TSE 623: Discovering What Makes You Different Which Makes You Marketable

We all hear about making yourself different to stand out from your competitors, but how do you really differentiate yourself without having to color your hair purple?

Our guest today is Jeffrey Shaw and he’s going to talk about how you can make yourself more marketable by discovering what makes you different.

A former photographer, Jeff is now a professional speaker, an author, a business coach, and a podcast host. This is Jeff’s second time on the show where previously, he talked about Selling the Intangible.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Jeffrey:

Redefine Your Niche

Jeff believes in the diversified model. Instead, redefine your niche. It’s not the one thing that you do. It’s not the one thing you stand for. It’s not the one audience you serve. The new niche is the space you own. What are you the category king of?

How to find your new niche:

Figure out what makes you different. What makes you different makes you marketable. Every day we’re competing to rise above the noise. Really dig deep and figure out what really makes you different.

How to make yourself different:

• What is your unique perspective? Perspective is as unique as your DNA.
• The biggest mistake people make about storytelling is they allude to the story that they don’t tell their story.
• Fully own who you are. When you let go of whatever it is you’re holding back or keeping and let that show up, that’s what makes you different.
• What’s different about you makes you brandable. Brand that hard so that the world interprets it to just the right perspective that makes you rise above the rest.

Great insights into BRANDING:

• Branding has been given a bad rap because of its so many different definitions.
• The Pareto principle states that 80% of your income comes from 20% of your clients. It can also be said for productivity where 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of your efforts. However, it’s predicted that by 2030, 60% of the American economy will be driven by freelancers. And these folks can’t afford only 2 out of 10 clients to pay off. Therefore, you have to have the right clients.
• The right way to get to your clients is through your branding. Your branding communicates to your customers when you’re not there. Your branding does the talking.
• Branding is done well magnetizes and attracts the people you want and the people you don’t want don’t even know what you’re talking about. If your branding is so spot on, it should be unappealing to people you don’t want to work with.

Understanding your customer’s LINGO

• Your branding has to be aligned to your right clients. Jeff’s upcoming book is called Lingo. Lingo is the evolution of buyer personas and avatars.
• You need to understand how different audiences speak in their minds. If you want to reach them, you have to know what their perspective is.
• It’s all about the experience. Be value-conscious, not money-conscious.

How to get ahead:

Embrace the idea that your business should not follow the 80/20 rule. Make 80% to 90% of your clients your ideal customer. This makes your business predictable because you know exactly the lingo of every person walking in your door. You know how to communicate with them. You get the best results with the least amount of effort.

The 3 I’s

• Impressions
• Involvement
• Interactions

Look at these three I’s to give you a one-of-a-kind perspective about what you do.

Jeff’s Major Takeaway:

Get out of the mindset of selling and into the mindset of moving people. Sales is moving people from one place to another. It’s about moving them from indecision to decision. It’s about moving them emotionally. It’s about knowing and caring so deeply what’s best for people that you want to slowly bring them to where they could best be served. And you do because you’re committed to service and moving people.

Episode Resources:

Get The 12 Must-Have Mindsets for Uncommon Entrepreneurs on www.musthavemindsets.com

Listen to Jeff’s podcast, Creative Warriors

TSE 623: Interview with Jeffrey Shaw – Selling the Intangible

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

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TSE 616: Understanding the Voice of the Customer In Your Data

Sometimes we think we know what our customers think, feel, or want that sometimes when things don’t go down our way, we end up forcing ourselves on them. Remember, people love to buy, not to be sold.

Today’s guest is Kathy Chiang and she shares with us some insights into understanding the voice of customers in your data and how you can take that data and help you make better decisions when it comes to selling.

Kathy works at Wunderman Data Management where she does marketing, real-time marketing analytics, and digital marketing for customers across the globe.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Kathy:

Strategies for understanding the voice of your customer:

1. Data capture and collection.

• Depending on the size of your business and your industry, be able to capture each transaction through the customer information and the record of the series of transactions they’ve done.
• Deliver the true help of one-to-one marketing that came up in the 80’s and the 90’s but the technology wasn’t there to support it.
• Be focused and targeted at your segment and your tools.
• Utilize social media to expand your market reach.
• Having an idea of your buyer personal and their characteristics allows you to use these platforms to target the same persona in a different market.

2. Data visualization

Process your data and put it into data visualization which has now become more automated and easier to use. Get that data into a database and structure it so you can connect it to other systems across the organization. There are data visualization programs available such as Domo, Beckon, or Looker and pass them onto your database that can spot trends and even merging trends so you can try to get ahead of that.

How sellers can use data to sell better:

• Spot emerging trends sooner and see the growth trajectory of their products
• Try to not get swamped in all the data and be able to distinguish a signal from the noise.
• Learn how to put the qualitative, intuitive side of the business in the market.
• Risk is still there but it shortens the time of getting insights in terms of new trends and market opportunities.
• Just know where your customer is on. Segment your market in a way that you’re micro-targeting groups of people and deliver a message that speaks to them.

Kathy’s Major Takeaway:

Give your customers a seat in the business. Make them a part of your business. You think you know your customers want and then you end up forcing them. Close that loop by tapping into data and bringing that back into the process. Then give your customers voice in your business and you’ll get rewarded for it.

Episode Resources:

Check out Kathy’s book here,  Monetizing Your Data

Wunderman Data Management

Domo

Beckon

Looker

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TSE 518: Why You Need an Effective Bridge Between Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing need to communicate properly as they both seek to bring value to the table. Ultimately, the goal is to increase revenue. Today’s guest, Giles House, shares with us how you can better improve the communication between sales and marketing to help you become more effective in your organization.

