Timothy Riesterer's Blog, page 30

Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference: The Content Lives On!

The Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference, sponsored by Corporate Visions, may be finished, but the content lives on! It took place on Sept. 18-20 at the InterContinental Hotel, Chicago. Highlights included keynotes by Billy Beane and Ben Zander, dinner at the Shedd Aquarium, and sales and marketing insights from clients (Wells Fargo, CenturyLink, Dell, Miranda, Infor, Lawson Software and more) and analysts (Sirius Decisions, BeyondROI).

Click here for session summaries, slide decks, videos (to be posted throughout the next coming week), and photos!

Filed under: Deliver Conversations that Win, Deploy Tools that Get Used, Develop Messages that Matter, Professional Development Tagged: Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference

Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference Speaker Interview: Infor

 

Bob Ainsbury

Vice President of Healthcare Strategy

Infor

 

Q. What is your role within your organization?

I am the vice president of strategy for the healthcare business unit at Infor, a three billion dollar company that is organized around 13 industries with healthcare being one of the top ones. In addition to overseeing the organization’s strategy, my team helped prepare the pre-sales consulting group to deliver expert information on the industry and our solutions to healthcare executives.  The expectations placed on this person in the field is that they will be the difference maker in a sales cycle when it comes to articulating the vision and value we can bring to bear on the prospects challenges.  That meant I had to give them the information, tools and skills to execute on that role.

Q. What were the biggest sales challenges that your company was facing?

Complexity, confidence and agility.

1)     Complexity – The healthcare business unit has made numerous acquisitions, and now that we are part of Infor, we have a broad range of relevant and interesting products. But, it also adds complexity making it difficult for the field to become experts on everything.  The other challenge is sorting through the potential for overlap, and understanding the product adjacencies that are common with multiple acquisitions.  Not only does this introduce complexity in the product mix, it also introduces complexity in the sales pursuit.

2)     Confidence – Confidence is everything. Every day, part of my job is to make sure that the sales organization is prepared and confident. This is particularly true in the healthcare market which is always changing and is in the national spotlight almost every day.  Very few markets have the public and private debate, legislative attention and uncertainty you find in healthcare.  Sales people are expected to provide a trusted advisor role, so we are always trying to overcome the question marks swirling around and confidently deliver a message that brings some clarity to the confusion.

3)     Agility – We are a mature and successful organization. In all honesty this is the strongest sales organization I have encountered in my career. They get it and I am always learning from them. However, because of the changing landscape I just described, what worked five years ago is not as successful today. We needed to change our approach, which is why we embarked on a new messaging development initiative with Corporate Visions. It was a very clear way to move in a very different direction, which got the attention of our salespeople. This gave them an approach to change the experience in front of customers, differentiate from increasing competition, and it has been a success.

Q. What are you going to be presenting at the conference?

It’s all about adoption of the new message.  You can make great changes to your story, but you have to make sure the field is using it.  You can think, ‘hey, this is really cool, everyone’s going to love it.’ But, just like we train our salespeople that customers won’t always understand your message right away…and make a decision right away… we had to accept that we had the responsibility of helping the field grasp and appreciate the potential positive impact of the new story. They need to own it and make it work for them.  So, we treated the message launch and adoption like it was a ‘sales cycle.’  We had to sell the field on the power of the story and the new skills. I plan to share examples of how we did that, giving the audience a chance to steal some ideas and learn from our experience.

One example I’ll share is what I call a “playground tactic.” The idea is that if you stand up to the biggest kid who is trying to bully you, not the smallest one, and take out the big kid first, you will be OK because everyone else will follow.  In this metaphor, the big kids are the salespeople who are the opinion leaders with the most influence and typically the most skeptical – they exist in every sales organization. Our strategy was to go to the big kids who can tend to be the mavericks in the bunch and win them over. And this helped everyone who tends to follow his or her lead.

