Some markets are considered as sexy: information technology, mobile systems, aviation, fashion, … and even cars.

However most businesses and markets seem to be dull with dull products: not at all sexy at all as they have:
- No new technology breakthroughs
- No market changing new entries
- No gamer changer
- No innovation in products or solutions
- No real surprises and instant changes in leadership – just slow evolutions.
This is what makes them challenging to sell as the products are not remarkable.

Avoid competing on price

Still the challenge to sell remains in this market with fierce price competition as this together with high service remains the main reasons to sell.
People know your product or solutions and have the same level of knowledge about your direct competitors.
The problem for your sales meetings is there is not much to tell or news to bring as business has become recurrent business with known competitors, known products and known service levels.
All that remains is to discuss the pricing and quantities to be delivered over the next period.
In all circumstances this pricing discussion should be avoided at first as your need to bring the benefits and advantages of your solution. Price discussions will only lower your price.

Continue or break the mold

You have 2 choices:
- Continue
- Break the mold

Continue:
Continue to do business the way it always has been.
Nothing will happen as long as your competitors don’t move or change.
The problem with this is that in business nothing is constant.
The only constant is change.

Thus just continuing like before can turn out badly sooner or later.

Break the mold:
Start making your meetings interesting with presenting additional free information concerning the business you are in, concerning your customers’ business.
This information can be:
- Viewpoints from respected industry or economic leaders related to the business of your customers.
- Case studies: people always like to know how competitors are doing
- Related university research findings
- Results of surveys your company has done
- Look for solutions beyond your solution by offering a complete solution concept

In every business or market there are interesting stories, events or related interesting stories or findings.
Additional related information will expose your content to others.

The interesting content challenge

The goal is to make your visits more interesting in order to get more attention and be remarkable.
Alternatively or additionally you can publish this information on line.

The challenge is in creating and providing sufficient interesting content for your customers or potential customers in order to stay ahead or to differentiate of your competitors.
The goal is to engage your customers or future customer by content and information allowing you to surpass the competition.

Will you break the mold or just continue like always was?

Although advocates, evangelists and influencers will create awareness and are future looking people, their roles, actions and drivers are quite different.
Still in marketing and sales their roles are confused with each other.

Advocates

Advocates will defend a brand as if it was their own company or product.
Just like fans of rock and movie stars.
Advocates don’t have gained respect or are positioned in a special place to influence the decision makers.
Advocates will praise the company or products during work and after hours. They consider the brand as a part of their life or even way of living. The advocate is not paid by the company and will spread the message freely.
Advocates are not always rational as emotions play a part of their story, actions and life.
Advocates can promote multiple brands each from a different product segment.

Evangelists

Evangelists are marketers that are paid by the company for distribution and evangelizing the brand-message of the product or company both externally and internally. Evangelists need to stimulate other people to keep on going for the good cause or to make people believe in the future of the brand.
An evangelist is expected to tell the world about the brand both during work and after hours. However as he is being paid by the company as an employee, he will not have the same fierceness as the advocate.
Evangelists are single brand or single company.

Influencers

Influencers are people that have gained respect and trust from the decision makers and have a different status than most other employees in a company.
They should be unbiased and rational.
Influencers are multi brand and multi-company.

The rewards for advocates, evangelists and influencers

Evangelists are recruited and work as employees in a company.

Influencers are mostly technocrats that will never take a decision themselves, but will present the advantages, disadvantages, benefits and drawbacks of a brand or product – and they are being paid to do so by the purchasing company.

Advocates are almost lunatics as they promote and market a brand or product for free as there is no direct benefit for them. Their drive is social respect or social influence.

How to motivate ?

Evangelists are motivated as you pay them to evangelize the world (or the market) for a company. Still they need the necessary information, facts and know the vision of the company in order to be able to stimulate the others.

Influencers will search for facts, testimonies and references and use their intelligence to come to a conclusion or overview. Marketers can influence them by providing the required information in a organized, neat and clean communication. Some exploration might be imposed in order not to make their task to easy.

