Selling on fear: proof the benefit

Many vendors offer a wide range of security appliances with preventive and defensive solutions:
Anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti- hacker, spam filter,…
Their selling is based upon fear.

The problem with these solutions is that the buyer doesn’t:
- Completely understand the benefit
   In many cases the decision maker doesn’t or might not understand the magnitude of the problem.
   The problem is beyond his knowledge or experience. So how to calculate or estimate the costs expected to be saved by the security solution?

- Notice the effect or the benefit easily: immediately or even never.
   The benefit is only noticed when things go wrong: when the security wasn’t performing or missed its’ goals.
   Thus in case the installed or applied solutions weren’t effective.
   Then spending of money on the preventive solution could be considered as a waste of money, even if it has saved money and avoided problems on many occasions.
    Occasions that have been taken for granted.

In many cases it is very difficult to proof the security solution was effective and has saved more than it has cost to install and maintain.
How much money does an intrusion prevention appliance saves a year? Hard to calculate by company. Less difficult to calculate for an entire market as statistics and probabilities can be applied.

The tangible benefit sales

However the sole security solution that has an immediate visible result is the spam filter:
Everyone in the company will experience and notice immediately when a spam filter is applied appropriately. The less spam is very clearly visible in everyone’s email inbox.
Also for the CEO, who has immediate recognition for his decision and investment.

In case the spam filter becomes less effective, the employees and the CEO will address this very fast.

The easy to measure tangible benefit

So despite all the marketing, advertising and communication messages in order to bring awareness of the dangers involved, people are still the best convinced by something tangible they immediately remark and influences their work or habits. Thus selling on fear isn’t that effective as selling a solution or product with an immediate result that is easy to measure or experienced easily.
In sales it helps if you can show immediate tangible benefits.

Tangible benefits that are hard to proof or to measure are harder to sell than solutions with an easy measurable or experienced solution. 

That’s why LEADSExplorer sells an easy to measure tangible benefit: Leads.
Do you sell a tangible benefit that is experienced or measured easily?

Search Engine Strategies conference

One of the findings of the SES San Jose Session: Advanced B2B Search Marketing as reported by Jessica Cameron-Ruud is:

Reach prospects early in the buying cycle
The sales cycle can often be long and complicated. B2B marketers rarely face the fact that people are conducting product searches at the beginning of the buying cycle. Reality is, your customers are looking for your product information way before they are ready to convert. You have to be there early!

When: visiting your website

The earliest possible sign of interest is in most cases when employees of companies visit your website.
Hence you need a web service providing website visitor identification by company name.

Qualify visitors as leads

In order to differentiate the many companies visiting, you need to qualify these visiting companies as raw leads by the:
- Pages visited
- Time on each page
- Duration of visits
- Visit behavior
- Returning visits
- Number of unique visitors
- Internet origin of the visit
- Geographic location of the visitor
- Language used by the visitor
- Type and size of visiting company
- Market of visiting company
- Management and directors of the corporation

Immediately you generate more leads

This will give you a head start over your competitors for getting leads.
You can cold call on warm companies as they have shown their interest on your website.

When do you get your leads in their buying cycle?

The StumbleUpon effect

Two weeks ago our blog post “Top 14 power words” got ‘StumbledUpon‘. Immediately this bookmark attracted a good inflow of website visitors.
Soon after the same post was book marked on Mixx, Propeller, etc.
In total this book marking created about 1,000 additional visits in one day upon our website.
During the rest of the week, the website received significant additional visitors, but that number decreased exponentially.
Every now and then a new load of visitors arrives in “small groups” over a short amount of time.

Book marking reason

We have no idea why this post was ‘StumbledUpon’, whereas other posts, that are more interesting ones in our humble opinion, only get a couple of dozen visitors instead of 2,000+ in 2 weeks.

