DirectGov – Government Services and Gay Porn all in one place

(This Blog first appeared on www.thedrum.co.uk where Gordon is a regular contributor, and again as an article in the Drum Magazine.

(Update from Gordon) - Within a few hours of this blog being posted DirectGov took the site down – see their full response in the comments section below.

(Update number 2 from Gordon) – 8 days after the story broke DirectGov complaints department have responded to the online contact form I filled in before posting this blog to say “Dear GMK -  We have seen the item. Our press office have issued the following statement:” the next bit was just the same statement as posted on this blog comments section previously. Clearly one part of DirectGov doesn’t know what another part is doing and this also proves that if you want something done don’t complain write a blog!

You must have seen those hideously expensive adverts on TV for www.direct.gov.uk with the big celebs like, well you know, her that used to advertise the sky digital box with Bruce Forsythe and well you know other celebs!

Well the website of the UK government has had a big budget, a big launch and a big campaign aimed at getting people to visit the site but they have also made a huge cock-up (oh maybe that’s an unfortunate choice of words).

The site even has a kids section http://kids.direct.gov.uk and to make it more kiddie friendly they have called it “Busters World” complete with an image of a friendly dog (presumably called Buster) who is wearing a sheriffs badge (nice bit of trust imagery).  The site describes itself “DirectgovKids helps you find out about the world around you. We have loads of fun games, exciting videos and cartoons and much more!” Have a look:

OK what is so wrong about that – well let me tell you it is very, very, very wrong!  In a spectacular piece of poor brand naming strategy which must have included no research whatsoever Busters World is also the name of a fetish gay porn site (I am not making this up honestly).

Imagine this, little Johnny learns about the site at school under the supervision of his teacher and comes home and tells mommy all about the fun new website Busters World and asks if he can go on it. Of course he can, now Johnny can’t remember the domain name and types Busters World into Google and the first site listed is probably not what he expected but there is a big balloon on the front page so it’s obviously for kids right?

When you click on the “I agree to these terms” button (which I only did for research purposes) you land at a very friendly welcome page where men with fashionable facial hair are having fun with balloons (and what child doesn’t like balloons?).

The Power of Twitter – I found out less than an hour ago via twitter, Falkirk based @More4Mums the online discount maternity clothing store http://www.more4mums.co.uk who tweeted.

“My 6yr old tells me she was on Busters World at school – Googled to have a look OMG !!! Real link here http://ow.ly/13TrB” And then later “How can someone be so stupid as to name the kids portal on directgov “Buster’s world”??? Internet safety anyone??  A few direct messages later and I have to say I share her indignation.

Ok lets pause for a few minutes … have you stopped laughing?  It took me a while but when the initial madness of this situation sinks in you will realise that the organisation ultimately responsible for child safety legislation in the UK has made a web, branding and child safety blunder of epic proportions.  Little Johnny will be damaged for life and may even end up becoming a politician!

The site NEEDS to be renamed now and given that the Drum community includes some of the leading branding experts from around the world lets be proactive and come up with some suggestions for a new name.  A packet of Smarties for each of the best three suggestions and we will pass it on to DirectGov.

So leave a comment and let me know what you think of this terrible situation (hint) and what your suggestion for the new name for the site.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp

Intelligise – Be Brilliant

Social Media is Dead

(This Blog first appeared on www.thedrum.co.uk where Gordon is a regular contributor, and again as the lead article in the February edition in the Drum Magazine)

It’s time to kill off the term “social media”.  It’s boring – it’s last years “big idea”.  Whilst we are at it it’s time to kill off the self appointed social media gurus, Twitter kings, Linked-in gods and Facebook queens, (although admittedly not all Facebook queens are selling social media consultancy!)  As far as I am concerned the word Guru denotes a level of expertise that you just can’t claim to have in an emerging field.

Every few years there is a small improvement in communications technology and someone with an eye for the main chance coins a term and tags the word “revolution” on the end and we have a bona-fide craze on our hands.  This time round the consultants, without any trading history or track record, have come out of the woodwork chanting “social media, social media, you gotta have social media”. Normally serious business people started uploading silly pictures on their Twitter pages and Tweeting inane updates like “oops put 2 much milk in my #morningtea LOL #fail, Please Retweet” and “@duncanbannantyne please ask your followers to follow me”.  Then to cap it all you get a linked-in invitation from someone you met at a conference in Birmingham ten years ago asking you to be one of his valued contacts.

Don’t get me wrong I love Twitter, Linked-in and my blog they are ALL indispensible to my marketing efforts.  What we need to do is clear away the social media BS that’s blinding people to the obvious truth that social media tools are just a new way to manage conversations to engage clients – its not rocket science – its for everybody.

