marketingtimes Official magazine of Sales & Marketing Executives International, Inc.
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The Facebook Trap: How Social Media Gets Co-opted by Traditional Marketing 1
marketingtimes
January 2013
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CONTENTS 8
SELLING & STUFFED ANIMALS
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THE FACEBOOK TRAP: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA GETS CO-OPTED BY TRADITIONAL MARKETING
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WELCOME TO THE VISUAL WEB
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VALUE-BASED SELLING GETTING PAID WHAT YOU ARE WORTH
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DUCT TAPE MY SOFTWARE AND HOPE FOR THE BEST?
DEPARTMENTS 4
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
president’smessage
marketingtimes Official magazine of Sales & Marketing Executives International, Inc.
® SMEI OFFICERS AND DIRECTORS 2012-2013
OFFICERS Jeff Fawcett – Chairman Nathalie Roemer, CME – Secretary Treasurer Clinton Schroeder, CME CSE - Chairman Elect Jeffery Jackson, CME CSE – Immediate Past Chairman Willis Turner CAE CSE – President & CEO SENIOR VICE CHAIRS Lynn Argenbright Kim Ferguson Ben Mastboom Karl Post Antonio Rios-Ramirez, Ph.D. DIRECTORS Jose Corujo, CME Jack Criswell, CSE – Chairman Emeritus Don Covington, Jr., CSE – Director Emeritus
Marketing Times is published quarterly by Sales & Marketing Executives International, Inc. (SMEI). Cover Photo Credit: Reistroffer Design CERTIFIED MARKETING & SALES PROFESSIONALS ASSOCIATION Nathalie Roemer, CME – Chairman Melissa Medley, CME - Immediate Past Chairman
SMEI PO Box 1390 Sumas, WA 98295-1390 USA T 312-893-0751 F 604-855-0165 admin@smei.org www.smei.org Willis Turner CAE, CSE – Executive Editor Tiffany Turner - Design & Layout
Copyright Sales & Marketing Executives International, Inc. Subscription Rates: 4 issues/year USA: $35.00 Canada: $45.00 All other countries/territories: $95.00 The statements and opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of SMEI.
WILLIS TURNER, CAE, CSE As we start off 2013 you may be pausing to set new willis.turner@smei.org goals and laying out plans to achieve them during the upcoming months. It is also a time to reflect on the past year’s achievements. 2012 was certainly a milestone year for SMEI. With the launch of our new 3-tiered membership program, a new blog and enhanced social media channels, SMEI is well positioned to grow and drive even more membership value during the coming year. I wish you the very best for 2013 and I hope you’ll continue to partner with SMEI to raise the standard of professionalism for sales and marketing around the world. Here is a recap of some of SMEI’s highlights from 2012: January: Concluded Marketing Management Immersion program for participants in Kosovo which included on-site workshop and follow-up web classes. Supported former board Chairman Jeffrey Hayzlett CME CSE in launch of his second business best seller in New York City.
February: Launched SMEI’s Social Media Playbook for Chapters. SMEI Akron held a successful DSMA® program honoring 27 recipients, one collegiate awardee and a Marketing Executive of the Year, Thomas Waltermire. March: Launched the new SMEI Blog with a party on Facebook April: SMEI Honolulu held the 54th Salesperson of the Year event honoring Vicky Cayetano. SMEI Vancouver held graduating exercises for the 59th Graduating Class of the SMEI Diploma Program in Marketing & Sales Management at the University of British Columbia. SMEI Vietnam held a sales conference featuring Dan Seidman. May: SMEI Members traveled to Europe and held meetings with HAN University in the Netherlands. June: SMEI Hong Kong held the 44th Annual Distinguished Sales Award™ program. July: SMEI conducted lectures in 4 cities in China including at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou. SMEI affiliate in Mexico held 51st annual conference. August: SMEI launched an updated website. September: SMEI Arkansas held 45th Top Manager of the Year event honoring Millie Ward. SMEI Vancouver opened 62nd annual 3-year Diploma Course in Marketing & Sales Management at the University of British Columbia. October: SMEI held international board meeting and leadership workshop in Las Vegas, NV. November: SMEI signed new certification licensee in Cairo, Egypt December: SMEI held a 2-day Marketing Management immersion class for 24 Chinese executive delegates in Los Angeles, CA.