Another approach is to behave differently. Sales people are often jaded when it comes to new messaging. So we knew we had to innovate in the sales enablement to get everyone’s attention and, more importantly, buy in.  In the presentation, I’ll talk about using video to launch the new message. Instead of sending out a PowerPoint or Word file, to bring the idea to life we developed several amusing and fun internal videos to demonstrate how to get the sales people’s attention. For example, we did the elevator pitch. Because part of this was how to pitch our strategy in the elevator, we filmed it in an elevator so the sales guys could see it being used. The goal here was to get the sales team excited and to make them more confident. We wanted them to be confident enough to be different, because using a white board and a napkin is not in the comfort zone for most of them. We wanted them to be confident that they can do it, deliver it and make more money.

Q. What are you looking forward to most at the Marketing and Sales Messaging conference? 

I really enjoy the work of Corporate Visions. I am looking forward to being with like-minded people who understand the lizard brain and don’t want to drone on.  I am really enjoying being an alumni and hanging out with these folks. I think the stuff Corporate Visions does is interesting and I think the people that find it interesting, I will find interesting.

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To contact Bob directly you can email him at bob@ainsbury.com. If you’d like to meet Bob and some of the other brilliant minds that have broken the status quo, aligned marketing and sales, and spearheaded lasting change in their organizations, please join us for our Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference, taking place in Chicago, IL, Sept. 18-20, 2012.  Register now!

Filed under: Uncatergorized Tagged: Bob Ainsbury, Infor, Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference

Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference Speaker Interview: CenturyLink

 

Amy Shriver

Senior Marketing Manager

CenturyLink

 

Q.  What is your role in your sales/marketing organization?

I am a senior marketing manager within the enterprise markets group and I am responsible for content strategy and our sales enablement tools.

Q.  What are the biggest sales/marketing challenges your company has faced/is facing?

At the 5,000 foot level, one of the biggest challenges for our sales people was ending up in a price bakeoff.  Though we’re the third largest telecomm company in the country, we have a lot of the same features and products as our competitors.  Our sales people were having a really hard time differentiating themselves.  That’s one thing that we’re working to fix and is part of the reason that we engaged with Corporate Visions.

Like a lot of organizations, we struggle with providing our sales people with the best tools and resources for the various sales stages. We want to be really focused on what we’re working on, so that’s one thing that we’d like to get better at.  We want to provide them with the tools that give them the biggest bang for the buck depending on the conversation that they’re having.

Q.  What does your company do well to align marketing and sales?  What needs work?

We have gotten much more aligned. I joined the company last August, and they had engaged with Corporate Visions in January and that really helped with the alignment because there was buy-in from all of the groups versus marketing throwing something over the fence saying, “hey, here’s something from marketing.” There was buy-in from competitive intelligence, product, sales, and the engineers.  That really helped.

We rolled out a pilot earlier this year with a couple of sales branches and we really took the best practices and all the work we did with Corporate Visions and applied it and we’ve seen some great success.  And now that we’ve seen success with the pilot, it’s time to start rolling it out to the rest of the company.  The pilot was small in scale and we did it well.  But now we’re figuring out how to roll this out to our general audience – how to mimic the success of the pilot but on a country-wide scale.  One of the pieces of the puzzle for us will be really leveraging our field marketing managers – they sit in the branches and are our voice out in the field – and the relationships that they have with sales within the various branches.

Q. Was scalability one of the factors that you considered prior to kicking off the pilot program?

It definitely was something we looked at because the pilot was really hands on.  We had a team of people who flew out to the sales branches and did in-person training and we did a lot of coaching.  That really worked in our favor, but that’s not scalable.  We can’t fly to every single sales branch.  So now we’re looking at what worked in those in-person trainings and how to use the tools and resources we have internally to create something similar that is scalable.  For example, we’re using BrainShark to provide some of the training and the messages, and to train the trainers.  We’re looking at our options and are in the process of putting all of that together.  We knew the pilot would look a little different than the general audience rollout.

Q.  What kind of sales tools did you develop as a result of the pilot program?

We did playbooks – that’s a big thing here at CenturyLink.  One of the other things we created that was new for us was a grabber pack with instructions. It was like a deck of cards that had grabbers specific to this vertical.  The grabbers were what Corporate Visions calls a number play.  The grabber pack walked sales people through how to approach the number play.  They’ve all been trained on Power Messaging, so they’re all familiar with what a number play is, but we gave them a step by step that matches number plays with the particular challenges for this vertical.  We got some good feedback…they thought that was pretty cool.

