Here's a story with an anecdotal marketing lesson for business owners. Spring begins the time of year when homeowners turn their attention to exterior home improvements, roof repair, painting, pressure washing and miscellaneous yard and landscaping plans that percolated during the winter months. In the Pacific Northwest where I live, May is always an "iffy" month for painting your house because we're still contending with the reliable spring rains.
Last week a neighbor seized on a window of predicted sunshine and their painting contractor arrived with three trucks and two trailers%u2026 more specifically: an immaculate, black Cadillac Escalade hitched to an immaculate, snow-white utility trailer; one snow-white, late-model Dodge and snow-white trailer; and another snow-white, late-model Dodge.
All white rolling stock except for the command vehicle. Five units; each pristine and clean.
You can have a premium-grade Web presence for the front end of your business, but if what shows up at the customer site is sloppy and poorly maintained, you're inadvertently disabling your sales process in an incalculable way. Don't let it happen. Twenty bucks a week to keep a rolling mini-commercial showing bright and shiny is twenty bucks well invested as good advertising and promotion.
I'm calling the Cadillac Company first next week for painting quotes. Companies Two and Three are already at a disadvantage unless their rigs are super clean.
Web engage Labs energizing your marketing sales and technology to increase relevance, remarkability and results. A Corporate and customer collaborating is fundamental to increase top line revenues and improving bottom line results and mobile marketing is proving to be a far more direct, high impact way of reaching a base than traditional marketing mediums.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Sales Enablement Survey - Understanding Sales Enablement Engineering
Sales Enablement Engineering is the process of analyzing more than five dozen "points of contact"
Sales Enablement Engineering is the process of analyzing more than five dozen "points of contact" (sometimes referred to as touch points) where a prospect or customer engages your company directly or indirectly, and assessing whether the "mini-commercial" your customer experiences at each point enables-or disables-the sales process. Sales Enablement Engineering (SEE) is a valuable exercise for companies of every size. It's objective is to strengthen the points of enablement, and correct the points of disablement.
Web engage Labs energizing your marketing sales and technology to increase relevance, remarkability and results. A Corporate and customer collaborating is fundamental to increase top line revenues and improving bottom line results and mobile marketing is proving to be a far more direct, high impact way of reaching a base than traditional marketing mediums.
Sales Enablement Engineering is the process of analyzing more than five dozen "points of contact" (sometimes referred to as touch points) where a prospect or customer engages your company directly or indirectly, and assessing whether the "mini-commercial" your customer experiences at each point enables-or disables-the sales process. Sales Enablement Engineering (SEE) is a valuable exercise for companies of every size. It's objective is to strengthen the points of enablement, and correct the points of disablement.
Web engage Labs energizing your marketing sales and technology to increase relevance, remarkability and results. A Corporate and customer collaborating is fundamental to increase top line revenues and improving bottom line results and mobile marketing is proving to be a far more direct, high impact way of reaching a base than traditional marketing mediums.
Sales Enablement Surveys - Be Where they Go
If you are a top performing sales representative - an A-player - it should be easy to incorporate a set of marketing questions into the list of discovery questions you normally use with new prospects. What I mean by marketing questions is probes about everything they did through the marketing conversion funnel to the point of their engagement with you.
You have to assume a lot more went on than "I saw your ad," and you owe it to yourself to find out as much as you can. The keyword searches, the explorations in online communities, the discussion threads, the blog sites they visited, etc., clearly indicate points of communication (contact) where a mini-commercial is playing (emphasis on present tense) about your company, your products, and your service quality.
A-players need to invest the time following these pre-engagement information gathering paths, and find out what their prospects are "seeing" and "hearing" out there in these mini-commercials. Find out if the commercials are good commercials or bad commercials; doubt inducing or confidence building.
Why? For two reasons. First, you will discover useful bits of intelligence that you can leverage to improve your presentation and negotiation. Second, ideas will percolate in your mind about these and other mini-commercial environments where you (maybe with the help of the company marketing department) may want to create a presence, and establish an influence.
Find out where they go, and figure out if it's beneficial for you to be where they go. Then create a stratdigi - the implementation map - for making it happen!
Web engage Labs energizing your marketing sales and technology to increase relevance, remarkability and results. A Corporate and customer collaborating is fundamental to increase top line revenues and improving bottom line results and mobile marketing is proving to be a far more direct, high impact way of reaching a base than traditional marketing mediums.
You have to assume a lot more went on than "I saw your ad," and you owe it to yourself to find out as much as you can. The keyword searches, the explorations in online communities, the discussion threads, the blog sites they visited, etc., clearly indicate points of communication (contact) where a mini-commercial is playing (emphasis on present tense) about your company, your products, and your service quality.
