What are you good at? What can you do better than your competitors? Why should I buy something from you? Many companies think they know the answers to these questions but often they don’t or cannot communicate them clearly. Technology companies in particular often emphasise a list of unique product features without clearly tying these back to a business problem they solve for their customers. According to the Forrester Research paper “Six essential elements of an effective technology marketing pitch”, only 34% of business professionals indicate that their best IT providers are able to articulate the business value of their solutions.
Another common problem is lack of a single definition within a company – if you ask two different sales people you get two different answers as to what they do and why they’re the best. Is this a big problem? Well, yes if you want to sell anything.
From the outside, a lot of companies look the same to their potential customers. The more complex the product or service, the harder it is for buyers to understand how to differentiate between the available options. You have make it easy for buyers to quickly understand how you can help them and why you are better than your competitors. You do this by defining a clear and compelling Value Proposition.
Your Value Proposition describes what you do differently, and how this helps your customers achieve a business goal or overcome a business problem. To quote Jill Konrath, author of “Selling to big companies”:
“A value proposition is a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services. It’s outcome focussed and stresses the business value of what you have to offer”
To develop your value proposition you first have to clarify what’s unique about what you offer. You must then connect this to a real need of your intended audience. Finally, you have to quantify the value you provide in concrete terms.
So, starting with the first part, can you define what is unique about what you can do, what makes you better than anyone else? Next, make sure this unique capability is useful to your intended customers – what value can you deliver to them because of this unique capability? Is it something they are going to care about? Will it make a big impact in their business? Don’t position your company or product on a unique feature that is irrelevant to most of your customers (this may seem to be stating the obvious, but it happens). One good way to assess the value you deliver is to ask your existing customers. Why did they choose you and why do they continue to work with you?
Finally, try to quantify the value you can deliver – put a number on it and make it tangible. Can you provide concrete examples from recent case studies? Does your unique capability help customers to increase revenue, reduce costs, shorten time-to-market, increase profit? By how much? Can you be specific? Do you have evidence you can show to a prospect? As Mike Schultz notes in his white paper ‘Making lead generation work for professional services’,
“the value a client eventually realizes from your firm’s services might well be your “efficient and effective solutions that helped them grow their revenue and strengthen their business.” However, before they work with you, most buyers don’t have the first idea of what that means, or how it applies to them.”
The Forrester paper makes much the same point:
“Marketers frequently make broad claims of improved efficiencies, faster time-to-market, lower cost-of-ownership, and other catch-all value metrics without reference to what’s really being measured and who in the user organization owns those metrics.”
There’s an interesting Harvard Business Review article on the importance of value propositions, ‘Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets’ (HBR March 2006). They describe how South Carolina based packaging supplier Sonoco requires that each of its product value propositions must be:
• Distinctive – it must be superior to those of the competition
• Measurable – all value propositions should be based on tangible points of difference that can be quantified in monetary terms
• Sustainable – the company must be able to execute this value proposition for a significant period of time
As you try to develop your value proposition you’ll see that it isn’t easy, but it gets better with each iteration. You are trying to create a statement that clarifies “what you want to be famous for” – what you want your prospects to remember about you, the “mental shorthand” you want them to associate with your company. The eventual goal is a simple statement that’s easy for anyone in your company to deliver each time – what you do, why it’s important, and how you do it.
So keep asking these dumb questions until you get to a satisfactory answer. What exactly are we trying to sell? Who is this for? Who will want to buy it? Why will they want to buy it? Why won’t they continue to use whatever they currently use? Why won’t they use a competing or alternative solution?
For some companies, particularly B2B and technology companies, PR is considered a little frivolous – a ‘would like’ rather than a ‘must have’. We advise anyone who thinks that way to think again. PR should be a key element in any sales and marketing program for companies involved in high-technology, complex B2B sales. Why is it such a big deal? Well, it can be one of the most effective ways to communicate with a target audience – they tend to take greater notice of news and press articles than standard advertising messages. It can also be a relatively low-cost way of raising awareness of your company and what you do. And today PR also plays a key role in improving your online visibility and improving your search ranking.
