch, and credibility.

The results?

Across all of the measures of message persuasion, the status quo reinforcement messaging outperformed the provocative and upsell messages by statistically significant margins. A message that documented success and reinforced the status quo biases showed a:

13% boost in intentions to renew, relative to the two provocative messages. To measure this, participants were asked how likely they would be to renew with their current provider and how likely it was that they would stick with that provider.

9% boost in positive attitudes, compared to the two provocative messages. Participants had significantly more favorable impressions of the provider than in either of the messages that challenged the current approach with a new idea.

7% lift in credibility perceptions, relative to the provocative conditions. Participants answered three questions assessing how credible, trustworthy, and confidence-inspiring the provider seemed to be.

Participants also answered three questions assessing switching intentions, which sought to find out how likely they would be to shop around for other providers, switch companies, and try a new provider. Again, there was a statistically significant effect, but in this case it assumed the opposite form. The study found that participants in the provocative conditions were 10% more likely to switch or shop around than participants in the condition that documented success and reinforced status quo biases.

These results strongly suggest that a great “why stay” message must reinforce the status quo by emphasizing its value and playing up the challenges associated with switching to an alternative.

Four Causes Of Status Quo Bias—And How To Reinforce Them

To help you build a better “why stay” renewal message, I offer this brief tutorial on the four causes of status quo bias and how to address them in your story:

1. Preference stability: Deliberately remind customers of the long, hard process they went through to make their original decision to pick you. People naturally prefer to keep their previous decisions/preferences stable.

2. Perceived cost of change: Walk them through the startup costs required that have now been returned through improved performance and are now sunk and functionally part of the ongoing operating budget. People believe change costs more than staying the same, so make sure you confirm that.

3. Anticipated regret and blame: Recall for them the time and resources it’s taken to ramp up the solution, onboard all the people, manage the changes, and get the implementation running as well as it is now. Making another change just reopens all these potential failure points they could get blamed for.

4. Selection difficulty: Willingly admit that most of the other solutions on the market provide similar capabilities, that the offerings haven’t changed much since the original decision, and that you’ve kept them updated throughout. People have a hard time changing if they don’t think there’s much contrast between the alternatives.

As you can see, decision-making science matters as much to your “why stay” message for customers as it does to your “why change” message for prospects. Turns out the forces you must exploit to defeat the status quo are the same ones you must exploit—in reverse—to maintain it. It also means your provocative, challenging approaches are not universally applicable.

#CTW16 Conference Roundup

Conversations That Win 2016 is now in the books!

The conference, hosted in Scottsdale, AZ, brought together sales, marketing, enablement and training leaders from leading B2B brands around the globe – with more than 350 live attendees, and hundreds more watching Corporate Visions keynote presentations via livestream.

Here’s a taste of the content that was presented at #CTW16: the only conference dedicated to your customer conversations. Watch customers share real-life examples of how they are breaking the status quo by applying decision-making sciences – NOT best practices – to transform their sales and marketing programs. Listen in as Corporate Visions thought leaders share our latest academic research and findings. And see pictures of all the fun and connectivity we enjoyed over the course of the event!

Check Out the Conference Photo Album!

KEYNOTES

The Brainy Side of Marketing and Sales: Decision-Making Science Deep Dive

Welcome & Opening Remarks – Joe Terry, CEO, Corporate Visions

Triple Threat Keynote (Singin’ in the Rain) – Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy Officer, Corporate Visions

Latest Messaging Findings – Erik Peterson, Conrad Smith & Rob Perrilleon, Corporate Visions Consulting Leaders

Essentialism Keynote: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Greg McKeown

Storytelling Keynote – Jennifer Aaker

BREAKOUT SESSIONS

It’s Da BOM! (Wipro)

Enable the Three Value Conversations (Corporate Visions)

Closing the Conversion Gap (Intelsat & Kodak Alaris)

Your Brain on Content (Corporate Visions)

Moving from Products to Solutions (Aon Hewitt)

Sales Masters (Cisco)

Customizing Your Corporate Visions IP (Thomson Reuters)

Driving Behavior Change in a World of Unreliable Managers (United Rentals & CUNA Mutual)

The Enablement Supply Chain & the Path to Readiness (GE Digital)

Moving From Products to Solutions

Aon Hewitt, a provider of human capital and management consulting services, made a big shift in its sales conversations, putting its sales team in a position to talk about issues and insights instead of just features and benefits. The change is making a huge difference in the quality of their conversations in the field.

The “before” and “after” story tells it best, as Andrea Armstrong, VP global commercial operations, noted in her sales breakout track. Before embracing an insights-focused, customer-centric approach, the company’s sales conversations were dominated by seller-centric messaging, with nearly 60 percent of sales meetings focused on talking about their company and products. The other 40 percent of the conversation was split evenly between talking about their slides and listening to the client.

That’s not the case anymore. Aon Hewitt has undergone a sea change in its sales conversations, as 75 percent of sales calls involve actively listening to and having fully engaged dialogues with their clients. Meanwhile, only 10 percent of the conversation now focuses on Aon Hewitt themselves.

The new Aon Hewitt sales cycle is built around storytelling, and their process has five steps:

Define the client’s goal.
Define Aon’s goal.
Craft the value proposition.
Craft a strategic communication plan.
Implement the plan.

Fundamental to the success of this approach, Armstrong noted, is knowing where you are going before you start the sales process, so prospects and customers understand that you know them in and out. Research how they write, and how they talk about themselves and their customers, to develop a robust client profile.

#CTW16 Recap: Moving From Products to Solutions

Aon Hewitt, a provider of human capital and management consulting services, made a big shift in its sales conversations, putting its sales team in a position to talk about issues and insights instead of just features and benefits. The change is making a huge difference in the quality of their conversations in the field.

The “before” and “after” story tells it best, as Andrea Armstrong, VP global commercial operations, noted in her sales breakout track. Before embracing an insights-focused, customer-centric approach, the company’s sales conversations were dominated by seller-centric messaging, with nearly 60 percent of sales meetings focused on talking about their company and products. The other 40 percent of the conversation was split evenly between talking about their slides and listening to the client.

Aon Hewitt’s Andrea Armstrong talks about the impact of transitioning to an insights selling approach.

That’s not the case anymore. Aon Hewitt has undergone a sea change in its sales conversations, as 75 percent of sales calls involve actively listening to and having fully engaged dialogues with their clients. Meanwhile, only 10 percent of the conversation now focuses on Aon Hewitt themselves.

The new Aon Hewitt sales cycle is built around storytelling, and their process has five steps:

Define the client’s goal.
Define Aon’s goal.
Craft the value proposition.
Craft a strategic communication plan.
Implement the plan.

Fundamental to the success of this approach, Armstrong noted, is knowing where you are going before you start the sales process, so prospects and customers understand that you know them in and out. Research how they write, and how they talk about themselves and their customers, to develop a robust client profile.