A-players need to invest the time following these pre-engagement information gathering paths, and find out what their prospects are "seeing" and "hearing" out there in these mini-commercials. Find out if the commercials are good commercials or bad commercials; doubt inducing or confidence building.
Why? For two reasons. First, you will discover useful bits of intelligence that you can leverage to improve your presentation and negotiation. Second, ideas will percolate in your mind about these and other mini-commercial environments where you (maybe with the help of the company marketing department) may want to create a presence, and establish an influence.
Find out where they go, and figure out if it's beneficial for you to be where they go. Then create a stratdigi - the implementation map - for making it happen!
Web engage Labs energizing your marketing sales and technology to increase relevance, remarkability and results. A Corporate and customer collaborating is fundamental to increase top line revenues and improving bottom line results and mobile marketing is proving to be a far more direct, high impact way of reaching a base than traditional marketing mediums.
Web Engage Labs -Theme
As indicated in the opening post, we want to strive to keep our fingers on the pulse of the paradigm change that's been unfolding in the relationship between buying and selling cycles, and provide low-risk, high-value recommendations for adapting to it successfully.
Within that contextual framework, we'll confirm (with research) that selling organizations are far from having control of the challenge, and that it is the individual sales representative who needs to get proactive and grapple with the impact of Web-enabled buyer on his or her own sphere of influence%u2026 not waiting on the employer for solutions.
We'll do this by looking at Stratdigi® Selling as the sixth discipline every sales professional must now master to maintain professionalism. We'll also study Sales Enablement Engineering%u2122, what company management must introduce in order to restore equilibrium between the company's sales cycle and its customers buying cycle.
Web engage Labs energizing your marketing sales and technology to increase relevance, remarkability and results. A Corporate and customer collaborating is fundamental to increase top line revenues and improving bottom line results and mobile marketing is proving to be a far more direct, high impact way of reaching a base than traditional marketing mediums.
Within that contextual framework, we'll confirm (with research) that selling organizations are far from having control of the challenge, and that it is the individual sales representative who needs to get proactive and grapple with the impact of Web-enabled buyer on his or her own sphere of influence%u2026 not waiting on the employer for solutions.
We'll do this by looking at Stratdigi® Selling as the sixth discipline every sales professional must now master to maintain professionalism. We'll also study Sales Enablement Engineering%u2122, what company management must introduce in order to restore equilibrium between the company's sales cycle and its customers buying cycle.
Web engage Labs energizing your marketing sales and technology to increase relevance, remarkability and results. A Corporate and customer collaborating is fundamental to increase top line revenues and improving bottom line results and mobile marketing is proving to be a far more direct, high impact way of reaching a base than traditional marketing mediums.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Web Engage Labs - Redux: Catch up…or catch you later
Again, we’re reminded (or should be) to recognize that we must learn to operate our businesses with some sensitivity to the Power of Internet Time, the hyper-active and relentless pace at which things on the Internet, or things related to the Internet occur, or risk peril.
Interestingly, I’m still reading on some blogs today (including a few posts from last month’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco) that Web 2.0 is a meaningless distraction, over-hyped and over-valued. Read this Business Week follow up report on an article it first presented in May, 2005 titled “Blogs Will Change Your Business,” then decide for yourself.
Afterwards, stay connected with this blog as I strive to keep pace with this time curve, researching and analyzing everything that spins out from its force to discover what’s fancy and what’s fact; periodically recommending what you can take to the street to keep you in-time, in-touch, and ahead of the competition in your game.
Web engage Labs energizing your marketing sales and technology to increase relevance, remarkability and results. A Corporate and customer collaborating is fundamental to increase top line revenues and improving bottom line results and mobile marketing is proving to be a far more direct, high impact way of reaching a base than traditional marketing mediums.
Interestingly, I’m still reading on some blogs today (including a few posts from last month’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco) that Web 2.0 is a meaningless distraction, over-hyped and over-valued. Read this Business Week follow up report on an article it first presented in May, 2005 titled “Blogs Will Change Your Business,” then decide for yourself.
Afterwards, stay connected with this blog as I strive to keep pace with this time curve, researching and analyzing everything that spins out from its force to discover what’s fancy and what’s fact; periodically recommending what you can take to the street to keep you in-time, in-touch, and ahead of the competition in your game.
Web engage Labs energizing your marketing sales and technology to increase relevance, remarkability and results. A Corporate and customer collaborating is fundamental to increase top line revenues and improving bottom line results and mobile marketing is proving to be a far more direct, high impact way of reaching a base than traditional marketing mediums.
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