They realised that the landscape of personal data availability online has changed hugely in a very short time and despite hysterical outcries about Facebook privacy settings, it is an important area that both brands and consumers should be knowledgable about.
Their concept of “personal data stores” is a really interesting concept that is being built out – imagine you, the consumer, setting the ‘terms and conditions’ for a brand to access your personal information?
It’s called Vendor Relationship Management read more here and here.
But see their great Personal Data infographic published in full with a brief snapshot below showing the 2012 situation…it describes the landscape for legislation, technology, entrepreneurs, corporates and consumers and looks forward in scenarios for each to 2017.
Ctrl-Shift the Personal Data Landscape future
“Your responsibilities”.
Imagine an agency telling a prospective client – not one we’re working with already – that they had to actively participate in delivering to make the marketing programme effective?
I love it.
Now I’m recommending we put this into all new client proposals. It’s authentic and transparent and gives the brand clear boundaries and guidelines that will help us give them exactly what they hired us to do.
What do you do in order to improve your client briefing and agreements?
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Which comes first – getting customers or raising capital?
You prove the model before you get investors in. If you can show repeat revenues from customers. a trial is good but it’s not enough. You have to have a customer who uses your solution in anger – this gives third party validation of the value proposition. Without this, who will give you money?
Most good investors won’t invest unless a company has customers.
Who is the sales person?
You have no choice – it has to be you. You want to hire someone who has a good job and is already selling to your customers – he won’t leave a good job until your offer is proven.
Who buys your stuff?
Who in your target audience – which individual. Who makes the decision? It’s often the women – in Japan that’s institutionalised. So what’s your message to the target and to his wife? Is it different?
The farmer makes an application decision and the farmer’s wife makes a financial decision – an un-complex jury.
A complex jury is a healthcare sale – it needs a clinician to decide but you also need clinical buy-in, a leader/ceo to support and ensure you know there’s budget. The budget guy is often “Dr NO”. What does it take to make him say yes? Show him the ROI… the value proposition. How are we going to make/save more money using your stuff? In a financial crisis it has to be ‘must-have’ because nice to have isn’t good enough.
Would it be easiser to sell your stuff if you didn’t get paid until they got the benefit?
Would that shorten your sales cycle? This concept is mission-critical for entrepreneurs. Reducing the resources it takes to make a sale and accelerating the pace at which people decide to buy from you.
SUMMARY: know well the value you deliver to your customers: Only then you’ll know what the price is!
Generally speaking early entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time making it easy to do business with us. This is one way – you make money: you give me half of it.
They ‘hockey stick’ is a myth too many people hang their business on. In Ken’s Aspen Technology company they fought hard for 17 years – it never was easy. We just worked harder than our competition – our technology wasn’t better than theirs.
When can you hire a sales guy?
When you can afford to (necessity) when you don’t have time yourself. Most sales people you hire should be better than you. When can you hire them? When they can make money for me.
You won’t be able to hire until you have figured out the business model, qualified the value proposition, got the beach-head customer (the biggest farm/ a known hospital) and then you can go and hire a hot shot salesman. “I’m a kid and I need adult supervision.” The stats are compelling – you freaking won’t make it without an adult on the team!
The concept of the “jury”
Understand there isn’t one point of decision especially for B2B sales – understand who they are, functional roles, drivers and limits to their power. Think about what it takes to land an Olympic Games for your City – a winning city bit manager said that he knew the shoe size of one Venezuelan delegate’s daughter! Because he needed his vote.
The sale is everything about the primary driver in commerce = gaining more market share. If you can help someone get more customers they’ll like you. If you can’t you are “road kill”.
Do you increase revenue or decrease costs?
Questions:
Thoughts on the prospects of saturated markets
Negative things: I don’t want to talke about my company until he signs asn NDA because they’ll run away with the secret. Crap. It’s all about execution. Secondly VCs are in the business of helping other companies grow and they won’t screw their reputations by stealing your idea – they’d also just hire someone to build your idea if they wanted it as it isn’t their skill set.
Positive things: If you are worried about talking to a competitior, you shouldn’t be talking to them about how your product is designed anyway. Talk about your passion for solving a custoemr’s problem. Speak about the problem and your startup situation will be obvious Demonstrating you have mastery of the problem is the best way. Selling internally on behalf of the champion is important (I give them a cheat-sheet to follow to get the deal to go through).
Networking follow up advice
HP makes software in perforated tear sheets slightly larger than a business card that you can use at a party – business card on one side and the problem you solve written on the other side. At the end of the party [put the cards of the people they care about in the left pocket and on the way out they throw away the cards in the right jacket pocket]. When should you send your thank you note to someone you met in the evening. Send it before he goes to bed… he’ll be checking his mail before he goes to bed. Don’t get lost in the clutter. How do you write 30 thank you notes after a party? Stay sober – if it’s business you can’t drink it is work, your shareholders pay for you to get your butt there, it’s about meeting people who may buy your stuff; write the letters beforehand 80% will be the same… letterhead, standard explanation about your product – you just top and tail add 20%. Focus. Go to the party to meet one person.
