Timothy Riesterer's Blog, page 33

Why Your Brand Message Does Not Convert Into Sales

Your company brand message tends to be all about you.  It tells the story of who you are, what you do, who you've helped, and how you've helped them.  Sales professionals learn the corporate story and then go tell it to prospective customers.  You assume that if your prospects knew as much about your company and solutions as you do, they would buy from you, right?  Unfortunately, that's not the case.

There should be a difference between your brand message and your field message.  Your field message should be about who?  That's right – your prospect.  Not a big deal you say, well actually it is.  Your brand message is most often communicated through the written word – things like your web site, brochures, advertisements, white papers, analysts' reports and even PowerPoint slides (which are written words projected on a screen).  Field messages are customer conversations, most often delivered through the spoken word – a completely different dynamic.

The Dating Game

To get a better understanding of this, go back to the time in your life when you were dating.  Think of your brand as the clothes you wore, your hairstyle, the perfume or cologne you spritzed on, or perhaps the car you drove.  Collectively they represented your brand and were designed to attract that other person into a relationship with you.  Your corporate brand has the same purpose.

Now what happens to you when you go out on your first date and your brand message does not turn into a field message?  He or she will later tell their friends, "What a conceited, self-centered, egotistical person.  All they talked about was themselves.  There would not be a second date.  Yet, this is exactly what sales people are forced to do when delivering a brand message, that's all about your company.

Everyone Lives in a Stories: Even Your Buyers

Why is it important to translate this brand story about you into a story about your prospect?  The answer lies in how the human brain works.  Humans live in story.  Your story is the window through which you look at your world.  Your story affects how you make decisions.  Developmental Psychologist refer to this concept as your "schema".

Your story needs to be translated into your prospects' world.  What top sales performers have figured out is that everything you do must be translated.  From the written word to the spoken word.  From a story about you to a story about your prospect!

You job is to take the story that you tell and make it a story about your prospect that provokes them to see the world differently, while also being a story that makes them feel that moving forward with your solution is the surest and safest thing they could do.  Just like in a court of law, whoever tells the best, most believable story wins.

Want to learn why stories work and how to use the Power of Story in your messaging?  Watch the webinar replay, The Power of Story: How to Tell a Story that Sells.

Filed under: The Power of Stories Tagged: Brand Messaging, Field Message, The Power of Story

Why the "20-Questions" Inquisition Doesn't Work For Business Service Companies

Your prospects are busier than ever. So imagine their reactions when your salespeople whip out their "20-question" prospecting checklist and proceed to ask your prospect the same thing everyone else asks?  Where's the differentiation in that?

Executive buyers are saying, "Don't play 20 questions with me, you should already know what I'm struggling with… And, I expect you to be able to tell me something I don't already know about a problem I didn't even know existed."

The 20-question approach is more than 20 years old. While it was revolutionary at the time, it's got a big problem. Prospects that are stuck in the status quo won't be moved to make a change by a set of assessment questions. This is even truer for business services versus product selling where sometimes the latest greatest product revision will cause a customer to upgrade. It's a much tougher call in the area of making changes to business services.

According to Forrester Research, 65 percent of executive buyers say they will give their business to the company that "creates the buying vision."  In other words, prospects will reward you with their business if you help them see the need to do something different and how that will impact their business.

Forrester has even started to coin a new term that replaces "solution selling": "outcome selling." Instead of relying on a series of questions to elicit pain that you map to a solution, the outcome selling approach requires you to bring a distinct point-of-view that shows where a prospect's desired outcomes are at risk due to their "status quo" approach. Then you provide an insightful, fresh way for achieving the outcome with a contrasting new approach.

Here's the difference. You are bringing ideas and insights that make your customer smarter instead of parroting a list of questions that anyone could ask, just waiting for a key word to pounce with the product pitch. You are adding value by helping the prospect see where their status quo is no longer safe and how they can get to a "new safe" that will help them realize their desired end state. Your business services company will set itself apart by focusing on your prospect's outcomes and creating a buying vision instead of playing 20 questions hoping to make a link to something you offer.

We recently teamed up with Forrester Research to dive deep into this new approach. Check out this summary of our findings:

http://win.corporatevisions.com/Outcome_Selling.html

Filed under: Deliver Conversations that Win Tagged: Business Services, Deal Creation, Solution Selling

Why Technology Companies Need More Than Innovation to Differentiate Themselves and Win More Business

There is the great Glengarry Glen Ross quote: "ABC – Always Be Closing." In the technology sector, there is: "ABI – Always Be Innovating." However, with the high costs of research and development, demand dependent on a slowing economy, and limited access to capital, the ability to "always be innovating" is difficult to realize for most technology companies.

As a result, today's emerging mantra may be: "It's not always about what you sell, but how you sell and what you say that makes the difference."