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SELLING & STUFFED ANIMALS By Dan Seidman
You can never win.
Want to get a good laugh out of your kids? Tell them you are going to win a staring contest - with one of their stuffed animals. I lay in bed, eyes locked on the small, but fiercelooking pug. He was a Webkinz, meaning he also had the power of the Internet backing his tail. The world began spinning as I fought to keep my eyelids from flickering. The dryness was the worst part of the contest; as my eyes began to feel as if they’d been rubbed while wide open in the fur of the little beast. Children cheered, but my concentration was so intense, I couldn’t tell if it was for me, or for him. In an instant it was over, and my kids began to laugh at my loss. “Dad, you can never win against a stuffed animal. He has no eyelids.”
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That’s a nasty thought. Here’s a nastier one — what activities during your day are absolute losers? Which things do you engage in, when you sell, that have ABSOLUTELY NO CHANCE OF RESULTING IN A WIN? Here are three key components of your day you’ll want to review, with a tip or two - to turn them into wins. 1. Are you chasing poor prospects? In my 25 year career leading and training sales professionals, this is clearly the #1 problem they face. In fact, you get in a roomful of sales managers and ask “is chasing poor prospects a serious concern?” and watch the heads start bobbing, quite vigorously. GET A WIN: Create a distinct strategy for identifying the
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perfect prospect. Qualify and disqualify, quickly by asking great questions about money, decisionmaking and timing. Your questioning skills help determine if this is a poor or perfect prospect. 2. Are you doing paperwork during time when you can be accessing potential clients? Great sales pros are wise about how they invest their time. And nothing has higher value than the time spent feeding your sales funnel. GET A WIN: Set aside a specific time during the day to do lead generation work. Let your colleagues know this is sacred and not to be interrupted. Now push yourself to see if you can increase your face-to-face or phone calls in order to further fill your funnel. 3. Are you using old techniques that now rub buyers the wrong way? GET A WIN: I’ll share a choice tip, from one of my favorite training modules. Research in Cognitive Psychology reveals that some buyers make decisions based on attaining good things, goals and outcomes. Others make decisions
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because they want to solve problems and avoid pain. The sales world began with benefits, then switched to pain-based selling. Guess what? Each of these approaches can be right and wrong. Each individual buyer tends to be influenced by either gain or pain. You identify which type of buyer you’re dealing with, and you can speak in terms that match their decision-making preference. More on this, in a future Marketing Times article. You get the picture. You got the three components clearly explained. Now remove from your day, activities that result in a “You can never win.” Do this, and in the blink of an eye, you become a better sales rep. About the Author: Dan Seidman’s sixth book, The Ultimate Guide to Sales Training is a 600-page encyclopedia of tactical resources. As a sales trainer, Dan travels globally, teaching the latest best-practices in selling. For a great keynote and an analysis of your existing sales training (it’s time to re-design!), you can contact Dan at Dan@GotInfluenceInc. com or 1-847-359-7860.
