Recorded: A Canterbury Tale of Modern Selling - 4: The Marketer's Tale

Story added:

Or - Whose Pipeline is it Anyway?

To watch a FREE RECORDING of The Marketer's Tale - CLICK HERE

Clegg-Brown-Cameron (Photo Source Sky News)
Who is telling the truth?                    (source - Sky News)

The continuing crowds of (sadly) experienced sales and marketing professionals who are driving The Canterbury Tales, are telling us things like...

"Marketing and Sales go together like Harry Potter and Voldemort, or Politicians and Truth".

...and it's clear, at the very least, that many sales people have strong, negative views on marketing.

But the internet has changed things – and skills in creating, building and managing conversations are now marketing's way forward. Traditionally, these are sales skills.

So are marketing and sales finally reaching the same page?

In this webinar we examine how marketing can help sales people sell better, become more valuable to their companies and build their own personal brand.

Hear from...

Peter Johnston

Peter Johnston of Intelligent Technology on how buyers changed the role of sales and marketing. How marketing can powerfully support your sales efforts. And why good sales people will soon be more in demand than ever.

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Jeremy Spiller

Jeremy Spiller of White Hat Media on how Microsoft drives business to sales people through social media. How it can transform your personal effectiveness. And how marketing paves the way to better selling.

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Sharon Drew Morgen

Sharon Drew Morgen on how it is no longer about selling, but about Buying Facilitation. How you can manage change and lead prospects through their buying decision. And how that sets you apart and gives you an edge.

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Join our webinar to find out:

  • What marketing really means in the internet/social/mobile world.
  • How marketing can introduce you to new business.
  • How to combine marketing and sales into a Technology Aided Prospecting team.
  • How marketing techniques can help you exceed your sales targets.
  • How personal marketing can make you sought after wherever you go.

And, how you could become a sweeper in the premier league!

Part 4 – The Marketers' Tale - of The Canterbury Tales of Modern Selling, brought to you by ModernSelling.com, Citrix Online GoToMeeting / GoToWebinar and LeadFormix. (Click to - watch the recording for free)

For this and all other recorded webinars currently available on ModernSelling.com, you will need a free download of Windows Media Player - click here.

And please also feel free to login with LinkedIn below, and ask your question or add your comment to further inform this very important learning series of webinar workshop discussions...

    Questions & Comments

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    Media and reaching target markets...

    This is also rather jargon-rich, and seems to be talking to advertisers and publishers, but I think we'll find that an Ad Agency RFP (request for proposal) has echoes out in the wider world of selling and marketing...

    http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7903-the-rfp-is-dead-new-concepts-in-audience-discovery

    ...where we might also be looking to engage the handful of real "prospects", rather than expensively influence the mass market we hoped were "suspects".
    Posted by Neil Warren on

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    Starstruck!

    No disrespect to you, Peter or Jeremy but WOW Sharon Drew Morgen!!

    I doff my hat to you sir. You have soared in my estimation and you were already pretty high up the list!

    Loved the first two seminars, haven't listened to the third one yet but am now hopping from foot to foot in eager anticipation of the fourth!

    Bring it on!
    Posted by Neil Fletcher on

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    Starstruck too

    I just googled Sharon Drew Morgan too and wow - she makes it looks so easy though and we know it isn't right.. But it is where we need to be I reckon.

    I liked her interview with Tony Pariello (spelling ?) on her site.

    The late David Sandler tried to buy her company that some kudos isn't it? I have ordered two of her books today.
    Posted by Jim Powell on

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    Sharon Drew Morgen

    Hi Everyone:
    How kind of you all to say such lovely things! And how did you know about david sandler, jim? is that story now industry lore? Gosh - i've only told that to a few people. He told me he had tried to 'get outside the box' but hadn't realized how far outside it was necessary to go before real change could happen. It was a lovely call... he also said how annoyed he was that the field had picked up his term 'pain' and was not using it properly...

    I'm going to be coming out your way shortly. I'll be putting on an open enrollment program to teach Buying Facilitation(r) and a few extra days for the few folks who want to license with me to train the material to their clients or staff. We can discuss if you want to contact me directly.

    Or, i'm running a webinar that neil/modern selling is putting on as well as having an open conf call to answer questions next week. Neil has all of the data (sorry - i'm out of my office now and don't have all details but neil will offer it).

    I look forward to working with whomever is interested in helping buyers traverse their buying decision journey - a different skill set (hence the program) that works with sales but addresses both the change management/buying decision path as well as the solution placement/sales path.

    I know, i know... it's different. But that's the good news, right?

    Let me know how i can best serve. Trying to change the world alone is a dark and lonely job, and whomever has interest in working with me will help us all achieve excellence.

