Monday Morning Quarterback: It's about having the right tools...

Greetings!

Well...it's Monday morning and time to be the "Monday Morning Quarterback" as I review the weekend. 

I'll begin by sharing that my daughter and her fiance bought a house about 30 minutes from us and its the perfect place to start their family.  Two-story, big rooms, lots of space and a yard that backs up to a wide-open field.  Great deck and really cool sun room.  Perfect right?

Well...you know how that goes.  The landscaping was "nice" but not what they wanted, the deck was spacious, but not well tended, the front door was cool, but a storm door would be ideal!  So, we went to work to help out....and that's where the RIGHT TOOLS come into play.

In any job, having the right tools is critical to both success and efficiency. For me, it was the pick axe and narrow shovel that allowed me to get into tight spots and be focused on the job at hand.  Especially for us, being 30 minutes from our house, made tool selection and access very important....the right shovel, leveling sand, a pick axe, hedging shears, etc.   For marketers, the same concepts apply!  The tool set you have becomes the resources to drive your success.  Here are three key "tool kits" to concentrate on:

Inside Tools

• Your team:  Developing the right mix of talent and focus
• Your support: Generating the necessary executive support and encouragement
• Your delivery: Ensuring you build teamwork to deliver at the customer point-of-contact

      KEY: Organize your tools close at hand for maximum leverage and success.

Outside Tools

• Extension: Enabling new capabilities and skills to add to your team
• Focus: Tactical focus to allow you to think strategy
• Expertise:  Clear expertise and advanced skills that move you ahead

      KEY: Expand your team exactly where needed without HR expense!

New Tools

• New to you: new ideas that you have not explored but others have succeeded with
• New to everyone: new ideas that can change the game in your market
• New spin: taking a proven idea and making it your own

      KEY: Sometimes the "new tool" is exactly what need to take that next step

The key is the tool set you have as resources...but it is also the WILLINGNESS to use the tools at your disposal.  This past weekend, it took the pick axe and the narrow shovel to get rocks out so that the paver wall would be leveled with the leveling sand and be perfect.  The tools and willingness combined to make it happen...for your bank/credit union... its the same.  Use the tools you have and be open to new ones or from other sources...it just may turn out to be the best tool ever!

Cheers!

Bruce

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We bring these marketing philosophies to credit unions and community banks nationwide, and would love to bring them to your institution too.  Contact us to see how.

Over 230,000 visits worldwide, we hope that you enjoy this blog.  If you find it helpful, please share it with your colleagues.  Also, check out our YouTube Channel for short video blogs about financial marketing.  

MarketMatch is also a nationally and internationally requested speaker.  Contact us to bring our marketing ideas to your next conference.

Here are the conferences where you can find MarketMatch.

See our story here. (click)

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937-832-7894 x101

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Create Content that Helps Sales Reps Sell - Sales Enablement, Part 2

Business buyers do not distinguish between marketing and sales activities. From the buyer's perspective, there is one problem-solving process that may result in a purchase. As they work through their decision-making process, what really matters to buyers is the relevance, quality, and credibility of the information they receive from prospective vendors. They couldn't care less about whether the information comes from the marketing department or a salesperson.

To maximize results, what B2B companies need is a demand generation process/system that can address buyers' needs at every stage of their decision-making journey. I call it managing demand generation "from curiosity to close."

Marketing and sales play distinct roles in the demand generation process, but marketing is well-suited to help make the selling process more effective. This role of marketing is usually called sales enablement, and marketing has two major sales enablement responsibilities.

• Content - Marketers must provide the content resources that will enable sales reps to advance sales opportunities.
• Information - When a lead is passed from marketing to sales, marketing must provide the information that will enable sales reps to continue prospect relationships without loss of momentum.

This is the second of three posts dealing with sales enablement. In the first post, I discussed why sales enablement is important for B2B companies. In this post, I'll discuss the content aspect of marketing's sales enablement responsibility. My next post will cover the information component.

Sales Enablement Content Needs Improvement

Recent research by Richardson, a sales training firm, paints a mixed picture of marketing's performance on the sales enablement content front. The Richardson research consisted of a survey of over 400 sales representatives and sales managers. Here are a few of the significant findings.

