In today’s marketing and sales, consumption-based, media world, a lot of messaging seems driven by fear.  Tune in at 10 PM to see why soccer moms are selling crack.  The president is destroying America.  Does your computer have a virus?

In sales and marketing, we often have the opportunity to create fear as a buying cause.  But fear, by itself, is not sufficient to create a sale.  You also need to create hope.

Without hope we would be trapped in a set of automatic responses.  So we hope for better lives for our children.  We hope we beat cancer.  We hope we find the right partner.  We even hope to win the lottery.

We think rather than hope if we buy your service or product that you will solve our problem.  This is because hope is intensely personal.  What we really hope for is that our lives will be better.

It’s difficult to have “hope” for a solution to a business problem.  Rather, in sales and marketing, it’s easier to create a “vision” of a solution to a problem.  The two are different.  Hope, is based on a feeling and a projection of what that solution will mean personally.   A vision for a solution is based on thinking about the technical results, and it’s very rational.

Successful marketers and sales people need to ask,  “What is the “hope” driving my prospect, and how can I help them achieve it?”  Is it to be respected, or to earn the love of their families by being successful?  It’s not just to provide a “left-handed crenznut” in order to improve the output of you sales force automation system that will lead to increased sales.

I am impressed by one simple but elegant example of hope-based messaging.  An outsourced printing center moved onsite to corporate campus in order to provide that companies reproduction services.  In the copy rooms of the company they placed a sign above each copier.  It said, “Let us help you go home on time.”

In eight words they accomplished the following things: 1) They acknowledged the hard work people were doing, 2) they connected it to the services they provided 3) they offered help 4) the message was positive and 5) they made it personal by tying it to seeing one’s family.  They provided hope. They could have said, “Are you going to be late again tonight? Call 1-800-WePrint.”

So what hope are you delivering in your messages?   Besides just providing a “solution” or creating a “vision,” can you get your customer to personally imagine what their lives will be like after doing business with you?

It’s hard work, but just imagine how you will be admired if….

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

Our political discourse today is full of smoke.  As a result, no one trusts politicians.   The same occurs with sales and marketing.  We talk too much, we obfuscate, which (irony intended) means we don’t say what we mean.

We are often uncomfortable with the truth, so not saying what we mean is and attempt to make us feel comfortable, but it is really a form of dishonesty.

The best sales and marketing people are those that are honest and direct.  You can hear it in what they say and write.  They are clear.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
Prairie Sky Group
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

But few of us have positions or jobs that are simply task-based.  Doing more activities or tasks is a tough way to increase your personal productivity.

We can also think of productivity as being dependent on creativity.  Figure out a new way to do something, and productivity can increase.  But here’s the problem.  You can’t be creative by answering email and being on call 24×7.  You’ll never win that race.  You will never out compete your colleagues and suddenly be recognized by the CEO or the board for your diligence.  This doesn’t mean that you don’t work hard.  But if you want to succeed, stop hitting your head against the wall and try being creative.  Easy prescription, but how?

The Greek, Archimedes of Syracuse (circa 287 BC to circa 212 BC), was a brilliant scientist and mathematician.  Some of his inventions are still used today.  There is the story of him and the golden crown.  He was faced with the difficult problem of figuring out if a gold crown was pure gold or an amalgam.  He was not allowed to scratch or assay the crown.  The more he thought about it, the more he thought the problem might be impossible.  But one day, as he was relaxing and stepping into his bath, he absently noted that the water rose as his foot went into the bath.  He had discovered the principal of displacement.  He realized that he could calculate the volume of the crown through displacement, and if he knew its weight, he could calculate the density, and thus tell if it was pure gold or not.  When he realized this, the story goes, he was so excited, that he ran naked into the street yelling “Eureka!” (I’ve found it.)

One key to creativity is letting your mind be occupied by something else.  We need down time and relaxation for our brains to come up with new ideas and solutions to problems.  Even simple ones.  Have you ever noticed that when you are trying to remember a name, or the artist for a song and can’t, that as soon as you stop trying, it comes to you.

Next time you’re faced with a tough marketing or sales problem, step away from the email.  Let it go.  Plan some down time.  Try doing something that occupies your head in a mindless way.  One irony of creativity is that the more you try to generate it, the more elusive it becomes.  Creativity is the Chinese handcuffs of thinking.  So go take a bath.  But stay out of the street.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
Prairie Sky Group
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7, except when I’m bathing)

Have you ever wondered why the typical response to a fast changing business environment is often to implement more planning, processes, and measurements, as well as re-organize the structure of the company?  (The last step is often referred to as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.) It’s the illusion of control.

We live in a period of rapid change brought on, in part, by digital connectivity and social media in a 24×7 world.  This also adds pressure and demands on the rate at which organizations, including marketing, need to respond.

At the same time, many corporate responses to the stresses of change seem to be to implement even more rigid plans and processes in hopes of maintaining control over the changing environment.  The effect is often less adaptability and less productivity, rather than responsiveness and more productivity.