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The Facebook Trap: How Social Media Gets Co-opted by Traditional Marketing
{ by Bill Lee
It’s easy to see why companies are seduced by the buying potential of Facebook’s one billion users. Unfortunately, many try to market to them (and those on similar sites) using old-school tools and tactics that are inherently unsuited to social media. 10
On the surface, Facebook seems like a marketer’s dream. It has on the order of one billion users around the world. It’s particularly popular with younger users (read, enthusiastic buyers with disposable income). Best of all, they share an ocean of individual information about the places they travel, movies they like, clothes they’re buying, gadgets that interest them, and more. And yet the firm is having substantial problems monetizing its business. This points to a fundamental disconnect between established companies and the customers they’re trying to reach. Executives from powerhouse advertisers like Walmart, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and others are pushing Facebook for access to more user data. Problem is, users don’t want them to have that data and are highly sensitive when it’s used to market to them. Facebook
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risks a consumer—and perhaps a legal—backlash if it provides the data, anyway. The result is poor ROI results for advertisers who “make do” with what little information they can glean. The message is clear: Despite their propensity for splashing the details of their lives all over the Internet, people balk at having that information used to sell them what they may not want. It’s true that TV watchers tolerated (for a time) interruption advertising based on broad demographic data—but mining personal information from social media sites to target ads to consumers is high risk, low reward. The problem is that marketing departments are trying to apply traditional marketing approaches to an entirely new environment—and it’s not working. Why fight nature? Why not instead work with what users of social media are looking for rather than try to shoehorn old marketing methods into an entirely different kind of environment? I offer the following suggestions: Build your own customer communities. Salesforce. com’s Marc Benioff recognized early on that Facebook is how people, including his customers and prospects, want to communicate online. So his team developed a “Facebook-like” platform called Chatter. Among other uses, it serves as a superb customer community-building tool. For example, it’s used by attendees and employees prior to and during the firm’s annual user conference, Dreamforce, to reach out, establish connections, and form personal interest groups prior to the conference. That has substantially raised participation in Dreamforce. Since 2009 when they started using the Chatter platform, attendance at Dreamforce has grown about 50 percent per year—except this year, when it nearly doubled from the previous year. And this has been during what we’re now calling the Great Recession, when conference attendance in general has significantly declined. Salesforce gives a great deal of the credit to its Chatter platform. Restore community marketing. Used properly, social media is accelerating a trend in which buyers can approximate the experience of buying in their local, physical communities. When you contemplate a major purchase, such as a new roof, a flat screen TV, or a good surgeon, you don’t go looking for a salesperson to talk to, or read through a bunch of corporate website content. Instead, you ask neighbors or friends—your peer network—what or whom they’re using. Companies should position their social media efforts to replicate as much as possible this community-oriented buying experience.
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In turn, social media firms, such as Facebook, should become expert at enabling this experience. They can do this by expanding the buyer’s network of peers who can provide trustworthy information and advice based on their own experience with the product or service. A new firm, Zuberance, makes it easy and enjoyable for a company’s loyal customers to advocate for it on their social media platform of choice. At the moment one of these customers identifies herself as a “promoter” on a survey, she immediately sees a form inviting her to write a review or recommendation on any of several social media sites. Once she does, the Zuberance platform populates it to the designated sites, and the promoter’s network instantly knows about her experience with the firm. Find and leverage your customer influencers. Many firms spend lots of resources pursuing outside influencers who’ve gained a following on the Web and through social media. A better approach is to find and cultivate customer influencers and give them something great to talk about online. This requires a new concept of customer value that goes way beyond customer lifetime value (CLV), which is based only on purchases. There are many other measures of a customer’s potential value, beyond the money they pay you. For example, how large and strategic to your firm is the customer’s network? How respected is she? One of Microsoft’s “MVP” (Most Valuable Professional) customers is known as Mr. Excel to his followers. On some days, his website gets more visits than Microsoft’s Excel page—representing an audience of obvious importance to Microsoft, which supports Mr. Excel’s efforts with “insider knowledge” and previews of new releases. In return, Mr. Excel and other MVPs like him are helping Microsoft penetrate new markets affordably. Help them build social capital. Practitioners of this new, community-oriented marketing are also rethinking how they repay such MVP (or “Customer Champion” or “Rock Star”) customer advocates and influencers. Traditional marketing often tries to encourage customer advocacy with cash rewards, discounts, or other untoward inducements. But a better way is to help advocates and influencers create social capital: help them build their affiliation networks, increase their reputations, and give them access to new knowledge—all of which your customer influencers crave. National Instruments used an especially creative approach with its customer influencers, who were midlevel IT managers at the companies they did business with. NI engaged them by providing powerful research and financial proof points they could take to senior management, showing that NI solutions were creating
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strategic benefits. That got NI into the C-suite. It also increased the reputation of the mid-level advocates, who were seen as strategic thinkers bringing new ideas to senior management.
them information to help them make informed decisions on what they need and want. For many marketers it’s a whole different way of thinking—but once you make the switch, you’ll find it far more rewarding.