• 54% of sales reps and 65% of sales managers say they understand their company's content marketing strategy.
• 65% of sales reps and 74% of sales managers say that the content their company publishes is valuable to their customers.
• Only 52% of sales reps and 43% of managers say that the content their company publishes helps improve sales effectiveness.
• When asked how their company's content could be improved to better support sales efforts, 59% of sales reps and 57% of managers said "improve content relevance to our customers." Fifty-one percent of sales reps and 65% of managers said "create a stronger link between the content and the solutions we sell."

Two Flavors of Sales Enablement Content

There are two basic types of sales enablement content. The first consists of "normal" marketing content resources that are distributed to prospects directly by sales reps. Marketing is responsible for developing content resources for all buyer personas for all stages of the buying process. This will necessarily include those stages that occur after marketing has passed a lead over to sales.

These later-stage resources are designed for prospects who are actively considering a purchase. To borrow the terminology used by SiriusDecisions, these are prospects who are "exploring possible solutions," "committing to a solution," and "justifying the decision." When late-stage marketing content resources are distributed by sales reps, they become sales enablement content.

The second category of sales enablement content consists of various "tools" that are specifically designed for use by salespeople. This category includes, but is not limited to:

• E-mail message templates
• Sales presentation slides (with accompanying scripts or notes)
• ROI calculators
• Total cost of ownership calculators
• Sales proposal templates

While I contend that marketing should take the lead in creating these kinds of content resources, marketers need to involve sales reps at every stage of the development process, and they need to pay close attention to the "real-world" intelligence and insights that sales reps can bring to the process. Getting salespeople to buy into these resources is critical because they will have no value if they aren't used.

In my next post, I'll discuss the kinds of information that marketing should provide to salespeople as part of the lead hand-off process.

Read Part 1 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 3 of the sales enablement series here.

The New “Basics” Every Marketer Should Know

This week, we are focusing on the fundamentals of marketing on the MarketMatch blog and Facebook.  And by basics, we aren’t talking about TV commercials and billboards, radio, newspapers, direct mail, and all of the more traditional forms of marketing.  There are some new basics that every marketer should know because marketing has changed dramatically since the days of Mad Men, and changes more rapidly as time goes on.

Let’s break down the basics of today’s marketing:

Tell a story with personality

Business Banking Services – Example 1

“We have business loans for all sizes of businesses and industries.  Our rates are competitive and we feature friendly, knowledgeable loan officers and an easy application process.”

Business Banking Services – Example 2

“Jerry Smith has owned his glass shop for 34 years and always had what he thought was a great relationship with his financial institution.  That was, until he received an unexpected call from his ‘personal banker.’  ‘We understand that you have never missed a payment on your credit line and you’ve always been a good customer,’ said the personal banker.  ‘But we are cutting back our lending, and we’re closing your line of credit loan effective next month.’

Angry and betrayed, Jerry turned to his local credit union/community bank, where the loan officer came to his shop, learned about his business and designed a custom solution tailored to Jerry’s individual needs.” 

Which of these examples is more compelling to you?  People make decisions based on emotion.  Stories make it easy for people to put themselves in a given situation allowing you an opportunity to “sell” your services in a way with which the readers can identify.  And, more importantly, makes your sale more memorable for the consumer.

Solve a problem with your positioning. 

We don’t need a marketing campaign to tell us how amazing chocolate is.  Or how it tastes.  99% of people love chocolate.  So how would a chocolate company position itself?  Enter my favorite candy, M&Ms: their tagline is “melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”  It instantly creates a visual, and they don’t describe the features of their candy with their positioning.  Plus they have the whole adorable character thing going for them, too.  

A great exercise for you to try next time you are developing a marketing campaign is to take off your marketing hat and be the consumer.  What problems or opportunities do you have or see with your personal finances, accessing your accounts, getting loans, visiting the branch, etc.  Once you have brainstormed those processes, back into how your account, loan, service, etc. will solve that problem.  If there aren’t any problems to be identified (which is great), how can those touch points and transactions be enhanced so that the transactions become memorable over other financial institutions selling the same services and products?

Personalize and position your product so that someone can identify with it and make it their “own.” 

"Bride" on my wedding day

As a coffee-loving person, the experience of going into Starbucks and ordering a “grande, one pump, nonfat, no whip café mocha” is a personal experience.  Am I in line like everyone else to buy coffee?  Yes.  But that is my drink.  