In the new social world, productivity often comes from interaction and collaboration rather than structured systems.  In the new world, it’s often the outputs of our work rather than meetings and processes that need to guide our direction.  The problem with systems and plans is that they let us feel like we are in control.  But since we often don’t know what the outcome should or could be, they limit us and slow us down.   They promise more assurance, but the most valuable commodity is knowledge gained by trying something quickly.  To use the military analogy, the first thing to die on the battlefield is the battle plan.

By following the conventional approach of working harder on more complete plans and implementing processes to avoid risk, the next step is inevitable.  That is cost cutting measures that eliminate jobs in order to make the productivity of an organization look better on paper.   These changes rarely have anything to do with changing the actual productivity, and often have exactly the opposite effect.  Your employees and team members know this.

What would happen, if instead of increasing control and process in response to change, you chucked these out the window?   What would happen if you increased the rate at which you tried things without a focus on a guaranteed result?  What if you learned quickly and adapted?  Or you could continue fiddling.  Welcome to the new world.

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

How did he do it?  His answer was succinct and direct.  He couldn’t always interview for specific skills or experience.  Others in his company could help him with that.  Instead, he said, he interviewed for the right values.  If he could find people with the right values, then he could worry about putting the right butts in the right seats.

The interesting thing was that the values for his company were written on a large sign in the lobby where his employees and guests could see them.  The list of five began with, “Always Add Value,” and ended with “Do the Right Thing.”

Values are different than business goals.  A goal is what you want to achieve.  Values are guidelines that we use for how we will behave and make decisions, especially when there is a conflict.

It seems to me that corporations don’t have values in themselves, but rather the people in them do.  When you put them on the wall, you are saying… this is how we expect you to make your decisions and conduct yourselves.  It helps hold others to the same code.

The test comes of course when really tough decisions have to be made or there’s some conflict between values.  In that case, you’d better have tested your own values beforehand.  Many companies simply put them up as they would office decoration.  Or they put up their business goals.  The real difference is can you live your values?

This is a time when positive impressions of business in America are at an all time low.  It’s easy to be cynical about corporate values when the company doesn’t live them or live up to them.  When this happens, it’s a huge demotivator and saps productivity and trust, both with employees and with customers.  However, this COO understood the value of values in creating a company that could grow at 100%.  Good values lead to good growth.  Values precede business goals.

Marketing and sales also own a big piece of the values for their organizations because they have the principle responsibility for communicating with clients, customers and prospects.   So what are you values?  Do you interview for them?  And how do you do that?

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

Snot link farms.

Snot keyword loading.

Snot listing on hundreds of directories.

Snot coding all content with H1 tags.

Snot solved by loading alt tags.

Snot hiring blog farms.

Snot copying your competitor’s keywords.

Snot forgetting 301 redirects when redoing your pages or site.

Snot traffic for traffic’s sake.

Snot always something you tell a new acquaintance at a party that you do for a living.

Snot easy.

Snot a one time fix.  (It’s a process.  It takes a while.)

Happy Leap Day.  Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

When it comes to organic search, there are a number of objectives on which you should focus.  These are all part of my overcoming resistance theme.

First, of course, is getting found or being discovered by search engine crawlers so you can show up in indexed results.

The second is having a site architecture that is crawler friendly.  You can be discovered, but present unintentional barriers to indexing and ranking your pages.

Once the page is found and accessible, your content needs to be available or extractable.  For example, the image of the webinar blurb you inserted in your sidebar may not help.

With these first three items, it seems like we are responding to search engines rather than people.  So the fourth item becomes the first and most important item.  You need to make the information on your page useful to people you are targeting and easy to read.  One way to do this is to provide Quid pro Nada.  But it’s also important to make content that can be scanned as well as read.  I often see word dense content littered with SEO terms.  (A sin I commit too often.)  My reaction is to flee quickly.  Life is short.  About three seconds short.

One little tool to check out for readability is The Readability Test Tool.

If you’ve done the first four steps, your last step is getting your visitors to take action or convert.

In the end, you are optimizing your page for people, not search engines, because people decide if they want to convert, and they decide whether to become clients or customers.  Create compelling content.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

The question I always ask next is, “Why do you ask?”  This is sort of a snotty response, and it doesn’t endear me to the sales team, but it has a purpose.

In my experience, too many sales people simply take the value proposition given by marketing and restate it to the prospect.  This is the worst use of a value proposition.  If you are in Marketing and you enable your sales team this way, then you are not helping.

A value proposition is a list of reasons why a prospect might benefit from buying your product or service, and it usually contains a number of elements.  The first is identifying a need, the second is some sort of differentiation, and the third is some sort of proof.

For example, “If you want fine flavor, then the smooth taste of Camel cigarettes is what nine out of ten doctors recommend.”   Parsed, the need is fine flavor and health, the differentiation is smooth taste, and the proof is that doctors recommend them.

While value propositions are good for internal dialogue and evaluation, as you know, simply stating the reasons why you should buy a product or service is bad sales form.  It’s also lazy.

When a prospect asks you, “What’s your value proposition?”  They are simply saying, “I don’t have time for this… just give me the Cliff’s Notes version, and I will decide.”

