FreshNetworks Blog

Tim continues his series on Selling Social Media.

So, we’ve got the attention of the stakeholder to discuss using social media within the organisation. By seeing a glimpse of some of the incredible achievements in social media for other industries or competitors, this has earned the right for a more detailed conversation with him. It’s now time to dive into more detail with him, and to align some of the various social media benefits against the unique requirements of this particular stakeholder. But what are the unique requirements?

This phase of the sales process is known as ‘determining the needs’.

Let’s use a real-life scenario and a brief recap. Say you have used the ‘elevator pitch’ to a Marketing Director in the travel sector and highlighted that Marriott achieved an additional $5m sales from people that accessed Bill Marriott’s executive blog. This is an impressive statement of fact, and you have his attention; and as a result he puts an hour in the diary for a more detailed chat on the subject.

What do you do now? The biggest mistake is to go to the one-hour meeting and then continue blindly selling the proposition, because you don’t yet know what’s going to be the business driver for this particular stakeholder. When marketing any service (and social media is no different), everybody’s individual business needs and priorities will be different. Grow revenue, cut costs, enhance innovation, improve customer service, and so on; it’s a long list of possibilities.

So, the elevator pitch grabbed his attention, but that won’t be the reason that social media may work for his particular organisation. The specific needs and objectives will be absolutely unique to this organisation, and it is your job to align these unique needs to the social media possibilities.

The rock band Weezer has a great single out at the moment. It’s called “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To”. The brackets are in the title. I love this title because it encapsulates the blundering teenage angst that we can still remember from when we were that age. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Similarly, the biggest mistake at this stage is to launch into the one hour conversation with a pushy “I want you to do this because….”, as if you were that teenager all over again! Instead, in this phase of the sales process it is time for a more consultative approach. You ask the questions, and then listen carefully to the answers. A bit like the doctor diagnosing the patient, you take the role of the consultant, and determine the business priorities that are most relevant for this stakeholder.

Read all our posts on Selling social media here.

Image by H. Lloyd via Flickr

One of the most important mantra’s of successful sales people is to ‘Earn The Right’; get some diary time, or hold a short telephone conversation with a new prospect or stakeholder, you must first ‘Earn The Right’ for their valuable time.

To get the attention of the stakeholder when you are selling social media, one technique is to inform what his peers or competitors may be doing. If his competitors may be gaining advantage from the use of social media then why wouldn’t he want to urgently explore this with you?

You may only have ten seconds in an initial contact with the stakeholder, and therefore your key message regarding their competitor (or other compelling justifications – I’ll cover these in future posts) must be snappy, relevant, and vital. For this reason, it is sometimes called the ‘elevator pitch’, i.e. you are in the lift (elevator in US!) with the stakeholder, and you only have a few seconds until he leaves at the next floor, what will you say to get his attention? Be concise and high level. Carefully rehearse the message beforehand. And then rehearse again, and again!

For example, I was watching breakfast television this morning, and Jeffrey Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer Kodak was interviewed, explaining how social media has re-shaped their business. He said that social media can excite, evangelise, educate, and engage their customers, and makes a real difference to their changing brand. Their brand was previously deemed old and out-dated, and now, with the help of social media, they have re-vitalised the company.

This is a great story. I know of at least five brands that would compete directly with this brand and I will contact them later today with my elevator pitch! Let’s see if it is effective and earns the right for a further dialog with them.

Read all our posts on Selling social media here.

Some more reading

• Kodak’s Social Media Tips (viralblog.com)
• Why Kodak Thinks You Should Use Social Media (kylelacy.com)
• Twitter at C Level (marketingpilgrim.com)

A reasonably bright school kid will build an excellent business case for a car that is 60% more fuel efficient, or a pc that is 50% faster. It’s easy! He can look at reduced running costs (for the car) or improved efficiency (for the pc), and the business case will quickly form.

But selling social media, whether to a client or internally at an organisation, requires more expertise and selling skills, because the benefits are much broader, and often a little obtuse! In my experience, every business or department that buys into a social media solution has a different business case with greatly different benefits. These could range from increasing customer-based innovation, to enticing greater web traffic, to enhanced SEO, to converting more online sales, to building the brand values, and I could list twenty more possibilities…

Therefore, for example, there is no point discussing the value of increased insight from social media, if what is really needed is to increase online sales. These are polar opposite reasons to use social media.

