Sales is tougher than it used to be, and for some, much tougher. Salespeople who keep selling the 20th century way are running into walls. These walls have been erected at many of the same prospect companies that used to have doors swing wide open. Quite literally, doors to lobbies with friendly receptionists were open to salespeople to come in and inquire about how they could help the company with their products & services. Telephones rang off the hook. Half the calls were from customers & vendors and the other half from salespeople. Selling was a lot of fun back then!

 
Formerly and still potentially excellent salespeople will tell you how they used to kill it in the 1990s (20th century) and maybe up to the post 9/11 boomlet. Something began to change around 2003 and then very rapidly in the years following. That change is now complete.

 
The number one sales problem that many CEOs will tell you is they can’t find any good salespeople and many complain about the ones they have. They aren’t delivering results. There are fewer good salespeople in the market because sales is less sought as a career and 20th century strategies are still in place along with the corresponding tactics that fail.

Unless you have an inside contact name and a referral, you’re shunned. Just try cold calling your way into an enterprise class or big business today. It’s sometimes possible but extremely difficult. If a live operator actually answers, it’s likely they are prohibited from putting a call through without a verifiable appointment or relationship. Cold calling can still work at small businesses, but if you’re going after the real money B2B client, you need a pre-established relationship or good luck Charlie!

 
My point here is to encourage salespeople and executives to sell successfully. The successful career salesperson today is a branding, marketing and networking expert. Their name is already familiar to their prospects. Their company is known for being in the top tier of providers in their category. When prospects are ready to buy, they get called in.

 
Every salesperson has the opportunity to brand himself or herself in a way congruent with their company branding. They can be their company’s Marketing Mini-Me and deliver hot leads. Ready to learn how?

• They can attend copious networking events, establish relationships and build an organic database.
• They can join trade organizations, Chambers and other B2B organizations, contributing knowledge and skills.
• They can send branded email newsletters free or super cheap.
• They can have personal websites with great blog content, also super cheap.
• They can have searchable LinkedIn profiles and network online 24/7 free.
• They can tweet pithy, relevant messages and reach thousands or more daily.
• They can print their own unique and memorable business cards and flyers cheaper than ever.
• They can support their marketing teams with field intelligence for more targeted messaging, driving more inbound leads.
• Their wise CEO or division VP can accompany them on sales calls and show prospects how serious their company is about delivering the best value in the market.

If a salesperson is still behind in catching up with 21st century sales opportunities, they can work extra hours at home. It might take a year or two to catch up, but the new way of selling is a lot of fun too!

The post Be a Marketing Mini-Me appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Guest author Stacie Andrews gets the credit for this brilliant question: “What can you give your audience that is relevant to them and still relevant to what you stand for?” 

That, my friends, is exactly what I focus my business practice on and it requires honest self evaluation from leadership. At an agency I previously worked for, principal Haden Edwards called it “matching promises with priorities.” That is, how your company – as guaranteed in your brand promise – helps meet the priorities (wants) of your target market.

It’s a remarkably simple strategy that too few businesses execute well. Steve Jobs seemed to understand his consumers’ priorities instinctively which is why he went against rigid conventional corporate thinking. He got fired from the company he founded, was pulled back in, allowed to keep innovating, and built arguably the most successful company in the world. 

Jobs knew that his customers wanted dazzling tech products that operated the way humans like to live and work – by intuition. He ardently stuck to proprietary platforms for Apple and his detractors despised those tactics if not the man himself. Jobs persevered in wowing customers and Apple products deliver on the company’s promise to meet the priorities of the computing and device-wielding public. Apple’s products perform as expected and give authenticity to their brand identity.

So how do you go about making your brand’s real value relevant to what your target customers really want from a business like yours? The answer is in your positioning. How do you position your brand for success?

Writing your positioning statement will bring you more long term success than just about any other strategic exercise you can do in business.

A positioning statement is your unique promise to customers that differentiates your business from the competition with honesty, relevance and value. It should be one or two sentences and crystal clear. You should articulate it in numerous ways that are natural in both writing and conversation, keeping it real for people.

How to write your positioning statement:

Dr. David Shore of Harvard University developed a positioning methodology many years ago that my previous employer, Tracey/Edwards, taught me.