We have seen this sort unhelpful hysteria before: remember the dot.com boom?  I spent the late 90s and early noughties evangelising about online community and facilitating discussion groups and online B2B networking, we called it “online conversation” or “online community” (if only I had known about the revolution thing).  As Shirley Bassey once said “it’s all just a little piece of history repeating”.

People are busy predicting a video revolution, a geo-location revolution, a mobile commuting revolution but if there is one thing you can say for certain about communication technology it is that next week there will be something new – its evolution and not revolution!

Why does the nomenclature matter?  Well revolution is a scary word and add to that lots of consultants claiming Guru status and people think that the tools are complex and difficult to use when they are not.  Most social media training seems to delve no deeper than how to set up a Facebook page or a Twitter account (the stuff that you can learn by reading the PDF guides available from thousands of web sites) and this is counter productive.  The gurus are trying to build a social media silo with access granted to those capable of over excitable hyperbole but its not rocket science – its just a new set of conversation tools.

Most of the people who read Drum blogs work in Marketing, Design, PR and Digital Marketing agencies etc and if the cocktail of social media tools are to become universally useful to businesses then you are the people who can make it happen.  If this latest communication evolution is indeed to generate revolutionary results for business (sorry hyperbolic slip) we have to destroy the silos by doing the hard work of strategically blending the benefits of the new social media engagement tools with each of our specialist marketing offerings.  Only when we have done this can sociability become the default behaviour setting and client engagement can take its rightful place in the marketing tool box alongside PR, advertising, sales, design and brand management et al.

I have just set up a new company and I struggled for a long time with the decision as to whether to start a separate social media consultancy or to keep my social media advice as part of my business development practice, you won’t be surprised that I decided on the latter.  On this blog I want to start a conversation about practical social media marketing and networking, not a load of “hyperbolic guru speak” but plenty of down and dirty, sleeves rolled up ways to use the emerging online conversation toolset to generate return on engagement for ourselves and our clients.

Maybe one day we will be able to say “Social Media BS is dead – long live Social Media Conversation.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp

Intelligise – Be Brilliant

Collect followers for vanity – Collect relationships for value

Collect followers for vanity – collect relationships for value – share something of value and build your relationships!

To me social media is a set of great networking tools, that you can use to enhance your networking and NOT a replacement for networking.  I use this WordPress blog, Twitter and Linked-in not to collect followers, friends, and connections but to enhance the relationships I have with people within my network.

I accept it is hard not to get caught up in the social media game of “who has the most followers” on Twitter, “the most contacts” on Linked-in or “friends” on Facebook, especially when you see a competitor has a few thousand more than you.  However for professionals it is not the number of contacts you have but the value of your relationships with your contacts that is your key performance indicator (KPI).

How I use my three main Social Media Channels.

1. Linked-in – www.linkedin.com/in/GordonMacIntyreKemp Like most people, I asked my best contacts to connect on Linked-in and the key word is “connect”!  So many people build a list of 200+ connections on Linked-in and think that is their network built, its not, it is your social networking database populated with targets.

• By regularly changing my updates I make sure that my contacts know what I am doing and I read their updates and send congratulations and comments as appropriate.
• Most importantly though I regularly make time to network and see my contacts face to face.  Every month I select a group of about 25 of my contacts whom I think would like to meet one another and I invite them to meet me for a speakeasy.  On average 16-20 attend and people say they are the best networking events they get invited to.  No speakers, no presentations just me in a bar mixing up my contacts and engaging them on a deeper level.
• Because I am social people reciprocate and when I get invited to someone’s networking event I ask “is there room for me to bring along one of my clients?” This way my contact gets a new high value contact at their event and my client gets a free seminar and well everyone is happy.  Its not clever its just networking!

1. Blog – I like to share my insights on selling, networking and social media every week and every blog is promoted via my Linked-in updates, on the Linked-in profile itself and via Twitter.  Every client I have read my blog before becoming a client and this is working so well for me that next month I am investing in a major new (best practice) blogging platform that will host not only this blogs but those of my best practice partners and guest bloggers as well.

• As a result of the cross referencing a lot of people who view my Linked-in profile also read my blog and this willingness to share my expertise has changed the dynamic of all of my recent sales presentations from being “asked to pitch” to being “asked to help”.
• If you are selling expertise (legal, financial, consulting or other professional services) then blogs are a vital tool in terms of building trust in your ability to deliver.  Sales techniques don’t close deals nowadays, trust closes deals and the higher the trust the higher the price you can charge for your expertise.
• A willingness to share shows how genuine you are and social media is changing the nature of knowledge in sales- if you are not the first to share your knowledge you may as well have never known it.

1. Twitter – http://twitter.com/theintelligiser My first two Twitter accounts were personal (I don’t use them anymore) and admittedly at first I didn’t see a business use but now where as Linked-in is where I manage my valuable relationships Twitter is where I grow and invest in my weaker relationships.