Advocates are people who are convinced of the benefits and advantages over other brands or solutions for many different reasons that can also include passion and non-rational reasoning. Hence the appropriate marketing messages are needed, where a kind of exclusivity can ignite the motivation to become an advocate.

Content marketing

It is clear that content marketing plays an important role in influencing or motivating advocates, evangelists and influencers.
- Advocates will re-distribute and hype your content.
- Evangelists will repackage your content to motivate.
- Influencers will summarize and extract the important suiting fact or features from your content in order to make it useful and understandable for the decision makers.

Just make sure these people can find your content – preferably online.
You have to generate interest to get customers.

Content marketing is important as it reaches further and can:
- Bring you advocates
- Feed your evangelists
- Win influencers.

Your CRM is crap when your marketing dept. issues a procedure on how to upload contacts using a spreadsheet as this indicates:
- Too many useless fields are required to be entered
- Contacts can’t be entered without a project set-up
- Spreadsheets are already in use as CRM by sales people instead of the CRM
- The CRM sole purpose is marketing not sales
- Sales are using a different system to keep track of their contacts and customers / leads
- The CRM has no significance for the salesman

The result is that the CRM is not supported by the employees, especially not the sales people.
They find the CRM crap as it sucks.

The main danger and cost is the existence of spreadsheets in use as a CRM by the sales people: there are at least 2 sets of data exist within your company (data redundancy – data duplication). This increases the cost of maintaining the data: in the spreadsheets and in the CRM.

Instead of issuing a procedure for uploading data using a spreadsheet into the CRM, marketing should investigate how to make:
- The input into the CRM convenient and effective
- The CRM useful for sales people

One of the main objectives should be that the CRM should become a source of information instead a data entry system for marketing and management purposes. There is enough data available in the company and on the Internet to make a CRM an interesting source of information to sales and marketing.
This will allow having the CRM supported by the entire company.

How crappy is your CRM?
Where did it fail?

If you want to score quickly using social media in B2B or B2C, forget about it. It won’t happen!

In social media marketing blogging is the most used channel.
In the past people just started a blog and hoped to get readers and subscribers.
However social media like blogging, micro blogging or even just posting comments is almost like creating a complete product that requires market research, then it needs to be designed, developed, marketed, deployed and “sold”.

The goal:
Before starting anything the goal(s) need to be set and defined.

The market research:
The market research: what do your customers or leads want to read?
What is your market target? Market segment?

The design:
The concept: what are the subjects or topics?
The format: blogging, micro blogging or posting comments

The development:
The packaging: the layout, colors and fonts used
The type of illustrations or images to be used.
The setup of the RSS feed.

The production:
The daily content generation.
This is the real operational work.

The marketing:
Without any marketing the blog or micro blog will not be read.
- You need to submit your RSS-feed to all possible feed websites.
- Advertising
- Emailing
- Commenting on other blogs
- Getting links for your posts from other blogs
- Writing guest blog posts
- Getting other people to write on your blog

The goal is to build a group of followers or a community that follows your blog or micro blog.

The sales:
This is the final goal: generating traffic that brings interest for the advertising on your blog (page views and clicks) or your product (selling).

A blog is not just something you start and hope it becomes successful. As with any other product or service it needs to be designed, conceived and created with the end goal in mind.
Blogging into the wild will not lead to your goal.

How is your blogging going?

One week ago we issued the press release “Web Analytics Are for the Webmaster, Whereas LEADSExplorer Is for Businessmen” using a handful of free press release distribution websites (find the list here).

Nothing special in our opinion as we previously have issued several press releases both using free and paid press release distributions.

However we were wrong: the press release went viral
At one moment of time (Sunday January 24th, 2010) Google (www.google.us) had 99,500 links as the press release has been republished by many:
- News websites
- News feeds
- Industry websites
- Blogs
- People on Twitter
- And other social media.

People and professionals found it interesting as all these links cannot be generated by bots because our previous press releases typically got up to 500-700 links.