Q.  What were some of the biggest surprises that came out of your work with Corporate Visions?

Based on my conversations with the people that participated in the Corporate Visions work, the big “aha” moment was the realization that we were able to differentiate ourselves in the market. I think that people had gotten so used to just talking about speeds and feeds that it never occurred to them that there really was a way to differentiate CenturyLink because it hadn’t been thought about in that way before.  I think the real awakening was realizing it’s what you say and how you say it, so we can differentiate with our message – we have the same products and services, but we can stand out with our message.

The participants in the pilot program loved the results of the Corporate Visions work.  Part of the reason we chose the branches we did for the pilot was we got buy-in from the sales leadership, so that was critical.  We wanted to work with a sales team that wanted to participate. We also knew that they had opportunities within their area.  We pulled the numbers from Salesforce, so it wasn’t just picking a name out of a hat.  It really was backed up by some hard numbers and figures.  We were able to show them how they were basically leaving money on the table. We created a business case going in.  Once we had buy-in at the highest level, the sales people were really excited.  They appreciated that we were giving them the messages to have meaningful conversations with prospects or existing customers, talking to them in their language and about their specific challenges. They liked that we gave them power and they now had the confidence to have that conversation.

I feel like what Corporate Visions does is cutting edge stuff.  People are starting to get smart about sales messaging and marketing alignment, but nobody does it quite like Corporate Visions.  You see people that do things that are somewhat similar, using different names and words, but this really is a new way of marketing and a new way of messaging.  It’s been a great learning experience.  I’d never done anything like this in previous positions.  This really is an advantage for any company that takes it on.

Q.  What can attendees expect to learn by attending your presentation at the Marketing and Sales Messaging conference?

We’re going to talk about alignment between marketing and sales.  We’ll tell the CenturyLink story and how we got to where we are today and then we’ll dig into the details of the pilot as a case study.  It’s great to talk about things in theory, but we’ll actually have some real-world examples.  Jo Becker, who focuses on sales training at CenturyLink, will be my co-presenter and she’ll show some actual results of what people who use Power Messaging’s funnels look like.  Her group is responsible for getting all of our sales folks up to speed and understanding how to use Power Messages and numbers plays.

Q. What are you looking forward to most at the Marketing and Sales Messaging conference? 

Listening to the other speakers.  One of the first things I did when I started last August was go to the Corporate Visions conference and, let me tell you, I drank the Kool-Aid.  I think they have some excellent content and I’m excited to hear from other companies that are as far along as we are, to hear what their challenges are and how they’re solving them.  I’ve noticed that at other conferences I’ve attended recently, CenturyLink is ahead of the game, which is a great position to be in, but I want to hear from people who are in a similar position to ours.

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If you’d like to meet Amy and some of the other brilliant minds that have broken the status quo, aligned marketing and sales, and spearheaded lasting change in their organizations, please join us for our Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference, taking place in Chicago, IL, Sept. 18-20, 2012.  Register now

Filed under: Business-to-Business Tagged: CenturyLink, Marketing and Sales Alignment, Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference

Corporate Visions Acquires WhiteboardSelling

We’re excited to announce that Corporate Visions has acquired WhiteboardSelling®, a sales enablement tools company. This move expands Corporate Visions’ business and strengthens its reputation as the leader in helping companies differentiate their marketing and sales conversations.

Joe Terry, Corporate Visions’ CEO, said: “This acquisition is a significant part of our strategy to grow both organically and inorganically. It also expands our global presence with talent, experience and clients. And, it continues to solidify our leadership position in the marketing and sales messaging, tools and skills category.”

Corey Sommers and David Jenkins co-founded WhiteboardSelling in 2007 with a mission to help marketing and salespeople use hand-drawn visual stories instead of documents and slides to sell expensive solutions to educated buyers in competitive markets. To date, the company has created over 500 whiteboards for more than 50 companies and trained more than 50,000 salespeople around the world.

“By becoming a part of Corporate Visions team, we have the opportunity to accelerate the growth of our whiteboarding concepts and capitalize on the intense interest in these solutions significantly faster than we could on our own,” said Sommers. “Our solution aligns perfectly with Corporate Visions’ focus on differentiating customer conversations because it helps marketing develop messages and tools that the field will actually use to tell a better story. It also gives salespeople a simple, repeatable process so they can gain greater confidence that they can create a differentiated experience in the buying cycle.”