• There really is no better tool for finding and engaging interesting people you don’t yet know.  With my business account I set out deliberately to follow as many interesting people and business people that I could identify as being from Scotland (where I do most of my business).  Most of them followed me back and I shared my thoughts, observations and links to my blogs and I got some great feedback.
• The best thing for me about following people on Twitter is that you get a real insight into people’s personalities and the things that motivate them from their tweets.  This means I now have a list of really interesting people I want to meet so I invite them to my speakeasy events, introduce them to my most valuable contacts and assuming all goes well we connect on Linked-in. Several have become high value networking contacts (friends in reality) and two have become clients.
• You can’t advertise on Twitter but you can sell, anyone who says you can’t just does not know how!  Selling isn’t selling anymore it is Engagement Marketing; people want to do business with people they trust and people they know.  I find the best way to sell is to be the sort of person people want to do business with.

To sum up.

The new golden rules of networking; Use social media but don’t forget to be social, collect followers for vanity – Collect relationships for value – share something of value and build your relationships. Oh and one final point – if your goal is to sell it wont work your goal has to be to genuinely help the people you are networking with or they just wont engage you!

Next Steps – Why not share?

1. Leave a comment
2. Email the link to this blog to your valuable contacts
3. Retweet it – share something of value & build your relationships.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp

Intelligise, Be Brilliant

How to engage your Linked-in contacts

Linked-in is the silent superstar of social media, it owns the online business connections market and it is without doubt the best online tool for relationship and reputation management.  Most people however just use it like an online rolodex and fail spectacularly to use Linked-in to engage their contacts on a deeper level.

Social media is changing the way companies communicate with customers and contacts and this has led to a plethora of social media consultancies (usually referring to themselves as gurus or experts) advising business people to set up Linked-in profiles and get as many contacts as possible.  One such agency even charges by the contact they deliver for you.  This sort of low level thinking has contributed to a lot of people getting to a 100 contacts and thinking right job done. You can almost hear the sighs of relief now that they have reached the point where they don’t need to work live a slave to look credible.

The problem is that it’s not job done its job started, to get the biggest return on investment from social media you actually have to be social!  A strange concept I know but in business contacts are nothing, relationships are everything.

In the near future people begin to look at numbers of connections, friends, followers etc in the same way as we now look at “hits” as a way of measuring a web business. Yet then as now an internet based technology has had a huge impact on business but with the wrong Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).  The amount of connections you have isn’t a KPI but the relationship value of those connections is.  The problem is that using all the social media tools in the world won’t help your business, you have to engage your clients on a deeper level than your competition or you won’t be able to compete.

Six keys to improving the relationship value of your Linked-in contacts

1. Quality not quality – First and foremost don’t ask people to link-in unless you know them and want to manage your relationships with them more effectively. Just keep telling yourself it’s a relationship game not a numbers game. At a networking event recently overheard someone say we should link-in to a man he had just met only to have the other person respond “I think we linked-in after the last chamber event”. In my view you should only Link-in to people you have worked with, done business with or know really well.

2. Update regularly – The is a twitteresk feature on Linked in called update and it asks you to post in 140 characters what you are working on – use it and use it every working day. People who visit your profile page will see that you are putting in some effort to your Linked-in page and they will respect that. Your contacts will also usually get an update email of what you are doing every week and this keeps you in touch with your most important contacts for the investment of five minutes per day.

3. Share – Using Linked-in along isn’t a social networking strategy its just one of the tools you will need. If your client’s perception of your credibility and knowledge is key to your success lawyers, accountants architects, IT sales etc then you should blog some useful tips and ideas and share it with your contacts via the update function and by via email.

4. Linked-in messages –When one of your contacts posts an update don’t just read it and think “that was interesting” drop them an email via the system and offer advice or tips, encouragement or a well done as appropriate again a few minutes a day can pay dividends.

5. Network – The most powerful thing you can do with your contacts is bring them together. Ok so some will be in different countries but 80% will be in your local area so BE SOCIAL. In the last two weeks I have held two speakeasy networking events where I have pointed at a bar and invited a dozen of my Linked-in contacts to meet me for a beer and a catch up.  As they all arrived at the same time I introduced them and there are two join ventures in the offer and five very warm sales pitches taking place next week – not only that I received several emails from people saying they were the best networking events they had ever attended.

6. Ask – this is what its all about, Linking-in to people you don’t really know, who don’t really trust you and then failing to engage them means that you have a dead list and a dead list can’t connect you to anyone.  I will bet if most people did a people search for their number one target client in their city they would find several of their connections know them but they wouldn’t have the depth of relationships that would allow them to ask for an introduction.  I am one step away from my top 20 target clients and in 80% of the cases it is one of my Linked-in recommenders that knows them.  It took me a year and I have turned down more offers to connect than I have accepted but my list of contacts is alive and kicking and every time I have asked for an introduction I get it.  Obviously no-ones profile or contact list can ever be perfect but by following the tips above you can improve the value of your Linked-in contacts significantly.