Given that it’s so important, why aren’t more B2B companies aware of its effectiveness? I think this is partly due to companies deciding that local or regional press coverage won’t provide much value. But PR doesn’t mean trying to get the CEO’s photograph in your local newspaper. It means thinking about who your target audiences are, identifying what they read and where they look for information about their industry and business. Once you know that, your job is to focus your PR activities on the media your customers use in their jobs, both online and offline.
Below is a short 8-page guide to PR which we think business managers will find useful. It discusses the value of PR and its impact on search marketing, before describing how you can develop and execute a PR program, including advice on writing and distributing a press release.
This is a presentation from earlier this month on Search Engine Optimization, given to the Donegal Women in Business network. It outlines what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, outlines why it’s important, and lists a step-by-step approach to use when trying to bring more search traffic to your website.
Marketing will become more technical, sales teams won’t be on the road so much, and there’s going to be more overlap and, hopefully, alignment.
The web, online advertising and online marketing are having a big impact on how Business-to-business (B2B) companies sell. But in some ways this just reflects the fact that B2B buyers now buy things differently too. Ten years ago, buyers started their selection process by talking to vendor sales people, often at industry tradeshows. And there were fewer people involved in the buying decision on the customer’s side. Today buyers do much more initial research online, so they know much more about a vendor before that vendor becomes aware of them and before direct contact is made. Who initiates the research and who participates in the buying decision is more complex, with more people involved even for deals in the $5k to $50k range.
This means that to be successful, companies need to meet the research and information needs of prospective customers at as early a stage in the buying process as possible. They need to be easily found online by the various people who contribute to a customer buying decision, and when they are found they need to provide compelling information that addresses the specific questions of each type of buyer or influencer.
The change in B2B buyer behaviour also means sales teams are going to change. Sales staff are being involved at a much later stage of the customer’s evaluation of a product. The earlier stages will be managed either by marketing or by a reconstituted sales team. Many B2B marketing units are starting to do some of the work sales teams traditionally did, from lead generation and qualification through to providing pre-recorded online demos, technical briefings, business cases and ROI calculations. Marketers can now use online video, animated product tours, webinars and other interactive and dynamic content to provide a ‘virtual sales demonstration’. While you cannot fully recreate face-to-face meetings online, you can get pretty close through the use of web conferencing software, video and the telephone. This enables you to provide product demonstrations and presentations over the web that traditionally would have been provided ‘on site’ at a customer’s premises by sales and pre-sales staff.
Another change to the roles of sales and marketing is that companies are automating the acquisition of potential customer contact details through registrations on web-pages and blogs. They will spend more time trying to profile prospective customers that they attract online so that they don’t pursue people who are uninterested and so they can quickly pinpoint those prospects that have the greatest likelihood of purchasing within a defined time period. For example, today if someone registers to download a document from my website they have to supply me with their name and email address. From this download registration I can see if they have been on the website in the past, I can look up their IP address and their broad geographic location, and I could pull further information from networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. These techniques enable companies to build a more detailed profile of their visitors which helps them determine whether they are more or less likely to buy their product now or in the future. For instance, if the same person has repeatedly visited your website in the past 5 weeks and downloaded every document or case study you have then this indicates some level of interest. If in addition you find that 4 of his colleagues have also visited your site and downloaded documents, you might want to consider having one of your sales guys give them a call. This kind of profiling can be automated, and can lead to more rapid generation of high quality sales leads that can then be passed more efficiently to sales teams to close and generate increased revenue.
So going back to the original question, I think Marketing departments will become more technically oriented, more process oriented and more fully automated. Their contribution to demand generation will be more visible and more easily measurable. I think Sales will share some of the online promotional tasks and lead qualification tasks with Marketing, and I think there’s going to be a significant drop in on-site sales visits. Miller Heimann will still be used to analyse and handle large corporate sales opportunities that have been fully qualified as real prospects, but this will be the tip of the sales and marketing spear that began with the initial acquisition of a contact or lead from online activities.
A short interview with Colm Long, Facebook’s Director of Operations for Europe, the Middle East and Asia I carried out on behalf of Donegal County Enterprise Board (I’m the disembodied voice and the shaky hand on the camera). Colm was just about to present a seminar as part of Donegal’s Business Week 2010. Here he talks about how small business can effectively use Facebook (and other online media) to promote themselves. The full video of his seminar will be available online shortly.
