Do You Suck?

Posted on | June 30, 2009 | No Comments

With all of the craziness in our world today, it’s easy to get caught up in the negative hype and let it affect our performance. I draw a half-hearted chuckle from audiences when I say, “…the reason you’re not closing sales isn’t because the economy is in the crapper…it’s because you suck.” Yes, I know, that’s a pretty broad statement, but I think it rings true in many instances, whether its applied to one person or a team of hundreds.

Let’s face it - someone is selling to the client you’re calling on. The client is making a buy somewhere and has budget to do something. Besides, any salesperson knows that humans buy what they want, not what they need.

Increase your chances of success by following these steps:

Know your client’s business. Amazing, but true. You actually need to spend a little time researching your client’s business before you pick up the phone, send an e-mail or show up for a meeting. Trust me, you don’t want to be that gal or guy sitting across from an exec with a look of panic when she asks, “Bob, tell me what you know about our business.” Not being prepared is a great way to end a meeting (and/or a relationship) prematurely.
Know what keeps your client up at night. We all need to deliver, whether its for our own bottom line, to fulfill some goofy ‘management by objective’ quota or any number of very valid reasons. That said, we all face challenges we want to overcome, some tougher than others. Find out what’s keeping your client up at night and figure out a way to fix it (hopefully, with your product or service.)
Manage expectations. Make sure you clearly identify and can articulate what the client expects you to deliver and what you expect from the client. No ambiguity here - it needs to be crystal clear.
Establish responsibilities. In order to meet those expectations, both parties will have specific responsibilities. Get them written down and agreed to, again, with no ambiguity. It’s very tough to achieve success (or measure results) if you haven’t established ground rules, including who will do what and when.
Give/Get Feedback. This is probably the most common cause of failure in business, projects, relationships - you name it. You have to communicate. Once expectations have been established and responsibilities identified and agreed to, you need to communicate progress (or lack thereof.) Once feedback has been provided and evaluated, you go right back to re-establishing expectations and responsibilities once again, with the end result more often than not being a very satisfied client.

Follow the steps above, communicate effectively and often, and I promise you most definitely will not suck.

Category: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy

Spotlight: Digital Mindshare co-Editor Julien Sharp

Posted on | June 22, 2009 | No Comments

julien-sharp-author-for-web

Hello Digital Mindshare readers and community!

I’m Julien Sharp, and I am thrilled to be working with Gene De Libero to expand and grow DigitalMindshare.net. My passion is social media, particularly in the way it has changed - or really expanded - the way people communicate. I have been a writer for many years, gravitating toward sales, advertising, and web copy, as well as interview-based reporting. In 2003, I completed received my MS in Psychology, where my focus was on systems theory. I studied how people behave in systems, from family systems, to social/friendship systems, to work systems (such as work teams or departments).

In 2004, I had the opportunity to work with Ivan Misner, the founder of BNI, an international business networking organization, who wanted to replicate a study he had done on networking in 1985. We surveyed BNI members from all over the world, and got thousands of responses, which allowed us to publish some very accurate results of the state of networking at the time.

In the study, one of the questions we asked was “How involved are you in online networking organizations?” When Dr. Misner mentioned wanting to add this question, it was my first real introduction to the growing trend of online networking. LinkedIn was really in its initial phase, Ecademy was more well-known in the UK than the US, and there certainly weren’t the number of online networking opportunities that exist today. However, from that introduction, I became very active in a few of these networks.

Then, in 2008, Entrepreneur Press approached me to write a how-to-book on launching an online social networking business. I’m really excited that it is coming out this month. Normally, a “techie” book would be written and published very quickly. In this case, the publishing date was extended, in part due to production schedules, and in part due to the economy. While that was initially frustrating, it turned out to provide an incredible opportunity: The chance to truly study the trends of social networking for over a year.

The changes in that single year were - in a word - astronomical. When I was first contacted by Entrepreneur Press, MySpace was still at the top of the heap. By the time the book went into pre-production, Facebook had far overtaken MySpace, and this month the former giant announced it was laying off 400 employees. In early 2008, Twitter was still for the geeks, SXSW attendees, and early adopters. Today, nearly everyone has at least heard of it (especially after the celebrities started “tweeting”), and its role in helping keep information flowing about the Iranian elections has certainly taken the platform to its highest level yet.

