The Best Salesman I Ever Knew
My 1st sales mentor, who sadly recently passed away (here’s one for you Dennis) was a salesman through and through. He didn’t need the internet or Powerpoint to make his case to a customer. He created an environment where people trusted him to have their best interests at heart. In the end he acted in such a way that all of his customers knew that he would never let them down or make them look bad for buying from his company.
He understood them first. He delivered value to them way before they ever spent a penny. He knew their company better than they did and the decision makers he knew even better. He knew his market and exactly what it was that they needed at the right time at the right price with the right specifications and presented it in the right way.
As a young sales engineer I accompanied Dennis to a Ford plant for a vendor meeting. The plant manager was a loud obnoxious and quite a profane guy that had 5,000 people working for him and 50,000 parts to put together correctly once a minute for 3 shifts, 5 days a week. I understood why he would use language and intimidation to get what he absolutely had to have out of the key vendors for his cars.
This manager would walk around the plant with about 50 people in tow and would verbally assault anyone that didn’t know their stuff and have the answers exactly when he wanted them when he wanted them. These people would wait nervously for their turn in the box while Dennis and I stood by, quietly smoking cigarettes, on the edge of the group (this was in the late 80’s so smoking was still very much ok in Detroit).
Eventually the plant manager got to us and I waited for the barrage to begin…..what we got from the plant manager was “Hey, Dennis, how you doin’?” and he walked away. Dennis gave me his great smile and I knew that he had figured out what the issues were ahead of time and made sure that the plant manager knew that the solutions were in place and that he had nothing to worry about.
Dennis knew his market, listened to them, delivered the value they wanted, how and when they wanted it, always. There are very few salespeople that can say they can do that.
I miss you Dennis my friend, I have never known a better salesman.
Todd Hockenberry
Top Line Results - Orlando,FL
todd@top-line-results.com
Market Driven, Sales Driven, or Driven Insane?
Nothing happens until something gets sold. An old cliché quote I have heard many times, mostly from salespeople complaining about not getting their just due from senior management. Do you believe this? I used to as a salesperson. I thought sales made the world go round. Nothing happens without us right?
Wrong. EVERYTHING happens before something gets sold.
That everything is your market. Your market existed before you and I promise you that if you went away they would still exist. Their needs, desires, wants, and community exist outside of you for the most part because you still look at them as a sale to be made. What they want is to be engaged, understood, and then they will buy from you.
Making sales gets harder every day. Creating demand through focused value delivery, constructive engagement, and actually understanding their business and how you can help them deliver results that they need will help convince them to buy from you.
Some salespeople will say that nothing happens internally until they sell something (budding narcissist) and for sales driven companies this may be true. It is also a recipe for mediocrity and lagging top line results. If a sale has to happen 1st then where is the empathy for the customer when the product is designed, the feature set chosen, software configured, costing optimized, pricing set, etc… If you are waiting for a sale to happen before you engage, understand, and earn the trust of your market then you are in big trouble.
If you wonder if you are market driven or sales driven ask yourself this simple question:
Have you EVER walked away from an order or project that was outside your area of focus?
If you have then you at least have an area of focus and exercised judgment as to the best use of your resources. I am not talking about the off the wall project or ultra-custom job. I mean something you have never done before but ‘close enough’ to what you are really good at. Or in an industry you have never considered but said, “Sure we can do that”. I am talking about the ones that your sales guys sell in spite of being told not to and you STILL take the job.
You know the salesmen I am talking about – this is the one that says, “I would rather ask for forgiveness than for permission”. Forgive me, but you have my permission to leave. These guys are selfish and not good business people.
Market focus and segmenting is pretty basic marketing strategy. Yet very few companies have the discipline to make the commitment to a target and drive deep to deliver maximum value. They would rather keep their options open or be flexible or serve a broad spectrum of clients. Maybe this works for the largest companies in your industry but for most it is a formula for stagnation. Oh, by the way, I’ll bet the best companies in your industry started by servicing one or two markets extremely well and then used that success as a springboard to dominate other market segments.