So the first lesson of successful selling in social media is…listen to and understand your client, because there will be a compelling business case for social media and you can help the client to reveal it.

(A note regarding my terminology:- for ‘client’ read ‘department head’ if you are selling social media internally within an organisation)

So, to get to the essence of the business case, there is no better person to understand your client’s business – than your client!

So ask him about it!

But this is where the skill comes in.

1. Do your research beforehand
2. Make the client (or department head) feel comfortable by building empathy
3. What’s in it for him? Establish the right to take his busy time.
4. At the meeting or on the telephone, ask lots of open questions, and finish with clear next steps and follow-up.

There may be some Objection Handling, but let’s discuss that some other time.

Read all our posts on Selling social media here.

The Marketing Forum on Aurora

This week FreshNetworks has been at two marketing conferences: The Richmond Events Marketing Forum and the IBDG Marketing Directors Strategy Meeting.

Both events use the format of an agenda rammed with 30-minute speed-meetings between marketing service agencies (suppliers) and Marketing Directors (delegates).

I’ve taken part in quite a few of these over the years and in case you’ve ever considered one, I thought it might be worth a quick post about my thoughts and learnings.

How do the marketing forums work?

The organisers attract delegates with the promise of a free conference pass and an opportunity to meet a pre-qualified group of suppliers. For these marketing budget holders it’s an opportunity to get out of the office, to network with peers and to discuss curent issues with some suppliers they might not otherwise cross paths with.

Suppliers pay between £7-15k to attend. That’s a lot of money for an agency, but the draw is having between 10 and 30 one-to-one meetings with the Marketing Directors – meetings that would take a lot of effort to book and attend if you tried to arrange them yourself.

A key part of making the events work is that delegates and suppliers provide lots of information about their respective businesses ahead of the event. That enables both sides to flag who they’d like to meet on the day. And after the conferences, just like speed dating, both parties say who’d they’d like to meet again.

This meeting format has been around for 20+ years (I think Richmond were the original innovators). It’s a far more focused way of doing biz dev than a stand at a trade fair, but it can be quite a bit more expensive. Relative to cold-calling I think the price per meeting is in the same range: £300-£500.

Richmond Events – Marketing Director’s Forum

This is the pinnacle of speed-meeting events. Three days on a boat moored off the Jersey coast. 150 Marketing Directors trapped with no chance of escape. Except by lifeboat.

The event has a good reputation and continues to attract a high level of delegate with marketing budgets that ranage from £100k to £50M. However over the years the number of Marketing Directors who attend has reduced sigificantly and most of the delegates now tend to be Marketing Managers or Heads of Marketing. One reason for this may be that the marketing procurement process has become more sophisiticated. As a result major appointments are rarely made purely on the basis of meeting an agency on the boat.

Got any other theories?

Compared to all the other events I have attended, Richmond definitely stand out as having the best-run most expertly-organised events. I also think they maginally clinch it on quality of delegates. As for conference sessions, based on the feedback from delegates, they were pretty good. The quality of keynote speakers is always superb. Richmond clearly invest a great deal of time and effort in picking the keynotes. And the other thing that I really enjoyed this week were the lunches and dinners. These provided excellent opportunites to venutre off the usual sales patter and really get to know some of the delegates.

IBDG Marketing Directors Strategy Meeting

I’ve been to lots of IBDG events. They are held in a hotel just off Portman Square in London. What I love about these events is that whilst they only promise you 8-10 meetings, we have often met 30 potential clients in one day. The reason for this is that the IBDG team really hustle (especially Nathan Lovegrove, our trusty account manager).

On the flip side, from the last two we attended I don’t think we’ll get a payback on our spend. That may be more to do with what we’re selling (Social Media services are still surprisingly new for UK Marketeers and only the early adopters have budget for it in 2009 or 2010). I understand that they are already booked solid for 2010 as many other suppliers have re-booked.

The other negative for me is that relative to other events, these always feel like a much harder sell (to suppliers). IBDG (understandably) try to hook you into the next event whilst your still trying to meet people on the day. But this is the last thing you need when you’re trying to focus on your next 30-minute meeting for which you have already paid. There is a cooling-off period, but it all feels rather pressured.