We obviously don’t sell coffee drinks.  We sell trust through our financial products and services.  This doesn’t mean recreating the wheel.  It means modifying (or creating) the consumer experience.  How can you appeal to the innate human desire of acceptance and belonging through the various transactions at your financial institution? 

Stop being a logo! Show your brand personality.  (Yes, you have one).

“Flo” has over 5 million Facebook fans.  It’s an insurance company!  But Progressive has done an amazing job at taking their commodity-based transaction and turning it into a people-based transaction.

 

It’s also insurance, but the Allstate “Mayhem” commercials do a fantastic job of dramatizing insurance needs in a funny, identifiable way. 

Why is this important?  The more consumers relate to and remember your institution, the higher your brand loyalty will be.

Engage and encourage them in conversation

In the age of social media where it takes all of eight seconds to tweet about a service experience, people are going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly whether you want them to or not.  So, instead of playing defense (or worse, not playing at all), how about being proactive and engaging them in conversation on your terms? 

Some negative response is inevitable and can even turn out to be a great opportunity for your financial institution.  In fact, your members or customers expect you to do things wrong from time to time, but it is how your organization handles those issues as Ron Zemke talks about in his article “Service Recovery: Turning Oops! Into Opportunity.”  He says, “the true test of an organization’s commitment to service quality is the way the organization responds when things go wrong for the customer.”  Conversation enables these opportunities to be uncovered and on your terms.

Choose the medium that is right for your financial institution, drive traffic there with your marketing and communications efforts, and actively engage your audience in conversation, whether it is in person or online.  Your members and customers want to know that there are real people with real personalities behind that logo of yours.  That’s why the examples above are so identifiable and memorable.

Make it about them, not you. 

In the same way that you go about positioning a product or service, remember your credit union or community bank is there to serve the people coming in the door, connecting with you online, or calling on the phone.  Marketing isn’t just about how you promote your business; it is how your business operates and involves everything from the building atmosphere, the employee dress code, how people are greeted, the transaction process…everything.  We are in a people business, and it is about them. 

It is imperative in today’s competitive environment that we as marketers go beyond traditional marketing mediums and tactics and do it before we need to.  Once your target audience has gone elsewhere, it will be that much harder to capture their attention and tell them your story.  And it’s a great story you have to tell.  

Amanda


MarketMatch brings these philosophies and die-hard energy to credit unions and community banks.  Want to learn more about how MarketMatch can help you with your strategic marketing efforts?  Contact me!

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Why Sales Enablement Matters More than Ever - Sales Enablement, Part 1

In most B2B companies, your success as a marketer depends to a significant extent on your ability to help the sales team sell. By no means is this a new development. For decades, many (perhaps most) B2B companies have been "sales driven," and the primary role of marketing in these organizations was to support the selling effort by creating collateral materials, managing trade show participation, and running occasional brand building and lead generation programs.

Today, marketing is playing a broader and more significant role in the demand generation process in many B2B companies. In particular, marketers are taking greater responsibility for nurturing potential buyers before passing those leads over to sales.

Notwithstanding all of the changes, sales is still a critical part of the demand generation process, and improving sales effectiveness is still an important business objective. If anything, the increased power and heightened expectations of business buyers are driving greater interest in the topic of sales enablement. For example, Forrester Research held its third annual sales enablement conference earlier this year, and other national research/analyst/consulting firms, including IDC, Gartner, and SiriusDecisions are also focusing on this topic.

In my next two posts, I'll discuss the two most important ways that marketing can support and enable the sales team. First, however, a little background information.

What is Sales Enablement?

Both Forrester and IDC have published "formal" definitions of sales enablement.

Forrester's definition:  Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.

IDC's definition:  Getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time and place, and in the right format, to move a sales opportunity forward.

These definitions are very broad because both Forrester and IDC view sales enablement as a strategic business function. Under these definitions, for example, sales enablement would probably include sales training, sales process management, and technology solutions, and sales enablement would extend to all "client-facing" employees, not just salespeople. I don't disagree with this approach, but in my upcoming posts, I'll focus specifically on how marketing can help sales reps sell more effectively.

Why is Sales Enablement Important?

