There used to be a time when ads had to be written with hyperbole. ‘Amazing,’ ‘Miraculous’ and ‘Spectacular’ made common appearances in old print ads, usually in large bold letters. Add to that a few more impressive, flowery phrases and an image of a person with a wide-mouthed smile, and the product was almost as good as sold.

Selling meant singing nothing but praises, and getting customers to buy was the only end point for marketing efforts.

And then… it changed. Over the years, sales and marketing have become quite sophisticated due in part to evolving consumer behaviors and expectations. Today’s customers are not as so easily wowed by “smoke and mirrors”. It is not enough that marketers say their product is the best. Even ‘New!’ doesn’t work as well any more. We live in an over-saturated — over-messaged – marketplace. Nothing is really new, and every trick in the book has already been tried and tested. Smoke and mirrors, flowery words and calls to action do nothing except annoy consumers and make them ignore the product being promoted in that way. Of course, direct marketing and hard sells live on in the world of infomercials – but fundamental brand advertising has changed.

Now, selling means providing solutions, and the end point of marketing is something much more long-lasting and substantial than simply getting a single sale.

Developing an effective value proposition is the first step to effective sales and marketing. The principle entails sending targeted messages rather than making broad sweeping promotions. Instead of “Buy this now,” it should be “Here’s what we can do for you.” Customers want the respect and autonomy to obtain products and services at their own leisure and according to their own considered criteria. They also like knowing what’s in it for them. Ask yourself: Would you buy something simply because someone told you to?

Building brand loyalty can be considered a much higher priority than making sales. Sporadic deals won’t get the company anywhere in the long run. With a loyal customer base, the company can build continued success. It is a win-win situation for both sides, as the customers will be getting what they want while the company can streamline their marketing efforts and focus their marketing budgets to yield greater ROI on dollars spent.

• Does your marketing speak to long term benefits?
• Does your messaging meet your best buyers in their language?
• Are you counting on tricks and clever words to close the deal?

Sharply defining your customer is a “starting block” for your go-to-market race.

• How many of them are there?
• What size?
• What is the published market research?
• Are there demographic and market research reports written on your target market?

In today’s sophisticated marketing world, you can’t go after a market without being armed with data – fortunately there’s lots of it.

At this stage of the game, you’re not necessarily looking at the way the market works, but simply defining the kind of company that your product or service most fits. Ultimately, it’s about knowing your customer. In every market segment, there are cultures, commonalities, unspoken rules of the game that exist in enclaves of the high tech, business and manufacturing worlds.

You need to know what these are. If you don’t have a feel for the people you’re selling to, you’re already at risk of falling further behind your competition.

While with a consulting firm focused on smaller business services firms, we worked with a small regional web design company with heavy specialization in user experience and interface design. As is typical for companies this size, they defined their customers primarily by geography – any business in their area needing help with larger web projects. Over a two-year period we helped them refocus on one particular market segment they had past success with – large, socially focused non-for-profit organizations.

While this was a positioning move, it was much deeper than just looking a certain way to a particular market – or choosing which mailing list to use. By focusing on the specific non-for-profit sector, they were able to start understanding the target customer’s culture, eventually adopting the language, pace and unspoken “feel” of the non-for-profit world.

They’re back on track, growing revenues and profits with a dedicated core of clients who view them as their specialist firm for web design and deployment in the non-for-profit field. In the same way, your understanding of your target customer will influence your marketing and the direct sales communication you have with them and the way you interact and serve them.

Adapted from the forthcoming eBook, “Know Thy Customer” by Jose Palomino

What level decision maker can you access?

If you want to sell to a specific type of company, you need to have access to call, talk and meet with the appropriate level of decision maker at that customer – whatever it takes to sell your product to them. Maybe you need to have access to CFOs of financial services organizations to sell your compliance solution.

While you may have many years and dollars worth of experience selling to financial services firms, you might find that you have no way to get your foot in the door of the C-suite, if your company never worked at that level before. That’s not to say that this marketing and sales capability cannot be acquired or developed – just that you need to know where you’re starting from and identify the gap as quickly as possible.

The “access” issue can go the other way, too. In the product development process, larger software developers often end up creating simpler versions that they try to sell “down market” to smaller customers. Yet, they don’t know the smaller customers (SMB) – the way they function, and what’s important to them. They often do not really know how to access this smaller customer (as in the Cisco example above).