Use advocacy to improve demand generation. With the rise of the Internet, demand generation has gone from a marketing backwater to a multi-billiondollar industry in itself. One of the challenges facing the demand gen industry now is developing a steady stream of interesting content that will attract buyers and move them through the sales funnel. Increasingly, companies like Intel, Hitachi Data Systems, Procter & Gamble, and others are bringing customer content into their demand generation efforts—in the form of customer communities, customer videos, customer success stories and case studies, and the like.
About the Author: Bill Lee, author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset, helps organizations reinvent customer relationships and accelerate growth through the creation of engaged, passionate customer advocates and communities. He pioneered the concept that return on relationship is the key to organic growth in organizations of any size, public or private.
Another challenge is to tease out where the buyer is in her “buyer’s decision journey,” as well as what her specific need is. Software at firms like Eloqua is helping to guide buyers to the content they want to read or watch, or even the person they may want to talk to—in both cases, that will often be a current customer. Social media marketing is actually much more appealing than traditional marketing. Rather than trying to persuade people to buy what you want them to buy, you’re giving
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Bill is also the author of Mavericks in the Workplace: Harnessing the Genius of American Workers (Oxford University Press) and has written for or been interviewed by a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review Blog Network, Forbes Online, Fast Company Online, CRM Magazine, Management Review, Organizational Dynamics, and Executive Excellence. About the Book: The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012, ISBN: 978-1-4221723-1-5, $27.00) is available at bookstores nationwide and from major online booksellers.
marketingtimes
Welcome to the
Visual Web Unless you’ve been unplugged over the last year, you’ve surely seen the explosion in visual content and visuallybased social networks to share that content on. This explosion is called the Visual Web. But where did it come from and how can you use it to blow your business goals out of the water? When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, it revolutionized photography. Before smart phones people would take pictures of life events—babies, weddings, graduations, trips, etc. Remember the “Kodak Moment?” The iPhone, essentially a hand-held computer that can easily be carried anywhere, suddenly allowed you to take pictures of and instantly share even the most mundane details of your life never considered worth documenting before—your conference badge, your dog lying around the house, strangers’ kids playing in a fountain, what you look like at 7am, the equipment at the gym you work out on, (all of these came from photos shared by my friends on Facebook—I can’t make this stuff up). With the iPhone and the other mobile phones that followed, photography was no longer a keepsake or memento. Photography was constantly being created and shared. It’s become disposable. The iPhone not only revolutionized the kinds of photos people took, it also revolutionized how people shared those photos. With mobile apps you’re able to take pictures and instantly share them with your friends, fans and followers and random people you connected with online but now regret. While networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube existed before the iPhone, visually-based social network apps have exploded over the last several years. There are numerous camera apps, including Hipstamatic and Instagram, both photo-sharing networks with digital filters that let you turn the photos you took today into relics from the ‘70s. There’s no bigger sign of the growing importance of these visual-networks to online engagement than Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for one.billion. dollars. In addition to YouTube, video sharing networks include SocialCam and Viddy, the Twitter of video networks. Tumblr is a blog platform based on images. Pinterest is an image- and video-sharing site based on bulletin board-like
By Leigh George , Ph.D. @leighgeorge lgeorge@r2integrated.com collections. Pinterest’s explosive growth made it the fastest site in history to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark according to comScore. It is now the third largest social network in the U.S. While mobile phones led to the proliferation of visuallybased apps, the Visual Web exploded because people are drawn to visual content. On Facebook, the network approaching mass media status, Dan Zarrella has found that photos perform best for likes, comments, and shares as compared to text, video, and links. Pinterest has generated more referral traffic for businesses than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined, says Shareaholic. And videos are just as powerful. According to MarketingSherpa, viewers spend 100% more time on pages with videos on them. Why are we so attracted to images? Our brains are naturally hard-wired to process visual information. People’s brains don’t like words. 3M Corporation and Zabisco found that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. How can you use that knowledge to create powerful social marketing strategies? Visual content should play a crucial role in any plan to shape the online conversations around the types of products and services you sell. If you can’t resonate with audiences, your message will fall flat. And that’s the beauty of visual content. It’s inherently architected to be consumed and shared. But how do you use it effectively? One area with tremendous promise is reporting. What do your analytics reports look like? Wait, let me guess. Lots of numbers, maybe some charts. But do they tell clients a story? Do you present information in a way that highlights what is important, what your client need to know to make business decisions? Instead of a bar chart representing a particular metric that some arcane blog told you was important to track, use color, size and scale to instantly communicate key information that drives business decisions. For example, an executive summary R2integrated created for a client instantly captures the impact of their paid media campaign and where conversions are happening. So, the next time your team sits down together to plan the next phase of your social strategy, think visually. Think about how your messages can be translated into photos, videos, and infographics. Figure out what visual networks make sense for your company or organization based on your goals and who you’re trying to reach. Explore how you can incorporate visual communication into other aspects of your business like presentations and reporting. The Visual Web is here. Now get your nose out of this thought leadership piece and start figuring out how to leverage it.
