Marketing Experiments Archives - The Sales Experiment

April 14, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

3 Productivity Lessons from the Movement Marketing Summit (So Far)

As I write this post, this is day 8 of the Movement Marketing Summit (4/14/2015 – but the lessons will be evergreen).

The Summit is a two week online conference put on by Aj Amyx and Andy Zitzmann.

I’ve been power listening to the videos during my morning and afternoon commutes (I wish online video players would make it possible to listen at 1.5X or 2.0X speed) and have noticed a few lessons popping up again and again.

These productivity lessons will transform your marketing efforts if you consistently implement them.

1. The 15 Minute Rule

Nearly every single presenter (from Aaron Walker to Sue B. Zimmerman) referenced spending around 15 minutes a day on something. From time spent meditating, to writing in a journal for a morning routine, to time spent engaging on social media or creating an image to post on Instagram.

The 15 Minute Rule kept surfacing. The rule is significant for two reasons:

The 15 Minute Rule Overwhelms Overwhelm: One of our biggest struggles in implementing new strategies or personal or sales disciplines is that we get overwhelmed by all the time we’ll have to spend. Just take 15 minutes. Pick one thing. Do it. Then start doing something else (and if you happen to get traction, then keep on going).
The 15 Minute Rule Leverages the Compound Effect: 15 minutes a day, everyday, will turn the titanic and start sending you in the right direction. 15 minutes of strength exercise. 15 minutes of sending value out via Twitter. 15 minutes of focused time with your children or your spouse. That 15 minutes will transform your life.

2. The 80/20 Rule

While I do not believe that the 80/20 rule is a universal law like gravity or the fact that there’s one tabletop or countertop that is required to be cluttered with junk mail, I do believe that it is a good starter guideline. (Check Web.Search.Social’s Carol Lynn and Ralph Rivera’s writing and podcasting on the 80/20 rule for there passionate, yet well thought-out, rebuttals to our lemming-like belief in the 80/20 principle).

If you are starting out in sales and marketing, the temptation is to try to get people to buy your stuff. Consequently, we spend 80% of the time asking everybody to buy, click, or signup and only 20% of the time adding value.

The 80/20 Rule in marketing is that you share and give value 80% of the time while spending only 20% of the time trying to capture value.

By keeping the 80/20 Rule in mind, you can shift your mindset toward bringing massive value 80% of the time, so that during the 20% of time that you do make offers, you’ll have more leverage with your audience.

You can apply this rule any way you want, but the long and short is that you need to go heavy on value. 20% is NOT a small percentage, so this still gives plenty of permission to serve people by showing them how to buy your stuff. More importantly, this 20% time you spent pitching or selling? That’s not slimy, smarmy, gross, or dumb. It’s giving people an opportunity to buy a solution to their problems.

Therefore, it’s 100% value, just broken down a bit to help keep you from machine-gun pitching.

3. The Checklist Rule

One key discipline that most presenters seemed to have but didn’t make too much fanfare about is the use of a checklist or process.

The power of checklists is in three key areas:

Your Self-Discipline: Self-discipline is a muscle. The more you have to use it during the day, the weaker it gets as the day goes on. When we have to use our short-term memories and that annoying nudge in the back of our minds to remember to keep disciplines around marketing, sales, or other processes, we use up that self-discipline unnecessarily. Using a checklist removes the need to access that limited resource.
Your Trustworthiness: People do business with those they know, like, and trust. Trust isn’t only about trusting your character. It’s trusting that you’ll deliver content and value in a consistent way. Checklists helps keep your product (you, your content, your marketing) delivered in an expected, consistent format. That will build trust.
Your Stress-Level: Checklists give your brain permission to relax. If you had to remember every process, every time, your stress level would go up. And that’s miserable. Another piece of awesome is that if you have checklists, you can further decrease your stress by outsourcing processes to virtual assistants (and those real-life assistants that work in your office).

A Bonus Observation

True confession: I’d never heard of Aj Amyx or Andy Zitzmann until I got an email from Jeff Goins about this Summit.

Apparently, these guys have quite the following. I thought I’d heard of all online marketers and coaches. I was wrong. By the way, Amyz and Zitzmann have put on a stellar online Summit. They ask insightful questions and offer up some golden nuggets of knowledge, themselves.

