The Salesby5 Blog

Thank you for joining us over here to continue, Innovate or Die.  If you hadn’t seen Part 1, head over to MySA.  In developing your product or service to be meaningfully unique, you’ll need to leverage three additional points.

Explore Stimulus

Exploring stimulus is a crucial component to the development of new ideas.  In typical brainstorming, people make a list of ideas to develop something out of nothing.  Imagine if you decided that you wanted to buy a new digital camera.  Rather than coming up with a list of features you’d dreamed up, wouldn’t it be easier and more effective if you reviewed different models for the features, benefits, designs and quality to make a decision versus trying to come up with a list of things you think you’d like?  Exploring stimulus when developing a new product is the same, where you begin with some building blocks to develop brand new ideas.

Leverage Diversity

Leveraging diversity requires taking different members of your team, even suppliers and vendors, and looking to them to provide new pieces of inspiration.  If you only ask one team for their view on a rose, they might all come back saying beauty.  Leveraging the diversity can yield different perspectives on the same rose including vitamin c tea, romance and rose water.  Bring in different teams and look at what different world views can do for your process.

Drive Out Fear

Drive out fear by applying a system to your innovation process.  Deming, who helped Japan rebuild after WWII implemented what we knew in school as the Scientific Method.  Plan > Do > Study > Act.  Plan what you’re going to do and what you want to test.  Do what you’ve planned inexpensively.  Study the results.  Act on your findings to adjust your idea.  A fail fast, fail cheap attitude is best in finding out whether your idea is worth determining that you should continue, you should quit or you should continue but adjust course.

How do customers perceive your products, services and innovations?

5% ROI success rate: The Boston Consulting Group found that only 4.5% of innovations meet or beat targets for return on investment. This is an 86% decline, down from the 35% innovation success rate reported in 1985.

83% of brands are becoming commodities: A survey by Copernicus Marketing Consulting found that in 40 out of 48 categories consumers perceived brands as becoming more alike and, in only 3 categories (automobiles, liquor, and beer) was brand name considered more important than price.

The  key distinction between innovations that exceed ROI expectations and those that fail is dramatic difference.  Invest your resources in products or services which customers truly perceive an overt benefit in and provide them with a real reason to believe. Otherwise, you better fail fast and fail cheap!

Source Doug Hall

Last December, seeking to enhance sales, Gary Vaynerchuk offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.

Are you using social media to get your story out there? You don’t have to pay for attention anymore.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of hearing Malcolm Gladwell speak for the first time. He told the story of a man named Vivek. Vivek was born and raised in Mumbai, but he was living in Silicon Valley with his family. His 12 year old daughter decided that she wanted to join a basketball team. Wanting to spend more time with his daughter, Vivek decided to be the basketball coach for his daughter’s team, though he didn’t know anything about the game. To learn more, he watched basketball on tv. What struck him as unusual was that the teams would score, then run to their side of the court, much unlike soccer, where the team scores then the opposite team has to work their way down the field. Having viewed this, he made two decisions: 1) he would never yell at the girls 2) he would teach the girls to play a full court press style of defense. For those of you (like me!) that don’t know about a full court press, it means that you play defense across the court, versus running back to your own side after scoring. To do so, he had the girls waving their arms frantically when the opposing team was throwing the ball back into play, in hopes of intercepting the ball. If that didn’t work, the girls were to surround the girl who caught the ball and wave their hands wildly to block. Fortunately, the strategy worked. The girls, with no basketball experience in their past and a coach who didn’t know the game, went to nationals the first year. The most interesting part was the reaction from the opposing teams coach. Initially, the coach would yell at his girls. Then, the anger would be directed towards the referee, who was clearly “blind” and “incompetent.” Finally, the aggravation became too much for the opposing team and the wrath was cast on Vivek and his girls. They were called cheats, would sometimes have a chair thrown onto the court and Vivek was even threatened by an opposing team’s coach.

Vivek and his girls basketball team is a brilliant example of focus and of rewriting the rules of the game. Vivek knew that his group of undersized, non-athletic 12 year old girls would not be the super star team of athletes, but likely the kids going to Cal Tech. Knowing this, he stayed away from the popular and glamorous portion of the game – offense – and maintained absolute dedication to the part he knew his girls could dominate – defense – on every play, in every game. Vivek rewrote the rules by not going toe-to-toe with the best and the brightest in the league; he created a separate path that was within the rules, but not necessarily the norm.