The effectiveness of visual storytelling is rooted in brain research, which reveals that a person’s “old brain,” is responsible for making decisions; however, that part of the brain does not have the capacity for language. In order to get customers and prospects to want to change and to choose your company or solution, you need to leverage the power of visual storytelling, which is exactly what the WhiteboardSelling solution aims to accomplish.

“88 percent of executive-level buyers believe it’s important that a sales pitch is framed as a conversation, as opposed to a prepared PowerPoint presentation,” said Scott Santucci, principal analyst and research director at Forrester Research. “WhiteboardSelling’s methodological approach for helping salespeople deliver more interactive conversations is a powerful complement to Corporate Visions’ messages, tools and skills offerings. Whiteboarding provides a proven approach to presenting complex and abstract information in a simple, concrete way, which drives a more natural sales conversation.”

Because the WhiteboardSelling solution creates visual tools and teaches sales teams how to use visual storytelling to engage customers and prospects in a compelling way, it will become an integral part of Corporate Visions’ customer conversation system moving forward.

“WhiteboardSelling is a perfect fit with Corporate Visions’ focus on differentiating customer conversations,” said Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and marketing officer for Corporate Visions. “Whiteboarding is really a process of building differentiated messaging, putting it in a differentiated tool, and differentiating the delivery of that story, whether it’s over the Web or in person.”

By leveraging the WhiteboardSelling solution and the power of visual storytelling, Corporate Visions customers will be able to  more effectively loosen the “status quo,” otherwise known as “no decision,” when they are trying to create an opportunity. It can also help more clearly distinguish the differences in their solution from a competitor’s and it can better visualize the implementation process or business case when trying to close a deal.

The acquisition was officially completed on August 30, 2012. For more information about what this acquisition means for the market, please view this Brainshark presentation.

Filed under: Big Picture, Deliver Conversations that Win Tagged: acquisition, Corey Sommers, David Jenkins, visual storytelling, whiteboardselling

Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference Speaker Interview: Wells Fargo

Tracey Fanelli

Senior Vice President

Wells Fargo

Q.  What is your role in your sales/marketing organization?

I’m Wells Fargo’s senior vice president in charge of the marketing team for our Treasury Management business.  Our reach is broader than most traditional marketing organizations in that, in addition to traditional marketing communications, we are also responsible for sales content and sales asset development, including proposals, RFPs, and presentations.

Q. How is your organization structured?

I was brought into Wells Fargo almost eight years ago to establish a marketing team and we have always been responsible for developing both marketing programs and related sales content and materials. Nine months ago, after our merger with Wachovia, we moved marketing into the sales organization to help integrate marketing and sales and focus on revenue generation.

Being a part of the sales organization has given us the opportunity to directly enhance the sales process and group, align our marketing and sales efforts, and receive senior sales executive support.  The new organizational structure has been very effective because we’re now creating content and assets that are meaningful and valuable to the sales organization.

Q.  What are the biggest sales/marketing challenges your company has faced/is facing?

During the financial crisis and at the beginning of our merger with Wachovia, we had the opportunity to position Wells Fargo as a thought leader in Treasury Management.  Our marketing team made a strategic decision to move away from a product focus toward a more customer or business-challenge perspective. We’re in a very competitive business that has existed for a long time, so one of the big challenges is differentiating ourselves from our competition.  Another is making our sales and marketing materials and approach more customer focused.  We’ve always been a customer-focused organization but our marketing and sales materials and methods did not necessarily reflect that.  We also noticed we were talking about ourselves and our products a lot of the time versus talking about the customer and their business challenges. And from an internal perspective, we were struggling with getting sales to take notice and use what the marketing organization was creating for them.

Q.  What does your company do well to align marketing and sales?  What needs work?

The new organizational structure is working well because we’re more aware of the challenges that the sales organization faces in their day-to-day activities.  Now we’re structured and prepared to support them with messages, content, and sales tools that help make them more effective.