This blog is part two of my series on getting the most from Linked-in you can find part one here http://bit.ly/7JtgEV I hope it helps.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp

Intelligise – Be Brilliant

www.intelligise.co.uk

Five ways to use Linked-in to build Trust and Reputation.

Social media is pervasive it is creating a peer to peer transparent economy where trust and reputation are becoming strongest business currency – yet a high percentage the Social Media profiles of professionals that I view are socially bankrupt.

Linked-in is the best social media platform for doing business but it is widely misunderstood.  Linked-in isn’t an online rolodex it’s a relationship and reputation management tool.

Are you one of those people with a bunch of contacts you don’t really know and an update that’s two months out of date?  Then you are actually damaging your relationships and your reputation.  You may as well go to networking events with a sign round your neck that says “I am not interested in you, I’m only here to get business”.

There are four ways to generate the levels of trust required to be successful in business nowadays and one of those is Reputation Management (RM).  In this blog I am going to focus on how to use Linked-in to build trust via reputation management.  RM is vitally important to business people where personal trust is core to doing business, sales people obviously but also for professionals like accountants, lawyers and architects.  In these professions your reputation is everything and yet these professionals are the worst at using social media to build relationships and trust

Five tips to building trust through your Linked-in profile

1. Have a goal in mind for your Linked-in profile.  If your goal is to improve your expert positioning then focus on your qualifications, past customer recommendations and your passion for your field of work.
2. Don’t forget the profile picture and make sure it looks like you do now.  Ideally the photo should be of you in a business situation / business dress.  Note this is different for Linked-in than Twitter or Facebook where you can be less formal and broadcast more of your personally.
3. Know your connections; don’t accept invites from people you don’t really know.  If you were to build a contact base of 500 people how many would your really see a benefit from engaging – 150 maybe 200 at most?
4. Update every working day of the week – how long will it take you to post 140 charter description of what you are doing today?  Look at it this way if you are a lawyer and you post an update saying that you are writing a talk on “new distance selling regulations” then you are sending a highly focussed message to your most valuable contacts that you have this expertise.  This builds trust, knowledge, referrals and don’t rule out the possibility that your phone will ring directly as a result of the update.  Here is what my profile said this morning: “Gordon is writing a blog on how to engage your Linked-in contacts – watch this space for a link this afternoon”.   Guess what it will say this afternoon?
5. Get recommended, this is the key action that will unlock all of the trust benefits of Linked-in, but there is a problem; if your contacts don’t see that you are serious about Linked-in why should they go to the bother of writing a recommendation?  If you haven’t carried out steps 1-4 people just won’t put in the effort.

Keys to a good recommendation strategy.

Don’t wait to be asked, if you have based your contacts strategy on quality and not quantity then there should be lots of people you could recommend – be proactive.

Don’t ever offer a recommendation on the basis that they give one back just give and see what happens.

Send a request after every successfully completed piece of work and you will build up a portfolio of relevant recommendations.  “He is a good guy” isn’t worth the pixels it’s written on – recommendations need to tie into your overall goal for your linked-in profile.

Dear god, don’t tell your staff to recommend you – how sad is that! – I hate seeing a list of recommendations with no clients but lots of staff saying “he is a great boss”. My rule is 20% max from current staff and none till you have at least ten focussed ones from clients and partners.

And finally – be the sort of person that people want to recommend  - Clue – you have to be someone that people can trust

Conclusion

For professionals but especially for accountants and lawyers trying to win business without first establishing trust is like eating steak without chewing.  As social media becomes more pervasive “online reputation management” will grow as a vital source of personal trust.  So if your Linked-in profile isn’t optimised, then you are probably already loosing business and until you read this I will bet you didn’t know why.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp

Intelligise – Be Brilliant

Check out my Linked-in profile www.linkedin.com/in/GordonMacIntyreKemp and give me a call or drop me an email if I can be of assistance Gordon@intelligise.co.uk

The Most Important Question in Business

I train and coach business development people and at the end of every training session the key lesson highlighted by almost everyone is “knowing what questions to ask during the sales pitch”.  Actually a lot of them say that their key learning was “to ask questions during the sales pitch” & boy do those guys learn a lot at one of my seminars!

When we talk about questions I tell my delegates that the most important question for the sales person is “how is the buying decision going to be made”.  Almost 50% of sales presentations and over 80% of sales emails and cold calls are made to the wrong person and by that I mean someone who does not have the authority to say yes to the sale.

The most important question for the business however is to devise your own version of the most important question ever asked in business and that is “Do you want fries with that”?  Yup unless you are a five stone, vegan health freak you have said yes to that question.  Globally “Do you want fries with that”? is worth tens of millions in sales for MacDonald’s every year.  It got to the point that people didn’t wait to be asked they just ordered fries and MacDonald’s had to come up with another question “Would you like to supersize that”?

