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I will pretend to sell if you pretend to buy
Revenue Growth, Sales Excellence“I will pretend to sell if you pretend to buy” This is one of my favorite quotes from Sherwin Uretsky, one of our Revenue Architects advisors and one of the top revenue architects that I know!
What does it mean?
So many people engaged in sales imagine that they can win business after gaining access to a particular client – or after a warm meeting with a prospective client. But too often, they fail to really listen to their gut . They fail to perform the basic qualification that they need to do: BANT – Budget, Authority, Needs and Timeline. Or SCOTSMAN: Solution; Competition; Originality; Time Scales; Size; Money; Authority; Need.
They are kidding themselves… meeting after meeting of friendly banter with the client….pretending to sell, and the client pretending to buy.
When you see it, stop it. Ask yourself the question – what is the compelling event? What is the implementation date? What happens if the client doesn’t buy? There likely won’t be an answer and you will see that there likely is not an opportunity after all!
How a Consultant Can Use Twitter: Coffee with Nat
Revenue Growth, Social MediaI enjoyed a Harvard Square coffee visit at Peet’s the other day with Nat Welch, a consultant at CFAR: Center for Applied Research. I checked in on Foursquare of course 🙂
Nat and I used to work together at Viant and it is always good to catch up. Nat is already an expert in collaboration and in particular in helping people impact change in organizations. Naturally the conversation led to marketing digitally and using social media. I was giving Nat a few of my headline perspectives on why he might want to use Twitter to establish an online presence. There is a lot written about this already and for many of you this is “101”, but here are some of the points that I shared that I think might provide a summary framework for management consultants and business professionals on how to think about using Twitter vs. other tools like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Summary takeaways – for those of you getting started:
NAPFA Presentation for Financial Advisors
Revenue GrowthSpeaking with NAPFA at the Bentley University Campus
John Stone and Kristen Luke (via Skype from San Diego!) spent the morning with a group of financial advisors as part of their monthly program.
We discussed the landscape of new marketing including the key elements and concepts that drive the adoption on digital marketing strategies. We also took a tour of the “tools of the trade” and discussed ways that advisors are using social media today. Finally we discussed the call to action – how to get started with social media and new marketing. Our new program: Digital Marketing for Financial Advisors is launching this Spring and offers advisors an opportunity for hands on workshops to build their web presence – social media, content development and website strategy.
Read more
Doing Good and Doing Well
Inbound Marketing, Revenue GrowthBig national brands and their local affiliates can accelerate their charity impact AND drive brand value by using a network approach like good2gether.
Companies want to accelerate the impact of their charitable programs. The terrible news from Haiti is re-focusing us on getting involved and “doing good”. While pursuing charitable programs for all the right reasons, leading brands and small businesses are also asking the question: “How can we continue to accelerate our charitable impact while better communicating our positive activities with our target audience?” Bad press from the economic downturn and financial meltdown has had a negative impact on many corporate brands – particularly in the financial services industry. These brands would benefit from both accelerating their charitable impact and showing the world the good they do for important causes.
As we look at this challenge, we can see the obvious alignment with new marketing and social media – but obvious strategies may not be quite enough. We can accelerate our activities and get people involved using Facebook and Twitter, however as more and more brands use social media, it is difficult to get heard through the noise. This is one reason that I am so excited about the potential of using a compelling new networked solution for charitable impact: good2gether.
The good2gether Do Good Channel is a powerful way for brands to extend reach and awareness while also connecting their network of partners, affiliates and customers with local nonprofits that mean a lot to them. The networked approach lifts all boats – the brand, the affiliate networks, and the local charities. The good2gether ecosystem uses social media and web services sharing to extend the velocity and impact of the charitable mission while providing the big brand a powerful messaging opportunity. Partners and affiliates can also “do good” in their local community while being associated with a national brand’s program and benefiting from the halo effect of charitable giving. The local charity benefits from local sponsorships and focus – while being a part of a much bigger global network.
How does this all work? Here is a basic approach:
We are working with a few brands to explore the potential impact of the good2gether platform, along with Good2gether’s Greg McHale. You can find out more from Greg at www.good2gether.com and Contact Revenue Architects to learn more.
Digital Marketing and Collaboration at the Algarve Energy Park
Revenue Growth, Revenue MarketingThis post is a reflection on the role of digital collaboration at the Algarve Energy Park. Revenue Architects is working with the Park to build a digital presence beginning with the recent launch of the website. The Algarve Energy Park initiative is designed to meet the needs of tomorrow’s world by addressing today’s global challenges. Its objective is to develop a model sustainable cluster community in collaboration with leading academic institutions and partners in industry, attracting leading initiatives and companies in renewable energy and preventive healthcare sectors.