It isn’t primarily a product issue – it is simply that a company that has been selling to Fortune 500 companies will face the same challenge connecting with decision makers in a $50 million dollar manufacturing company that a SMB focused company would have calling on GE. Movement – both up or down market – is possible and many companies manage to do it successfully. However, many more have failed or have had to make many learning runs till they got it right (e.g., Microsoft moving up-market in corporate IT with server software).

Access challenges run both ways: smaller companies face challenges selling to bigger ones, but oftentimes, bigger players can’t get small enough to sell to smaller companies or individual buyers.

Adapted from the forthcoming eBook, “Know Thy Customer” by Jose Palomino

So much of what’s out there today is old thinking. Not old marketing or old sales thinking. But rather, the “silo” approach which separates these functions as if they existed independent of one another.

The fact is that they are as dependent on one another as nutrition and exercise are for improving someone’s overall health. In companies looking to achieve revenue and market share goals, overall company health is simply the ability to impact a specific market – as close to plan as possible.

When Marketing “bakes” the big ideas of positioning, pricing and placement, Sales has to face off with real people who say “yes” or “no“.

…and yet, in company after company, sales execs and sales management are to be “seen and not heard”, like little children at a long-ago Thanksgiving gathering.

So who knows what works with real prospects and customers? Who can shape the message to yield “yes”? Direct Sales is across the table from the very people Marketing wants to reach. So why not just let sales decide the message, pricing and positioning strategy? Well, because it would be like lettting the kids cook Thanksgiving dinner – you’d get chocolate turkeys and ice cream salads – in other words, you’d get the opposite problem: a myopic, current view of reality vs. a longer term vision of the reality you want to create.

The answer then is KISS simple: talk to one another; test the ideas you have with the people who have to deliver the message; and then, respect the strategic view and toolset of those who craft messages, etc.

In short: recognize that your company’s “Revenue Health” is dependent on “Nutrition” (Marketing) and “Exercise” (Sales) working together on the same plan.

Enjoy dinner.

For those of you who’ve read my “She’s right again” blog posts, you know some of the big lessons I learned around the “dot-bomb” era. But like all harsh lessons, just learning the negative is not enough. What really matters is what you do about it.

Well, since I wasn’t going to write new laws, solve world peace (no Nobel for me) or invent a new machine – I was left with looking at what I’ve been looking at for a long time: business models and go-to-market methodology (I know, sounds exciting!)….

From my experience, came a sincere desire to figure out “what happened?” and “what could be better?”

I wanted to discover and give voice to something new. A better way to bring “an idea who’s time has come” to the marketplace. I knew that the notion of “new”, “exciting” and “useful” as essential dimensions of a value proposition had to have operational implications. Nothing substantive would change if all that changed was a “tag line”– as important as that is.

Great ideas would still fail to attract an audience – money and energy wasted.

Not only money and energy wasted – but also an old way of doing things. What else needed to change? For over 50 years, companies involved in complex or big-ticket sales have dichotomized “developing the message” and “delivering the message”. Even companies that derive the majority of their revenue from their direct sales channel rarely ask their sales teams, “What’s happening out there?” – relying instead on traditional market research and industry experts.

Is this a wrong practice? Marketing experts are not typically sales professionals and the converse is usually true. That wasn’t the issue nagging at me. What was “off” was this: why not take advantage of the intense customer-facing resource that is your direct sales force for real-time market intelligence?

Marketing owned message delivery in all venues except direct sales. In other words, the marketing function “owned” the website, marcom and other communication vehicles, except that which happend in the sales interview. So – marketing contribute to the “what” conversation at the strategic level (as in “what are we? who do we serve? what makes us different”) and could shape a message – a value proposition statement – and control how it manifested in advertising, marcom and other public delivery – but stopped short of providing real and specific guidance for direct sales.

Salespeople usually have to synthesize and deliver the messages found in marketing collateral and given by corporate and product marketing to prospects.

I believe this state of affairs can be – must be – radically altered.

How would your go-to-market program look if message development – that is – identifying what is new, useful and exiting about your product – were purposefully connected with your sales team’s message delivery? Why should message design end before entering the sales department?

Likewise, why ignore the wealth of immediate and grounded marketplace insight – the thousands of hours of conversations between your salespeople and customers?

While these questions have been asked in other quarters – thay are not asked that often – and not enough to change common practice. I’ll take a deeper look at this in another post.

Meanwhile – what do you think?

Do your sales and marketing folk truly collaborate? Do they share insights and idea?