When we ask that question, we get the same answer: we have a global delivery model, we are client centric, we put people first, we are domain experts and/or we really understand our clients.

Woop do flipping do. Welcome to the club. With those credentials, you are beautiful and unique, just like everyone else.  Your competitors have the same answer. They have a global delivery model, they are client centric, they put people first, they are domain experts and they really understand their clients.

So if you are just another IT services shop, what do you do when it comes to answering the question: “so how are you different from all the other firms out there?”  How do you differentiate yourself in the undifferentiated world of IT Services?

There are really three interrelated ways to answer that question. All three answers build on each other and are critical to each other. But explaining all of them here would take too long and is beyond the scope of this post.

The first answer is “trusted customer relationships.” We believe this answer is most critical, actionable and more important and therefore will be the basis of this article. The second answer falls into the camp of messaging, positioning, and defensible-niche creation. We’ll discuss that answer in the next article.  The third answer comes at the question from the inside-out perspective – company  culture, decision making process, and internal trust. Again, this is a topic for another article.

Trusted Relationships and Hunting Big Accounts –  the founder’s problem of scale

Say the word “trusted customer relationships” and many definitions and meanings come to mind. Each definition has a different context. In this case, we need to be very specific about context and so we want to talk about a very specific scenario.

In our work with professional services firms in the $1 to $5 million/year revenue range, what we generally see is a founder who has left a senior Fortune 500 IT position to start a company. As a first customer, the new entrepreneur lands his account by selling services back to his former employer – a whale (a large farmable account capable of more than $1M annual billings and a well known brand or reputation).

In this scenario, other than a trusted relationship, there is very little that on the IT services menu that differentiates the IT services shop from the competition. Aside from marginal differences in talent, culture, expertise and methodology, almost every other $1M to $5M competing IT services firm can do a job as well as any other.

So when we talk about trusted customer relationships, we’re talking about founders who are friends with their new clients. They have leveraged a deep pre-existing relationship to become entrepreneurs. This relationship was built over many years through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency.

Because of the relationship, the founder brings speed and nimbleness to problem solving. This is due to the fact that he or she has an intuitive grasp of the project goal (i.e. benefit to the company) AND the culture’s style of generating support for the goal AND the culture’s preferred style of organizing execution toward the goal.  Together all this means a relationship that is hard to duplicate.

The problem of scaling this kind of relationship begins when the founder wants to find another major whale sized account that is just as profitable and farmable as the first major account.

The entire problem for finding the second whale is creating what was “second nature” with the founder’s former employer.  How do you replicate in the selling and marketing process the relationships that were created over time through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency?

The answer (and the currency by which the trust is established, earned and scaled) is USEFULNESS.

In sales-processes, the conversations, the relationships, the personal network and persuasion have always been the de facto currency. If people buy from people and if a brand is really the sum total of a customer’s interaction with a company, then it follows that in B2B, the personal brand of the founder is really all that matters when it comes to finding the next whale.

And, if you accept the fact that, for IT services firms of this size, the definition of a successful marketing and sales campaign could be the addition of one new whale per year. In this context, the sales and marketing discussion takes on an interesting new perspective.

The web and social media did not create the idea of a personal brand. Leading with value and emphasizing relationship value over a quick-transaction have always been the hallmarks of successful professional services organizations.

The only difference that social media makes is that the technology finally got granular enough and accessible enough and instantiated enough to be useful in facilitating this level of the ageless human dialog of value exchange.

The tendency of people to become known through repeat encounters is as old as walking upright – and establishing a brand of credibility and openness to repeat transaction is earned by being accessible and broadly useful to the challenges prospects face – across the whole lifecycle of the problem solution.

Unfortunately, many founders of professional services organizations somehow got disconnected from this simple truth. You can see this in their marketing departments – day after day churning out me too SharePoint webinars with co-op Microsoft funds. If everyone is using the same campaign materials and selling the same products, then there is no differentiation.

For that and many other reasons, a dedicated emphasis on personal branding may overlap and replace some of the “traditional” tactics in marketing’s tool chest. The highest value of these personal branding activities is how they reach past the product attributes and into the underlying human issues beneath the problem the prospect company is experiencing.

Professional services marketing needs to take the next step to scale personal branding. Marketing’s ability to speak to, or at least package the pitch, to speak to this broad set of human issues feels like the leg up that the sales organization needs in order to stand out, be remembered, and be valued as sources of solid thinking, not just products.  Again, before trusted advisor, before regular meeting, even before someone recognized your name comes USEFULNESS – which we believe is the new universal of finding and growing a business through new sales.