Digital technology is playing a role today in the outreach and communication efforts for the park. It will also be used when the Park is fully operating and collaboration is taking place around the creation of new science. Globalization, inexpensive network connectivity, growth in social software and a new architecture of participation is driving an explosive growth in social networking and business collaboration. The Algarve Energy Park is embracing these trends and technologies to accelerate marketing outreach and drive collaborative working.
Social software helps connect people across time zones and culture. Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook are widely adopted in personal and professional networking. The assimilation of global teams within a collaborative working framework is far easier than ever before and no longer requires complex choices of often expensive and proprietary technologies and processes. Today, cloud-based applications are available on demand at little or no cost and it is easier than ever before for users from different organizations and with varied technical skills to quickly adopt these services.
At the same time, marketing leaders are transforming how they engage, educate and influence target audiences. Traditional media is declining as a model for audience outreach. Advertising is less effective as consumers gain more control of what they consume. People can now easily filter out the unwanted pushed messages and “tivo” through advertisements. Newspaper readers abandon print versions and consume content online – and by using RSS readers, they are bypassing advertisements. I am certain that the industry will arrive at a balance that helps to monetize delivering quality content, but within this environment, marketers recognize the need to engage audiences in new ways. Brands can no longer control their message through owned media and they are becoming more focused on earned media. They are moving beyond a focus on their website to a focus on their web presence.
With the advent of newer social media and web 2.0 services, exciting and informative content can be very easily shared across the social web. As my colleague Amy Hunt says, more than ever, content needs to be like “peanut butter”- sticky and spreadable! What does this mean for the Algarve Energy Park? When we consider the role of collaborative and new media technologies that support the Park, we focus on the two critical stages in the Park’s development and the corresponding roles of these new collaborative and digital technologies.
Digital Collaboration for Research
At its core, AEP is about collaboration. The Park will combine leading thinking across a combination of interrelated elements – academics, economists, business strategists, energy researchers as well as architects and master planners to create a sustainable community to design and develop new technologies and set standards for clean energy, sustainable living, and personalized medicine. The community will benefit from both in-person and digitally-enabled collaboration. By extending the physical interactions digitally, we foster greater global collaboration among experts across disciplines and accelerate the velocity of knowledge and science globally. AEP can be at the forefront of the work in support of sustainable energy.
Deep web experiences offer a blend with physical experiences to create a unifying human experience. As collaborators in the park, we will be considering how these enabling technologies and web collaborative social experiences will impact successful research collaboration. We believe that many existing public platforms and social network technologies can effectively drive communications and support the research agenda. With a diverse range of collaborators working together on sustainable energy, we will need solutions that are open, readily available and easy to use and adopt. At the same time, we understand that some projects will need deeper structures and security levels to facilitate formal research and economic agendas. As technologies mature we are seeing a shift from a social focus to a blend of social and business focus. We see the greater levels of security, reliability and availability needed for mission critical program work. The challenge for AEP will be to find the right mix of openly available platforms and dedicated solutions. The right solutions will be the ones that fit with the specific needs of the collaborating teams.
Digital Collaboration for Marketing and Outreach
At our early stage of development, we are marshaling support and capturing insights from many key stakeholders that help define the AEP vision and support the program development. We are engaging a collaborative global network of leaders, influencers, stakeholders and investors. We connect across government, community, business and science leaders and we listen to these communities to incorporate insights and perspectives that shape a better outcome.
At our current stage of development, it would it be rational to launch an expensive outreach program using the traditional media for communication. Could these strategies even succeed given the global range and diversity of our audience? With such a diverse set of stakeholders, we needed to rethink how to engage our audience? How can we reach out and be open and available to a global and local audience? How can we capture input and insights to shape the strategy? What are the best ways to foster interest and commitment?
We believe the answer is to embrace a new marketing strategy. We are using new media strategies to facilitate the outreach agenda. We use the social web and effective web presence to be where our stakeholders are. While branding and design are important to reinforce our core vision, we also place emphasis on content and functionality that support our stakeholder needs. Our strategy is to build a web presence beginning with an effective website and tools for interactive communications. We are extending our web presence with new media digital outposts. With these capabilities in place, we will have the foundation to grow incrementally with a focus on content and conversation.
Below are the elements of our new marketing presence and outreach strategies:
Website: Our website is at the center of the discussions, content and information resources for the community. The www.algarveenergypark.com web site is using up to date web 2.0 features that encourage content engagement and sharing. The back end administration of the site facilitates continuous updates to valuable content. We will deliver content in the two languages that our audience is most comfortable with – English and Portuguese. A blog will help inform readers of updated insights and content from the Park. The foundation for the site is using an open source content management system and facilities to continually update of the site elements, content and promotional messages.
