SalesVPI

Keeping PowerPoint in Perspective

A recent New York Times article -- We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint -- is the latest in a (seemingly) never-ending series of articles deriding the tool. This is a good opportunity to move from the "cool" perspective of bashing PowerPoint, to consider it's significant possibilities -- even for content professionals.

For over twelve years we have recommended a different perspective. Rather than view PowerPoint as a bullet-oriented presentation tool -- it's initial purpose -- we suggest viewing it as a business graphic development, and even general communication tool.

Training organizations have long embraced PowerPoint as a foundation for e-learning. Where would marketing webinars be without PowerPoint?

As a production tool for general business people, nothing beats it and that's why it's so pervasive.

But what of more "professional" users?

A Tool for the Content Marketing Professional

Consider the following marketing and sales content requirements facing most business content creators:

• Relevance -- tailor content so it is relevant to viewer's roles, interests, etc.
• Faster development times -- produce and deploy content quickly
• Multi-purpose -- create content that can be used for multiple purposes -- training, marketing, briefings and selling
• Modularity -- create content as modules that can be mixed-and-matched for different versions of end products
• Multimedia -- move beyond static text to rich media documents and multimedia
• Maintenance -- maintain content to extend shelf life and accuracy
• Lower content costs, improve return-on-content -- accomplish the above objectives while driving production costs lower

Years ago, a marketing agency performed an analysis on the use of PowerPoint at HP. One of the (not so) startling findings from discussions with the sales organization was: "if we built PowerPoint the right way, we would never need brochures."

I believe this is even more true today.

For non-website content, companies must adopt a new approach to creating content. We've called this thinking and creating like a publisher.

PowerPoint is a true multi-media content creation tool. Over the last few versions, functionality has matured significantly. It enables professionals to quickly build highly modular content which facilitates dynamic content assembly. Front line business communicators can easily tailor and personalize finished content so it is relevant for intended audiences.

What other software tool provides a universal standard with usable functionality for "mere mortals" to work with text, images, graphics, animation, audio and video in a single application that costs virtually nothing?

Twitter -- What do you read at breakfast?

I've had several colleages ask me lately, "how do you use Twitter for your selling activities?"

Twitter is becomming a primary resource for me for listening, learning and research.

Listening

“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”-- Clay Shirky

Using Twitter to listen to topic specific conversations is a skill we really need to develop. I don't have time to listen to everything. By selecting and cultivating people who share my interests, I leverage their research, insights, ideas and conversations.

I pick up themes, topics and keywords that help me further my listening, but in an efficient way.

Learning

The people I follow regularly tweet and post links to articles, reference sources and tools that provide an efficient way to learn new ideas. I've developed the habit of replacing my morning newspaper with Twitter. Using Hootsuite, or even on my Blackberry with Ubertwitter,I'm able to categorize the primary topics I'm interested in learning about. Using #hastags and Twittersearch I'm able to quickly retrieve conversations and their related links.

Research

Before working on a specific account, I search Twitter to find conversations about the company,their news and events, topics of issues and competitive landscape. Often this as uncovered new people I need to contact but who were not readily available to me. Contacting these people through Twiter has prove a much more effective technique than phone or email.

If I find people at the company who work in functions that are relevan to me, and they are on Twitter, I follow them. It's a great first step, and the next best thing, to being in direct relationship. How else can you "listen in" to what they are thinking and saying.

My Process

At breakfast, I open Ubertwitter on my Blackberry and start to review my tweets. I typically keep the application open so the app has been accumulating tweets long before I long on. As I find tweets that interest me or people in my organization, especially those with links to great resources, I simply email the tweet to myself or my colleagues.

When I have time I can review, print, or post those tweets to our wiki. I can access the resources referenced. It's a fast, easy and interesting way to expand my listening, learning and research. I'm addicted.

Using Twitter to Sell

Maybe there is something to this Twitter thing, even for sales professionals.

I've dabbled with Twitter for over six months, mostly as spectator. Last week I listened to a streaming audio conversation hosted by John Jantsch, Taking Your Brand Online, with Guy Kawasaki, David Meerman Scott and Chris Brogan, and it's worth checking out.

In response to the question, "what 2 or 3 things should a small business do first with social media?" Guy Kawasaki resonded, "Twitter, Twitter, Twitter!"

Co-incidentally, I read Dave Stein's blog on using Twitter. So, I took a couple of hours for additional research.

My specific selling interest was to find people at key companies who are running virtual events or virtual shows. I used Twitter Search with those keywords and instantly discovered several people with whom I wished to connect. Given the several weeks spent trying to accomplish this objective, this was a major achievement.

But, my story doesn't end there.

Next, I created a short multimedia vignette from my Avitage Collection. In this vignette I invited the person to try one particular feature of our service -- iNgage Presenter -- a live streaming audio and video communication console that also delivers visual support during a conversation.

Within two hours, I conducted three online conversations, responded to two email requests and had two phone conversations. I have three immediate follow on meetings scheduled. It was truly an exciting and mind blowing experience. And, did you hear me? TWO HOURS!