At first, this approach is not a substitute for the “core” business building activities. Over time, however, it will replace the shopworn marketing tactics that just aren’t working like they used to. Marketing will soon be measured by its ability to reach into the inner recesses of the decision process around every significant buying decision. The way buying decisions are made is so complex within major accounts that nothing other than pure USEFULNESS could penetrate the dialog.

Great sales people have always done this – communicated the solution when it was time, and then spoken in specific about how it could be sold inside by the champion, and how it would be implemented, and described the benefits that would accrue. Equipping the internal champion to carry the message further and generate some kudos for himself in the process is natural.

Tom Searcy, author of “Hunt Big Sales” says “People only buy what they can safely sell to others, or defend if challenged. Our job as whale hunters is to equip and train the buyers to defend themselves from the attacks that will come later.”

It is in such a discussion where you first get to cross over into the advisor role, almost coaching the internal champion on how to make the case succinctly for your solution. Not only is this valuable, but you quickly pick up other cues about the company’s comfort level with the disruption that comes with change, entrenched interests and some of their agendas, priority of the need against other investments the company is making, etc.  These are exactly the kind of things that are “walking around knowledge” for the recently exited employee when he hangs out his shingle and sells services to his former employer.

In transferring this knowledge to new whales, over time, the more useful encounters you have with the prospect/customer, the more quickly you can get to equipping them to defend themselves and eventually co-own your goal. Co-owning a goal is not just implementing the solution, but helping your internal champion adequately share and evolve the problem and its solution.

Co-ownership is an exploration of how the whale’s culture generates appropriately widespread concurrence on this problem. How does it get on the priority list of problems to be attacked? How does the company’s culture establish resources for those sufficiently high-priority problems it decides to attack? What is the current decision-maker’s role in those deliberations about priority and resources?

When these questions are answered, THEN, only THEN can the sales machinery begin sketching a proposal that speaks to prospective solutions AND how to help steer consideration of those solutions through the company’s internal machinery, equipping the current decision-maker to advance the dialog, not just show a product list and price sheet from a vendor.

Trying to short-circuit this natural process is much like getting married on a first date. It only happens to a lucky few.

The sales process must itself be value-add if it is to stand out from the competition’s.  As satisfying as it would be to sit in a prospect’s office and take an order, most substantial-dollar transactions cast a 6 to 18 month shadow in front of them. Helping with the decision dynamics of getting your solution chosen is a way to equip your internal champion, to lead with value, and to stand apart from the show-up-and-throw-up types.

In our experience working with IT services organizations, the one true differentiator that separates one IT services firm from another is the relationship it has with clients. Unfortunately, this aggregate concept is tired, shop worn and not even a memorable cliché.

Yet, if the personal relationships of the firm are the true differentiator, then the co-ownership of problems that keep the project on track, on the priority list (to preserve resource allocation) and interim results appropriately socialized to maintain support.  These dimensions are what is inside the “relationship” concept and the goal of ever more familiarity is ever faster grasp of the goal of co-ownership.

The ideal scenario for finding the next whale begins with discovery of the client’s pain-points, or challenges, or problems – because then the dialog can begin about possible solutions.  All too often, in the rush to “close the deal” we’ve seen too many founders jump straight from this discovery to an internal mapping back to his company’s potential products and services for addressing the prospect’s problems.

Instead of rushing to a solution, co-ownership should begin with fresh perspective about the issues surrounding the problems, the solutions, the challenges, the benefits, untethered to promotional push to sell the products.  It’s the intellectual property that is related to the solution-provider’s area of specialty that can be scattered around like seeds, to find fertile ground wherever they can.

This really is where the payoff is when it comes time for the customer to source his next solution – it shows when the sales person gets the call telling him of the need, it shows in the degree of involvement in helping shape understanding of the need, perhaps even contributing to the internal defense document to secure funding.

This is far beyond “will the prospect know whom to call” when he needs something.  In every case, the IT services firm that wins disproportionately is the one that has established trusted relationships with clients, possibly  many years in advance of projects.

Recurring features of such a relationship include:

SKIN IN THE GAME.  Perhaps this is better framed as alignment. Do you have skin in the game? Are your fees tied to the client achieving their project goals as well as their business goals? How closely is your success tied to the client’s success?

TRANSPARENCY. This is another component of co-ownership. When your profitability is aligned with the client’s goals, there is a level of transparency and trust built into the transaction.

RELATIONSHIPS. Invariably project success will involve interactions beyond just the sales person and the internal champion – to what degree does the sales person have relationships with sources of special knowledge or experience when helping refine a solution?