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Value-Based Selling Getting paid what you are worth
By Ralph Kison
Your compensation reflects the value you provide your clients – nothing more. If your price or fees are low then your perceived value is also low. You may disagree and say that your clients do not appreciate your value and the expertise you provide. If that is the situation, you have likely done a poor job creating a positive value proposition in your client’s mind. Unfortunately, the problem likely has more to do with you than with your client. In order to be viewed in a positive manner in your client’s mind, and possibly your own, consider the perspectives and ideas in this article to raise your value and increase your worth. PERSPECTIVES TO CONSIDER WHEN PRESENTING VALUE TO CLIENTS: • Has your client been educated to understand and appreciate what value is? • Has your client defined what value actually means to them and what they would possibly pay a premium for? • Have you educated your client to the value of your products or services? (Do YOU know what your value is?) • Is your client cheap? There is likely nothing you can do to get a client to pay you what you believe your products or services are worth if they do not buy on value. • If your clients are purely price shoppers, start the process of finding new clients that seek a value-based relationship and that will pay what you are worth.
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QUESTIONS TO ASK THE CLIENT TO IDENTIFY WHAT THEY VALUE: • What will be the effect of this initiative/product/service on your sales, price, market share, etc? • What will the effect be on your reputation, brand, image, etc.? • What if you did nothing – will you be better or worse off? • What will this mean to you personally? Is the client positive, neutral or negatively inclined towards your proposition or offer? • How will you leverage this to create a competitive advantage or do something you could not do before? GUIDELINES FOR EVALUATING IF THE CLIENT IS VALUE ORIENTED: • If the discussion with the client is primarily on fees and not on value, the client is driving the conversation not you. They likely don’t care about value and only pay lip service to it. • Are you dealing with the economic buyer, a.k.a. the decision maker or a subordinate influencer who can only say no to your requests because he/she does not have buying authority? • Do they have a reputation for making positive, principle and value-based decisions, rather than making a quick buck at the expense of their clients or staff?
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GUIDELINES TO ASSESS YOUR VALUE:
About the Author:
• Do you have the skills, ability and belief in yourself and what you offer to stand firm on your price or fees? • Is your low self-image or lack of belief in your product/service the reason for not being paid your value? • Do you over estimate your value or are you unrealistic regarding your value proposition? • Can you demonstrate and quantify the value of your products, service, experience and the impact it has had on others? (Will they confirm your claims?)
Ralph Kison, President of Growth Through Learning, Professional Development Specialists Ralph assists organizations focusing on employee development in the areas of: Training and Development, Management Coaching, Talent Management and online learning. He brings passion, commitment and experience to each project. He leads and directs organizations and their employees to achieve their full potential by acquiring skills and applying proven business development processes and techniques. Ralph’s career spans over 25 years in sales, management and consulting with experience in the engineering, architectural, construction, distribution and insurance industries. An accomplished speaker, Ralph has addressed numerous organizations and groups across North America. Ralph is a graduate of the University of British Columbia Marketing and Sales Management Program. He has taught professional sales courses at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) and for SMEI Vancouver. Ralph is a member and past President of Sales and Marketing Executives International of Vancouver (SMEI) and is a member and past President of the Canadian Society for Marketing Professional Services (CSMPS).