Digital Video: The team has already created some exciting video assets that introduce, promote and explain the park vision. We know that video is a popular and important media for education and information sharing. We are populating the site with these creative communication assets. In addition, we host these on the open web. By using tools like YouTube and Vimeo, we can expose the AEP vision to an audience that may not have otherwise found us at the park website. Presence on these open video services enhances our search visibility and helps us expand our footprint.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the established social media platform leader for business networking and collaboration. We do not need to build out our own community on our own website. We can engage a platform like LinkedIn that so much of our audience is accustomed and comfortable using. We can use LinkedIn to share the profile of the Park, leaders within the team and engage in discussions. We can share news from the park and bring people back to the website to learn more.
Facebook: Clearly we think of Facebook as a “social” network. We mostly use Facebook as a place to share our personal views and life activities with our trusted network of friends. We may not think of Facebook as a platform for a business outpost, but there are about 350,000 businesses using Facebook today. Facebook provides an extension of our web presence and allows us to share news with the community that is connected to us there. Big brands and sports teams gain a great followings and fans. Our presence may not attract a massive following, but we can be there – available to our constituents on another popular outpost and delivering another opportunity for them to engage with us. Also as AEP includes an innovative residential and living model, the Facebook presence may grow to be a vibrant part of our social activities for and among park residents. In keeping with our strategy, why build or promote a proprietary private community application when we can carve out an appropriate presence on a very popular and engaging platform like Facebook.
Twitter: We are also preparing to roll out a Twitter presence. Twitter will be an important way for us to stay connected with the deeper web conversations. The depth of conversations and mentions on Twitter helps us find those potential collaborators on the park’s mission and research topics. Twitter will allow us to build a following as well – our community of stakeholders will be able to follow developments from the park through Twitter updates. We can use Twitter and related platforms like co-tweet or Tweetdeck to track and engage in the conversations that are relevant to the park’s mission. The tools we will use will allow us to manage our micro blogging and status updates from one place – we can update our status on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts all at once. Why? We want to share links to meaningful content and valued insights to our community – where they are. We want to reTweet – or resend – the interesting tweets we find to our community. As our capacity and ambition evolves, AEP can stand out as a content leader on critical sustainable energy topics, but in the nearer term, Twitter will be a great source of insight and information sharing about the topics that drive the AEP agenda.
Bringing it all together
The Algarve Energy Park is about innovation and collaboration. By being connected and available in the new social web, we are ready to begin the dialog. We are eager to hear from our audience and engage in discussions about the ideas and concepts that AEP is putting forward. We expect that collaborators will find their way to news and information across the different touchpoints and that they will visit the website. When they visit us, they will have the opportunity to learn about the park, comment on content items, subscribe to feeds, and register to receive updated news and information on a more regular basis. We will offer different mailing lists to help them stay informed on the specific topics that drive their particular interests. We will also encourage our guests to take action: Collaborate, Support, Partner!
10 Steps to Get Started with New Media and Social Media Marketing
Inbound Marketing, Revenue Growth, SEOYou recognize how the explosive growth of social networking – with tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube – is fundamentally changing the way your clients learn, evaluate, and ultimately make their decisions. You recognize that these web 2.0 tools are an increasingly important influence in the client engagement process. Prospects seek evidence online to validate decisions and get instant feedback from others by listening and participating in online conversations.
We work with leading wealth managers and financial advisors who recognize that their clients are using social media and the web to help them evaluate an advisor. The content and professional credentials visible online are an increasingly important part of their decision process. Successful advisors use their online presence to drive new business. They use blogs, Facebook Groups / Fan Pages, and Twitter to engage in online conversation, increasing referrals and attracting new clients.
However, new media marketing is not a panacea. Your online presence and activity won’t replace your existing relationship-building activities and the quality work you perform with clients. Your approach to new media marketing should be authentic—engaging in meaningful activities that enhance the quality of your work and personal relationships. Tackled the right way, a new media marketing approach will further accelerate your growth.
But where do you begin? Which networks should you join? How do you build an online presence? How do you avoid introducing risk with your current brand? What is involved in using social media and inbound marketing techniques day-to-day? To help you get started, we developed the following checklist. This ten-step plan will guide you in taking positive steps forward in your new media marketing plan. With a thoughtful approach and a committed strategy, you will be rewarded with a professional online presence and accelerated growth.
10 Steps to Get Started with New Media and Social Media Marketing