See you there!

I spent part of last weekend reading iPad reviews and a review of iPad reviews.  I particularly liked the Engadget review.  Long, well organized, thorough, thought provoking.  For the first time ever I’m really thinking about trying first generation technology — I can always upgrade, right?  I received a number of comments and some feedback about my tiny tweet and the Engadget review.

Alex – who if memory serves camped out for first generation iPhone – forwarded me his one-word “iPass” response (which I’ve shamelessly borrowed for the title of this post).  Steve asks:  “If I’m in the market to buy a new laptop (mine is 8 years old), should I consider the iPad? I only use my laptop for Email, Internet browsing, and programs like Word/Excel…”

Here’s what Engadget says: 

[W]e don’t think the iPad is a laptop replacement. Not yet. What that means is that if you need a laptop to work in something like Excel, Word, or countless other PC or Mac applications, you shouldn’t expect the iPad to take its place. But, if you’re like a lot of computer users, you don’t really do much on your system except for listen to music, casually browse the web and read news sites, watch some online video, play games, and keep in touch with friends via Twitter, IM, and Facebook. If you fit that description, you might just fall in love with Apple’s $499 bundle of joy — because it does the majority of those things much better than its laptop counterparts (granted, one at a time, and, er… not online video).

So the verdict? The buyer of an iPad is one of two people, the first is someone who sees not just the present, but the potential of a product like the iPad… and believes in and is excited about that potential. This is also a person who can afford what amounts to a luxury item. The second is an individual who simply doesn’t need to get that much work done, and would prefer their computing experience to be easier, faster, and simpler. Does that sound like anyone you know?

That’s probably right.  Here are a couple of things that come to mind:

1)  How much do you use your machine? My laptop is on 12 to 18 hours a day five or six days a week.  A good sign that I’m not ready to move to an iPad as a one-and-only.

2)  How mobile are you? An alternative to a laptop might be a desktop and iPad combination.  I’m very mobile — in and out of client offices, working from home, working from our office.  I need to carry laptop power with me.  If I was at my desk more often (he says partially wistfully) I’d very seriously consider a desktop/iPad one-two punch.

3)  What’s your content creation vs. consumption balance? I’m looking to the iPad for content consumption (surfing, reading, listening, watching, etc.) and not for content creation (writing, developing, designing, etc).  I anticipate that the iPad will bring more magazines and books back into my life just as the iPhone/iPod brought more music back into my life.  The iPad will cannibalize my iPhone more than my laptop.    As an interesting side note, thanks to @schnitzelboy I did manage to demo SalesLink on the iPad last week and it was pretty sweet — a few things to work out but it gave me a small taste for what the future might be.  But there’s no way it knocks my laptop off its pedestal.

What I will say for sure is that Apple continues to demonstrate its mastery in developing great products.  My Macbook Pro is going on 18-months and it just works.  Every day.  No problems.  No headaches.  It’s lovely.  This is the way you want machines to work and it’s totally worth the premium you pay.  I’ve totally drunk the Apple Kool-Aid.

As always – keen to hear people’s opinions (here or directly).  I’m especially interested in your thoughts about first generation vs. waiting for subsequent generations.

Colaborative Partners. We are strong thought partners who work collaboratively with our clients.  We help develop and test ideas to accomplish your goals.  We marry what you know with our experience and best practices to define a plan of action. We will regularly be asking you for your feedback and if we are meeting your expectations.  The result is a great working relationship highlighted by mutual trust and respect.

How this plays out: Honestly — we have the best clients ever.  In just about every meeting I’m in we have a creative, funny, and energizing time.  I continue to learn from our clients all the time and it’s great to have that experience.

Strategy and Execution. Great strategy is only great to the extent that it is effectively executed. We have a strong bias for action.  We recognize that there is no perfect strategy and that we need to consistently revise and tweak initial direction with continuous learning.

How this plays out: For years I’ve riled against the big studies and binders that collect dust on shelves.  To the extent that you need a report or an analysis, it should be the kind of thing that gets dog-eared and used regularly as you execute against it.  And another thing — you have to be able to execute.  I still flip back to Bossidy and Charan’s Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done from time to time.  I think it’s a classic.