    I am delighted to be coming back.... I lived in London from 83-89, so i even have a bit of a british sense of humor (my u.s. friends think i'm rude) and i know how to speak proper english. i even pronounce 'herb' and 'schedule' and 'jaguar' properly :)

    looking forward... and thank you for your kindness. i'm touched...
    sd
    Posted by Sharon Drew Morgen on

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    Blogs, teleconferences, webinars, seminars and workshops (with the stars!)

    Exciting stuff this mixed media world, eh Gents?

    And thank you so much for telephoning yesterday Sharon Drew, you can see that there is a great sense of excitement and anticipation around all this.

    Let me firstly point everyone at the teleconference opportunity that Rob Mottram was setting up via our LinkedIn Group...

    http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Sharon-Drew-Morgen-conference-call-1328087.S.68558779

    ...(and I'll see about getting him to replicate that out here too).

    And then, given that I too am learning as fast as the rest, let me also suggest that, as you advised me Sharon Drew, getting at least a feel for your book "Dirty Little Secrets"...

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dirty-Little-Secrets-Buyers-Sellers/dp/0964355396/

    ...will give people at least an idea about quite how big and fundamental these change of mindset and attitudes and ways of working are. (And Sharon Drew's clients and case histories span the likes of Barclays and Salesforce.com folks, although I'm not sure she can share all she was kind enough to let me hear about, in public, but no wonder David Sandler was interested!).

    I haven't got the October workshop details to hand just now, so let me stop here with this reply, and we can save that for further Comments / Questions. (I'm also off to order the book).

    We're looking forward to it all though, as you can see, and more follows, as would any of your specific questions be welcomed, from any passing reader...
    Posted by Neil Warren on

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    The UK Buying Facilitation(r) Workshop with Sharon Drew Morgen

    Ah yes, thanks again Sharon Drew, I've found the 3-day workshop flyer now...

    http://www.newsalesparadigm.com/UK_BuyingFacilitation.pdf

    ...which also links people to the "how to book" page.

    (And don't forget to book the free webinar above folks, or here...

    http://learn.gotomeeting.com/forms/13Sept11-EMEA-G2MC-WBR-L?ID=701000000005lki

    ...if you want a better idea of what these "dirty little secrets" are! ;-)
    Posted by Neil Warren on

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    It's a BIG topic, not a quick A.B.C. of Selling...

    I dug out the Tony Parinello interview too Jim...

    http://salesbr.vo.llnwd.net/o2/QBC/qbc091023a.mp3

    ...which is well worth a listen on anyone's next spare 30 minutes. More examples like Unisys trying to solve a $Billion banking problem.

    Having seen the slide deck for Sharon Drew's part in our webinar here though too, and had an hour or so on the phone with her, one-to-one yesterday evening, let nobody be under any illusion that this is any kind of quick-fix "read and run" solution. If the second Scottish example she gave is anything to go by, reducing buying cycles from a year to 3 weeks, how could it be?

    Plus with us here, Sharon Drew is also having to address how this merges with marketing and buyer activity on the web, most of which is still well before the average sales person (in the UK, pre-Sharon Drew) gets involved, let alone with a bird's-eye view of what our whole company ought to be trying to do, as solutions providers to troubled and lost buyers.

    This is a fundamental CHANGE in most of everything we've been taught, so far, about how buyers buy and so how we can most effectively "sell" - and A.B.C. (Always Be Closing) it most definitely is not.
    Posted by Neil Warren on

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    Onwards and Upwards

    Sounds like a great session and looking forward to those dirty little secrets from the Facilitator in Chief plus what Microsoft have been up to from Jem!

    To show how fast everything's changing (as if anyone needs convincing) I've just been made aware of this which is well worth a minute and a half of your time:
    http://www.zeromomentoftruth.com/

    Waiting patiently in anticipation.
    Posted by Richard Nolan on

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    The Great God Google calls it Zero Moment of Truth

    Ah yes - excellent Richard, thank you for that. I read the eBook / .pdf thing, but the video clips are very helpful indeed.

    And I'm not sure either how easily "Zee-Mot" or (Aussie version) "Zed-Mot" will enter British Business Culture (BBC?) - but I do know now, having also just done a rehearsal with Sharon Drew, Jeremy & Peter, that this is all the same big picture we're talking about.

    It's a VERY different picture from the one that went before, too, so I really hope this shared learning can be as widely shared as possible.
    Posted by Neil Warren on

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    Can salespeople cope with being up front in the lead generation process?

    Coke has just announced it is looking for a social media agency. Intel has come up with a comprehensive social media plan.