I am serious, I am not being flippant or funny, 99% of all sales presentations are designed from the viewpoint of the selling company, they are talking at people and hardly any sales pitches are based around asking questions of the buyer.

Let me by totally clear – Old style features and benefits presentations (especially on PowerPoint) are to sales what steam engines are to a Bullet Train!

The world has changed – as it always does – a new generation of buyers are in charge and they react badly to old style sales pitches. No one wants to be sold to any more they want help to buy!  The key to helping people to buy is to ask questions, to uncover their often hidden needs, wants and desires in a way that drives trust, which creates openness that leads to the sale.

But

When the sale is made the biggest opportunity in business is often missed.  The way to land the opportunity it is to ask the most important question in business – No not “do you want fries with that”? You need to ask your own personal version of that question.  As a sales recruiter the most important question I ever asked was “would you like training with that” and now my business model is based around only recruiting when I get to train the new sales guys and that means I can now offer a guarantee. In fact in recruitment the question that led to more sales during my entire recruitment career than calling and fixing appointments was “what other positions does your company need to fill”?

What is your version of the question?

• Training – Would you like ongoing coaching with that?
• Technology – Would you like technical support with that?
• Flooring or roofing company – would you like us to maintain it and offer a guarantee?
• Phone systems – would you like broadband and mobile phones with that?

OK I get that you wouldn’t always ask the question in such a simple way as MacDonalds but the principle remains the same.  Millions of pounds of sales are probably being missed by your business right now as either you haven’t figured out what your version of the question is – or because your people are not bothering to ask it.

On average the companies I work with get 25% more sales from existing customers and increase the value of new sales by 15% – but the question they invariably ask me to begin with is how they can find new customers!

Two Caveats

1. In larger companies the reason the question doesn’t get asked is often because the benefit from any additional sale will go to a colleague in another team. Good sales management requires that where cross selling involved, sufficient benefit must go to the questioner.
2. If your sales team are cold calling old fashioned closers, when they ask the question the answer will be NO even if the client really needs the additional service – think about it!

Engage your customers on a deeper level – ask searching questions, stop selling and start helping people to buy, become the type of company people want to buy from and remember that the most important question often comes after the sale is made.

Action – Please leave a comment and give me a call if you want to grow your business.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp

Intelligise-Be Brilliant

www.intelligise.co.uk

How to quickly turn a failing sales guy into an appointment setting machine

How to quickly turn a failing sales guy into an appointment setting machine.

I was approached after one of my recent sales seminars and asked by one of the attendees to look over his appointment setting script – it was a shocker – here is a snippet with XXX in place of the name, dates and product.

>>Start

Hi (buyers first name)

Sorry to bother you do you have 5 minutes to talk right now?  Yes / No

If No = ask for a time to call back.

If Yes= ask -How are you today?

I am calling from XXX and as I am in your area next week meeting important clients on XXX I would like to see you to tell you about the benefits of XXX.

Have you got just 15 minutes to see me on XXXX?

<<<End snippet

One script can never fit all and personally I like it when salespeople develop their own style of selling on the phone but everyone needs a good starter script to begin with.  Simple as that may sound finding a good introductory sales script often seems about as easy as searching for the holly grail.

This scrip in particular started me thinking; the reason a lot of people struggle with cold calling for appointments is because they come across as begging for the appointment.  Buyers don’t buy from people who beg, a begging sales person clearly isn’t confident in their own abilities or the product and just do not project the level of professionalism required to win the trust needed to close a meeting and then to close the deal.  You don’t need hugely confident sales people either, a key success factor is just sounding confident and so a confident sounding appointment script can pay dividends.

So what is wrong with the script above? Well it makes 7 DEAL KILLING mistakes in the first 20 seconds of the conversation! Let’s look at them:

1. “Hi buyers first name” – the buyer doesn’t know you, the first time you use their name include the surname, if you keep them on the phone long enough to use the name again you can call them by their first name without asking permission.
2. “Sorry to bother you” – Do people really expect to be taken seriously when they start conversations with “sorry to bother you” how about just saying “Hi am not worth talking to”?  If you believe in your product then you are doing them a favour by calling them so stop apologising and start explaining how you can help.
3. Do you have time to talk right now?  – Here is a clue – he picked up the phone!  If it’s not on voice mail they have time to talk but only if you make it worth their time to talk! This question is just asking for a straight no or a wise crack like “that depends on what you want to talk about”? And no that’s not rapport building.
4. “How are you today” – Don’t ask me that! What business is it of yours how I am?  What if I am having a crappy day do you really want me to share that?  If I am having a good day am I going to tell a stranger on the phone?  Worse still if you are calling one of my fellow Scots they will answer “not bad” and ask “how are you” “not bad either” great, is not bad the position you want to start this sales pitch from?  You just lost momentum and gave your buyer time to think up an excuse not to engage with you.
5. “In your area on XXX” – is that the best reason you can come up with to convince the buyer to meet with you – “You are in my area”? “Oh well then, if you are in my area I had better make time in my busy diary to see you” – Get Real.
6. “To tell you about the benefits” –You mean make a sales pitch that is as bad as this one? Buyers don’t want to buy they want results, they want problems solved and they want expert advice from credible professional sales people.  Just tell me what’s in it for me, what specifically is different about your offering and what will it do for me.
7. “Have you got just 15 minutes” – You can close sales in 15 minutes?  I asked the guy and he admitted that a sales meeting took at least 45 minutes and that he always over ran and had to rush his appointments.  His boss had told him to ask for 15 minutes as it was easer to get than 45 minutes, wrong it’s a hundred times harder.  You know you can’t close the deal in 15 minutes the buyer knows it and you both know you are unprofessional for not asking for enough time. Worse still the buyer now knows that you are dishonest.  Engage the buyer on the phone, ask deep and searching questions be professional, be intelligent, show a genuine interest in the prospect and his problems and you become someone that the buyer would like to meet – Ask for an hour and deserve an hour.

To sum it up the script makes the sales guy sound like he is begging for an appointment and has nothing to offer.  You may also have picked up an angry undertone in my writing – well I am angry about this script – the guy was selling sales training!

If someone sells to me this is the least I would expect:

“Hello is that Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp”? (yes) “Great the reason I want to talk to you is…” (Give me a hook and then ask a question to engage me in conversation). Find out my pain, tease me with part solutions from your expert experience of helping people like me and then offer me a meeting to tell me more and maybe even bring along a case study or two. Oh and don’t tell me you will clear your diary to see me (that’s begging) offer me two dates when you are genuinely free and take it from there, I want to believe that I am not the only person who is willing to meet you.

The best way to get an appointment is to be the type of person that people want to meet.

Buyers don’t want meetings with beggars they want meetings with experts who have engaged them on a deeper level, who have something to teach and a product that can solve a problem.

If the sales person changes his approach the appointments will flow, if he doesn’t he will blame the script and the management and quit – at the same time the management will just say there goes another sales guy who couldn’t sell.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp

Intelligise Be Brilliant

Everyone hates “Sales People” BUT they love “Experts”

Everyone hates sales people – admit it you do as well – even sales people hate sales people!

When a sales person approaches you in a store and asks “can I help you” unless you are in the Apple Store or maybe PC World you automatically say “no thanks just looking”.  Even if you are not just looking, even when you really could do with a second opinion on which shirt goes with the trousers you just picked out.  When a telesales person gets you on the phone you will rarely give them the chance to tell you about the deal they have for you or the service they offer.  At the networking event when someone you just met delivered his elevator pitch before you have even had a conversation and tried to force his card on you, the only person watching who didn’t know that you were not going to do business is the salesman.

The rare exception I mentioned was when you go into the Apple Store or PC World you actively seek out the salesman to ask advice we value their expertise, you understand that you may know less than them and so you are desperate to tell them what we need, how we will use it and how much you can afford and boy will their advice influenced your buying decision.

Why?

Because everyone hates “Sales People” BUT they love “Experts”.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

In the 80s and 90s sales people were trained to push information, to state the features and benefits overcome objections and then try to close the deal.  The world has moved on but sales training in the main hasn’t.  People don’t want to be sold to they want to be engaged, advised and empowered to make the buying decision themselves.   Engaging means sharing expertise, questioning and delving deep into the needs and wants of the buyer, engaging is far more powerful than running through the old style sales script.  Engaging empowers the buyer to make the decision, it is easier than selling, it’s more fun AND everyone I coach to engage increase their sales by at least 25%.

So stop selling people what you want them to buy and start engaging and helping people buy what they really need.

Fortunately becoming an expert is easy, yes you need to read your product manual and service level agreement etc but that’s just background info.  The best way to become an expert and be loved by your clients is to ask questions.  A field sales person will meet between four and a dozen buyers a day, a telesales person will talk to at least 20 decision makers a day and a retail sales person will talk to up to a hundred.

Now imagine if those sales conversations were used to engage and to understand the reasons that the buyers may want to buy and to understand the problems and pain experienced by the buyers of their service.  How long would it take for every one of them to become real experts in their marketplace, to be able to offer really credible advice and to share information that will empower the buyers, make them respect the sales person and make it far more likely that they will buy?

Results can be instant but to make engaging a habit and get 25% plus sales increases usually takes people I coach about three weeks.  The person in every business that is best placed to access the knowledge required to become an expert is the sales person but most of them just keep trying to force the sale through rather than listening to reasons that their prospect needs to buy and that’s a pity because everyone hates sales people BUT they love experts.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp

Intelligise Be Brilliant

How to drive Instant and Easy Organic Sales Growth

I get really angry and frustrated sometimes when I consult with sales managers who say they are desperate to increase sales and then tell me that their solution is to make more sales calls and increase the activity levels of the sales team.