As more and more people “socialize” online, so is there more and more discussion of how “healthy” is it to spend so much time with “virtual” relationships. This is a particularly fascinating topic for me, given my graduate studies of social systems. It is also why I covered the topic of bridging offline and online networks in my book. I revisited this topic in an article just published on Entrepreneur.com:

As most of the country’s top networking experts agree, an online network can grow faster and have longer life if the network offers its members face-to-face meeting opportunities, making the networking more “real” at a fundamental level. And those networks that have traditionally only met in person can extend relationships by adding an online component.

I am curious to hear from our readers: What has been your experience in online/offline networking - do you participate in both? Do you find you do most of your networking (for jobs, for business development, for fun) online or “in person” these days? If you have a story to share, please leave it in the comments or contact us - we’d like to revisit this in a future post!

Julien

Julien Sharp is the author of Design and Launch an Online Social Networking Business in a Week, and a contributing author to Masters of Sales: Secrets From Top Sales Professionals That Will Transform You Into A World Class Salesperson by Ivan Misner, PhD and Don Morgan, MA, both available from Entrepreneur Press.

DOOH: What if you threw a party and nobody cared?

Posted on | June 18, 2009 | No Comments

Having spent many years and a lot of hard earned money hacking my way through the bush in the digital-out-of-home (DOOH) space, I had to chuckle when I came across an article this morning on DigitalBeat regarding Outcast and AdtekMedia (owner of PumpTopTV) joining forces to create a network of gas pump video displays.

The article states, “The two companies will have a combined monthly audience of 20 million viewers a month. That’s roughly equal to a top five primetime TV show.”

Let’s get real. I think what they’re really saying is that their screens see about 20 million viewers a month, not that 20 million viewers are actually watching, let alone taking action on an advertisement they saw on a gas pump display! The reality is that although the audience may be “captive” because they’re standing in front of the display while they fill their car with gas, what they’re seeing on the screen in many cases will have no real value or relevance to them. They may look once, but they wont be looking in the future.

The excerpt below from the PeC Traffic Report makes sense, and applies to marketing both online and off:

The ability to simply ignore advertising has its roots in human psychology. Habituation is the gradual reduction of psychological or behavioral response over time as a person is repeatedly shown a particular stimulus. In laymen’s terms, it means that because Madison Avenue advertising agencies have been bombarding people with so many ads for so long. those ads essentially become muted—they are like background noise that consumers just tune out.

Depending on who you ask, American consumers, as an example, are exposed to between 300 and 3,000 advertisements per day on average. In that hail of “Buy Now,” “Limited Time Offer,” and “New and Improved,” ads it is little wonder that humans have had to take psychological cover. Even the most modest estimates would translate into an ad every three minutes for every waking hour of the day.

Basically, the bad news for our friends at Outcast and AdtekMedia (and any other company involved in some hokey, interruptive, “captive audience” marketing play) is that people just ain’t watching. For more external validation of this, go to a WalMart and ask the employees and customers if they’re watching WalMart TV (or have ever watched!)

What would be really valuable to the marketplace is to publish comments from clients who’ve advertised on this network and seen some real ROI. Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely love the idea of DOOH, but my experience has shown that people just aren’t watching these displays and just as important, that advertisers aren’t seeing a return on their marketing investment in this medium.

Until we learn how to connect with our target audience in a way that’s relevant and meaningful to them, they’ll continue to ignore the noise and focus on what’s important - tanking up and moving on.

Category: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Digital Technologies
Tags: digital out of home > dooh > interruption marketing > interruptive advertising > interruptive marketing > Narrowcasting

“Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.)”

Posted on | June 17, 2009 | No Comments

Seth Godin has a post on his blog today titled, “Scalejacking.”

Dave Balter coined this great term. It describes the quest of marketers for size at all costs. Because marketers were raised on the scale of mass—TV, radio, newspapers—they have a churn and burn mentality. The internet turns this upside down. The internet is about who, not how many. The internet lets you take really good care of 100 people instead of harassing 2,000.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s about getting the right message to the right people at the right time in the right place. The Web (like any digital channel, or “addressable media”) allows the marketer to focus the message for maximum relevance. But in order for the ‘narrowcasting’ approach to work, you need to have a very clear understanding of at least these three things:

Your target audience
How they consume content
How they create content

You can’t choose a digital channel for your marketing initiative until you’ve got good information about all of the above, otherwise you’re missing the boat. As Seth says,

On the Internet, the mantra that works is, “Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.)”

It’s far better to reach 1,000 people who find your message highly relevant than 1,000,000 who could care less. Go forth and Narrowcast!

Category: Digital Strategy, Narrowcasting

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Do You Suck?

Spotlight: Digital Mindshare co-Editor Julien Sharp

DOOH: What if you threw a party and nobody cared?

“Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.)”

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