Respect Budgets. There will never be any budget surprises.  We work against a specific budget, which is only changed with your knowledge and approval.

How this plays out: Today I gave a client a number of options to host files that she wanted to serve up using SalesLink.  There was varying complexity to each option and varying degrees of work for our team.  She asked me for the cost of the two different options and my response was that I couldn’t bring myself to invoice her for the work.  Yes – one option was more work and we’d have to keep track of more moving parts.  But our interest is in long term relationships.  In my mind you can’t charge for every 6-minute interval, every photocopy made, every courier used.  Lawyers have a notoriously bad reputation for this — I don’t know if it’s true or not.  If you want to be in long term relationship, agree on a price for your work and then work to exceed expectations.  As the work changes (and it often does) talk about it with your client.  It’s taken me a while to be able to have easy conversations about money with our clients but, what’s nice, is that none of them want us to work for free.  That realization made money conversations easy.

There’s that really helpful visioning adage — begin with the end in mind.  If you have a decent sense of how SalesLink emails work then in no time you will become really good and very confident at sending out SalesLink emails and making them dance for you.  This post breaks down the different elements of a SalesLink email and shares some of the SalesLink lexicon.  As always, questions and comments (especially where something isn’t really clear) are really helpful and appreciated.

The information used to populate SalesLink emails comes from three main areas in the application:   Preferences, Step 2, and Step 3.  Let’s look at each of these.

1)  User Preferences. There are a few sections in the User Preferences tab.  Here’s a screenshot of the top of the page — this is where the user details come from.  As you activate and deactivate the checkboxes the information that appears in the user details appears/disappears.  Want to show your company name?  Make sure the company name checkbox is populated and checked — same is true for all the fields in the user block.  Your picture and company logo or banner can be loaded here too.

2)  Step 2:  Select Content.  Content in SalesLink is organized in a hierarchy.  Categories contain topics.  Topics contain copy, links, and images.  Here are two pictures of the Manage Content tab.  The first is from my own instance of SalesLink.  Our categories follow our selling process:  Our Discussion, To Review, Of Interest, Next Steps, etc.    Then Compare that to the categories and topics used by Studio 1098 — a custom jewellery designer.  Their categories follow product lines:  Cufflinks, Rings, Special Occasions, Wedding Bands, etc.

Content aligned with Sales Process

Content aligned with Product Offering

3)  The last place that information comes from to populate the SalesLink template is from Step 3:  Preview and Send.  Three main pieces of information come from here:

• Headline.  Most SalesLink templates have a hard coded spot for a headline at the top of the page.  This is a great place to personalize your email and call attention to why you’re writing.  Examples of email headlines include:
  • Great to see you today, {Firstname}
  • {Firstname} – Here’s the follow-up I was telling you about
  • 3 Links you should follow…
• Salutation.  You can use one of the salutations in the dropdown or leave it blank and enter your own salutation (think:  “Hey Dude,” or “Bonjour!” or “Hiya”, etc.) at the beginning of the opening paragraph like you do when you write an email today in your regular email program (e.g. Outlook, Gmail, etc.)
• Opening/Closing Paragraph(s).  This is where you write your opening and/or closing paragraph(s).  In many cases templates use an opening paragraph only because we’ve found that people just want to introduce the content that they’re sending in their email and then let the rest of the SalesLink content (Categories, Topics, etc.) speak for themselves.

Here’s a screenshot of Step 3 that shows these three sections.

Conclusion: It’s helpful to know how a SalesLink template works.  It means that you’ll be faster at sending and more creative in your setup.  You can’t really break SalesLink (and if you do/can, we want to hear about it) — so feel free to play around and experiment.  Send yourself emails.  Heck — send us emails — we’d love to see how you’re using it and we’ll be happy to give you our feedback as well.

Whenever we get the chance we like to run statistically valid tests with our clients.  They’re hard to do – most of us in the business world are happy to run a small test, not necessarily bound by the large sample sizes and constraints of statistical validity.  We’re happy with a directional sniff of where the winds are blowing and then make decisions based on that (not statistically valid) information.