How about developing strategic relationships with companies in your market space but that do not necessarily service your target markets and give them the projects that come across your plate but are outside of your area of focus? Trade these ‘leads’ for contacts or referrals in the areas where you are great. You could also develop lead sharing or referral agreements with companies that are complimentary to your focus.
Focus on being market driven not sales driven and you will avoid being driven insane and out of business.
Todd Hockenberry
Top Line Results - Orlando,FL
todd@top-line-results.com
Think of Everything: Know the answers to the questions the customer will ask before they ask you.
When I saw this on the quirky blog Soberin a Nightclub it made me laugh out loud and it illustrates a very important point.
Empathy is the root of all success. Pay your prospective customers the respect of being prepared.
Customers only care about their problems and you better know how to relate your offering to their specific need. Just selling a general use tool and hoping that your target customers can figure out how to use it is a recipe for mediocrity.
A call center I inherited would call targets and ask if they had any need for a laser. As you might expect the response rate was very low since many targets did not see any need for a laser (insert your product here).
When the questions changed to a needs focus the results improved significantly. The call center started to ask if the target used any labeling or identification for their parts or if they did any engraving. Once the target answered ‘yes’ then the call center could show how a laser would potentially solve those and other problems. Pretty basic stuff though I am still surprised at how common this type of thinking is.
Are you really putting yourself in your target customer’s shoes and understanding their issues BEFORE you engage them and try to sell them?
How about service? Is your service team completely prepared to react in a proactive and exceptional way to any questions your customer answers? This should be easy – you are the expert, right?
If you understand them 1st you will not have to sell them - they will want to buy. They expect you to think of everything so they do not have to.
Top Line Results - Orlando, FL
todd@top-line-results.com
Only a Fool Gives Something Away For Free, Right?
Just finished the book ‘Free’ by Chris Anderson... got it free from the library. Lots of great ideas and analysis that are relevant to every profession and industry in today's ever changing digital world.
A few key points….
The price of commodities
comes down over time. If your prices are
coming down, your products are moving toward commodity status. As well as toward irrelevance.
Scarce resource prices stay
high and earn higher margins. So what are
you doing that is ‘scarce’?
Is it service that is so
good it stuns your customers?
Is it just being so
friendly, considerate, responsive, and polite that people want to buy from you?
Is it bringing your
customers in house and letting them help design and engineer your product?
Is it education about how
to use a product and not just talking about features and specifications?
How about an expert
analysis of their competitive situation? Are you
expert enough to do one?
Are you showing your
customers the opportunities they will take advantage of if they work with you
and your product or service? Are there
any real opportunities for your customers if they work with you or are they
just a transaction to you?
It is easy to copy; it is much
harder to create something that is scarce and valued as such.
Customers want these things for free now before they consider paying you.
Think about the value you get
from Google and yet you have never given them a penny. Now you know why people want things for free.
Like the song says, “Free
your mind and the rest will follow”
Todd Hockenberry
Top Line Results - Orlando,
FL
todd@top-line-results.com
What is Marketing?
“The aim of
marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service
fits him and sells itself." -
Peter F. Drucker
Marketing is as simple as
Drucker says it is — know and understand first, then communicate. If the knowing and understanding are right,
the customer sees himself in the product and will not need to be sold but will want
to buy.
Marketing is not a tactic,
not a trade show, or ad, or web site, or article. These things are tools used by
marketing professionals to communicate the deeper message of your product, the meaning of
your answer, the results customers should expect, or the solution they seek. If the knowing and understanding are not
there then the tactics will fall flat.
Think New Coke.
So many people I talk to want to go straight to the tools and tactics. They want to know how to use Twitter, or should they blog, or should they go to this trade show. Marketing has been described by marketing people as a tactic for so long and so often they have forfeited their seat at the strategic planning table. It is just a tactic to be used, cynically in many cases, to lure people in. No value has been created from the customer's perspective so they try to make it up on the back end with slick 'marketing'.
When companies leave the strategy
to the engineers, or to design or heaven help us, to the financial guys, you get a
product in search of a customer. Maybe
the customer shows up, maybe not.