Observations:

1. Lots of traffic. However traffic is not lead generation.
2. After the first bookmark has become ‘popular’, others will bookmark the same post on another book marking website.
3. Most people just visit the blog post: Every visit and every page visit is registered by LEADSExplorer.
4. Only a small group of people visited other pages of the blog or the website - mainly website visitors from companies: information provided by the LEADSExplorer webservice.
5. After a few days, other people will link the blog post in their “best of the week” posts.
6. 98% are residential Internet surfers. Only about 3% of the visitors are people using corporate or company Internet connection: we know this, as we use LEADSExplorer on the website.
7. Most visitors are from USA - still French and German people do use StumbleUpon or one of the other book marking sites.
8. Visitors seem to read the entire blog post. The time spent by every visitor on the single blog post page is registered by LEADSExplorer.
9. People do read, leave and then come back to read the same post over again. Sometimes even up to 3 times. Don’t they read attentively?

Website visitor discovery, filtering and analysis

For every single website visitor the origin is presented and in case of a company: the company name. This makes it possible to differentiate between residential and corporate website visitors. This allows us knowing the reach of the blog post in our market (B2B).

We didn’t have to wade through those 1000+ visitors as LEADSExplorer provides filtering of:
- The visit data by number of pages
- Minimum amount of time
- Number of returning visits.
Thus making the discovery and analysis of visitors feasible and effective.

The viral results:

- Getting bookmarked has increased the number of visitors significantly over a short amount of time (2 weeks).
- This increase of visitors has brought an increase in ranking on Alexa: from about #950,000 to #650,000. We already decreased back to #690,000.
- Additionally, it seems that Google has ranked the website higher for several and different search results.
- The Technorati authority increased from 1 to 5 and the rank went up from 1,5mio to 1.1mio
- We didn’t receive any additional inquiry related or thanks to the blog post.
- We didn’t notice any additional conversion, no immediate lead generation as it is B2B, thus getting bookmarked won’t bring additional revenue directly.
- Thanks to the number of visitors there will be an increase of branding.

Conclusion:

- Getting bookmarked boosts traffic, not leads
- Getting bookmarked has nice side effects like increase in rankings: SERP on Google, Alexa, Technorati.
- Probably branding and awareness has been increased.
- If you want to know and measure the effect of getting bookmarked, having a web service defining who is visiting your website is a must have in B2B. Else you don’t know anything about your visitors, the effect and the value.

What were your experiences or results of getting bookmarked?

Ladies and Gentlemen of Sales… always prospect.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, prospecting would be IT.

The long term benefits of prospecting have been proved by businessmen whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and greatness of your selling. Never mind. You will not understand the power and greatness of your selling until they have faded.
But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really were in selling.

You are NOT as bad as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the lead generation; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.
The real troubles in your sales are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Cold call.

Don’t be reckless during sales deals, don’t put up with people who are reckless with your deals.

Email.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The tail is long, and in the end, the race is only with yourself.

Remember sales you close, forget the failures; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old sales letters; throw away your old price quotes.

Listen.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know how to sell to the next lead. The most interesting sales people I know just have built trust with their leads, some of the most interesting salesmen I know still have this trust with these customers.

Get plenty of relationships.

Be kind to your relationships, you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll make a fortune, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have leads, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll become sales manager at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 50th salesman anniversary.
Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself, either. Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s.
Enjoy your sales ability, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Write pitches.

Even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do NOT read business magazines, they will only make you feel a laggard.

Get to know your customers, you never know when they’ll be gone for good.

Be nice to your sales assistants; they are your best link to your success and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that colleagues come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography in relationships because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

Be at the top once, but leave before it makes you hard; be a failure once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Meet.

Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, products will change, you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, products were great and competitors respected each other.

Respect your competitors.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a recurrent business, maybe you’ll have a big customer; but you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your career, or by the time you’re 40, it will look badly.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the prospecting.

Origin:
This is based upon “Everybody’s free (To wear sunscreen)” by Baz Luhrmann, who has used an essay called “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” in 1997.