Before writing this post, I trolled through Google and, while there’s lots out there about the efficacy or inefficacy of personalized subject lines, I couldn’t find one post that referenced any actual statistics.  So I thought I’d share some success that our friends at Mackenzie Financial had recently.  It’s also interesting to note that this is a B2B test. 

The firm launched a new mutual fund product and we helped execute an email campaign to let financial advisors know about the product.  We used two different subject lines in English and two in French.  The Open Rate on the personalized email was 28.5%.  On the non-personalized it was 23.7%.  When we ran the response rates and sample sizes through a statistical analysis package we were really pleased with this test — statistically significant at the  99% confidence level. This means that 99 times out of 100, subject line personalization to this audience will result in emails being opened anywhere between 2.9% and 6.7% more than emails with no personalization in the subject line.

Here are a couple of other good links about subject lines in emails:

1)  Signs your email program is behind the curve. This comes from an email marketing site so some of the references here won’t necessarily apply in B2B/corporate marketing case but the post is a good reminder of the things we should be considering regularly (if applicable) to stay on the “best practices” line of our email marketing efforts.

2)  Improve Your Email Subject Lines.  This post comes from the good people at Exact Target — it’s a good checklist and almost a primer of things to keep in mind while you’re writing your email subject lines.

3)  And then there’s the retail email blog:  http://www.retailemailblog.com/.  This is more good old fashioned business geek voyeurism into an industry that I personally don’t spend much time in (save and except as a consumer).  It’s really interesting to see the different campaigns, the creative, the calls to action, how the campaigns performed, deployment strategies, etc., etc.  There’s probably some good cross-over to the relationship marketing space.  It’s definitely an interesting read.

Happy to hear back from people and get comments — especially if people have links to other results that are anchored in stats.

My summary of what they did (though I did miss it on Twitter):

• Planned to give away 1,000 free t’s as a way to measure engagement — it also would build their Twitter and Facebook followers…but that wasn’t the goal (nice side effect though)
• Didn’t require anyone to retweet or add a hashtag (can be effective for measurement but annoying)
• Used a landing page to control the campaign

I connect with a couple of things here:

1)  Investing the time to do a landing page which you can turn on/off for various campaigns makes total sense to me.  By the time you’re doing this work, you may as well put some control behind it and make it reusable.  Genius.  Here’s a link to the campaign’s landing page.

2)  There are additional/hidden costs to consider.  The post hints at some of these and promises a part-2 which may cover some of them.  You can’t forget (this is a reminder to myself more than anything else) that it’s not just the direct cost of the promotional items.  You also need to consider:

- Organizational time and energy/opportunity cost.  What aren’t you doing because you’re working on this cool initiative?

- Development costs of building a campaign landing page (in this case including a small database).  For some of us with developers on our teams it’s a bit easier and can be absorbed into internal costs.  For others this becomes another hard cost.

- Shipping.  Right!  I totally forgot that you actually have to get whatever you’re giving away to wherever it’s going.  This is both a hard cost AND can be a logistical PitA — I imagine that the Chimps had a fulfillment house/vendor taking care of the shipping.  In smaller volumes/for smaller campaigns we’d probably do this ourselves…and that will take a bit of time and money.

3)  I do think that this kind of investment makes total sense if you want to build and measure engagement.  I think it can also be used to drive other behaviour as well — demo, quote, purchase…anything really.  While MailChimp used the tactic really well with no strings attached I think that attaching strings is definitely worth a try.  You need to consider the campaign’s ROI.  The costs of a giveaway tied to steps in your sales process (demo, quote, purchase) can be considered as part of your acquisition cost.  If you have appetite/room to increase your acquisition cost this is an interesting approach.

4)  Random trivia.  Incidentally, buried way in the comments on the post was a comment from Alan Buffington responding to the logistical challenge of t-shirt sizing.  He checked with a “supplier of stencil making products who lives in t-shirt companies” and came up with the following for ordering shirts:

Standard scale for t-shirts is:  1-3-5-3 for adult sizes S-XL

Promotionals however run:  3-5-4 in a M-L-XL scale.