Sales enablement is important for three very simple reasons:

• Sales enablement is expensive - According to Forrester, companies on average are spending about $135,000 per year per sales rep on sales support people, activities, and processes.
• The selling process in most companies needs improvement - In research by IDC, 26% of business buyers said their sales reps were unprepared for the initial sales meeting, and 31% of buyers described the sales reps as somewhat prepared. Only 43% of buyers rated their sales reps as very or extremely prepared for the initial meeting. A recent Forrester survey found that only 15% of executives say that their meetings with sales reps meet expectations.
• Poor sales enablement is costly - According to IDC, a lack of good sales enablement results in $14 million of wasted sales and marketing expenses and $100 million in lost sales opportunities in a "typical" $1 billion company.

In my next post, I'll explain how marketers can support the sales team by developing the right kind of sales enablement content.

Read Part 2 of the sales enablement series here.

Read Part 3 of the sales enablement series here.

Great Content Marketing Infographic from Demand Metric

Did you know that 90% of all organizations use content in their marketing efforts?

Although the phrase "content marketing" is something of a buzzword amongst today's marketing teams, the reality is that this inbound marketing practice is both remarkably widespread and effective. To learn more about what content marketing is, how it can benefit your organization and how to get started using this technique to promote your company, check out the following infographic (click to enlarge):

A Cheat Sheet to Perfect Creative

Give your creative the FREEDOM of a tight strategy.

What I love about what we do is that there are infinite ways to address the same problem.  There are few rules and usually, the crazier the idea, the better.

You want your creative to stand up and take notice.  You need it to be clear and concise.  To get there, you have to be focused!  

That's the job of the creative brief.  In one to two pages, describe exactly what needs to happen.  A great creative brief can lead to killer creative.  It's also your sanity check to know whether the creative is simply entertaining or on strategy too.

Here are the 5 areas to focus on when you're focused on creative:

1. What do you want to do?

Why are you spending this money?  What do you want the effort to accomplish?  How will you quantitatively know if it worked or not.

• What does the advertising do for the brand?
• How will the objective be measured?

2. Who are you talking to?
It's easier to write to a person than to a nameless group.  Who do you want to talk to?  Give them a name, a face, a personality and needs:

• What do they look like? What do they like to do? What is their economic standing?  What makes them tick? (be as specific as possible)
• What motivates them?  Why are they making this purchase decision? What's going on in their life?
• When they buy, why do they choose you?
• When they don't buy with you, why not?
• How do they FEEL when they make the decision?  How do you WANT them to feel (tone)?

3. The ONE Big Thing

Let's face it, we're lucky if anyone ever sees our work ... we're blessed if they care ... and if they take away ONE message, we've done our job.  What is the ONE big thing that you want them to know?

• How does it make you different from the competition?
• So what? (Benefit) What problem are we solving?  Why should anyone care?
• Prove it (3-5 supports - Prioritize) Why should they believe you?
• Who's voice is telling them?  Are you the trusted old uncle or the hip young friend or the crazy granny?

4. What do you want them to do?
How will the audience help you achieve your objective?  Do you want them to feel something?  Pick up the phone?  Go to a URL?  Run to your location?

• Is it easy for the target to do what you want?
• Who answers the Call to Action?  Are they prepared?

5. Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots
What are the rules? The must and must nots.

• Budget
• Schedule and duration
• Media options: Print? Broadcast? Web? Direct Mail? SEO? Point of Sale? Outdoor?
• What does the staff need to know or do?
• Mandatories (logos, icons, legals, etc)

Now go back and start crossing words out.  Keep the brief ... well, BRIEF!  The more focused you are, the less sidetracked the creative ideas will be (You know creatives ... show 'em something shiny and you lose them for hours!).

From the brief, try to come up with at least 3 good ideas:

• The safe idea
• One that scares the hell out of you
• Something in between

Finally, when the work is complete, go back to the brief and start checking off each item.  If the work addresses each element of the brief, then it should be on strategy ... focused ... and ready to generate business.

We bring these marketing philosophies to credit unions and community banks nationwide, and would love to bring them to your institution too.  Contact us to see how.

Nearing 230,000 visits worldwide, we hope that you enjoy this blog.  If you find it helpful, please share it with your colleagues.  Also, check out our YouTube Channel for short video blogs about financial marketing.  