The Lessons Here

Learn from New People: Don’t limit yourself to the people you’ve heard of. Every once in a while, take in a new webinar or follow a new rabbit trail. Not only had I not heard of Amyx and Zitzmann (I fear that sounds bad, but it’s not. I’m an insurance agent. I can’t know it all), I hadn’t heard of the lion’s share of their guests. Through these fresh voices, I found some new perspectives.
Your Market Has Room for You: I don’t suspect that most of you will want to become online marketers or coaches. The space seems filled to the rim with talent. But the fact that I just now discovered about 30 new voices who are making online hay tells me that even this glutted market has space. Therefore, your market – whatever it is – has plenty of room for you, as long as you bring grit, determination, and your authentic self to the table.

To Wrap It Up…

Pick a discipline, create a process for it, and do it daily – for 15 minutes a day. Make sure that, even if you’re not specifically putting out 80% ‘generous value’ vs. 20% selling and pitching, that you tint everything you do with the generosity that the 80/20 rule represents.

March 2, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

5 Reasons Why Cold Calling Is Not Dead (and Never Will Be)

I love social media more than the average sales professional. I love to blog and tweet and Facebook and connect on LinkedIn. I even have a secret affinity to Pinterest and Instagram – not typical for insurance sales guys.

But having been involved in social media for this long simply confirms my belief that cold calling is not dead.

If you want to make hay in higher stakes selling, then you must pick up the phone and make calls. Just like the most beautiful cheerleader wasn’t running around searching for dates, your most coveted future client isn’t trolling LinkedIn to find a service provider.

That client already has someone who that client assumes is doing a good job. Further, fewer individuals are on LinkedIn and Twitter than we imagine, especially when it comes to key contacts in targeted firms. These contacts didn’t rise in the rinks because they were spending all their time on social media.

Cold Calling, Defined

Much current sales literature might malign cold calling by redefining cold calling as blindly taking a list of prospects and powering through dial after dial.

That is a version of cold calling.

These days, most of us can do a little research and relationship-building online or through other venues. I would include making calls based on basic research as cold calling. Unless you’ve gained specific permission to call, then it’s a call that is unexpected.

At the very least, you should be clear on the type of firm or client you can best serve before you start dialing.

Current social selling proponents might call well-researched calling ‘warm calling’, but when most new sale pros have any leeway NOT to make calls, even well-researched calls, they will not, citing that ‘it doesn’t work’ or ‘nobody takes calls’ or some other excuse.

A cold call for our purposes here: Any call you make during a specified prospecting session to a company or individual who is not expecting a call from you, for the purpose of building a business relationship.

Why Cold Calling Is Not Dead

There are a bunch of reasons why cold calling is not dead. Even when you hear your favorite online or sales trainer gurus tell you that it’s an ineffective method of prospecting, please do not believe that person. Find that trainer or online resource (I suggest Anthony Iannarino or Paul Castain as places to start) who are active on social and blog regularly, while still encouraging using prospecting calls as part of your relationship-opening arsenal.

5 Reasons Why Cold Calling Isn’t Dead

Your key client isn’t looking for you

I touched on this above, but the client you want to work with – that whale, isn’t always looking for a new provider of goods and services. You might need to start adding value. But before you do, that client needs to know you exist. Making a telephone call is a very effective way of doing so.

Your key client might need you, but doesn’t know where to find you

I’ve run into this scenario a few times. I call a prospect from a general, but targeted list, and gotten the response, “You sell insurance specifically to nonprofits? Oh good. We need you. We’ve had a hard time finding an insurance agent that gets us.” If you niche out well, then your future clients desperately need you, but they don’t know where you are.

Your key client isn’t actually on Twitter or LinkedIn

Again, we touched on this above. My whole C-Suite at my current employer’s office is not active on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. You would never get in with my firm as a service provider by trolling social media. You might gain a little information about us, but you’d never directly connect to a decision-maker.

Cold calling requires clarity about your value proposition

Cold calling requires that you lead with value, not relationship. The person on the other end of the line does not know, like, or trust you yet, and one of the only ways to gain traction is by a quick hit of value. Consequently, making effective cold calls requires that you mine the value that you create for others. This makes cold calling relevant because it requires that you define your own relevance to your prospects. As a by-product, this practice will make your social media efforts even more compelling.

Cold calling requires that you gain commitments

This reason might sound more like a skill you have to acquire vs. a reason why cold calling isn’t dead. In truth, all sales is a practice in gaining commitments. All sales requires some measure of boldness. Cold calling is an effective way of learning how to ask for the next commitment from your prospective client and why they should commit to your process in the first place. Social selling often is an endless circle of likes, reposts, and favorites, never requiring someone to ask for a commitment, thus, never resulting in sales.