Read the entire “Everybody’s free (To wear sunscreen)” story.

There are many hurdles to overcome when selling, not always related to your products or solutions, but related to the people or their function in the company you are selling to.

1. The will hurdle:
The lacking of motivation.
Even though you have the best solution to the problem or risk, the manager or director is not motivated to take the risk to buy your product or solution.
How to motivate or convince him to take the risk of buying your product?

2. The skill hurdle:
The person who is in charge isn’t up to his task or job or just misses experience of the business he is in.
He hardly understands the benefits your solution or products are bringing as he doesn’t see the problem.
Probably your competitors will encounter the same hurdle, if they address the same problems for their products and solutions.

3. The bill hurdle:
Missing resources, having no budget.
The manager of director is interested in your products or solutions; however he hasn’t got the budget.
This is a money problem and is hard to solve from your side.
Instead of a one time cost or fee, maybe a recurring invoice can solve this problem.

4. The nil hurdle:
Lacking the authority to accomplish the task.
The manager of director isn’t the decision taker: the authority is at a higher level.
Thus you need to talk to the next level.

5. The situation hurdle:
Wrong location or wrong environment or wrong group of people within the company.
Your products or solutions are not suited for the business unit or the company or the group of people.

6. The moved hurdle:
People do get promoted or change functions in a company.
Then you have to restart your sales process all over again.

7. The time hurdle:
Although your solutions are interesting and adequate, there is no time to plan and to implement them.
You probably need to go and talk to a higher level in the hierarchy.

8. The brand hurdle:
Due to a previous problem with your company or brand, the decision maker in charge doesn’t want to know about your company. The reason or reasons can be fully irrational, but still selling will be nearly impossible.
Maybe customer references can help to change his mind.

9. The influence hurdle:
Even though you have no problems with all the above, your contact is not able to influence and persuade his directors or CXX of the company: thus you will get nowhere if you can’t contact the decision takers directly.

You have probably encountered additional hurdles in the companies you have been selling to.
Tell us about.

Price pressure

Selling at a higher price has many advantages.
The question is how to achieve a higher price and not getting squeezed in a price war between your competitors?

Analyze what the lead really wants

As a start you need to know what the probable buyer wants. What are his purposes for the solution and the drivers for the purchase?
This requires a in depth review of the signals he is giving you:
- His behavior on the website
- The search terms used
- The originating website
- The company itself
- The branding of the company
- A leading or lagging behind company
- The question asked in the inquiry email
- The wording in the reply emails
- The comments he makes during the telephone calls
- The vision he has for the solution
- The method of working he has in mind for using the solution
- The body language during the meeting
- Their competitors
- The solutions bought by their competitors
The goal is to try to define the mindset of the probable purchaser.

Differentiate your offering

Next you need to differentiate your offering from the others. Anything that differentiates your solution from the competitors is good enough.
Insist on those aspects, features, functions or benefits that are sensitive for the prospect.

Only if the products or solutions from your competitors are 100% compatible and similar, then differentiation will be difficult and hard to explain the premium. Then it comes to the good name, fame, reliability and sustainability of the company or brand.

Potential customers are willing to buy at higher prices or pay a surplus for additional features, advantages and benefits that can be both: tangible and intangible.
Make them feel as if they are to obtain a unique benefit or advantage that will set apart their selected solution.

Of course:
- Make believe to have a bargain value although it is at a premium price.
- Uniqueness of the solution
- Potential higher sales, revenue, gross margin, profit,…because it is at a premium price.

Free

Give something for free that has low value or cost for you, but is valuable to the probable customer.
Still the complete price is higher than of your competitors.
People just love to get something for free.
This works both in B2C as in B2B.

Career play

People have build careers because of buying more expensive (and complex) solutions.
Examples:
- Mainframes during the eighties
- ERP systems in the nineties.