1. Clearly and narrowly define your target audience.
2. Define your general business category (manufacturer, retailer, law firm, college, home builder, consultancy, engineering firm, etc.).
3. Determine their priorities with your own research. (Suggestion: spend some hours with clients who use your product/service and really understand how they get value from it – or not.)
4. Determine your statement of need fulfillment – what of value will you deliver?
5. Provide the reason to believe with relevant support.

I’ll use my own positioning statement, based on this model, as an example. It covers all of the above in one concise statement which my company strives to live up to every day.

(1) To Business Owners, Organization Leaders and Marketing Directors:

Chuck Sink Link is the (2) communication firm that (3, 4)) creates ideal messages for your target audience because (5) we reveal the authentic value of your brand and convey it with relevance and clarity.

Notice how all 5 listed elements are contained in one brief statement? All of my marketing messages stem from this positioning statement and they’re working. Every week, people I’ve never met introduce themselves and already know who I am and what I do. I have successfully built a strategic brand and now my leads are inbound and the referrals are warm.

If you still struggle with working the numbers cold calling or trying to blitz your prospects because things are slow, I would suggest you take time now to strategically position your brand for success. Highly profitable inbound business will come your way if you communicate the same message with consistency and deliver what you promise.

Your brand positioning is the nexus where your stated brand value meets the needs and desires of your audience. It’s the fulcrum point where your marketing messages gain the leverage of consistency for broader reach. When you consistently reinforce your company’s positioning, you become well known in the market – “for the reasons you want to be known!”

We’re redesigning our website now to better reflect the company’s evolved brand value. I made this decision in part to practice what I preach and more importantly to fulfill my own brand promise to my own business.

It’s vitally important to work ON your business as you must also work IN it. This carpenter’s online house will soon be rebuilt, true to it’s brand positioning. So please stay tuned in the coming weeks for the unveiling of our new site!

The post Brand positioning – Your success sweet spot appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Engaging your audience is easy when you know what motivates them. You can grab their attention, hold it and then persuade them to take action with more ease if you use one or more of The Six E’s of Audience Action.

Way back during the dawn of social media marketing development (like around 2010) I worked for a marketing agency that talked about the “3 E’s of social media engagement.” They were Ego, Entertainment and Education. I knew there was more to it than those 3 things so I’ve been striving to come up with a short yet comprehensive list of motivators that would cover all or most of what moves us humans to take action, and maybe even buy things.

Striving for simplicity, so I can understand my own concepts, I wanted a simple guide or formula that could make business communications resonate with target audiences. I wanted a set of guiding principles which work across a broad spectrum of constituencies and media. Serendipitously, the 6 best keywords I considered happened to start with E. Therein is the simplicity of my new guide to audience engagement.

When you examine each of the motivating factors that move people to action, you’ll see that each one fulfills a strong human desire or need. Beyond basic survival (food, clothing, shelter) these motivators are all part of our instinctual nature. In a manner of speaking, we were born to respond to them, and so they are very effective when used for strategic communications. Let’s take a look at the 6 E’s:

Ego

Empathy

Education

Enrichment

Enthusiasm

Entertainment

These are not in any particular order other than making a word pyramid, but Ego being at the top is actually quite helpful. We all have an ego! To discount it’s power over the individual would be remiss. Everyone loves to be recognized and we love hearing our own name called out in a positive way.

So, let’s look briefly at all 6E’s of Audience Action:

1. Ego – You make it happen. Thank you!
2. Empathy – I totally identify with you and know exactly how you feel.
3. Education – Understanding this material is the key to your success.
4. Enrichment – This will bring you security, comfort, fun and enjoyment.
5. Enthusiasm – You are delighted by my energy and excitement.
6. Entertainment – You will enjoy passing the time this way for hours.

• Egos aren’t stroked by manipulation.
• Empathy can’t be faked. You have it or you don’t.
• Education should edify or it’s meaningless.
• Enrichment can’t be given if you don’t have value to offer.
• Enthusiasm can’t be put on or faked because it’s an internal gift.
• Entertainment is the result of real talent, creativity and skill.