Bonus Reason: Cold calling allows you to tell people about your content and social marketing efforts

Your social efforts could, possibly, make your cold calling more relevant by giving you a very tiny, simple commitment to gain from your prospect. Use the call to connect on LinkedIn, Twitter, or to point the individual to your stellar blog content.

Do You Still Make Prospecting Calls?

Do you still find success making calls? Do you have a regular weekly or daily practice of picking up the phone and calling individuals who aren’t expecting your call?

Let me know in the comments what works for you – or if you’ve punted the practice, and why

January 8, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

Starting New Habits by Creating Deadlines

I sat down with a colleague today and worked on setting up a personal sales and marketing plan for the next few months.

He had engaged me to assist him in creating a plan that he could implement to kick his sales efforts up a notch.

I’m not technically a sales trainer, but consuming content and attempting to implement said content has helped me to recognize patterns in me and in others.

I see that while many of us want change, we fail to create deadlines to reinforce and establish new habits.

Therefore, when I sat down with my colleague, I attempted to focus on developing a clear system.

The Importance of Committing to New Habits

My suggestion was to be systematic and habit-focused:

Decide on an ideal client profile.
Create a list of at least 100 potential prospects that fit said profile.
Commit to weekly prospecting appointments with self that are every bit as important to commit to as client appointments. Be violently committed to that time.
Use that time in a systematic way: make calls, intentionally research client organizations, write content.
Make note of ALL questions that current clients and prospects ask and have that running list handy.
Use those questions to create consistent emails, blog posts, mailers.
Reach out to that list of 100 as close to a monthly basis as possible as the relationships open up.

And I suggested that he commit to having the list of 100 list in a week and to have the first email scheduled to go out on a specific day, even if only one person is on his list on that day.

We settled on a specific date to send out that initial email, but I felt some hesitation. No list yet. Who is he going to email?

I said that it doesn’t matter. Put a couple current clients on your list and send something out.

Give yourself a deadline. Go ahead and write the email for that matter. Why not?

Change Is Simply The Accumulation of New Habits

This whole program will require developing new habits. The habit to schedule a weekly appointment or two solely dedicated to prospecting. The habit to make note of common questions for content fodder. The habit of sending regular emails out. The habit of taking time to map out potential clients’ organizations and finding connections.

All of these habits require intentionality. They require doing more than just popping on LinkedIn to send a connection request when the idea hits. They require more than just allowing client call-ins to determine who goes into the funnel.

To be better than average requires quality habits.

[Tweet “Quality habits don’t happen by accident. Crappy, useless habits happen by accident.”]

Quality habits happen by creating deadlines, taking a bit of time to plan, and scheduling them in the calendar. There really is no other way to build a new habit.

It’s consistent, daily action.

I hope that my colleague (and I, for that matter) will find some traction. I hope that there’ll be enough reward from forging ahead that the new habits will be reinforced.

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Recent Reading and Listening

Social Media Marketing Happy Hour 163: Fight Your Border Bullies

Dawn Marrs Ortiz and Traci Reuter are two of my new podcast best friends. I love short podcasts with big nuggets of info and experience-gained knowledge. This particular podcast discussed the idea of ‘border bullies’ – those folks who stand around the edge of your safe life and encourage you strongly NOT to push the envelope and slay your dragons and forge new territory and pursue passions (and all the other metaphors that indicate moving outside of your comfort zone).

3 Questions That Matter Most This Year – Jeb Blount, Sales Gravy Podcast

Jeb’s is another wonderfully short, power-packed podcast. This episode encourages you to answer these questions this year:

What do you want?
How do you plan to get it?
How bad do you want it?

It’s stuff you know, but more than likely you need to listen to it again. I, for one, have learned that it matters not how much I know. It matters what I do with what I know. As soon as ‘I’ve heard that before’ comes out of my mouth, the very next statement better be, ‘And I did something about it.’

Pinterest Smart Feed Is It Bad for Business? – Oh So Pinteresting Podcast with Cynthia Sanchez

I love Pinterest. I’m not all that consistent with it, but thanks to Ms. Sanchez, I’m getting better and better at it. I highly recommend her podcast and other content. She’s the go-to girl on the topic (in my humble opinion).