Many tech companies have relied on R&D to differentiate themselves from their competitors by developing new products and improving old ones. Companies like Intel and Microsoft typically spend 15% or more of their revenues on R&D. The problem, however, is that with greater competition, tinier windows of differentiation and a slowing economy, these companies can no longer count on innovation alone to set them apart.

No Decision Crisis

Also, customers are postponing their technology purchases until the markets stabilize. Since tech products are often updated older versions, they can be the first to go when a company cuts its budget. In fact, up to 60% of forecasted deals end up dying as a result of the customer choosing to make no decision at all. The issue is not having a better product or service than the competitor, but rather customers don't see enough reason to do something differently.

What's really happening is that your customers are not deciding between competitors, but rather they are trying to determine if there is even a need to change. While most of your money spent on R&D goes toward developing new features and benefits that defeat your traditional rivals, the real, true battle is against the customer's status quo. As a result, your current messaging and R&D efforts are not doing enough.

In the customers' eyes, all options look the same, and they do not see enough reason to change to anything different. Therefore, instead of spending large portions of the budget trying to convince prospects to choose you over your competition, you must re-allocate time and resources on the 60% that are not choosing anyone or who are indecisive.

Most technology companies are entering into a competitive bake-off of features and benefits — talking about "why you" or convincing the customer "why us."  Meanwhile, the real questions customers are considering are "why change" and "why now." This requires an entirely different approach to your messages, selling tools and sales training.

If you want to grow faster than the market, it's not a matter of having greater innovation than your competitors have… it's also not about stealing customers from your competitors. It's about helping your customers overcome their status quo. Your real competitor is the status quo. Your job is to actually help your customers make the decision to change, before you help them make the decision to choose you.

Learn how to overcome the status quo barrier: http://win.corporatevisions.com/Do_Something_Different_IS.html

Filed under: Message Creation Tagged: Status Quo, Technology

Coaching through Story

Ever skydived?

Years ago, Corporate Visions' CMO, Tim Riesterer, completed his first, and only, static line parachute jump (static line means no tandem expert; you are on your own).

He started in a class that walked you through the basics of the jump on the ground. Knowing your equipment. Mastering a stable position. Navigating the countryside from the air. And, negotiating a safe landing on the target.

Seems simple enough to remember, right?

Wrong. Turns out, when you're hanging off an airplane strut, staring down at 3,500 feet of nothing but air between you and the ground… you can barely remember your own name.

While sales presentations may not have quite the same life-or-death terror-inducing effect (or, maybe they do), your brain reacts in the same way. How many times has your sales manager given you a list of suggestions before you walk into a sales meeting… but the moment you get up in front of the room, you forget everything she said?

Since you're reading this blog, you either are a manager, have a manager, or will one day be a manager. And you need to know how to get coaching to stick, even in the heat of the selling moment.

That's where Power Messaging techniques come in. Both your presentations to prospects, and the coaching sessions to get you there, require the same approaches to make them great.

Here's just one example.

Stories to Make it Stick

Paul George is a consultant at Corporate Visions, but before joining us, he was a sales manager. One of his account managers had planned to tell a story as a kick-off for a very important meeting with several executives of a large hospital. The most influential decision-maker in this group of executives was the hospital CFO.

After handshakes and introductions, the account manager stood up and said, "I'd like to begin today by sharing a story."  No sooner had he gotten those words out of his mouth when the CFO stood up and interrupted, "Look… I'm busy and don't have time for your stories. When you get to the meat of your proposal, have someone page me and I'll come back to the meeting." With that, he turned abruptly and walked out of the room.

Can you imagine the kick in the gut that this account manager experienced when the CFO did that? Every bit of positive energy was sucked out of the room as that executive walked out the door.

This is the story Paul now tells when he's coaching people to just get on with the story – don't preface it with an introduction.

Recently, Paul was at a client site when a rep who'd received this advice stopped by to say hi. He told Paul that a short while ago he was in front of a prospect, getting ready to start his presentation by saying, "I'd like to tell you a story…" when Paul's anecdotal example about the CFO came rushing back into his head. He told Paul, "I didn't want this guy getting up and leaving the room." So, he told his story, but he didn't announce it first.

Think about what happened there. Even as this rep was preparing his message, he'd forgotten a key piece of coaching. But in the actual moment itself, he was "rescued" by coaching that had been told to him in the form of a story.

Coaching Pays Off, Literally

Coaching, especially when delivered in a memorable and impactful way, has a quantifiable impact on sales performance and the bottom line. A third-party survey company recently identified that coaching after Power Messaging has been shown to increase quota achievement by 40%, and deal size by 2-3 times. So, as powerful as Power Messaging is for sales reps, it's even more potent when your frontline managers coach to it in the field after the training event.

If you're a Power Messaging alum, and feel that your sales managers would benefit from knowing how to coach to (and use) Power Messaging techniques, pass this along to your sales leaders:

http://www.brainshark.com/cvi/powercoaching

Filed under: Coaching, The Power of Stories Tagged: Power Coaching, Skydiving, tim riesterer