Tips about selling intangibles
If you don’t have a value proposition – forget it. Change your business model. They usually won’t be ready to buy until they get stung once.
How many people use carbonite?
It’s a cloud back-up for everything on your pc and is constantly updated. David Friend – founder is a friend. Get Ben Kepes to look into it – diversity.net.nz Ken’s an investor in carbonite.
We are getting enquiries from people interested in taking stakes
if you are planning on growing, even if you have 65% growth margins you’re going to need outside capital. the longer you wait the less dilution you’ll get. But the longer you wait the higher quality investors you’ll get. If you are over a barrel you take what you can in order to survive but that often screws up the company later. Wait until you have a really good value added investor. Assume you’re successful building your business in NZ you will need more money to go to Asia or USA to capitalise on the growth potential – think about having money that will work for you more than just working capital, open doors, group people, get access to other money. So the angel investors that you get should be entrepreneurs who have done it before and have a rolodex address book that is powerful and is wiling to use it for you. And has access to more institutional capital when you’re ready for your next round of funding.
]]>Staying current with procurement purchasing and how to assess a supplier of web design can be short-circuited by reading Lance Wiggs’ excellent quick assessment of the local market.
If you’re not from his locale, still read it.
- The points he makes about Pricing for services in the Buyers Guide section is instructive. Many agencies are still charging by the hour and it’s clear that over-charging still exists.
- Intermediation or sub-contracting is part of the process and this affects both buyers and sellers. Transparency and honesty are the best approach here.
- The attributes of a “good client” are excellent. Being clear about your role as the buyer is important.
- The Agency Sellers Guide has some great points. Too many agencies rely on word of mouth promotion.
- The attributes of a “good seller” are important. Know thyself.
And finally, the comments. I was the first (*) but there will be many more.
Here’s my penny’s worth of commentary
Lance, great, incisive analysis as ever. Thanks for taking the time to do this work on behalf of the whole industry. I’m a newcomer to Auckland and my agency doesn’t do web design but I will comment on the two parts of your piece that are not wrong, but may mis-represent the way part of the industry is changing.
I am writing a series of blog posts called “The Creative Agency of the Future” #FutureAgency in which I’m collating examples from the business operations practices of agencies who are challenging the status quo and looking for improved ways of delivering excellent marketing services to their clients.http://creativeagencysecrets.com/category/creative-business/future-agency/
Here are two ways that leading agencies are different from the ones you researched:1 – charging. Some agencies are moving away from time/hour charging basis and onto a fee wholly based on results, or partly based on outcomes.
2 – business development. This is my specialism. It makes me cry that marketing agencies can’t market themselves successfully. Many whine about “procurement” or “RFPs” or “pitching and coming second” but the underlying fact is that a planned approach to HOW you win new business tends to deliver MORE new business. If you don’t do it yourself, outsource. It’s the lifeblood of your agency and as you say yourself, relying on word of mouth may not be sufficient for your business survival.
WildfireApp poor quality support
The details of my issue were not resolved by the first ticket I submitted. Then, in order to provoke a response (rather than raise a new ticket) I had to use their ‘customer satisfaction questionnaire’ to add in my supplemental question.
I’m not going to spell out what it takes to offer good customer support but this fails on several levels.
The WildfireApp website fails to give real people’s names, the email contacts for support are all the same (whatever office you use) and I don’t want sales.
Can I speak to a real person?
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It doesn’t work like that.
There certainly are many agencies who sell themselves as inbound or content marketing specialists. And there are just as many brands who say they use Inbound Marketing as part of their promotional mix. Some unscrupulous agencies sell this as the modern web solution and imply that it’s all you need to do to succeed online.
It isn’t.
Inbound marketing Has to be balanced with outbound marketing.
We were listening to Jay Baer on a podcast with Copyblogger and in it he says
“You don’t create demand with inbound marketing, you fulfil demand.”
You are capping your upside
You are reaching out to people who will take the step to find you.
For these people inbound marketing is great, it works.
What about other customers?
But what about all the ones who haven’t yet realised they might need you? For them you need outbound demand generation activity.
Classically this is ‘campaigns’ – executed in many ways, online and offline. Ways to bring your brand to the attention of prospective customers in different marketplaces and with a range of communications.
But there’s more to modern marketing than this. Baer comes back in again with a new catchphrase “YouTility” – this is where you keep your brand front-of-mind in the intervening period between gaining awareness and the point at which the client is ready to purchase.
Blogs and other inbound marketing tools are good at maintaining youtility. And coincidentally these are also good tools for inbound marketing.
See the connection?
Related articles
- Inbound Marketing Attracts Millions from Google, Salesforce and Sequoia (seomoz.org)
- The Ins and Outs of Inbound Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC] (contently.com)
And so we hoped to find a strong follow up to that story and were delighted that Lance Wiggs wrote up a talk John Brackenridge did to the BBD CEO Summit. We were hoping to find out exactly what John hired….