Call it random trivia that you might want to use someday.  I suppose this is information that might be readily available on the internet.  I don’t even know how accurate it really is but it’s a starting point anyway.

Overall I’m intrigued by (and quite fired up about) the model that MailChimp shared and already thinking about how to apply it in my own business.  I’m also forwarding this post to a couple of clients where I can see some applicability as well.

• There’s no substitute for being meaningful and providing value
• The presentation encourages us to focus on our role as “suppliers” of meaningful content.  We can be more effective in this role if we pay attention to what people want.  In the context of search, that means understanding what search terms people are looking for.
• Links to your site are important.  People link to:
  • Interesting and useful content
  • How-to guides and tutorials
  • Lists (“Top 10 best…”)
  • Thought-provoking or unexpected content
  • Sites that update frequently

The Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide referenced under the article is very good for the basics.

What browser do you use?  What others have you tried?  Are you browser loyal?  Are you constrained by your workplace?

One of these networking-chains led me to Adam Bullied, a product manager who’s worked largely in start-ups.  Adam is genuine, generous and smart!  In a short hour he shared a few product management basics and asked a bunch of questions that made me think pretty hard about the work we’re doing.  He also left my confidence in tact which I appreciated.  I’ve subsequently spent some time on his blog and have found more thought provoking material there.

Adam really helped with a simple conversation that helped me connect the dots between

• Problem Statement.  What problem is the product solving?
• Vision.  How are you going to solve the problem?
• Market Segmentation.  Whose problem is it?
• User Objectives. What are they trying to accomplish?

He then showed me how these are building blocks to value proposition, features and benefits, differentiation, and a number of other concepts.

A second line of conversation (short though it was) had to do with formalizing pilot/beta programs – making sure that these programs have:

• stated objectives,
• a set number of customers
• a defined start and end date
• set timelines (what’s going to happen between the start and end date)
• well defined requirements; and
• an identified program manager

Here too – none of this is revolutionary – but it caused me to stop and think.  It’s also added another item to my To Do list.

My time with Adam was important because I’m reminded that broad generalists (like me) can really benefit from specialists who have frameworks at-the-ready.  Of course, we (generalists) often take those frameworks, oversimplify them, and then run into all kinds of trouble but that too is a topic for another day.

We’ve been working with clients and friends on a new Sales Effectiveness Index. the goal is to help organizations support the execution, measurement and coaching of defined relationship sales processes in the workflow. This is a post-sales call evaluation form, which can be completed by the sales rep to measure/track performance from one call to the next. It is a self-reported, self-discovery exercise to improve overall performance i.e. Did I get commitment for a follow up meeting to discuss the issue? Was I adequately prepared for the meeting? How effective have I been in my sales efforts?  When done correctly the index moves us away from sales effectiveness coaching and towards sales effectiveness management.

The Traditional Sales Management Process

Traditional Sales Management Process

The traditional sales management process starts with product and brand training, which is supported in the workflow with performance reviews, sales management and coaching. Performance data and success ratios (eg. call to meeting, meeting to sale) are usually well defined and data is available to uncover if activity or sales effectiveness is at issue.

When an increase in effectiveness is desired, coaching activities include self-evaluation, performance appraisals, field visits and role-playing. The cycle is then repeated with the rescheduling of the next training engagements.

The issue with the traditional sales management process is that coaching is based primarily on performance data and not on information directly linked to the defined sales process. If this data were available for all calls we could transform coaching into a more effective management process.

A New Approach

New Model for Sales Effectiveness

Sales engagement is intended to create value for our customers by uncovering and satisfying their needs. This relationship sales process has specific elements that are the basis of our sales training:
Plan – Approach – Probe – Prove – Handle objections/misinformation – Close – Set next steps

We can define the outcome data for each of these steps of the sales process and provide a tool to capture this information after each meeting. The process must be easy to use and take minimal time (under 2 minutes). This data will now give us the foundation to understand, manage and increase our sales effectiveness.

The result: a move away from Sales Effectiveness Coaching and a move towards Sales Effectiveness Management.  It’s powerful and compelling work.  I’ll provide updates from time-to-time as they become available.  If you have comments or feedback on this or other ideas please feel free to share them.