Other marketing forums

Similar events are organised by:

World Trade Group WTG One to One meetings

Revolution Magazine: The Revolution Forum

Forum Events: The Internet Marketing Summit

Have you been to any of these events? If so what was your experience?

It’s been another week of gloom in the business press. European airlines facing tough times, questions about the sale of banks and falling profits on the high street. Times are undoubtedly tough. Brand are facing a problem with this growing uncertainty about the economic outlook. A report out this weekend suggests that over two-thirds of British families are reigning in their spending and a similar pattern is being faced across Europe and North America.

In times like this, brands need to work harder to make sure they attract and retain consumer spending. Getting close to and understanding your customers is even more important than ever. You need to ensure that you understand what they want and that you are at the forefront of their mind when making a purchase. Sustainable engagement is critical – more than just a need for good marketing campaigns, brands to to build and maintain sustainable relationships with their customers. And they probably want to do this without spending too much money.

So in the interests of helping brands face the credit crunch and come out the other side, here are five recommendations from the team at FreshNetworks of how you can use social media to help make the most of your opportunities in the current climate and to engage your customers in a sustainable way.

1. Add product reviews to your site

If you have your products listed on your site (whether it’s an e-commerce-enabled site or not) you really should have a place for customer reviews. A rating mechanism (scoring the product out of five, for example) would be a good start, but allowing people to write reviews is best. Many firms worry about doing this and doing it openly, but reviews tend to be more positive than not (the typical score given out of five is 4.3) and the presence of reviews (be they positive or not) are reassuring for customers. In fact, a study done by FigLeaves showed that by adding reviews to their site increased conversions to sales by over 30%.

2. Involve customers as soon as possible in your decision making

You can’t afford to make a wrong decision, but you might not want to delay getting your new product or process to the market. It’s important to involve your customers to make sure that you are going in the right direction and that you are meeting a need that they have. It’s often said that the brightest people don’t work for you and some of the biggest companies recognise this by working with their customers in online research communities – testing ideas with them in real-time. Checking your plans with them as you are developing them, or watching what customers think, do and say so you can adapt your product for them. In a recent online research community that we ran for a global telecommunications firm, the community let them see the language their customers used to talk about their product and feed this into their marketing and advertising.

3. Reward your customers

Customers want to be passionate about your brand. Whatever it is you sell or do, there will be customers who care about you. You need to reward them. You need to be as passionate back to them. This is where social media can really come to the fore. Letting them be the ‘first to know, first to see, first to do’ is a great way to reward them. Create a community and release new product information to the community members first. Let them interact directly with senior staff and enter into an exchange with them (as shown by Gordon Brown in Ask the PM). Making your customers feel like part of the organisation is the best reward they can get. And using social media is the most effective way of letting them feel this.

4. Equip your advocates to amplify word of mouth

Your most passionate advocates should be doing your marketing for you. We know from research from McKinsey and Forrester Research that people are more likely to trust ‘people like me’. If you can equip your advocates with information (such as the early access to new product information proposed above) and maybe let them take it to their own social networks through widgets then you can get them to do your marketing for you. You can amplify the word of mouth by giving them information to talk about and help them spread the word about your product.

5. It’s okay to ‘join the conversation’ but you need to listen and respond

Whilst there has been a lot of talk of ‘joining the conversation’, people often don’t say what this means. If you are to truly engage your customers, you need to create a space where you can have an open and frank exchange with them. You can tell them things about your product, your brand, your intentions and developments. You can also listen to them, about their life, their thoughts on your product and the place your product plays in their life. This is a powerful exchange to create and an area where real engagement develops. What will make it a success if feedback. When you listen to your customer make sure you tell them what you think, what you are going to do based on their thoughts, and also why you might not do anything. This two-way feedback is what makes online communities work.

Some more reading

• ROI measurement + Items = YES you can measure Social Media ROI
• Understanding Gartner’s “Generation Virtual”
• The Credit Crunch – What Next?
• Financial chaos does not rule out economic recovery
• Now is the time to seize power from the markets
• What is next in debt crunch?
• Online shopping and the credit crunch