Ideas & Musings on BtoB Revenue Growth
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A great set of tips about on-the-fly sketching from XPlane are directly related to a recent post here about “2.0ing your sales meetings”
Happy to see that collaborative selling approaches are becoming popular, and now insightful companies like XPlane and WhiteBoard Selling are helping sales reps get more interactive and collaborative. That can only translate into greater customer relevance, and more productive and valuable sales meetings.
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Your sales reps need to know how your customers think about their customers. How educated are they about this? Everyone gets product training, but other desperately needed enterprise sales education topics are neglected. Here are a few:
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I hate hate hate pricing my consulting work. There is always a tension between the value it brings to the client (which gurus like Alan Weiss will tell you is the only thing that matters), the reality of the client’s budget, the amount of effort and expertise required, internal company politics, etc.
So even before reading the article about a coffee shop that does not post prices, I had tried handing the pricing reigns to clients by asking some version of, “What do you think this work should cost, given the value you expect it will bring?”
Results? Some clients did not want to name a number, and I ended up pricing the project as usual. Some DID name a price: always higher than I would have quoted. The difference: Clients who were comfortable naming a price already knew me and had worked with my firm before. It seems letting your customer set the price may be a great model when:
1. The customer is well-informed about the product and its value, or can become informed easily and quickly as in the case of the coffee shop. (This is the basis for free trials: Assume the customer will assign little or no value when first encountering a product. Depend on familiarity leading customers to agree with you on price.)
2. The customer has had some exposure to competing products and prices, and has a basis for comparing the relative worth of your product vs. the others.
3. The customer has a relationship with you, even if only a momentary one (note in the video that the cafe owner describes people “looking him in the eye and stating what they think is fair”)
Share your thoughts on if and when letting customers set the price is the right thing to do.
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It was great to be speaking to a room full of entrepreneurs last Thursday at the TechCoire panel, Strategies to Drive Revenue in a Recession. Gopan Madathil masterfully organized the event. The big takeaways form our panelists (Igor Shoifot of Fotki, Rajat Paharia of Bunchball, and Vadim Rosenberg of CA) for generating revenue in this economy:
Got more ideas for driving revenue while everyone clutches their wallet ? Comment!
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Social networking channels are not the only way to make your marketing efforts more interactive. While you experiment with social media, you can make traditional marketing methods conversational too.
Getting customers to contribute to the substance in your marketing content, events, products will raise the value and trust customers place in them. Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, demonstrates that “labor enhances affection for its results.”
This week I’ll be posting a series of ideas on adding interaction and soliciting active customer engagement and contribution through traditional marketing tools. Here are a few to start off.
Have you tried these or other ways to engage customers in conversations? Share them in your comment!
Read More
Turn Marketing into Conversations – Part 2
Turn Marketing into Conversations – Part 3
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Companies used to selling products struggle to shift to “solution selling”. There are lots of obstacles – product-oriented habits, the never-ending argument of “what’s a solution, anyway?” (more on that in a future post), sales reluctance to adopt new techniques, etc. Before we put the big strategy and sales kickoff program in place to “transform Sales”, however, lets first look upstream at marketing.
As any sales approach, solution selling starts with customer-relevant content, programs, and ultimately (we hope) leads. All supplied by marketing. In this case, by Solution Marketing. Understanding how its different from product marketing can pave the way to a smoother transition and solution selling success.
Solutions Marketing is about shifting your perspective and context. A solutions approach to marketing places your offerings within the context of the customers’ broader situation and needs. It starts with the customer and their desired outcomes, instead of with you and your products. (Note – their objective is NOT to buy a product.) Focusing on the customer’s broader context means solution marketing can encompass aspects of the customer’s needs that your own product or service may not solve. The value prop IS the customer’s desired outcome, not your product’s superiority.
Let’s be really clear – “Solution Selling” and “Solution Marketing” are not the same as actually selling and marketing solutions. They are approaches to how your customers become aware of, learn about, interact with, and commit to your business. They don’t require that you actually offer a complete solution – only that you understand the role you play in helping customers achieve their objectives.
Ultimately, solutions marketing must support solution selling. That means giving sales reps and channel partners the knowledge and tools they need to carry the customer-centric view through the entire sales process and beyond.
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