If your sales guys are making more than 50 contacts a day then they are NOT sales people they are order takers.  If you have a team of order takers and especially if your average order value is so low that the decision to buy can be instant then you could get most of your current sales via e-commerce, a good email campaign or at least a much lower paid customer service team.

If you are going to hire real sales people you need them to sell so that your business can grow. You need to have deeper conversations with fewer and more highly targeted buyers and crucially invest more time in your existing clients that have with the potential to drive organic growth.

In this Blog I am going to concentrate on Account Management as less than half of the businesses I meet that NEED an Account Management approach have one and most of those that say that they Account Manage usually don’t have a clue as to what Account Management really means.

So what is Account Management?

Well it is not ‘just being a bit nicer to your best accounts’ which sums up the answer I get from most people. It is consultative selling turbo charged and mixed with a strategic approach to selling to your most valuable accounts.  By strategic approach I mean you actually have to have a strategic plan, set objectives, goals, strategies and measures for each key account.

OK here is the sales bit – Account Management is a strategic process for maximising the revenue and profit opportunities within your top accounts – and its not that complicated!

Take a look at your client base – 80% of your revenue comes from your top 20% of clients.  Don’t believe me get the spreadsheets out and do the math, in any mature professional sales business this 80/20 rule applies and it’s called – Pareto’s Law.

Now ask your self the question – Which of your clients do your competitors want?  Yup that’s right whilst your team are cold calling 100 people a day who don’t want to speak to you your competitors are calling your best clients and (because they can’t sell either) offering them a discount to move their business away from you.

If you don’t engage your most important clients on a deeper level then you are vulnerable to cost cutting but here is the good news

• It is 50% easier to increase your sales to existing clients than it is to find new ones of the same value
• Pricing can be 10-20% higher on a well managed account over time!
• If you target fast growing companies and then Account Manage them your sales will grow organically and you won’t have to win more business to increase your turnover.
• Account Management vastly reduces customer churn

So should your business adopt a Strategic Account Management approach?

Intelligise – Account Management Questionnaire (5 mins)

Answer the following questions of your company YES or No and then count the YES answers to find out:

1. If you need to adopt a Strategic Account Management approach
2. If Account Management is right for you what level of sales and price increase should you expect to generate after one year.

Questions

1. Do you sell mainly on a lower price than the competition?
2. Do you have transactional relationships rather than close relationships with your larger customers?
3. Are you in a position to give knowledgeable advice so that clients could make smarter purchases and use your products more effectively if only they would listen?
4. If your customers used your products more effectively would there be additional revenues to be had for your company?
5. Are your clients unaware of that you could do for them?
6. Are your larger clients loyal only till someone offers them a better price?
7. Do your clients often have offices in other locations / divisions / subsidiaries that you could also service but don’t?
8. Do your clients have multiple budget holders and dispersed decision making?
9. Do your sales decrease rapidly when your competitors chase your business with discounts?
10. Do your sales efforts focus mostly on chasing new business and do you feel that in this economy that is getting harder?
11. Would your clients find it hard to say that you were always on time and gave fantastic customer service?
12. Do you spend more time fire-fighting customer problems than selling and driving the business forward?

Results: Number of “Yes” Statements

0 – 4 = Low requirement but you may get some benefit from handling your top two or three accounts this way

5 – 8 = Account Management approach required for your top 20% of accounts size wise as they should be generating 80% + of your total turnover. Adopting a successful Account Management strategy could result in turnover increasing by between 10 and 20%, and price by between 5 and 10%.

9 – 12 = You need to adopt a consultative selling and strategic account management approach – tout de suite – your business is vulnerable to competitor action and could decline rapidly. Adopting a successful Account Management strategy could result in turnover increasing by between 15 and 25%, and price by between 10 and 20%.

Note: If you have a large number of clients (50+), Scored between 9 and 12 on the test and currently do not adopt an Account Management approach you need to restructure your approach ASAP. If you are based in the UK get in touch today and I will see if I can help you www.intelligise.co.uk

Everyone else watch this space for more helpful tips on Account Management soon

Gordon Intelligise – Be Brilliant

It’s the Network Stupid

In a legendary moment of political strategising Bill Clinton’s team were debating what issues they should run for the presidency on. Issues like abortion, fiscal policy, foreign policy, military funding, you name it were all in the mix with no agreement on what the message should be. Then came the epiphany Clinton smacked himself on the side of the head and exclaimed “it’s the economy stupid”!

