May 7, 2012 10 Comments

4 blogging tricks learned from #BlogSomething2012

#BlogSomething2012

The experiment that was #BlogSomething2012 has come to a conclusion. A week of blog posts of all sorts has ended. Let’s see what we learned.

1. Choose your imagery wisely. Some days, the content of the photo was easy to relate to the story. Some days, it was particularly difficult, such as the statue of the Puritan.

2. Participation scales with commitment. Despite a ton of retweets and comments on Facebook before the experiment began, in the end, only a few people took on the challenge and actually participated.

3. Confinement breeds creativity. The act of forcing pre-set topics and content had an interesting effect on my blogging habits: I came up with more ideas and topics I wanted to blog about last week than normal, each time reminded that I had to defer them until the week was over. Luckily things like Evernote can store them until later, but setting up a challenge for yourself like this may get your brain generating new ideas just to be contrary. This, by the way, comes from a martial arts exercise I learned from Bud Malmstrom way back when.

4. The one thing I would have done differently would have been to create a feedback mechanism for participants. Certainly, the hashtag helped some, but I think a dedicated Facebook group or page or some other collective mechanism might have been a helpful thing to have had.

To read all the posts in the series, check out the social media search for #BlogSomething2012 hashtag.

What did you think of #BlogSomething2012?

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May 4, 2012 1 Comment

#BlogSomething2012: Creating evangelists

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

The final part of our series looks at what happens when a customer becomes an evangelist. For those unfamiliar with the term in context, evangelists are your unpaid marketing force, customers so delighted that they can’t stop talking about you and recommending you to their colleagues, friends, and family.

Customers who become evangelists are fueled by not only their love for the products or services that you deliver, but their faith in the implicit promise you make that things will keep getting better as time goes on. That’s a faith that you must constantly renew and constantly bolster. There are plenty of companies that have done something excellent once, but otherwise provided mediocrity; those companies may have satisfied customers, but certainly not loyal evangelists.

When someone becomes an evangelist, they take a leap of faith and begin to share their reputation with you. Consider for a moment how powerful that is. Someone else is granting you a portion of the trust relationships they have with their friends and colleagues. They’re putting their own name on the line in some way, small or large, by endorsing you and saying, “Buy this company’s product or service. I love them and trust them.”

If you’ve ever participating in any kind of team building retreat, there’s an exercise known as a trust fall, where you stand on the edge of a desk/table/tree stump, etc., fold your arms across your chest, and fall backwards. Your teammates link arms behind you and catch you. The implicit message is that you have to have faith and trust that your team will safely catch you and not let you simply fall and crash into the ground. That’s what your customers do every time they recommend you. They take the leap of faith that you will not damage the trust they’ve put in you and let down their friend or colleague. If you do let them fall, it takes a very, very long time for someone to regain their trust in you.

The benefits, however, of rewarding someone’s faith in you are gigantic. Here’s an example. Once upon a time there was a scrappy little company that made a pretty awesome line of products. At a certain point in their history, they broke their faith with their customers and stopped making things better. Certainly, they still made things, but things stopped getting better, and stayed that way for a long time, culminating in the company’s stock price falling to record lows in 1997.

NASDAQ

It took a long time for them to realize that things were really bad, but they eventually did and found their way again, making products that were consistently getting better and better over time. They delivered on the promise again, from consolidating the product line to simply making a better set of products, their evangelists slowly came back, people took more and bigger leaps of faith and were rewarded, and the company’s financial success reflects that.

NASDAQ

Today, the company has more evangelists than ever. It has more supporters than ever. It also has more amazing products than ever. Certainly, they power their efforts with massive marketing dollars, but so does every other competitor in their space, and their competitors don’t enjoy the same success because their competitors don’t keep their promises nearly as well. The company, of course, is Apple, Inc., and few companies have the legions of evangelists that they do, so much so that people willingly pay large amounts of money and time to attend company keynotes, which are in effect two hour commercials for their products.

When was the last time your customers showed up at your office in person, excited and eager to listen to you for two hours as you told them about your new products? That’s the gold standard by which you should measure your ability to create evangelists. Forget followers and retweets – when customers show up at your door for a two hour commercial, you know you’re doing it right.

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May 3, 2012 Leave a Comment

#BlogSomething2012: Closing the deal

MFA Mummies

In the early days of what would become the science of Egyptology, the ubiquitous hieroglyphs that adorn many Egyptian relics were indecipherable. The culture that spoke and wrote the ancient Egyptian language was long gone, and Arabic and European scholars were reduced to blindly guessing what the different symbols meant. It wasn’t until 1799 when Napoleon invaded Egypt and discovered the Rosetta Stone that hieroglyphs began to be accurately translated. Why? The Rosetta Stone contained three version of the same memo (and it was basically a large interoffice memo from the kingdom to the priesthood) in hieroglyphs, demotic (commoner) text, and ancient Greek.

The ancient Egyptian language is a peculiar one that combines phonetics, literals, and ideograms together in a complex interplay. Sometimes a picture of a bird will represent the sound of a letter; other times, that same bird will represent a bird. In order to read hieroglyphs, you need an understanding of the subtleties, nuances, and contextual changes that give the language meaning.

When you think about it, closing a sale isn’t much different. When you’re closing a deal, you’re juggling different contexts and different states of mind in a prospective customer that are as fluid as hieroglyphs. One moment, the customer is using words that suggest a need for emotional inspiration or reassurance. In the next moment, those same words are being used to define literal contract terms.

Where a master salesman differs from the average salesman is in the ability to recognize when contexts are changing and be able to understand how that language changes as he or she listens in real-time. The only way to develop that level of understanding is through a post-mortem with the customer. If you work with a phone system that permits it, start off all your sales calls with the disclosure that calls are recorded for quality assurance (a nearly meaningless phrase that everyone says nowadays) and then record your sales calls.

30 days or so after a sale has completed and the customer has been a part of your company, go back to the customer, buy them coffee or something, and ask them at what point the decision was made. Once you know when the decision was made, go back in your call log and listen to the call or calls that preceded a decision and listen to the language you used and the customer used – that’s your Rosetta Stone, your way to decipher what helped close the deal. Over time, as you gather more and more of these call logs, you may start to notice similarities and commonalities among your successful calls. That’s when you look at that, extract the data, and refine an even better lexicon of the words, phrases, and approaches that are successful for you, much in the same way that Egyptology was revolutionized all from what was a mundane interoffice memo.

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Filed Under: #BlogSomething2012, Advertising, Marketing, Sales
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