ACCUMULATED LEARNING.  The essence of repeat-interaction is that no one has to start from a blank sheet to establish a baseline understanding of the challenge, the resources, the culture, the goals.  The sales person with a trusted relationship is this “on steroids.”  Not just having access to previous purchases, but having notes about issues learned while implementing the solution, technical notes, people notes, management hot-buttons, etc that broaden the reach of the internal champion as he navigates the project.

The items listed above, when appropriately investigated, can lead you to the answer of what is different. It can help you help the client mitigate risks (and in some cases share risk) as well as understand your critical thinking abilities.

If product specs, delivery times, rates, and service level guarantees are all very close and can be put on the IT “menu,” where can the differentiation come from?  As all veteran sales stars know, the differentiation happens when youhuman beings finally make sense of chaos –  when data becomes information, specs are aligned with goals, project timeline get fleshed out and dollars are allocated.

The IT Menu of services can be neat, clinical and rational; the messy part is in the eating. No one ever gets nourished consuming the menu.

In that spirit…MARKETING AND SALES FREAKS UNITE. What’s on your mind? How are you? Who are you? Where are you?

Can you take a few minutes to respond to our B-to-B Sales and Marketing Snapshot: 2010?

Take the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7NZMPVX

In concert (no pun intended) with ZoomInfo, we’ve created this survey to get a better handle on the alignment of sales and marketing.

We’re hopeful the responses will give us a sharper sense of the kind content we can provide that will help b-to-b sales and marketing pros perform their jobs better, grease the sales funnel, and, like, the Grateful Dead realized a long time ago, create life-time value with their customers. We’ll share the results in a few weeks.

To respond to the survey, please click http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7NZMPVX

Data, like unrefrigerated milk, goes bad fast. In fact, by conservative estimates 25% of  the database will sour within a year. Add poor import practices and other minor mistakes and bad things quickly snowball. It isn’t until senior management realizes it is making strategic decisions on the back of sub-par data that heads begin to roll.

But head rolling is a complicated task. Do you get rid of the person responsible for cleaning the data in use or the person responsible for preventing low quality data from getting into the system in the first place? Do sales people bear some of the blame for not updating contact info? The marketing department for not scrubbing the unworkable e-mail addresses? Or should the executive team take a hard look in the mirror because clean data was not a strategic priority?

Some organizations try to fix the problem by assigning an intern to scrubbing the data instead of committing to a permanent process change. Others will look longingly for new gadgets, tools, hosted software, widgets, mobile apps or various marketing automation tools to fix the problem.

These items provide a wonderful, shiny distraction and maybe an incredible technology advantage, but they are no substitute for actually changing the process. Need to rationalize it to upper management? The ROI for clean data is simple.  All things being equal, a company with a larger database of clean prospects will close more business than a company with a smaller database of clean prospects.

Barry Trailer, co-founder of CSO Insights, confirms in an upcoming report what we all know: “The 2800 companies participating in CSO Insights’ 2010 Sales Performance Optimization survey confirmed what everyone knew: 2009 was the toughest year yet. But it was harder on some firms than others,” Trailer says. He adds: “Those implementing higher levels of sales process implementation, enjoying higher levels of relationship with their customers, and leveraging enabling technologies fared better than the rest. Of course, having accurate data to inform your systems and processes is key.”

Data quality is not a one-shot deal. Cleaning your data will cost money and so will the improvements to process that are needed to support ongoing data quality. But in the end, it’s worth it. Although the option to continue working harder not smarter is always appealing, a fast way to improve sales and marketing success is to fix things that can be fixed. Data quality is one of those items.

Every reptilian instinct in my body wanted to find a way to bad mouth the agency’s work. But their creative, positioning and the execution was brilliant. We couldn’t find fault in the agency’s work.

We dug deeper and asked to look at their new CRM – the foundation for the entire product launch and the basis for all of their prospecting efforts. It fueled their direct mail, email newsletters, catalog mailings and sales outreach.

The problem was immediately obvious. The turd in the proverbial punchbowl was data quality. The client had spared no expense building world class creative and but left the task of data hygiene to a group of marketing interns who would rather mop the floors than scrub data.

In the post mortem, we learned the interns received various Excel files containing old data, questionable lists, incomplete lists and exports from a variety of personal contact management applications. Then, with bubble gum and bailing wire, the master list was normalized, checked for obvious data format requirements and imported verbatim into the million dollar CRM.