Lessons Learned

First, a little context: To me, marketing and selling is all about resolving some fundamental communication challenges:

• Find interested people


• Capture their attention


• Capitalize on attention with compelling, relevant content


• Enable viral communications to make sharing easy


• Deliver the right information, the right ways, at the right time -- timing is everything


• More marketing and sales "conversations" are conducted over the phone, through email or on the web, especially at the early stages of the customer buying process


• In a complex sale, a key communication challenge is to enable third parties to carry our messages: customer sponsors, partners, referral sources, etc.


• Even after live meetings, we need ways to sustain and extend conversations and deliver our messages

This objective is significantly enhanced by using multimedia programs, and this is a main part of our business.

Now, my Twitter lessons:

• Twitter can help find individuals and companies at the time they are focused on a specific topic


• Twitter provides a direct, personal way to deliver a targeted and well timed message


• Today, people on Twitter are eager to receive appropriate messages through this medium


• Like all good communication tools, Twitter can accelerate the selling process by helping us find and engage people who are interested, and possibly ready to buy.

Consider the communicaton tools that were in use in this example:

• Twitter


• Multimedia vignette for dynamic, but asynchronous communcations


• Email


• Phone


• Web site -- everyone checkout out our website before contacting me


• Real time web-based communcations using streaming video, audio and graphics (aka PowerPoint).

I'm sure there are many other selling uses for Twitter I'm not yet familiar with, please share your insights.

Coaching vs. Training

This year we helped our colleague Rob Scanlon launch a truly unique sales coaching and benchmarking company and product called PrivateSalesCoach (www.privatesalescoach.com).

This has been a fascinating experience on several levels which I will share across a number of blogs:

• A product that assists sales people in convenient and non-invasive ways to improve their odds in specific opportunities
• Executed through a simple, web diagnostic, that in less than 10 minutes answering questions provides instant advice for account strategies and next steps
• Benchmarks sales efforts against a best practice standard
• Provides qualitative assessments for how opportunities are being worked
• Can be applied in both direct and channel selling
• Low cost, hosted and easily implemented

A product that initially provokes skepticism and incredulity -- indeed I almost missed the opportunity to assist with this project due to my own initial negative assessment.

Dave Stein had a similar reaction when I first described this product.

Through this work I've gained a heightened appreciation for:

• The challenge of launching something new into the cacophony of today's market
• The difference between coaching and training -- as well as distinctions about coaching
• The importance of coaching on sales performance
• The value of sales benchmarks for sales performance and coaching
• The value of multimedia vignettes for leveraged selling and support of customer advocates conducting internal enrollment conversations.

It will be interesting to see how open people are to evaluate an innovative way to gain an early advantage with something others don't yet have.

Sales coaching and benchmarking appears to be of high interest for sales managers today. There is just not enough time or bandwidth for managers to touch every opportunity. How does a manager quickly assess which opportunities in the large portfolio of deals really needs his attention? How much time does it take to diagnose each opportunity with each rep to get the information needed to help? How much of this assessment is based upon a documented standard vs. intuitive gut feel?

Pilots use a "flight check" to make sure they don't miss any important steps, despite years of flying. Doctors send us for x-rays and lab work before meeting patients. That way they receive technical confirmation of a diagnosis and can spend more of their valuable time prescribing remedies and treatment. Many doctors today use online diagnostic tools to research or confirm a diagnosis despite years of education far beyond that of the typical sales rep.

CRM systems give us quantitative insight to sales opportunities, but do little to reflect a qualitative assessment of how opportunities are actually being worked, or what could be done to improve selling of each opportunity.

As we continue to support this effort I'll report on these questions and other lessons.

Accessing Intelligence on Customers and Prospects

Jim Dickie's article in CustomerThink makes a strong case that good sources of content exist to help sales people better understand customers, especially the challenges they are facing.

His annual survey reveals 49.5% of participating firms surveyed reported that they needed improvement at thoroughly researching customers and prospects. His article suggests sources for assistance.

Over the past 18 months we've made significant progress in this area. Here are some of the tools our sales people use:

Landslide -- this is our basic selling environment which provides the essential contact information but more importantly, great tools to manage our selling process, activity notes, private individual portals, and great reporting and dashboards.

Inside View -- is integrated right into Landslide, so when working on an account or opportunity we see, with one click, summary company information, key people, key news, even job openings.

Stratascope -- for in-depth company research and simple, visual reporting on key business issues and financial realities along with competitive comparisons.

ZoomInfo -- for looking up contacts at target companies. We also use Jigsaw.

Linked-in -- getting better and better not just as a network and referral tool (VERY important), but for searching contacts at specific companies, and joining affinity groups to make referrals and company research even easier and faster.

Sales Genius -- for allowing sales to generate email campaigns quickly and easily to groups as well as individuals, and to track viewing of emails and links to programs and our websites. This helps us know who is really interested, and who (for whatever reason), never even viewed our communication.

Leadlander -- notifies sales reps when customers and prospects visit our website, and which pages they viewed. This helps us better understand areas of interest, but especially timing.

iCentera -- to manage all our documents in one central repository, and create customer and campaign portals to deploy relevant content to prospects and customers. Makes it easier than embedding content into emails, and convenient for customers to view content when they are interested. Tracks individual viewing and provides marketing aggregate data on how our content is used. Supports our "drip marketing" campaigns, and quick emails (with links to content) to individuals and groups.

These are the tools used by our selling organization and doesn't include the marketing tools.