There is a bit of ‘history’ in the industry as Mckinsey was hired to advise on the structure of the growers versus the marketers in 1999 and recommended splitting the marketing and promotion function off into a ‘commercial entity’.
And we thought now was a good time to show off our original 2010 pitch. What’s interesting is that little has changed. We’d still recommend most of the same activity.
Download it here NZ Merino Proposal
Or review the slides.
Here’s some ideas of ways to get over this barrier by appealing to your existing customerbase. They know you, they know your brand and they also know their local area:
1. The English Cut – bespoke Savile Row suits – adding a ready to wear range
English Cut Savile Row suits
I have been on Tom Mahon’s email list for years – not because I buy from him (he only clothes men) but because of his promotional methods using social media and email marketing. In the message I got today he links to a video in which he asks his readers for two things: Recommendations of stores local to their home who might stock his ready to wear range and secondly, introductions to Tailors who might want to make the suits.
The one mistake he made was not specifying ONE SINGLE PLACE for the replies – it came from a noreply email address and the video is both on his site and youtube – so he’ll have to collate answers from a range of sources. I would have chosen to set up an unique email address for replies and mentioned it in the video – printed it on screen.
2. Global Culture wants to expand its retail stockists
The other is an iconic kiwi t-shirt brand who is keen to get new outlets in three cities in New Zealand. Using a trade magazine, we helped them write a short article about the company and its recent growth which included the appeal for new locations.
Global Culture has its target audience in towns where there is a mix of both tourist visitors and locals and so is well-represented in New Zealand towns like Queenstown and Christchurch. It is trying to get introductions to retailers in Gisborne, Napier, Wellington, Tauranga and around the Hawkes Bay region who might be willing to stock their range.
Idealog is the business magazine and website that features innovative businesses and new products or services and so getting the article about Global Culture published there and also included in their daily email news roundup to a recipient list of 5,000 business people was a good start to opening dialogues.
Any of you know of businesses who’ve succeeded in getting expansion plans promoted by customers?
Brian Carroll wrote a super blog post about this subject and came out with solid suggestions about how to get executive support for your proposal or project.
Working with larger organisations means that budgetary control is not always within the grasp of the person wo you’re speaking with.
Brian made these suggestions:
- Identify executive priorities [align your pitch to their priorities]
- Analyse your sales organisation [how much time do they spend prospecting vs closing]
- Show what others have done [sell using case studies]
- Huddle with your sales team [check you're on the same page on what works/doesn't work]
- Develop a pilot
All great advice – read the full article here for the detail and the links Brian suggests.
But how to up-sell your proposal to the Marketing Director?
Last month we had three situations where Creative Agency Secrets was approached by a member of staff who didn’t have sufficient authority to buy our services – but they wanted to work with us.
Take a read of these three mini-case studies on how to upsell your proposal to your contact’s boss.
- We wrote to the CEO stating the issue and a solution – he forwarded it to the young man who’d originally approached us with a note to investigate our ‘offer’…. Nice way to let the CEO think he had the idea first.
- We took a detailed brief from the junior and agreed not to write a proposal, but to email him a critique of the company website and sales process – he then took that to the CEO for discussion with a view to getting a con call for us with the CEO.
- We analysed the issue; suggested a small pilot. This fitted the budget for which the executive already had sign-off but was below our normal charge out rate. We worked to adapt the campaign to work on a parallel platform and to an audience we controlled [our blog newsletter list] thus giving the exec a case study pilot with measurable results which he could use to prove the case to his bosses. This also enabled us to demonstrate our skill and set up the campaign to deliver the ROI needed.
Related articles
- Aha! Marketing Leaders Reveal Their Most Powerful Marketing Insights from 2011 (customerthink.com)
Why is your client or prospect listening to you talk? Why have they agreed to meet you or requested a proposal?
Hopefully they think you can deliver the goods and improve their business’ sales line.
If Madison Avenue....
The FutureAgency will get more business direct without pitching in a competitive situation
You pitch – we all pitch. It’s a contest so a brand can review a number of prospective suppliers.
So when you are pitching – why do we tend to give away for free the whole strategy for their brand AND how you’ll achieve that strategy through tactical campaign executions?
Have more pride.
Many brands listen to pitches, collate the best ideas and just do it in-house. Or pass it to their favoured supplier. They probably won’t do it as well as you could, but by investing a few hours of their time they gain expertise from you that has taken years to acquire – free of charge; because it’s a pitch and you answered the RFP.
This has to stop.
What value will that client place on your knowledge if you give away the best for free without a contract or remuneration? This archaic process of requests for proposal should not be on the agenda of any self-respecting, modern marketing agency.
Many of our clients tell us
“It’s not worth chasing public, open bidding for contracts unless you have an inside track, know the client personally or have an existing track record with them.”:
A Failed System
The system is flawed because it only pays the winner and every participant has contributed hours and dollars of value.
What do you think? What would it take for your agency to stop answering or seeking RFPs?
What would it take for the Government and Public Sector to stop asking for the whole solution in a competitive tender?
Read Part 1 of the series: Creative Agency of the Future #FutureAgency