Last year we started working with Corporate Visions on messaging and training. We’ve seen a remarkable difference in our sales approach and success rate. One thing we’ve been doing is going out and soliciting success stories – what we call internal successes – that are not necessarily customer successes, but rather the sales person’s effectiveness with the Power Messaging approach.  We have gotten some great insight into how different sales people have approached customers and been successful. In situations where our sales team has struggled with moving a deal forward, they’ve been using Power Messaging to change the conversation and close more deals.

Where we still have work to do is not necessarily the execution, but the adoption.  Our sales team has been very proactive and eager to adopt a Power Messaging approach and they’ve been very successful using it, but we’re still in the early stages of rolling this out and we would like even greater adoption across the organization.  And our marketing team is working hard to keep up with all the new requests for sales materials!

Q.  What can attendees expect to learn by attending your presentation at the Marketing and Sales Messaging conference?

As business-to-business marketers, we have to take responsibility for sales enablement.  We need to understand the sales process and the customer buying cycle, and be able to take our marketing messages one step further and create sales content and tools to help generate revenue for our organizations. I’ll talk about how to partner with your sales organization, gain a better understanding of the sales process, and create the tools that the sales team needs to be successful. I’ll also discuss where you should go next after beginning the process.  How do you make sure you develop a short- and long-term strategy that you can sustain?  How do you continue to engage your sales organization?

Q. What are you looking forward to most at the Marketing and Sales Messaging conference? 

I’m looking forward to meeting other marketers that are maybe further down the path of marketing and sales alignment, and hearing what their best practices are and what’s worked and hasn’t worked.  I also enjoy talking with people in other sales organizations to learn about new things that we can possibly adopt to bring value to our sales team.

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If you’d like to meet Tracey and some of the other brilliant minds that have broken the status quo, aligned marketing and sales, and spearheaded lasting change in their organizations, please join us for our Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference, taking place in Chicago, IL, Sept. 18-20, 2012.  Register now!

Filed under: Marketing, Message Creation Tagged: customer-focused, Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference, Merger, sales tools, Wells Fargo

Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference Speaker Interview: ADP

Eryn Del Castillo

Director of Sales Effectiveness

ADP







Q.  What is your role in your sales/marketing organization?

I am the director of the sales effectiveness team, which is inside the centralized sales operation unit at ADP. In sales effectiveness, we focus on two major areas: sales tools and sales messaging.

Sales tools could include a proposal generator, ROI calculator, or sales presentation. We are currently looking at all the different presentation apps for the iPad.  On the messaging side, we make sure the messaging is incorporated into everything that touches our sales force and everything that they use.  If there’s a phone script, we make sure the messaging is correct; if it’s a client-facing document or some sort of marketing material, we weigh in on that, too.

Q.  Why did ADP make the decision to have a sales effectiveness team and what are the results?

The sales effectiveness team was created about 18 months ago.  We wanted to make sure our sales people are equipped with the most state-of-the-art, up-to-date, market-forward sales tools in the industry. We also wanted to make sure that there’s someone who not only represents the voice of the field saying “yes, this is something we’ll use and use well,” but also looks externally at the trends and new tools in the marketplace so that our sales people are equipped with the best of what’s out there.

Over the last year and a half we’ve created some of the highest-quality sales tools and messaging that the company has seen in a long time.  We’ve had really favorable feedback and we’re also reaching out more and more to the different business units saying, “have you considered XY&Z?” This year we created what we call “Field Readiness Kits” that were so well received we have business units reaching out to us for input on solving other challenges to help move the needle on the close ratio and deal advancement.

Q.  What are the three biggest sales/marketing challenges your company has faced/is facing?

Speaking from a sales effectiveness viewpoint, one of the biggest challenges is competing against the status quo.  Though we go head-to-head against competitors just like anyone else, the status quo is our biggest competition. That’s one of the reasons why I think the Corporate Visions methodology aligns so well with our sales process. We spend a lot of time focused on the tools, scripts and training our sales people need to loosen or unhinge that status quo.