In hindsight, the client was incredibly candid. No one wanted to own the data hygiene. It wasn’t sexy and it cost a lot of money to do right.  So, in the hopes of prevent future CRM data quality disasters, here are few tips you can use to get the biggest bang from your CRM dollar:

1)    Data quality is not a one-time event. Your data will get dirty and cleaning it is an ongoing set of activities so it helps to design processes that keep data clean. For example, after an email blast, a single individual should be responsible for removing or updating undeliverables. In addition, sales people should also be responsible for keeping data clean. They own the accounts and it is in their best interest to champion the data. Additional quality checks such automation of duplicate record checks also stops problems before they get out of hand.

2)    Duplicates cost you. A single company record should be tied to a set of addresses and contacts. Failure to tie together information about an account to a single company record dilutes the effectiveness of the data – especially in key account selling.

3)    Humans matter. While automation of data clean-up is useful, humans are essential to the process. Computers miss things that are usually obvious to a human such as a division’s relationship to a corporate entity.

4)    Protect your data from good intentions. With CRM, it is far too easy for individuals without an understanding of data hygiene practices to import data from external sources. An equal opportunity automated and a manual review process should always be applied to external data before it is imported.

5)    Find a balance. It is easy to be compulsive about data quality but it is not practical. Your data changes every day, making sure it is always accurate is not financially feasible. That is why it is important to strive for “good enough.”

Good data is the foundation for effective CRM. In B2B it is impossible to build strong marketing unless you know the names of the people most likely to buy from you. Maintaining a clean CRM punchbowl requires more than a summer intern.

To properly evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns, it is important to know your real cost of a lead.

Forrester Research recently revealed that about 50% of b-to-b marketers don’t use e-mail metrics to measure their campaign results(1). Do you know what your real cost of a lead is? If you are thinking about building a pay for performance (p4p) marketing campaign with your vendor, it is important to know this number before speaking with a prospective vendor.

Email campaigns are simple to measure. In fact, most email marketing tools have built-in measurement dashboards.

Overcoming inertia aside, once you start combining marketing tactics, it is deceptively difficult to determine your true cost of a lead because you must add all your costs – your tools, time and vendor costs for going to market. Assessing the real cost of lead generation requires an deep understanding of all the costs and expenses involved in the process. Think about all the activities you employ to make the phone ring: website optimization, direct sales, email newsletters, press releases, direct mail, networking, speaking engagements, etc.

There are very few companies that are using just one tactic to drive new business. In other words, I know of very few companies that are just using just cold calls or just PR to drive their entire business. The successful marketers layer multiple tactics to achieve stable lead flow.

So it should come as no surprise that the true “ballpark” cost of a lead is between $200 and $4000 depending on the market and difficulty reaching the decision maker.

Some clients think this ballpark is reasonable. Others run screaming for the door thinking that these numbers can’t possibly be true.

So the next time you think about building a p4p campaign, ask another question “where and how should we spend our money to get the best, most stable cost-per-lead” not “what do you charge for a meeting?”

Linking marketing and sales to buying activity requires reinvention of the sales process as well as process improvement. The traditional model of marketing handing leads off to sales is being replaced by the idea that both organizations jointly own prospect relationships and coordinate activities to nurture and migrate the prospect forward in the decision cycle.  Unfortunately, these two departments approach the customer in different ways, with different cultures and different compensation models.  Companies that figure out how to make this work can see dramatic improvements quickly at the top of the pipeline. 

Our beta B2B Marketing/Sales Execution Model is a first pass at explaining the inter-relationship between the departments. We attempt to align the activities of sales and marketing by mapping activities against the buyer’s decision-cycle. To request a copy, please complete the form below. We’d appreciate your feedback as we evolve and improve this concept.

• You have a marketing operations model (not just a collection of tasks)
• You understand the key inputs and outputs from each marketing tasks
• You use the model to understand where you should spend your time or focus attention when key metrics don’t hit the right thresholds
• You know when you need to add staff or other resources well before you get caught short.

Curious, how are you measuring? What are you measuring? How are you quantifying and justifying the unmeasureasble investments?

In an earlier post, we conducted interviews and almost everyone interviewed said new business was generated via “trusted relationships.”

In that spirit, we’ve become quite competent at executing small but highly targeted outreach programs designed to build or enhance the personal brand of a firm’s individual practice manager(s). These campaigns help practice managers build their portfolio of critical relationships and expand their network of buying decision makers.

This post describes one process we use for elevating the profile of a practice leader in approximately 4 to 6 months from start-to-finish. These programs are focused on building relationships through mutual shared discovery of needs and wants.  This is “intelligent selling” through Trojan horse marketing, but it’s done at a practical, street-level. It is done in a sophisticated way that leads to trust in relationships through a mutual fair exchange of ideas.
 