The post Motivate Your Audience with E’s appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Sometimes this blog brings some hands-on marketing technique information to readers such as better SEO practices, how to use Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. But it focuses mostly on building skills that help business owners, marketing directors and salespeople do their jobs better. Let’s look at just a few key skills that will help you in your business, whatever category you’re in; professional services, manufacturing, construction, business services, retail, legal, real estate… you name it.

3 skills every business person needs to succeed:

1.  Networking & Building Relationships:  If you can’t listen well and carry on a mutually pleasing conversation with someone you may as well go back to your cubicle and fight carpal tunnel syndrome. That may be fine if you program or crunch numbers better than anyone else but chances are you’ll always work for someone else or need someone else to help you grow your business. There is no substitute for people doing business face to face. Clients and customers gravitate to people they enjoy being around and prefer to do business with people they like.

2.  Consistency:  Stay focused on what you do best. The jack of all trades is master of none and today’s customers want the best that’s out there. If you try to be all things to all people, you will be known for nothing. None of us can be best-in-class in more than one or two specialties. Resist the temptation to position your brand as an expert generalist. There’s really no such thing and customers know it. Business owners often fear they will miss out on opportunities unless they cast the broadest net. It may work in politics but not business. When you carefully develop your business strategy and clearly communicate your brand positioning by being known well for one thing, customers from all over the place will be attracted to that message because they want that one thing from the best in the business.

3.  Customize experiences:  Do your homework! “When you walk in empty headed, you’ll walk out empty handed.” There’s another brilliant quip from Jeffrey Gitomer. It means preparing for every unique customer interaction. If you have an appointment with a prospect or new customer, go in knowing about them and what makes them tick. How can your product or service experienced be customized to fit them like a comfortable glove? This takes research. It takes extra time and work on your part. Do the extra work and you’ll stand up head and shoulders above your competition. Your genuine confident smile will set your clients at ease and let them know they made the right choice when they called you.

We subtitled this “3 skills…” but here’s your bonus: Believe and have faith in the power that is greater than you – from whence all success is derived. Whatever your understanding of this power, know this. It exists and it isn’t you. I choose to call Him God. All of your skills and talents are given life to serve others and you are the instrument through which they are carried out in service. The most precious habit you can nurture is prayer and meditation to start your day – every day.

The post Soft Skills that Deliver Hard Assets appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

It occurs to me that marketing and sales have more parallels to teaching than people may realize. As an adjunct professor I’m learning a lot about audience engagement.

Students sit though class because they have to, not because they want to. Their parents are paying good money for them to be there. Most students understand and respect that. They also realize that success or failure in a required class can have a real impact on their futures. There’s incentive pushing them forward and making them pay attention – as far as their attention spans allow.

Naturally there are a few students in just about every classroom who are internally motivated and inspired to learn everything they can. Predictably they excel in learning the material and participating in class discussion. What about the majority of the students who appear indifferent and uninterested? Their academic success is just as important to them as it is to the self motivated students, whether they know it or not.

I’m attempting to paint a metaphor concerning your business audience. Your loyal customers are a pleasure to work with. They look forward to hearing from you and often take initiative themselves to keep improving the business relationship. In reality, they make up a very small portion of your target market and total audience. By the numbers, the mass market of the indifferent could be the source of your future fortunes if only you could engage a significant percentage of them like you do your good customers.

What I find raises more heads and focuses more eyes on the professor is when he introduces emotion and human drama into the material being presented. When I stray off textbook rote and bullet points, I notice that most of my class is focused and listening. It’s the stuff they’re not expecting that has them thinking and becoming curious. So long as I stay within the core of the curriculum, I have a tool at my disposal to wake up my audience and get them refocused on why they are there; on the importance of paying attention. I get them to buy into my message (which is to teach them business communication skills).

Today’s lesson for you is to tap into what really matters to the majority of your audience. Once you understand the emotional hot buttons that can be assigned to your product and service benefits, you’ve stuck through the common bedrock of commodity messages to the real marketing pay dirt. Your otherwise bored students (prospects) will start paying attention and want to learn more from you.