In many cases by spending more money, one makes himself more important in the company, because of being the buying manager he is in charge of the expensive solution, approved by upper management.
And the high investment is allowed to cost even more in order to succeed.
This career insinuation has to be mentioned carefully.

Price isn’t the main driver

In B2C consumers take risks, whereas businesses seek:
- Reliability
- Service
- On-time delivery.
The price isn’t the main driver, quality and avoiding risks are more important.
A high price justifies the decision, just to avoid those risks and having high quality as the product or solution will be better because of the high price. This is a vicious circle.

The alternative: just say “No”

There is one more solution:
When the buyer wants a price cut or a big discount, just say “No” and leave him to the competitors.
That won’t do the competitors any good.
Selling at a 10% price cut results in at least 35% less profit, or at least the double amount of units needs to be sold to make up for the discount.

Thus instead of selling, you avoid decreasing the profitability of the company or business unit.

The next time a potential customer asks for a discount, will you think twice before committing?
Or do you need the sale so much?

If there is smoke then there is a fire:
- Brian Solis
- Amanda Chapel
- Steve Rubel
- Robert Scoble
- Josh Morgan
- Marshall Kirkpatrick
- Peter Himler
- Mark Hopkins
- Mike Volpe
- Dan Leach
- Chris Apollo Lynn
- Keith O’Brien
- Digital Vibes
- TechAddress
- ThreeMinds
- Jennifer Leggio
- Damien Murphy
- Kerry Gaffney
- Michael Arrington

As many people are talking, questioning or blogging about the possible death of PR or on the other hand defending PR, it is very likely to be the truth:
The End of PR is near.
Only we are probably too close to see the global or long term picture.

PR was born and has existed in a different era, when written communications were slow and distribution was controlled by a limited number of sources (News papers and magazines).

Now the Internet has brought communications to a different speed and the hurdle to enter the arena has been lowered. Communicating to a large audience has become possible for many.

PR should adapt or get eliminated.
It is a natural selection process as Darwin described in ‘The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.

However the struggle also exists within the information distributed by bloggers: there is also a “Survival of the fittest“:
Both the information of the bloggers and the bloggers themselves are struggling in order to publish new and interesting information each time.
Thus a company needs to feed the bloggers using Press Releases?

Study finds the gap is still there

A new global study Closing the Gap: The Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative by the CMO Council is not only about the gap between Marketing and Sales, but also about the use of CRM.

Sales and marketing is still like a “A Tale of Two Cities” or “Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus” as 55% of all companies surveyed are just planning to implement programs and systems to unify these two important company functions.

The report highlights the technology, data shortcomings and solutions that should bind sales and marketing.
It reveals that neither sales nor marketing is effectively leveraging customer data and insight to form deeper, more connected relationships with the customer.

You can download the executive summary or buy the full report for $199.

CRM = frustration

The CMO Council found that although the use of CRM by Sales is far from universal, it is even less used by the Marketing department. Both groups experience significant levels of frustration in employing these tools.

They suggest that it’s time to embrace new technologies that enable wider and deeper customer conversations. Using customer listening and behaviour tracking systems provide for a real-time view of the customer experience to help engage the customer and deliver more relevant offers.

Read the executive summary for a more elaborate and wider explanation. Please note that although we have no affiliation with the CMO Council whatsoever, we think that parts of the executive summary will sound like a brochure for LEADSExplorer.

Our findings

Our feeling is that Marketing uses CRM tools as they are driven by the functionality of email and direct mail marketing. Whereas Sales people are reluctant to use the CRM as Sales reps do sandbag deals for their own benefit.

A lot of the current CRM tools also offer no real incentive for using them: they require a lot of manual data input but offer no real reward, no added value afterwards.

Digging deeper also reveals that Sales people often view the CRM only as a way their superiors can track their actions. And who wants to be a data entry typist without seing any real benefit, only thinking he or she is typing up a stick they might be beaten with ?

