Category Archives: Business & Marketing

What you know, not what you sell

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Sales trainer Chris Lytel points to a Wall Street Journal interview with Ram Charan, a business professor turned consultant and author (What the Customer Wants You to Know).

“It has become very hard to differentiate yourself in the eyes of the customer, for business to business sales. So salespeople should not sell the product anymore. They should find out what the customer needs, which will be a combination of products and services and thought leadership.”

“In the old game, one person could do the selling. In the new game, you need a team from your company. The reason you need a team is the solution you’re going to create is going to come form different parts of your company. That means salespeople have to be good leaders, to lead their team, and also persuade the customer team. Because customers also buy in teams.”

Thought leadership. Interesting concept. Increasingly, our “network radio” sales reps are finding that their clients want more than 30 second spots. I suppose you could say they always wanted more than spots… they wanted the sales or mind-share those “spots” could bring.

These days, it’s rare that the prospect doesn’t bring up the subject of the web as part of their marketing strategy. Knowing a little something about blogging and podcasting has been very useful.

Macworld: Day Two

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Winding down here at Macworld. Hit the exhibit floor again and watched a very cool demo of Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac. Out in March. Show continues through Friday but I head home tomorrow.

Devo150Last night our gang attended a Devo concert at the historic Warfield Theater. I lasted about 15 minutes. Not sure if it was the head-exploading decibels or the depressing sight of a bunch of guys my age (or very close) dressed in yellow coveralls and orange plastic hats.

Dinner tonight at some fancy-pants French restaurant. More on that later.

Macworld: Day One (SF: Day 3)

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In line at 4:30 a.m. for Jobs keynote. Waited in the cold and dark for a couple of hours… and a couple more inside the convention center. Got in to the keynote room just as Jobs began speaking. If we (Mark Snell was with me) had gotten in line 5 minutes later, we wouldn’t have gotten in. We would have stood in line for almost 5 hours…for nothing. Glad I had the experience. But the keynote looks pretty good online.  I’m just saying.

After the keynote, we had lunch and then hit the exhibit floor. The Hot New Thing was/is the MacBook Air [Ad – Tour]. They have a long (150 feet?) table set up with 40 or 50 of these little beauties on display. But for the first couple of hours, you couldn’t get close. The crowd was three deep with people who just wanted to see, touch and hold The Worlds Smallest Notebook Computer. We got a few minutes with it and I must say it is impressive. But I am easily impressed.

Lots of other interesting stuff in the keynote but others will report on those. I’m looking forward to renting movies from iTunes. If it works as advertised, this could eliminate the need for Netflix.

I have some video of the day’s adventures and will post that later.

If you’re going to San Francisco…

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Flowers_hair…and I am. Leaving for MacWorld tomorrow. As a MacWorld virgin, I’ll be under the collective wings of George, Tom and Mark. Seasoned veterans all. If we were driving cross-country, this trip might make a decent road-trip movie. Middle-aged geeks search for meaning and happiness among 40,000 people talking to each other on their iPhones.

I’ll have the MacBook with me (I’m not sure you can get into SF without one for the next week) but blogging might be light. I really hope to soak up the experience and not worry too much about recording it. We’ll see.

Unhappy Camper

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Fbl_motorhomeOur offices are just a couple of hundred feet from the headquarters of the Missouri Farm Bureau. As I headed out for lunch I noticed a motor home had pulled off the highway, just in front of FB building. I didn’t have my camera (I know, I know) so I didn’t get a shot but found this on the FarmBureauLies.com website.

This guy is not a happy camper. And I have no idea who is right in his dispute with Farm Bureau.

I’m just wondering how many people got back to their offices and did what I did… pulled up the website. And if you’re Farm Bureau (or any big company), what –if anything– is the proper response. I’m sure the lawyers would tell them they can’t say anything about a matter that’s being litigated.

As disgruntled customers take their grievances online, it would make sense for big companies (and small ones) to have a online strategy of their own (I looked for a FB blog but didn’t find one). Seems to me companies have to find some way to engage with their customers in this space.

If the sign on the camper read “Learfield Sucks” and was parked in front of our building, what would we do? If Clyde Lear had his way, he’d probably go and talk to the guy. Maybe record an interview with the guy, let him tell his story. And then post all or part of that on the company blog.

Would the guy be any less pissed? Who knows. Would we look more responsive or concerned as a company? To some.

“Instead of shouting the message, hide it”

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Will we still get carpet bombed by mindless 30 second commercials in the future? (And by future I mean a couple of weeks from now.) Seems unlikely, but how will savvy marketers reach –and more importantly– engage us? How do you “reach people who are so media-saturated they block all attempts to get through.”

Perhaps with alternate reality games (ARG’s). That’s the subject of a fascinating article by Frank Rose in this month’s Wired Magazine (Issue 16.01).

“The initial clue was so subtle that for nearly two days nobody noticed it. On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails’ European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled “i am trying to believe.” Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum. People started typing “iamtryingtobelieve.com” into their Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something called Parepin, a drug apparently introduced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agents, but in reality, the page declared, it was part of a government plot to confuse and sedate citizens. Email sent to the site’s contact link generated a cryptic auto-response: “I’m drinking the water. So should you.” Online, fans worldwide debated what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what?”

I’m not a gamer. At all. But I love shit like this. Reminds me of the viral video snippets in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. The Wired article is well worth the read.

Advertiser Optimism by Medium

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From Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog:

"Advertiser Perceptions latest survey of 2,047 ad executives (published twice yearly) — as published by Online Media Daily — reveals growing pessimism among ad buyers about traditional forms of advertising. I view this study as significant, because it speaks directly with people who are making decisions about spending money."

Adforecast

Only newspapers face a smaller increase and larger decrease than radio? [Emphasis/red from original post]

Blogging as marketing tool

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Good story in the NYT Small Business section on blogging as a marketing tool:

“…while blogs may be useful to many more small businesses, even blogging experts do not recommend it for the majority.

Guy Kawasaki, a serial entrepreneur, managing partner of Garage Technology Ventures and a prolific blogger, put it this way: “If you’re a clothing manufacturer or a restaurant, blogging is probably not as high on your list as making good food or good clothes.”

Blogging requires a large time commitment and some writing skills, which not every small business has on hand.”