The post Make them want to be there. appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Marketing is every business activity directed toward selling a product/service and successfully delivering it into customers’ hands. Marketing drives sales. There is no business until a sale is made and that’s why every CEO is his or her company’s chief of sales. Sleepless nights are the result of insufficient new business flowing through the pipeline.

One or two salespeople control their smirks knowing they’ve already exceeded goals while the other 80 percent of the team desperately hold poker faces, fighting the fear that furrows the brow, lest their weakness show through. “How many calls are you making per day? What are you doing to qualify your appointments? How many serious leads did you get from that schmooze fest you call a networking event? What’s your average closing ratio? We actually lost money on your last two clients! They aren’t the right fit for us.” Let me the hell out of there!

The accusations, complaints and criticisms of the average boss toward his sales team ought to be leveled right back at him if such an attitude is his. After all, that selling model died about 20 years ago, so shame on our poor old hypothetical boss. But meetings like this are still takingplace out there and it’s too bad when there’s a better way to sell. It’s called positioning and it isn’t new. It’s many decades old, in fact.

What if the boss was instead focused on positioning his company’s brand so customers knew it was the easiest choice to make in the crowded market?

Positioning is essentially how much space your brand occupies in your prospect’s mind relative to your business or product category. The more you win the battle for the mind, the more sales you will make because your prospects will be sold before a single call is made to them.

Effective positioning differentiates your brand with relevance combined with emotion. The perception of quality is higher, therefore the value is greater than other brands.

If customers and potential customers want the Apple i-Product instead of the Microsoft or Android device, they will wait longer, travel farther and pay more for the Apple. It happens every day. If the thrill seeking driver is already drooling over the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500, the Chevy Camaro ZL1 won’t even be given a test drive.

Sales nostalgia can never bring back the effectiveness of cold calling, follow up and closing – ever!  So it’s high time every CEO wakes up to the positioning model and starts directing his team to communicate his brand’s authentic value using the myriad digital tools available to everyone – including answering the phone.

The post Positioning: Relax, the sale is yours. appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

We all want to make money, earn money, save money. Make no mistake. If you want to design and build the physical manifestation of your dreams, all it takes is money.

So how do you view cash, the most liquid form of money? For any business, having sufficient cash on hand keeps operations running. Cash can be summoned to fix all kinds of problems. Having abundant cash on hand provides investment leverage to lift a business up to a higher level.

In business, what’s the bottom line really all about? Cutting to the chase it’s always about making more money and keeping more money, and there is nothing wrong with that. I’m striving to grow my business, primarily in revenues so I will have enough cash on hand to hire people and buy things that will better serve my clients. I want to help my clients grow their businesses because, should I repeatedly fail in that endeavor, I’m out of business!

But looking at cash reserves as an end rather than a means is a dangerous viewpoint. I used to set sales, revenue and personal income goals as my primary objectives to be reached. The question became, then what? The easy answer was, if I had enough cash, then I could purchase things to make life better. Make life better…  In truth I just want to make life easier!  My mother used to say, “Money isn’t everything but it sure can smooth over the rough edges.”

Cash is merely a tool and a powerful one indeed. People ask how high you want them to jump if you dangle enough cash over their heads. Everyone needs cash to survive economically, whether earned or gifted. It’s amazing how enterprising and industrious a sloth will become when his gifts run out and necessity beckons.

I’ve been musing about money and many thoughts came to mind about the positive things cash can help accomplish. The more I thought about it, a list began to form as to how an ethically centered business would view cash.

Cash is:

A tool | An enabler | A means | A replacement for work | A commodity of the wealthy | Grease | Wheels | Speed | Help | A gift | Proof | Influence | A substitute | Power | A yes answer | Security | Repair | Bailout | Incentive | Opportunity | Magnanimity in motion | A SERVANT… What else can you think of?

Cash is also very shy, elusive and discriminating. It only follows value – value in the eyes of the beholder.

There is a marketing lesson here! What of value do you give in exchange for cash? Define it! Communicate it with precise clarity to an audience of beholders and you will unlock the vault. Customers will come to you. They will travel farther, wait longer and pay more for your product and service.

There is a moral to this essay. Remember this as you gratefully serve your customers and community: Any legacy you build with money stays right here when you go. Be mindful about what you really treasure within your heart.

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