MarketMatch is also a nationally and internationally requested speaker.  Contact us to bring our marketing ideas to your next conference.

Here are the conferences where you can find MarketMatch.

See our story here. (click)

Chat with me LIVE! (click)

Or email me directly (click)

937-426-9848

Follow me on Twitter @egagliano

Kill the Friction Gremlins to Accelerate Buying Decisions

In a recent survey by CSO Insights, almost three out of four respondents (73%) said that their average sales cycle for new customers requires four or more months to complete. B2B marketing and sales professionals know that reducing the length of the buying/sales cycle will produce substantial benefits, but this is not an easy task. The only truly effective way to accelerate the buying process is to reduce the friction that slows prospects
down.

When it comes to accelerating the buying process, B2B marketing and sales resemble the sport of curling. Curling is a little like shuffleboard, but it's played on ice and involves sliding a large polished granite stone toward a target painted on the ice. The playing surface is prepared by spraying water droplets (called "pebble") on the ice. Because of the friction between the stone and the pebble, the moving stone will turn or "curl" to one side or the other.

After one team member "throws" the stone toward the target, two other team members accompany the stone as it moves down the ice and guide it toward the target. The catch is, these players aren't
allowed to actually touch the moving stone. Instead, they use brooms to sweep the ice in front of the stone. Sweeping temporarily melts the pebble and reduces the friction between the stone and the ice, and this changes both the speed and the direction of the stone. Therefore, sweepers affect where the stone stops, but they do so indirectly.

In B2B demand generation terms, friction is anything that slows a potential buyer's progression through the buying process. Like the sweepers in a curling match, one your primary jobs as a marketer or a salesperson is to reduce friction. You would like to be able to directly lead your prospects through the buying process, but in today's B2B buying environment, attempting to push prospects through the buying process on your schedule just doesn't work - at least not very often.



The friction gremlins live everywhere in the buying process, and some of the causes of friction are beyond your control. For example, a change in the prospect's business or financial condition, or a change in the composition of the prospect's senior management team can delay or stall the buying process.

The good news is, you can address many causes of friction with the right marketing content and selling skills. Most causes of friction fall into one of two categories - friction that relates directly to your solution or the problem or challenge it addresses, or friction that accompanies any significant organizational change.

Friction Related to Your Solution

This type of friction usually results from a lack of information. To keep moving through the buying process, potential buyers need the right information at the right time, and if they don't get that information, the buying process can stall. For example, a potential buyer's progression can be slowed or stopped if he or she:

• Doesn't understand or appreciate the costs or negative ramifications of the status quo
• Doesn't fully understand how your solution will improve the status quo
• Perceives that the purchase of your solution will entail substantial risks
• Doesn't have an accurate picture of the ROI that your solution will produce

Change-Related Friction

Change-related friction is usually caused by internal prospect issues, and most of those issues have little to do with the selling company or its products or services. Every prospect organization will have a unique mix of change management issues, but there are four causes of change-related friction that arise in most organizations. The buying process is likely to stall if the principal buyer:

• Doesn't understand how the proposed change will affect the existing organizational "system" (people, processes, and technology)
• Hasn't identified who must be involved in the decision to change
• Believes (or other stakeholders believe) that the problem or need driving the consideration of change can be addressed using internal resources
• Hasn't identified the issues or concerns that must be addressed to get buy-in from all necessary stakeholders

How to Reduce Friction

Both marketing and sales are responsible for reducing friction in the buying process, but marketing's share of the job has grown because of changes in buyer behavior. With business buyers delaying interactions with salespeople until later in the buying process, marketing content must be a primary tool for reducing solution-related friction. In fact, marketing content is often the only effective tool for dealing with the solution-related friction that arises in the early stages of the buying process.

Because change-related friction is unique to each prospect, sales must assume a large part of the responsibility for reducing it. Even here, however, marketing content can play an important role. For example, a white paper or ebook that describes how to build a business case for your type of solution can help your potential buyer identify all of the stakeholders who must be involved in the decision to change. A white paper or ebook can also be used to discuss why an internal "home-grown" solution isn't the best alternative for most companies.

You can't completely eliminate friction from the buying process, but the best way to speed up buying decisions is to kill as many friction gremlins as possible.

Photo Credit:  pop culture geek via Flickr cc