How many Sales people do you know that actively use a CRM ? And how many do you know that use excel or a bunch of textfiles instead of a ‘real’ CRM, even when they have access to one ?

These are exactly our findings when we were gathering feedback from sales and marketing professionals while prototyping LEADSExplorer. We have to admit though that our feedback group was a bit smaller than the more than 500 professionals the CMO Council surveyed.

Closing the gap

Both departments should see equal benefits in using Lead Generation and CRM. Partner or perish!

The Lead Generation solution should provide Sales with real leads.
The CRM should be a source of information, a real tool, not only a data entry system: A Computer Assisted Selling solution with serious consideration for usability.

Are you a marketing or sales professional ?
Do you use a ‘real’ CRM or do you keep your precious data in excel or something else ?

Satisfied people

We always wonder if the images of people in an office, completely satisfied of the product they just used is really effective?

The typical satisfaction images:
- Businessman taking a satisfied laid back position in his chair, preferably looking upwards.
- Businesswoman raising her arms in joy and satisfaction, with wide open eyes.

Do these images actually work?
Do they really generate interest, leads?

We would believe such images just classify the product in the ‘doubtful‘, or ‘get-rich-quick-schemes‘ category.

Picturing a B2B product?

We are aware of the problem:
How to picture or express a B2B product?
A B2B product or a solution is more difficult to show, present and define.

In B2C the picture can show the improved product, the benefits of the solution or the before/after.

In B2B the result, effect or benefit of applying the product is more difficult to portray.
How to show?
- less costs
- more efficiency
- more time
- less hassle
- more bottom line profit
- automated solution (firing the workers?)

Our example image here might be a bit dodgy, but there’s an overall recurring theme of happy/satisfied looking people wearing business suits. We are so used to these images that we only notice them when they’re missing. Still… they usually don’t seem to add much value or tell anything about the product or service itself. Should they ?

It is at least an attempt to trick our subconscious mind into wanting us to look as happy, satisfied and beautiful as the people portrayed.

After all it still seems better to use such images instead of no images at all. People like something to look at and images can liven up a page and make a wall of text less intimidating.

Our example: the blurred image concept

We had the same problem with our website visitor identification. We chose not to go the traditional B2B advertising route and try something else:
- Using pedestrians walking in the street as they window shop incognito, just like website visitors.
- The blurred image of people walking in the street (actually it is a train station) expresses you cannot see who these people are: you need glasses.
- Our solution reveals the identity of the people by company name and should sharpen the view on whatever they are doing.

Maybe it is not obvious, but there is a story, a concept: this is your current situation, we provide the glasses.

Besides that, we really liked the image and the colors, which is probably a far better reason than choosing an image for a concept that needs explaining.

Do you like our headline picture?

Would you prefer a typical satisfied business person?

What images do you use on your B2B webpage or advertising?

Problem

Your emails or advertising is missing to get answered ?
Sales letters not selling ?
Ads not getting clicked on ?
You want to catch attention ?

Power words

Use these power words:
1. Free - the best motivator for immediate response.
2. You - People want to know what’s in it for them.
3. Results - What to expect.
4. Immediate - online everything is expected now or instantly.
5. Guarantee - make your offering more serious.
6. Discover - finding something new.
7. Proven - should remove fear of the unknown.
8. Safety - appeals to basic human needs.
9. Limited - appealing to a sense of urgency.
10. New - appealing to human curiosity.
11. Improve - always interested in becoming better.
12. Bargain - everybody wants to get something at a better price, and better than “Sale”.
13. Exclusive - only those who are invited.
14. Save - spending less.

Too simple to be true ? Too obvious ? Have you actually tried this yet ?

Copywriters have been using these tools for ages, and that’s not because this isn’t working. There’s even software that can spice up your writings by suggesting power word replacements for your texts, like a special copywriter thesaurus.

Applicable for:

Emails, advertising and communications. These words should help you get noticed, catch attention, generate leads and sell.

Spice up your text and let us know how you’re doing!