Giles is the Chief Marketing Officer at CallidusCloud, a fast-growing global enterprise and SaaS company that features the Lead to Money suite, which is a marketing and sales services platform that helps people manage their businesses from leads to closing deals to making money.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Giles:

Major challenges in sales and marketing:

• Getting the basic processes right
• Disconnected in the end goal of driving revenue
• Falling into the silos

Think about the 360-degree view of the salesperson

Many salespeople tend to check the lead away if they’re not ready now, not realizing that 50% of these people are in an active sales cycle with competition because they failed to nurture them. This is a symptom of not having a good process in place.

Disconnected journey from lead to money

There is misalignment in your sales process due to the lack of data that disconnects the journey of the buyer. You lose data. You lose insight. You lose the ability to cross-sell and upsell.

A need for artificial intelligence

There is a need to look through data and be able to suggest opportunities to sell them more.

Data as the underlying thread

The more different systems you use for the sales process, the more complicated things get and the more inaccurate your data will be.

They key is to prioritize your client’s problems that align with what you can offer as well as manage their time frame to get in the order you want instead of the order they want.

The role of data is to analyze other opportunities that are less obvious and to catch the plates that just might fall from the many plates a salesperson is juggling.

Pre-sale is the new post-sale

Begin at the first contact you have with the company. Get that right. Be that value-added advisor and they will keep coming back to you.

KPI’s to pay attention to:

• Cross-sell and upsells as good indicators
• Customer survey and feedback

Giles’ Major Takeaway:

Understanding what the customer is doing gives you an opportunity to sell more. Think about the 360 of the customer and think about the 360 view of the salespeople.

Episode Resources:

Connect with Giles on www.calliduscloud.com and on Twitter @HouseGiles.

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TSE 433: This Is How Your Sales & Marketing Team Should Work

Sales and marketing either don’t mix well together or other companies see them as one in the same. Well, they’re not. Sales and marketing are two different things. However, they have to align in every step so you can make the buying process for customers both beneficial to them and to you as a company.

I’m bringing in Tracy Eiler on the show today as she shares with us a ton of insights from her book Aligned to Achieve: How to Unites Sales and Marketing Teams Into a Single Force for Growth to help us understand the power of aligning sales and marketing in any business, big or small.

Tracy is a lifelong B2B marketer where she has spent most of her time in technology companies and helping businesses figure out a way to get the biggest deals and make their sales teams the most productive. Her mantra is that marketing exists to make sales easier. She is currently the Chief Marketing Officer of InsideView, a Market Intelligence Platform solution that produces results across sales and marketing operations.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Tracy:

Why she wrote the book Aligned to Achieve: How to Unites Sales and Marketing Teams Into a Single Force for Growth

Changes in the market that make alignment of sales & marketing an imperative:

1. The buyer has changed a lot.

Buyers are more in control of the buying cycle, doing their research online before they even approach a company. They’re not making themselves identifiable to sales and marketing but they’re much more informed when they do come to you.

2. Proliferation of technology for sales and marketing.

There too many choices in technology now. Most of the sales and marketing teams receive different reports from tools in the market place. They’re not measuring the same things and they’re getting in their way.

The book is broken down into three sections:

1. People issues (Leadership, culture)

They surveyed over 1,000 sales and marketing people to find out their biggest issues around alignment and communication was the number one issue. Communication takes a lot of forms such as the cadence in meetings, metrics, leadership and cultural issues. (In their book, they have a checklist or test that you can take to measure whether your sales team really trusts you.)

2. Process issues (First lead generation, closing deals, and customer satisfaction)
3. Technology and data issues

Strategies for a better sales and marketing team:

1. Have a “smarketing” meeting.

This is a practical meeting where you discuss what has just happened in your marketing campaigns with sellers and what’s happening at this moment. This is an opportunity for marketing to show sales some concepts, how they’re doing it and get their opinion. The more transparent marketing can be with sellers, the better relationships there’s going to be. This gives sellers an opportunity to get some of their creative ideas in front.

2. Align around metrics.

Retention is an example of a metric you could use. The main focus is whether you bring customers in or not? Tracy believes marketers should be measured by pipeline. Marketing delivers some set of qualified leads that have met the criteria you’ve all agreed on.

3. The traditional marketing funnel model is obsolete.

There are so many businesses that are based on subscription services, for instance, where the expansion of customer relationship is constantly moving around. They could be found along the different points of the sales process (ex.engagement, closing, growing) so the cycle just continues and continues. Hence, there are a lot of processes go throughout this new funnel.

4. Every step of the process must have definitions and hand-offs.

You need to agree on what a lead is, what makes that app, and agree on that definition. Also agree on the hand-off between marketing to sales to make sure it’s clean. Every hand-off process needs to be examined every step of the way. Both sales and marketing should understand what it takes to get a complete stranger to become a customer.

5. Focus on data strategy for account-based marketing

There are a number of tools now that you can use to penetrate accounts more broadly. But there is an overlooked piece for account-based marketing which is the data strategy. This means you have to have an agreed-upon set of accounts that you need to go after.

How you can define your Account Score could be things like:

Behavior of the customer’s interest – Over time, interest may increase

Different tools you can use: Marketo, Engage PEO

Episode Resources:

Connect with Tracy on LinkedIn or send her an email at tracy.eiler@insideview.com or visit www.insideview.com for more information and resources.

Tracy Eiler’s book Aligned to Achieve: How to Unites Sales and Marketing Teams Into a Single Force for Growth

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