Great marketing is both the
foundation and the energy behind the growth of great products and great companies.
Todd Hockenberry
Top Line Results - Orlando,
FL
todd@top-line-results.com
11 Ways to Know if Your Company is Marketing Passively
You are marketing passively if….
1. Your web site has product info only, has a list of trade shows you went to in 2007, or anything else that is not real fresh, interesting, and new.
2. You go to the same trades hows every year and employ the “build it and they will come” or the “oh, please stop by my booth begging/luck/hope strategy”.
3. You send e-mail to the same few hundred people with no response and no idea if these people are still alive and then hope someone bites.
4. You run the same feature laden ad in the same trade journals and hope someone calls all the while complaining about ad rates and hearing editors tell you that the ads drive people to your web site.
5. You send outfeature/product based press releases – just once I would like to see someone lead with the ultimate benefit the customer receives– then talk about how you do it.
6. You join a trade group with all of your competitors but not one your customers are in - as my favorite announcer Myron Cope (you Steeler fans know) used to say, “Double Yoi”.
7. Your local or regional salespeople (and VP’s and managers) are not known in your field and never join local groups and network as the experts– you can usually recognize these guys by the “I just need more leads and I’ll meet quota” whine.
8. You do not know theblogs that are talking about your company, product type, service, industry, etc…muchless write one or at least write comments.
9. You send out your salespeople and have them mindlessly chase what is “hot” – the “if the phone rang then it must be hot syndrome”.
10. Your salespeople cherry pick what is at the bottom of the pipeline about ready to close yet never generate one lead or referral themselves.
11. Your service team waits for the customer to call with a complaint and never proactively calls them to offer ways for them maximize the benefit and value they get from your product.
There are many more but you get the idea.
ToddHockenberry
Top LineResults - Orlando, FL
todd@top-line-results.com
10 Reasons Ads Are Dead
We are immune to
advertising. Sorry folks but it doesn’t
work anymore. It hasn’t worked well for
a while and the future looks worse.
How do I know this, let me
give you 10 reasons why….
1. My kids NEVER watch
commercial television. They only watch
shows on the DVR and always skip all of the commercials. They, and anyone under 30, will NEVER, EVER
pay attention to ads.
2. We can get all of our
product information on demand exactly how we want it with RSS, custom home
pages, Google Alerts, and on and on….
3. Most ads are terrible and
have no message for the reader/viewer/your potential customer so
readers/viewers/attendees have been ignoring them for some time.
4. An editor of a major
industrial magazine told me that the reason to advertise with them was that it
drove traffic to your web site – guess what, most customers just skip the whole
trade magazine step and go straight to the web sites that are geared toward
them and their concerns.
5. Blogs – this is where real,
honest, and trusted conversations about most products take place, why get your
info from someone obvious biased when you can connect to a community and get
the REAL story.
6. Ads are a one way
interruption and that is just rude. Let
me read the real story, if you have one, unfiltered and unbiased and free of
spin and puffery (I love that word).
7. Did I mention that most
industrial ads are boring, unimaginative, unhelpful and a ridiculous waste of
the reader’s time?
8. They are static and become
obsolete very quickly.
9. The only reason to pay for
an ad placement is viewers or more accurately the POTENTIAL for viewers. Less and less people are subscribing to
magazines and I believe the ones that still do subscribe do not spend as much
time reading….so less eyeballs. Same
holds true for trade shows where attendance keeps shrinking.
10. We know you have your best
interests at heart and not ours, until convinced otherwise and ads are not
convincing.
Todd Hockenberry
Top Line Results - Orlando,
FL
todd@top-line-results.com
Help your customers sell more of their products – what a concept.
While relaxing the other night watching some shows on
the DVR this line popped out at me because it was so crisp and clear and
summarized much of what I believe to be the best part of marketing and sales.
“I sell
products, not advertising.” said Don Draper the Creative Director for the
fictional advertising agency Sterling-Cooper on the show Mad Men.
Sounds so simple.
Of course that is what he does.
He sells the benefit of the benefit. His highly creative ads help to sell his
customer’s products, period.
