The era of mass marketing, sales driven information gathering and sharing, and being “just good enough to win” is being shattered by the rapid emergence of a smart, networked, and increasingly demanding generation of empowered customers. In the fragmented and fast moving world of concepts, buzzwords, technologies, and applications, most executives are looking for looking for answers to a few basic questions:
– What matters?
– What’s different?
– How can I and or my organization benefit?
– Where is the opportunity?
– What should I do now?
As I survey the evolving landscape, there are four primary things that stand out as emerging keys to sales and marketing success in an always on, attention scarce, information rich world.
- Growing your network
- Sending signals that are valuable
- Building a glowing reputation
- Focusing on delighting your customers
None of these are new tactics. They’ve all stood the test of time and have been employed by folks over the last several hundred years. However, the speed and access to people and information has made each of them exponentially more important. Take a look at the stats in the image below.
*** TAKEAWAY ***: When buyers want something, they’ll turn to search and their network to look for answers. Make sure you are there.
A great “human digitization” is taking place. Hordes of people and content are flooding into the web. Search engines and other content and people filters have to come up with a scoring mechanism to make results meaningful. Google, Bing, Facebook, and others are merging “people rank” with “page rank”. Search results are now being presented taking into account the “influence” and “reputation” of the messengers who are sharing it.
*** TAKEAWAY ***: Position yourself and your organization as a voice that matters (among those who know you, AND those who have yet to discover you)
*** How do you do this? ***
- Build your network(s).
- Send valuable signals – these could be blog posts, tweets, white papers, videos, comments, etc.
- Focus on delighting your customers, prospects, partners, employees, suppliers, etc. It matters. It stands out. It breeds enthusiasm, loyalty, and word of mouth.
- As your networks and signals expand their reach with positive sentiment, your reputation will increase.
- As your reach and reputation grows, it provides an even greater platform to create moments of “delight”
- Congratulations! An exponential and continuous feedback loop has been created.
For more on the concept(s), feel free to download/view the entire presentation below, or simply contact me directly.
[slideshare id=7541190&doc=networkssignalsreputationanddelight-110406175312-phpapp01]
Hi Brian Great presentation, thanks. I’d add listening and getting better at conversations to your list. I believe that businesses need to develop their “farming” skills to sit alongside their “hunting” skills. Now, whether sales and marketing are the best folks to do the “farming” is still open to question. As you know my concept of the Clienteer sits in the cross functional space in business. By truly engaging in a listening process with customers (and employees) a “clienteer” will gather the actionable insights that will inform not only sales and marketing, but production, product development, customer service etc and of course most importantly the leadership of the business!