    It seems that Listening for Leads is becoming the way forward. But one blog from Kenny Madden at Spiceworks (http://bit.ly/pxLFjF) said salespeople couldn't wouldn't do it... His words, not mine:
    1. Salespeople are terrible at prospecting. ( Sometimes it has takes 30 - 40 attempts to break into a company and qualify a brand new opp. Salespeople usually stop after 4 ? 5 times )


    2. Salespeople hate to prospect and do the upfront work to drive demand. ( salespeople want to sell not drive demand)


    3. Even if a salesperson does do some prospecting, as soon as they generate some pipeline, they become too busy to prospect. It?s not sustainable. ( This is why ramp up time are so much longer than anticipated)

    Salespeople do not cause customer acquisition growth, they fulfill it.

    Do you agree? If not, why not?
    Posted by Peter Johnston on

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    Being better in sales

    I believe one of the problems with social media and the use of the web for prospecting is that it is over hyped by many of the people who work within it.

    This is then further hyped by the money people and this is now being seen in the sort of valuations social media business are getting at the moment. This is a bubble that will burst in exactly the same way that the dot com bubble did.

    Does this mean it has no value? Of course not. That would be like saying the web had no value during the dot com boom or after the bubble burst. The value is huge.

    However at the other end of the scale there is a large section of the sales industry who maintain that social media has little value to them and that the old ways are still best.

    This is even in the light of improved technologies such as voicemail that prevent sales people from speaking to decision makers and the web itself where now transparency is so much greater.

    In other words as a buyer if I don't want to talk with someone I don't need to. If I'm considering buying from someone I can check out that individual carefully on sites like LinkedIn and the business in many places on the web.

    I can visit communities within the suppler's vertical to see what others are saying and engage with these other people.

    So not being visible and not engaging online is a major issue and this is down to the communicators within a business who are as much as anyone else the sales people. That's everyone in sales, at every level.

    When the whole sales industry realise this, it will change everything very significantly, permanently and for the better.
    Posted by Jeremy Spiller on

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    Thanks for the webinar

    An interesting lunch hour, but no question time.
    Jeremy on "visibility" shone a light on a dark corner!

    I am less sure about changes to the funnel in B2B and selling and buyer changes. Selling is changing due to Social, Technological, Economic, Political and Competitor factors just like everything else.

    As for S&M alignment, maybe Marketing should go back into the Firm and Sales should re-align with Buyers?
    Posted by Brian MacIver on

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    Question Time is alive and well on here

    Thanks for the feedback Brian.

    One of the greatest things about online is that you can try things out without waiting years to make a change.

    Unfortunately so can your competitors and maintaining a competitive advantage is harder than ever.

    As to Marketing and Sales, I firmly believe they are converging into Unified prospecting with clever and adaptable people from both winning out while the low level jobs become automated.
    Posted by Peter Johnston on

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    Talk Talk or Type Type & Blog Blog?

    The recording is now posted folks, for those who missed it, and don't forget to get your free Media Player update - linked above in the main article.

    There are also some "technical hitches" in this one, so apologies for those, as indeed there are on the site here, where logging-in to comment whips you back to the home page - where you then have to find "Webinar Corner" bottom left or under News & Events. All work in progress - apologies for any inconvenience - but part of the price of being innovative tribe members, as Peter is saying.

    I then also thought that this indicator of changing marketing and sales pipelines, and communications, for what was a "telecoms" company which now similarly must incorporate the internet, both in terms of what it sells, and how it sells and markets it, was very timely. It's about TalkTalk...

    http://www.commsbusiness.co.uk/RSS_News_Articles.cfm?NewsID=14481

    ...and we can highlight...

    A statement said: "We are also seeing customers increasingly choosing to deal with us online due to the services they are purchasing and we expect this trend to continue."

    The majority of its customer interactions are now online
    Posted by Neil Warren on

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    Interesting webinar

    I gleaned several valuable insights from the webinar, even if there were technical issues. (Is this is a bandwidth limitation, by the way, or some other issue, because it would make you think twice about using the system if you were making an important customer presentation.)

    As a marketing comms person I was struck by two things:

    1) The recommendation to use Wikipedia for SEO purposes - obvious but brilliant (like all the best ideas) and I will be straight on to that one.

    2) The side-by-side approach to the sales funnel or pyramid for Sales and Marketing with each of their contributions outlined. I thoroughly agree with the approach and hope that it signals an end to the sabre rattling that has been going on between sales and marketing. What is the point of in-fighting? It never benefits anybody.

    In terms of the pyramid, however, it does presume equipping salespeople with skills that some companies have not been prepared to invest in previously. Because, what this new breed of salespeople is being asked to do - even using Marketing as a service to supply them with the relevant tools - implies a level of business knowledge and experience that has only prevously been seen in the higher echelons of sales.