He knows who he is and what he does and can say it with
clarity and simplicity.
In the end isn’t that what we all do – though with just about all of the capital equipment companies that I have worked with and for the answer was more like this;
We design great______.
We engineer the best
_______.
We make world class _______.
Our feature/model/product is the first/fastest/smallest/biggest
——whatever!
If you can clearly and simply say how you help your
customers sell more of their products then you are way ahead of most and well
on your way to earning their business and loyalty.
Todd Hockenberry
Top Line Results - Orlando,
FL
todd@top-line-results.com
Proactive Marketing and the “The Long Tail”
I just finished reading "The Long Tail" by
Chris Anderson and was fascinated and impressed by how well this book describes
many of the changes we see in the distribution of entertainment, books, and a
growing variety of consumer goods and services.
The ‘Long Tail’ refers to the shift from large one size-fits-all mass markets to one where there are many niche products and specialized offerings. We see this effect at work most evidently in places like the traditional brick-n-mortar book store versus Amazon in terms of number and type of books offered for sale.
As Amazon and others have proven emphatically is that there is a whole lot of money in the Long Tail.
Below chart is from The
Long Tail Blog by Chris Anderson.
The question I kept asking
myself as I read was how does this theory apply to proactive marketing and capital equipment companies?
One answer is to offer
variety AND a way for your customers to sort through the choices to make a
great decision. Create solution
platforms that can be used to address a wide variety of applications (niches
along the Long Tail). A core product
with lots of options is one popular way of addressing the niche requirements of
many customers.
Where I see most
manufacturing companies miss here is the second part of my recommendation –
making it easy for customers to sort through the choices and understand how the
tools apply to their requirements.
Many engineering driven
companies will think it is enough to build the tools and options and then let
the customer figure out what to do with them.
Salespeople in these companies need to be the force that delivers value
by helping the customer understand the options and how they can be configured
to solve the problems customers face.
Capital equipment companies
must also find their niche. Very few
products are big mass market hits and if you can make a hit, great, but it is
better to know your niche and serve it extremely well.
Deliver a high value
solution, specific to your target – do not try to be all things to all buyers.
Once you find your niche
you need to be where the niche is looking.
They are online, I promise.
Give away the knowledge of the
uses of your products. Become the expert
online, be findable online, and share this information for free. Help customers understand your solutions and filter through the issues they face to
find the best solution for their situation and they will reward you with their loyalty.
Todd Hockenberry
Top Line Results - Orlando,
FL
todd@top-line-results.com
Chipotle – Tasty Proactive Marketing
Chipotle – Tasty Proactive
Marketing
We love Mexican food and
our daughter has food allergies so when a new Chipotle opened in our Orlando, FL neighborhood we were very excited (they
have an extensive gluten-free menu). To
add to our pleasure we received a coupon for a free burrito in the mail.
Our kids can be a tough to
corral during a meal out so we often order take out instead of eating out. My wife saw that Chipotle took orders online
so we went to the web site to place our order.
What we found was impressive.
Number one, we could order
as individuals and not as one giant mixed up order.
Number two, we were told to
bypass the in-store line of people ordering and go directly to the register.
So I follow directions,
walk up to the register, and before I can open my mouth the young lady says
‘are you Todd here for your pick up?’
Nice.
When I get home we start
unloading the bag for the three hungry and loud offspring and guess what is on
each item? Our names! This may sound like a small leap in the grand
scheme of things but, as my wife will attest, if you have to open each item it
is stressful trying to figure out who gets what in the midst of the mayhem that
is our dinner table. Nice.
Number three, the next day
I get a call from my local Chipotle and they ask me if I was satisfied, if I
had any suggestions, and if they would have the pleasure of us coming
back. They actually called me to follow
up on a $30 meal. I know people that
sell systems for tens of thousands of dollars that don’t follow up this well. Very nice.
What do you think, will we
eat at our local Chipotle again?
What are you doing to make
it this easy and pleasurable to do business with your company?
Is your team anywhere near
this proactive?
Todd Hockenberry
Top Line Results - Orlando,
FL
todd@top-line-results.com
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