But the process they are going through is: 1) Do I really have this need? 2) Is this really any better? And 3) Do I really believe this, or do I trust you?  There is no way that a single “Statement” or “Value Proposition” will ever do justice to a prospect in answering these questions.  But if you fail to answer any of these, your sales and marketing efforts will falter.

So instead, slow down, and go back to basics.  Take your Value Proposition and turn it into a set of questions to determine whether the prospect has the need you believe your product or service can fill.  Then determine the prospect’s perception of the value to satisfying that need.  If it’s worth solving, then look at what their current vision is for solving that need.  Only then can you begin to explore an alternate vision and differentiation.  Your differentiation may be simply that you are not spouting a value proposition, but guiding the prospect through a process of discovery and helping them see things differently.  Proof doesn’t come until the prospect has a vision of capabilities they might need.

But please don’t just give your value proposition.  You might as well sit back, light up that Camel, and wait for good health to flow your way.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

This is essentially what is happening to many businesses as the result of the Internet.  Yet, when I talk to B2B executives about their Internet efforts, I get three different responses.

The first group, let’s call them Luddites, doesn’t have the willingness, the time, or the resources to focus on their web presence.  While they may have a website, it is little more than a cardboard storefront.  They still believe that their current marketing approach will work, and they are riding this horse hard, even though their businesses are increasingly failing.

One of these little drug stores has figured out a way to get found and motivate people to drive five miles off the freeway and stop.  It’s called Wall Drug.  How did they do it?  They put up signs all over the world and made their business a novelty.  Imagine, they offer free ice water.  It took a long time and cost a lot of money for the signs.  The other 20,000 drug stores in small towns didn’t do as well.

The second group, call them the Reluctants, believes that the web is sort of a necessary evil.  It’s complicated, and they pay some technical geek to do some SEO and “stuff.”  Sometimes they are proud of their site, though they don’t know how to measure the results of their investment.

One of these drug stores formed a chain, put up a store on every corner, and got bigger through volume and lower prices.  Their cost structure is wacked because of the cost of their physical presence.  They have some Internet services.  They can be found online.

The third group, call them the newly Awakened, understand that their business strategy and their web strategy are irrevocably linked.  The world has changed.  They are seeking to change their business model and gain access to this new world.

One of these drug stores decided to take a different approach.  They decided to use the Internet to access those that were looking for solutions to particular health problems or access to particular drugs.  They sell online, but they decided to improve the customer experience online and offer access to pharmacists and even doctors, if needed, at no extra cost.  They deliver anywhere in the US, anytime, even after normal hours so you don’t have to get into your car.  Their prices are competitive, and they honor every major form of insurance.  When you can’t afford it, they will help get your drugs paid for.

There is a difference between doing a little Internet and embracing it.  Just as there is a difference between SEO and Web Strategy.  Strategy doesn’t just change the tool from a sign post in Afghanistan to the Internet, it thinks about the way potential buyers find, access and experience the relationship with your business whether you are online or not.

The biggest mistake I see around inbound marketing is the confusion between SEO or getting found, and the experience and customer relationship in the interaction.  You can get found with SEO, but no one will visit you on the net if you don’t have a sound strategy.  For example, you may have all the keywords you need, but if you don’t write for people and offer them something useful, no one will spend any time on your page or convert.

Start with a strategy.  Strategy for the web, as with any strategy, has to be pervasive across your organization.   And it has to be more than just a set of tactics or SEO.  Though free ice water sounds good.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

My reaction was, “Really?”  And not in a good way.

Think about it.  Do you really want to phone it in?  If you are truly passionate about your business, how can you simply hire out the content and voice of your business’s soul?

I believe that marketers and business bloggers need to provide thought leadership, push the envelope, and not just offer rehashed stuff.  Because when you do rehashed stuff, your readers won’t tell their friends about your posts.  It will be boring.  Your readers will drift away from your blog.  Your posts will wind up like my insurance agent’s newsletter.  I will never read his stock subject, “Summertime Grill Safety.”  I might look at “Five Ways Not To Blow Yourself Up.”  But no newsletter or blog service will ever come up with that title.

Like every other industry, the marketing business can also follow the path of mass production.  Figure out how to produce more at a lower cost, offer it for a lower price, and then spend the money you make “marketing or advertising” your service to the masses.  You may sell something.  So will a hundred other organizations.  They will all be the same.

Yes, occasionally there is a technical discontinuity that happens in the marketing business.  For example, the creation of websites becomes more automated and doesn’t require experienced html programmers.  This can lead to lower costs for putting up a site, and suddenly there are website companies springing up from South Dakota to Manila.  This doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of improvements in technology or marketing.

We are told that blogging helps generate leads, and social media helps leverage your content.  I believe this to be generally true.  But you need to do the hard work.  Thank you to those that do it.

So if you are contemplating blogging and want to generate leads, I would advise against using a blog mill.   You might just as well lock yourself up with everyone else… or blow yourself up.

Do Great Things!
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Driving Sales With Customer Focused Marketing
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

PS: For those of you who want to stop the other kind of mill you can visit this site.