    Hopefully, this will be the catalyst for the whole UK sales profession to refocus away from the banging-your-head-against-a-brick-wall approach and to metamorphose into expert business communicators able to engage and interact with the market in the way that customers require.
    Posted by Nick de Cent on

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    ..."the higher echelons of sales"...

    That's the bit that interests me Nick. I can't actually recall working with any of the hundreds or communicating with any of the hundreds of thousands of (UK) sales people of my varying amounts of "acquaintance" who did enjoy or have expectations of being in any "lower echelons of sales".

    We all of us always complained about being stuck on the end of a business owner's (or marketing's) production line, with the intent that we just "closed" what weak leads the Glengarry Glen Ross machine had brought us. Or to follow the telemarketing formulae outlined in anything from Wall Street to The Boiler Room to The Pursuit of Happyness.

    A car is complicated technology, as is a phone, if we look at them that way, and so "learning to drive" either can be a very daunting process (average of 35 hours is it - for men, longer for women, for the car, according to The Sunday Times?), as can "Professional Telephone Selling" - or the car and phone can both be seen as "everyday" tools that we naturally expected to master.

    So then here's what currently looks like a US Advanced Master Class in using LinkedIn - directly, by sales people - to substitute some of that telephone or field work, from a very "ordinary" and "street smart" sales person...

    http://davekalstrom.nextslide.com/15-key-ways-to-develop-your-linkedin-account-to-generate-sales

    ...(Dave Kalstrom - OUTBOUND Excellence - note), and offering 3 days = 24 hours for $795 to get us all up to speed / passing our driving tests, plus or minus then any specific "marketing" or "marketing communications" support we might then need.

    And what he's doing for himself and his own company is what he's offering to do for all other sellers, namely fill up your own, personal INbox, with "leads" - being actual people you have aimed to nurture along their own buying paths, with thought leadership "items" of every description, carefully placed in whatever ponds you fish in, be that Bankers or Morris Dancers, as per Jeremy's examples.

    Sean McPheat, on The Seller's Tale and in "eselling", also has that as "re-purposing content", but again I suspect that it is going to seem no more complex than finding the right page / product in the Argos catalogue and explaining the difference to a bemused punter, in time.

    Improving those "basic" skills should bring us all a many-fold improvement on the current position, and I suspect then that getting to the bottom of Sharon Drew's "other 80% of the reasons they cannot buy" will be the next layer after that.

    As Seth Godin points out here though...

    http://advertising.yahoo.com/video/futurist-26379595/yahoo-futurist-seth-godin-21881548.html

    ...that might require a bit more humility from company owners, managers and marketers, if they are struggling to believe their sales people / customer messengers, when they explain that the latest, greatest mousetrap is a monstrous great yawn out there.
    Posted by Neil Warren on

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    It's good to talk (but better to let the punter choose)...

    And here's BT mirroring TalkTalk with the shift to online communications...

    http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7992-q-a-bt-s-warren-buckley-on-multichannel-customer-service

    ...even though "the phone" must surely be their thing?

    And here's Ray Taylor teaming up with Roger Courville and asking me how this webinar might play out this side of the pond...
    ____________________

    Neil,

    Roger and I are going to present the topic of using virtual to accelerate sales to UK market next week. Anything you'd recommend we modify for that audiences?

    I don't have a tremendous amount of time to make changes but if there are things that might not play across the pond I'd prefer to avoid them.

    Here's the information on the session. 4 October at 3pm UK time.

    To register ? just click on the link below.

    http://learn.gotomeeting.com/forms/04Oct11-EMEA-G2MC-WBR-S?ID=701000000005nAb

    Thanks!
    _____________________

    ...and where my answer did indeed include taking "Broadband Britain" (and super-defensive Corporate firewalls and IT Depts, "in charge" of telesales and field sales teams) with a pinch of salt, for now.

    Posted by Neil Warren on

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    Sales, Marketing & Management - there's no way they mix, surely!?

    Concluding grand finale of The Canterbury Tales is The Boss's Tale, now open for business...

    http://www.modernselling.com/news-and-events/webinar-corner/boss-tale-workshop-webinar-discussion-series-neil-warren-jeremy-spiller-20114049.aspx

    And yes, there has to be a way (is a way, several actually) that sales and marketing and management can all work together. We'll show you.

    In fact, if you think about it, isn't it some kind of (collapsing?) economic miracle that we've survived the last century or so, whilst so clearly working in many instances in such ridiculous push-me-pull-you opposition, and with The Boss often not even thinking of your customers as his / hers?

    This is "Back to the Floor" and "Undercover Boss" in the real world (yours), so we need you and your Boss (or team if you're it), and your pains and problems - just stick them in the Question / Comment bit - and let's see if we can come up with some New Year Resolutions that will stick this time.

    Posted by Neil Warren on

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