This became the message of the campaign and every reporter was (no matter what was asked) was answered in terms of the economy and how Clinton’s reforms would get it going again. A sign carrying the slogan was placed above the door in the war room and after a day or two someone scribbled in pen” and don’t forget healthcare” and the biggest turnaround in presidential electoral history began.
What’s this got to do with the new golden rules of business or with getting better at sales and marketing? Well if I had my way there would be a sign above the door in every sales office in the world that said “It’s the network stupid” and after a week or two you might want to scribble “and don’t forget your business cards”. Twenty years ago you might have had a sign that said “Don’t forget to close” a decade ago the sign might have read “remember to win-win”.
One of the New Golden Rules is “No Network No Growth”.

Now I am not saying no network no sales, you can always drop your price to the point that you buy the business rather than win it but selling more product than last year at a lower price, isn’t net growth it is gross stupidity. The only growth worth having is an increased ratio of profit to turnover, if your turnover increases and your profit ratio decreases you are a busy fool and on the slippery slope to seeing all your profits disappear. Been there seen it done it!
So how do you develop a sales strategy that generates a better profit ratio? It’s the network stupid!

Your personal networking strategy is now far more important to your sales performance than your company’s product development strategy, marketing strategy or financial strategy.

I am going to make you read that twice

Your personal networking strategy is now far more important to your sales performance than your company’s product development strategy, marketing strategy or financial strategy.

Attending a networking breakfast once a month, just going to the local chamber event or taking extra business cards to a conference just doesn’t hack it anymore. You need to engage on a deeper level.

Six keys to developing an intelligised networking strategy:

1. Care – It’s not about creating pitching opportunities it’s about connecting to and helping people. If you must think of it in sales terms then understand that nowadays (far more than ever) the relationship makes the sale.
2. You need to Engage on a deeper level – caring widens the communication channels between yourself and others in your network. If you organise monthly networking events and connect online with people in your network on a weekly (if not daily) basis then information will flow and your market knowledge will grow. Knowledge gives you a sales advantage and an engagement advantage. Once you start the process your reputation just grows and grows.
3. Pay it forward – Don’t give to get – just give – if you only care about your own business you are not building a network. If you genuinely care about your clients and potential clients business and show a genuine interest in them as people then you are building a relationship.
4. Position yourself – people respond to expertise nowadays in the way that they used to respond to brands – trust is everything and the best way to establish trust is to have your peers recommend you. People don’t recommend people they have transacted with people recommend people they are connected to and people they are currently engaged with. Look at my testimonials page on www.intelligise.co.uk or the recommendations on my Linked-in profile www.linkedin.com/in/GordonMacIntyreKemp. Want to do better than that? Shoot video testimonials and put them on your site.
5. Broadcast – As your knowledge begins to grow so will your wish to share your expertise and just as importantly your personality to the market. If you are like me you will have big thoughts and little thoughts – both are as useful to people inside and outside your network and the best ways to convey them are:

• Blogs – look at these as macro entries in your export diary.
• Twitter – same thing really but you are limited to 140 characters including spaces – writing tweets as they are called takes a great deal of skill and discipline and its not easy to make them interesting and relevant. I have several twitter accounts and have just started one on networking and social media – I don’t pretend to be the best but take a look at http://twitter.com/theintelligiser

6. Intellicast – People always ask me what are the best networking events to attend and they always get the same answer – the best networking event is the one you run yourself.

• Seminars – people might not accept your cold sales call but they will actually apologise to you if they can’t make an expert seminar you invite them to. If you don’t know the best way to become an expert read points 1-5 again. Honestly are you still selling to people one client at a time?
• Speakeasy – Got a dozen people you want to connect with but can’t find the time? Send them all an invite to a bar at 4.30pm one day and connect with them all at once – introduce them to one another and you start to create a meshwork and that’s the best kind of network.
• Coffee catch ups – set your self a KPI (activity target) of at least two a week you don’t need to have an agenda or a pitch to make just engage and see where it goes.
• Hot topic dinners – Like a seminar but posher and more expensive so often best used for a group including some of your VIP clients and prospects.
• Partner Seminars – Who do you know in your network who is completely non competitive with you but targeting the same buyers? Why not share the costs of an event and cross invite your clients. As long as you add value to the event they usually say yes and it’s easy to get 50 people in a room. Need an idea ask me to present on social networking strategies it’s the hot topic at the moment.
• Caveat – if people attend one of your events and it turns out to be a sales pitch they won’t come back. Use the event to engage, connect and pay it forward your pitch will be welcomed and listened to and trusted. What more do you want?

After a few months you will have more knowledge, deeper relationships, more trust, higher visibility and a better reputation in the market place that your competitors. In short you will become someone that people want to do business with – someone that is indispensible to your clients businesses on a level beyond just the actual transaction, or the features and benefits of your product or service.

Your personal networking strategy is far more important to your sales performance than your company’s product development strategy, marketing strategy or financial strategy.  Hopefully I don’t need to repeat that.