The afterburner is:
- More hits on the website
- The increase of number of sign-ups for free trial
- Inquiries for partnership/reselling
- Brand awareness

This press release proves that interesting content can spread on the Internet almost virally:
- For a B2B press release
- Using free press release distribution

In order to succeed you need to:
- Catch the attention by using popular keywords
- Generate interest by controversy or challenging in the subject
- No need for paying for distribution

The challenge now is to prove we can do it again using a free press release distribution.

Update:
On Jan 26 2010 – The search on Google (www.google.us) had 192,000 links !

You have been selling several years; you know your business and your competitors. Your world is steady and controlled as every party knew the other. You all trusted and respected each other. The business is under control.

The change of the controlled world

One day one of your competitors replaces the sales rep. with a rather young sales guy.

Although he is inexperienced in the business, he manages to set-up meetings with most of your customers in a very short amount of time and seems to move ahead with negotiations at a speed you are not used to.

Nothing wrong you think until you start finding out he is making propositions you cannot compete with – propositions and offers he cannot realize without making a loss:
- Breakneck prices
- Full services at entry level pricing
- Incredible or not feasible promises
Then it comes clear to you: you are facing a “Sales Cowboy”.

This type of salesmen will do whatever it takes to win a customer. Their goal is to win any customer and gain market share and even try to face you out.
Disaster has struck for you!

Competing with the Sales Cowboy

Now you have to overcome the objections and the pricing the Sales Cowboy has communicated with your customers.

Counter the inexperienced Sales Cowboy
As the Sales Cowboy is new to the business he will not know the business of the customers. You will have to build trust using your knowledge and experience of the business. Provide your knowledge and assets to the customer for free.

Counter with facts and benefits
Previously your products or solutions had good facts and benefits that sold. As the market and business hasn’t changed overnight you should use these facts and benefits over and over gain.

The price war
Don’t compete on the price war.
You need to survive.
The Sales Cowboy is aiming to eliminate you in order to control the market afterwards. Let him do so as he will have to report to his VP Sales and explain.

The unfeasible promises
You know the Sales Cowboy cannot realize the promises he has made.
Let him fail.
The customers will return to you.

The growth problem
As the Sales Cowboy has made many promises and can have acquired many customers he and his company need to deliver what has been promised.
All companies come under stress, strain and run into operational problems when the sales increase significantly over a short period of time.
This will happen and cause problems with the customers.
Soon these customers will come back to you and never return.

Internal envy and competition
As the Sales Cowboy is successful as a newbie in the company, he will not be loved and liked by all of his colleagues.
They will take care of him too or avoid supporting him.

Sales cowboys don’t last long, but in the meantime they will hurt the business.

When and where did you encounter your Sales Cowboy?
Or are you a Sales Cowboy ?

When you close sales on a regular basis and have customers signing contracts, you feel great – almost invincible. It feels like you are the part of the ‘Masters of the Universe’.

The spiral of negativity
However when you have a series of missing sales and deals, you start to doubt about yourself.
If you start doubting about your capacities and skills, you will start to show too much negativity in your conversations and in your attitude: your body language will show signs of negativity. This will reflect in your sales: even less deals.

The switch from ‘Master of the Universe’ to ‘Failure’ (or ‘Looser’) can happen relatively fast. You just need a series of lost deals and you will feel as you have lost the magic touch.
You will start doubting about every step you take in the sales process. About every call, every email, and every bit of information you send. You are getting scared about the next mistake you will make.

The spiral of negativity has taken possession over you. This whirlpool of negativity will take over your entire life: both professional and private.

Unwind the spiral of negativity with success
If you don’t have any achievements, nothing to be proud of in your business life then you urgently need success in your private life. Just to reassure yourself.

The success in your private life can be anything and it doesn’t need to be big or fantastic.
Just some small successes in your private life will help.

You can build on these successes to overcome the negativity in you business life.
- Rejoice
- Show confidence again
- Be proud of yourself

Yes you can do it!
Being the Master of the Universe is just a belief in yourself.

Press releases can turn out quite differently:
- No interest at all
- Social media interest
- Press/journalist interest
- Potential customers interest.
We have published already many press releases

The press release “Web Analytics Are for the Webmaster, Whereas LEADSExplorer is for the Businessmen” generated quite a lot of social media buzz as it has been Twittered (Tweeted) and copied in blogs.