Consider this, in battles where underdog armies, those considered to be 1/10th the size of its opposition, go to fight, they typically win about 30% of the time. When those underdog armies create a strategy outside of the normal methods of battle, the winning percentage jumps to 65%! Take a look at your company and your sales process. Are you battling the 800 lb gorilla daily? If so, are you using Vivek’s full court press strategy or are your sales being stifled because you’re playing by the rules that your competitor wrote. And, if you are, how fast can you get your new strategy in place?

A couple of weeks ago, we spoke to an organization. About 10 minutes after we got there, it was easy to see that this group had no passion and a cluttered purpose. It is amazingly important to have a purpose and live a life that is aligned with your purpose. If you can paint a picture in your mind, the key is 1% vision and 99% alignment. True alignment is everyone focused on where the organization is going, with passion fueled by purpose. This group had none that was visible and it made me worry that they will never be able to reach their goals. In the last nine months, they have had no increase in membership, yet they plan to double it by the end of 2009 (with no strategy). Winning the hearts of your team with your purpose is not easy, but it is necessary in order to align your people towards your goals. Get your team together and help them find their passion for your purpose. Do something exciting to align your team towards something big!

We believe that the future of the marketing piece will continue to evolve away from the company brochure. As the attention span of consumers gets smaller and smaller and the number of marketing messages increases, you need to create a marketing piece that gives concise, pertinent information about your company. We suggest a small two sided card with the following details.

The front of the small two sided card will not focus on the name of your company or your title, but rather what you do; what true benefit your customer receives from you. Then, it will feature how you are different from your competition, being sure that the difference is a true overt benefit. Then, the back of the card will feature a photo of your product or service, your tag line, your website, phone number, and social networking sites where your company can be found.

If you’re interested in distilling your marketing message, grab your best marketing piece, a permanent marker and start cutting. Keep the hard hitting information only. How much IMPORTANT content do you really have left?

We’re in Day 2 of Fortune Small Business’ Sales and Marketing Summit in New Orleans. We heard from Victor Cheng this morning, who gave great clarity to recession proof business. Companies like FedEx, UPS, Price Mart and Coors were all founded during a recession. They succeeded (to say the least) because they solved a problem for consumers at that time. The key to building a recession proof business is to find a solution to a problem that gets worse during a recession, and to do it in a unique way. This can work nicely alongside what we learned from David Meerman Scott yesterday about social media and viral marketing. Once you have your unique solution to a problem, you will have a great story to tell, so you won’t have to spend thousands of dollars on advertising campaigns. Take a look at your company; is there a better way for you to solve a problem or a struggle for consumers today? Your most profitable area may have changed. Don’t be afraid to reinvent your business in order to offer something of real value to your customers.

(If you’re on Twitter, check out @salesby5 for conference details and live tweeting from the event!)

New customers are what drive top-line growth. Al Lautenslager says that “effective marketing is the key to business survival, growth and success.”  Most successful entrepreneurs know that they have to market, but many don’t know where to start or how to cut through the clutter.  Gazelles has invited Al to their Sales and Marketing Summit for his insights into guerilla marketing, the entrepreneur’s preferred method of gaining new business. Have you taken the right steps toward new business? Are you thinking creatively and finding innovative ways to market your products or services?  Tune into the conference to learn the steps to smart marketing with energy and imagination.

Drop us a line in the comments if you have a good example of creative ways you’ve gained new customers.

The rules of marketing and PR have changed, according to David Meerman Scott, who has made it into the Marketing Sherpa Viral Hall of Fame twice, in 2006 and again in 2007. He shows us that the old ways of marketing and PR are outdated; you don’t obsess about being “on message,” break the bank with expensive advertising nor do you beg mainstream media to write about you. Instead, you tell your story directly to an interested market.

With all the tools we have to connect with one another—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Plaxo, to name a few—it is much easier to reach an interested audience. These money and time saving tips are more relevant than ever. To learn more about David Meerman Scott, join us at the Gazelle’s Sales and Marketing Conference!

We believe the answer to selling more in a down economy is using more of your creative ideas. The #1 way to increase creativity is through stimulus such as reading, research, visiting a trade show outside of your field or for a 5% increase, through meditation.

If you are having trouble with sales or with seeing an increase, ask yourself, what are you doing differently? If everything has changed, have you?

Here is a device that has not (yet) hit the mass market, but it has the potential to change the way we give out a business card.  A Poken allows you to connect with your friends and colleagues instantly across online social networks right when and where you meet them.  Imagine all of the ways this could be used.  How are you innovating?  

http://www.doyoupoken.com