We operate in a free enterprise system where you have the ability to compete and be rewarded for being different and better than your competitor. The first step towards success begins with you believing in yourself. You must be able to state how you are different and how those differences will benefit your clients. Furthermore, your products and services, must at minimum, do what you claim they will, or better still exceed your client’s expectations. If all these factors are present then you have earned the right to be well rewarded for your efforts.
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And Hope For The Best? By Joe Thomas
Here’s a breakdown of those reasons, and whether or not a redesign is the solution.
The clients are different, but the question is always basically the same. Can you redesign my website? It doesn’t matter how the question is phrased, every time it’s asked, I give the same response: There is no such thing as a Re Design. It’s true; a redesign of a website is simply a repackaging. It’s taking the same content and putting it in a new dress. Or taking the same software or function and adding some makeup. Now seriously, why would you want to do that? There can only be a handful of reasons to even entertain the thought of it: 1. The current site doesn’t work. It’s broken, kaput! 2. The current site is no longer effectively selling your product or service. 3. It’s outdated and ugly. 4. You just woke up and decided to change everything for the sake of changing things. 5. Somebody told you it was a good idea.
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1. If the current site is broken: Well if it’s broke, you’ve got to fix it. And if it needs to be fixed, why use duct tape and glue? Building it correctly from the ground up is a smarter use of your money, and will most likely cost you the same thing - or less. And you can build it with the latest technology, optimized for search, easier updating and better functionality 2. If the site is no longer effectively selling your product or service: Why repackage something that doesn’t sell? A good developer will tell you why it’s not selling - he just needs to look at the data. Let him show you why it’s a lame duck, then have him give you the alternatives. 3. If it’s outdated and ugly: Well this is pretty self-explanatory but I will say this: I’ve seen a lot of “ugly” sites sell a lot of product; don’t base your decision on ugly - that’s a matter of opinion. I’ve told many people with ugly sites NOT to touch them. Hey, if they sell, who cares what they look
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like, right? Outdated is a different story. You can’t compete with today’s sites using outdated technology. Just ask MySpace 4. If you just woke up and decided to change everything: Go shoe shopping. Buy a new hat. But realize when you call a web developer, you’re not going to be happy with anything he does. You’ll be wasting your money and driving some poor developer nutso for nothing. 5. If somebody told you to redesign your website: Odds are, that person is a web designer NOT a web developer, and trust me, there is a huge difference between the two. A web designer is going to give you exactly what you ask for - the colors, the content, the buttons, the pictures - the exact website you tell him to build. A web developer is going to tell you honestly if and why you’re wrong about all of those things. A developer is going to tell you that your bio is great, but it doesn’t sell you. Or that your photos make you look like an alien life form. A developer is going to tell you how and why to build it this way. And let’s be honest - if you knew the exact site you needed to have with the colors, content,
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buttons and pictures, you wouldn’t need to hire someone would you? If I want to build a house, I’m going to call a guy who builds houses, not a guy who paints them. So, when is it time to redesign? If your site isn’t selling, it’s possible that tweaking the content, navigational tools or other elements will help. But before you decide a paint job is the answer, consult a web developer, who can provide an objective opinion based on quantifiable data. When is it time to build anew? If your site is broken or outdated, it may be time to tear it down to the studs and start fresh, using all the new wisdom and whirligigs that have become available just in the past five years or so. In either case, I suggest staying away from the duct tape. About the Author: Joe Thomas is the founder and owner of Left Brain Digital (www. leftbraindigital.com), a web development company. He’s an award-winning web designer/developer with more than 18 years of experience in print and web design and development. Thomas’ work became a major influence in graphic and web design in the “Y2K” era of the Internet’s dot-com explosion.
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