If we could pin point the reason why, we could try to repeat this success for future press releases.

Keywords in title
Probably the title is the main reason as it uses the words:
- Web analytics
- Webmasters
- Businessmen

“Web analytics” probably triggers many bots and creates alerts.
Combining “Webmasters” with “Businessmen” could increase the interest as these are 2 distinctive groups in a company.

Message: comprehensive
The “news” of providing actionable information for businessmen is sufficient.
Additionally the message is comprehensive as it is logic that businessmen will need other information than webmasters about the visits on the website.

Timing: published on Sunday
Could the timing have to do anything with the buzz generated ?
The press release has been sent out on a Sunday during the winter- not a business day. Maybe people were bored and were happy to read something interesting.

Channel: Free press releases
We used several Free Press Release providers, but it seems BigNews.Biz and PR-USA seem to be the most referenced.

Still the amount of buzz generated by this press release is still a surprise for us as the press release started to live its’ own life on the Internet by being copied.

The question remains: how can we repeat this success?
The most important question is: will this press release generate leads?

A few years ago the idea was that using a viral video any company could reach a huge audience. The video just needed to have that extra to make it go viral. That was the hype.

Top viral video’s

Now when analyzing the statistics of the top viral video’s on YouTube it is clear that mainly amateur video’s go viral obtaining millions of hits.
People also avoid commercial video’s and prefer original or authentic video’s from amateurs over sleek commercial video’s.

The success is related to:
- The sentiment or emotion with the people in the video
- The sympathy for the makers of the video
- The recognizable situation
- The missing relation to any product or service
All these play an important part in the appreciation and the chance to go viral.

There is no formula or standard scheme for a viral video:
- Anything can become a success
– Anyone can become a success – still babies are likely to score high
- A good laugh has more chance.

The quality of the video doesn’t matter as the content is the more important.

The viral hype has faded

The hype of the viral commercial has faded due to the low predictability of success. Marketing of products cannot rely upon this as a company only makes investments if they can calculate the ROI (Return On Investment), which is impossible for viral campaigns.

The uncertainty of success weighs too much compared to the needed creativity, the production costs and the cost of getting the viral campaign started – which requires in most cases an old-fashioned email campaign or whatever you can think of in order to get viewers.

The viral requirements

If you still want to give viralicious a try bring a video that is:
1. Unbelievable but true
2. Controversial
3. Aiming for a community effect
4. Bragging or organizing a contest
5. Making ´em laugh
6. Showing celebs doing the wrong things
7. Using babies

Use your imagination and be creative as you have to compete against a massive number of amateur video’s that are released continuously from all over the world.
Additionally your creativity and efforts shouldn’t stop after releasing the video; you will need both too for marketing your video.

Do you know where your leads and customers are coming from?
How did they find your company or products?
How did they end up contacting your salesmen or sales team?
What was the first contact or who established the first contact?

You should ask your salesmen, sales team and marketing how leads have really found your company or products.
Asking leads and customers directly would even be better.

The CEO prejudice of leads origin
Most CEO’s and managers make many assumptions and take for granted what they believe is the truth. They have a certain prejudice: like they believe leads are generated on trade shows or by print advertising.
The only way to find out is to ask how they found your company or how they became aware of your products.
You need to register the origin of leads.
If you don’t measure you will not know.

Statistic analysis of marketing channels
Not knowing the origin of your leads, means you will be wasting time, money and effort on channels that don’t or hardly bring revenue.
The number of leads and customers a company has is limited, hence it should be feasible to review or ask every single one of them in order to make a statistic.

The ration of the amount of money spent on a marketing channel, events or efforts over the number of leads generated or customers acquired will show the best lead generation method for your company.

The lost leads analysis of your funnel
As a matter of fact the analysis should be taken one step further: why or what was the reason the leads left the funnel? Why did you loose those leads?
Again this should be grouped by lead source of marketing channel in order to find out when and where the biggest churn happens and the marketing channel that is the least successful in the sales process.

What holds you back not investigating in the origin of leads?
And where they left your funnel?