SAMPLE APPROACH

One approach used in the past  (and there are many other tactics at our disposal) is to publish version 0.9 of a whitepaper. We then conduct outreach to a defined group of key prospects and thought leaders seeking their input as a way of finishing the whitepaper. The goal of the outreach is to elicit additional comments and facilitate personal discussions between your practice manager and the prospect that can be incorporated into a next generation whitepaper as a series of practical best practices interviews.

In this example, the primary goal of the process is not the whitepaper. It is the outreach itself. It is the conversations about your products and practices that are most important to this process. We facilitate and organize conversations so your practice manager has more face time with key prospects. The goal is to learn about their needs in a non-intrusive and valuable way that builds trust. 

The value of this overall approach is significant because it is immediate. This approach is effective because it generates IMMEDIATE relationships with interested parties who have needs.  

Program success can be measured in several different ways.

• Substantive interactions initiated with the target audience
• Number of prospect sign-ups for ongoing communication
• Requests for download of whitepaper from qualified prospects (this KPI is less important that the others so it can have a smaller weight in final calculations)
• Signups for specialized roundtable or survey about the whitepaper 
• Change in web traffic from launch date and forward
• Web traffic from this whitepaper landing page/blog to the main website
• Number of referring links to whitepaper/blog plus viral seeding of specific information by tagging via any of several social networking resources
• Inquiries of substance leading to articles or other posts by authoritative opinion-shapers

The compensation model is also unique and I believe this model is the primary reason for our recent growth — we put 50% of our fees at risk. This means that together we define the scope necessary for program success and only when we are successful do we bill for the remainder of project fees.

Fantastic and quick read called Smile and Move.

Good article called: There is no room for panic in the selling process.

Video: Selling in Turbulent Times.

Sales training tips from the SalesHunter.

How are sales training experts getting along in this economy?

Making the Number: a great Book From Mike Drapeau.

Six Sigma Selling – another great read.

Trust is a shared belief that you can depend on one another to achieve an objective. Trust is built through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency.

The business development challenge for most professional services firms is identifying ways to scale the process for demonstrating trustworthiness to prospects.

How do your firm’s current marketing activities strengthen the personal networks of the managing partners or help build trusted relationships?

If you have a vague feeling of marketing malaise, it may be due to the growing recognition that modern marketing-think is steadily transforming itself into sales-think. In sales-think, the conversations, the relationships, the personal network and persuasion have always been the de facto currency.

Your unease may stem from the fact that the marketing function as we know it is changing dramatically. This may be due to audience fragmentation or the shift of power from the seller to the buyer or hundreds of other equally valid reasons.    

For those practice managers and managing directors interested in more efficiently finding new business it begins by aligning marketing with the task of increasing the number of highly-qualified trusted relationships in the portfolio, not closing a deal. For marketing, it is important to recognize that new business development as a disciplined activity is steadily morphing into an exercise in “personal branding.”

If you are uncomfortable with the term “personal branding” because it minimizes the power of the corporate brand, welcome to the club. But if people buy from people and if a brand is really the sum total of a customer’s interaction with a company, then it follows that in professional services, the personal brand is really all that matters.

Traditional marketing-think such as intrusion, hard-sell tactics, product-push, branding and controlling-the-message activities just don’t resonate anymore. Marketing-as-control has been undermined by customer access to information, networks and experience far beyond the marketing department’s ability to control and manage.  The marketing department is being forced to accept that authentic, inclusive, people to people-driven information is becoming the dominant method for inviting prospects into relationship that can be nourished into customer relationships.

This is even more complicated by the fact that the isolated points of encounter between a company representative and a prospect aren’t just sales encounters, but social encounters as well.  These social and network encounters don’t lend themselves the traditional linear progression of a sales pipeline diagram.

There are some stand-out marketing organizations that have embraced this truth. Yet there are others who are just not capable of authenticity because they are so far removed from the customer.  

This is why some professional services organizations are delegating the function of authenticity to the managing partners and practice managers. The managing partners, responsible for thought leadership are now also responsible for promoting and demonstrating that same leadership through their actions.

Today, the cost of content production and distribution has shrunk dramatically, the information freely available  has grown to include not just sellers but buyers eager to share their own needs, challenges and experiences;  and reaching interested people with relevant offerings is a much more fractured challenge. The challenge is aligning personal relationships with the sales funnel in a way that supports meaningful and valuable discussion as well as trust building.