The second challenge is adoption.  Our sales force is 6,000+ people in business units organized by market segment or product.  We produce what we think are really valuable sales tools and sometimes our sales force has a hard time keeping up with the volume and sorting through which are the most appropriate tools to use.  Occasionally they get stuck in their own status quo, where they’re using the same things and following the same process over and over again.  When a new tool is introduced, we want the quickest adoption and as many people as possible using the tool.  There are only so many hours in the day, so we want to make sure their sales efforts are hyper focused on the things that get them the best results.

Lastly, when we’re talking to a company, we want to make sure we’re selling to the specific strategic goals of that company or decision maker. That means having our sales people do their due diligence and a thorough analysis of what those issues are and then tailoring the talk track, script and presentation specifically to that message.  Since that’s not a process that comes naturally to a lot of people, we’re always trying to find different ways to equip them with tools that they can use to help them better do that.

Q.  What does your company do well to align marketing and sales?  What needs work?

We work with marketing in three different ways. We have marketing that’s inside our sales operation function and we’re directly aligned, with a VP who oversees demand generation and sales effectiveness inside our sales operations.  We also work with the higher-level corporate marketing group.  We communicate with them on a biweekly basis to make sure we’re all in synch. Lastly, we have our digital or Web marketing group and we’re in touch with them on a weekly basis, making sure we work together in areas where it makes sense.

We’re really just beginning to look at how we communicate and how well we’re aligned. It all comes back to the communication and there’s a lot of opportunity there.  But the first step is to make sure there are weekly touch points, because corporate marketing is putting out incredible content that we really could leverage in the sales process and we’re not doing it well today.

Q.  What can attendees expect to learn by attending your presentation ?

Sales tool creation is really the meat of my presentation.  I’m going to talk about how we take messaging a step beyond marketing or training.  I’m going to show how we make it actionable, relevant and easy for a sales person to use so that the messaging becomes cultural.  We have really taken Power Positioning and POV integration to another level.  Our Field Readiness Kit is completely embedded and grounded in the conversation road map that we created in partnership with Corporate Visions.  It’s a dynamic, navigable tool that parses out the important pieces of the messaging road map so that the sales people can use it.  We’ve aligned this tool with our sales process so that no matter where the sales person is in the process, they can go in and find the most relevant and effective tools. Every item that’s in there, whether it’s a script, talk track, elevator pitch, etc., is inventoried in this dynamic tool with the same Challenger Methodology and Corporate Visions messaging embedded.

Q. What are you looking forward to most at the Marketing and Sales Messaging conference?

I’ve been before and I really enjoy hearing from the thought leaders.  This is a unique opportunity to get like-minded folks in the same room and understand what it is that they’re doing that has made them successful.  I like to hear from other market leaders so that I can learn from them and continue to improve and incorporate new ideas into our processes, and I also like to hear about what they’re doing as it’s a good benchmark for us.

Q.  What was the biggest surprise when it came to your new message and Point of View development?

We first engaged with Corporate Visions about five years ago and I would say the biggest surprise was how well the Power Positioning was received and what a strong impact it has had on the organization – it has spread rapidly throughout the company.  We have every sort of business unit/product line/segmentation all wanting their own POV pitch and their own Power Positions.  I thought at some point we would have created enough to meet everyone’s needs, but there never seems to be an end to the demand for this type of messaging inside of our business.

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If you’d like to meet Eryn and some of the other brilliant minds that have broken the status quo, aligned marketing and sales, and spearheaded lasting change in their organizations, please join us for our Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference, taking place in Chicago, IL, Sept. 18-20, 2012.  Register now!

Filed under: Business-to-Business, Deploy Tools that Get Used, Marketing, Sales and Marketing Alignment, Sales Readiness Tagged: ADP, Eryn del Castillo, Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference

Clever and Cryptic is Not Good Messaging

Have you seen these ads for the Lung Cancer Alliance?

They’ve been the subject of editorials, articles and debate and – in some cases – public outrage. In a recent UPI.com blog, Stuart Elliot says the advertising campaign “features hipsters, cat lovers, tattooed people and crazy old aunts with a tagline reading that they ‘deserve to die.’ According to the Lung Cancer Alliance, the ads are meant to challenge the perception that people with lung cancer have brought it upon themselves.”

Provocative? Yes. Cryptic and clever? Yes. Effective? We’ll see. Even if the creators are courting controversy to gain our attention, how will this attention translate into changing health policy, elevating awareness, and empowering patients – which is the organization’s stated mission?

Out-clevering your audience is not good messaging. And it turns out funny ads are not necessarily effective either. New research by ad-testing firm Ace Metrix shows that funny ads are “slightly less likely to increase desire of purchase intent.” So two strikes against this campaign.

If funny, outrageous or clever doesn’t work, what does? Good messaging that produces results has the following characteristics:

Exposes a relevant problem
Uses contrast
Shows how you’re different

Watch this 10-min video on how to create effective point-of-view messaging:

Sources:

Lung Cancer ad photo: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/deserve-die-posters-ad-campaign-lung-cancer-201119572.html

“AdAge” article with Ace Metrix research:  (http://adage.com/article/news/10-funniest-tv-ads-sell-unfunny/236024/?utm_source=daily_email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=adage)

Lilia Todorova

Communications Director

Corporate Visions

Filed under: Business-to-Business, Develop Messages that Matter, Distinct Point of View, Marketing, Message Creation Tagged: advertisement, Lung Cancer Alliance, meme

The Hero Model: A Marketing Strategy to Win Olympic Gold

With the start of the 2012 Summer Olympics, and related ad campaigns in full swing, you might have seen this stand-out P&G Olympics commercial:

You might also be wondering why it is so memorable. The answer is simple: it uses one of the most effective marketing techniques – storytelling, and specifically, the “hero model.”

Want to learn more? Check out my recent post on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog for details about what the hero model is and how you can apply it your B2B marketing campaigns to be even more successful.

Filed under: Business-to-Business, Develop Messages that Matter, Marketing, Message Creation Tagged: "hero model", Hero, MarketingProfs, olympics

Stimulate Your Customer’s Lizard Brain to Make a Sale

Many marketers and salespeople believe they are in a selling war against their direct competition. However, a less anticipated and more dangerous enemy exists, called “no decision” — otherwise known as “the status quo.”

The root cause of the problem is that most marketing and sales efforts focus on the wrong messaging and therefore do not stimulate the correct part of a prospect’s brain, which means that the status quo problem, at its core, is actually a sales messaging problem.

To disrupt the status quo, you need to learn how to appeal to the part of the brain where decisions are actually made – the “old brain,” also called the “lizard brain.” You also need to create context and urgency, and use storytelling techniques.

To learn more about how you can break through the status quo barrier to win more deals, read my recent post on Harvard Business Review’s blog at the following link: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/stimulate_your_customers_lizar.html.

Filed under: Develop Messages that Matter, Distinct Point of View, Marketing, Sales, Your Buyer's Mind Tagged: Harvard Business Review, Old Brain, Status Quo, tim riesterer

BMA Event Puts Sales into the Marketing Conversation

I recently spoke at the Business Marketing Association (BMA) Conference and noticed a not-so-subtle shift in the show content from years past.  Sales – a sometimes ignored but vital participant in the marketing conversation – has been ratcheted up from its traditional second-fiddle status. Companies can’t run, or even walk, without both the marketing and sales legs moving in sync, and it seems that the organizers of the BMA conference are taking note.

BMA “sells out” … so to speak

BMA significantly beefed up the number of sales-oriented tracks and discussion topics at the 2012 conference. And BMA had a sell-out crowd this year.  Coincidence?  I’d like to think not.

For example, Neil Rackham, author of “SPIN Selling,” and Matt Dixon, author of “The Challenger Sale” were featured speakers.   Even Don Schultz, the father of integrated marketing communications, added sales to his “integrated” story.

I had the privilege of delivering a keynote and facilitating a panel session on marketing’s role in sales enablement, which included Corporate Visions’ clients from Wells Fargo (Tracey Fanelli), SunGard (Ken Powell) and Omnicell (Todd Sims).

Kudos

Congratulations to BMA, specifically Gary Slack, the event organizer, and Eduardo Conrado, CMO for Motorola Solutions and BMA president, for recognizing the importance of sales and marketing alignment and for putting on a well-attended, thought-provoking show!

Tim Riesterer

Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer,

Corporate Visions

Filed under: Business-to-Business Tagged: Business Marketing Association, Marketing and Sales Alignment, tim riesterer