Free Sales Intelligence Part 2: Alerts & Readers

Continuing on my last post…salespeople have access to a mountain of information on their prospects and customers. What’s more, this deal-accelerating content doesn’t cost a nickel.  The only risk is getting trapped in a time vortex by visiting too many sites, reading too much content and finding too few gold nuggets. The only sure way to avoid the vortex is automation. Excellent paid solutions exist that address this problem; however, sales and social intelligence gathering doesn’t require a big budget. You can automate at least 50% of your intelligence gathering and monitoring processes with free tools.

The following is a 101-level guide on using common free tools to harvest information on your prospects and customers, and create alerts that will always keep you up to date. Today’s post provides an overview of Alert Solutions and Feed Readers. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or additional ideas on the subject!

1. Alert Solutions

Alerts are an important tool to help monitor clients, contacts, leads and industries in real-time. For those of you new to alerts, they often take the form of emails and are essentially automated search engine results. Google Alerts is the most commonly used alert tool. Once set up, it will send you up-to-the minute emails whenever new content appears that matches your search terms. The content could anything from news, blog posts, video, discussions and even books.

For example,  if your client is SALESFORCE, you can create a general alert for the search term “SALESFORCE”. Whenever new content (like news, videos, blogs and discussions) is posted, you’ll receive an email. Now SALEFORCE is a big company, generating lots of content. To manage information flow, you may want to add more specific search terms like “SALESFORCE FINANCIAL RESULTS” or “SALESFORCE ACQUISITION”.

Types of Alerts You Can Create

Industry – Creating an alert with search terms for your industry can help you keep up to date with competitors and new companies, which can help you generate new leads.

Geographical – You can combine an industry alert with a specific geographical key word to generate leads and monitor your existing clients more accurately within your sales territory. Remember that you can use standard Google search parameters and syntax when creating Google Alerts. For example, if you need to put more than one state or province in your Alert, you would put a capitalized OR between each one (e.g., Ontario OR Quebec).

Company – You can create an alert based on the company name or web site URL of your potential and existing clients, as well as your competitors.

People – Create alerts on the names of your leads and contacts to monitor their latest activity on the web. For more accurate results, you can put their name in quotes (e.g., “John Smith”) and you could also provide their blog name, company name or job title.

Here are a few of the standard alert terms that I regularly use with a company name:

ACQUISITION [company_name]

FINANCIAL RESULTS [company_name] in Google News

PRESS RELEASE site:WWW.[company_name].COM

PRODUCTS site:WWW.[company_name].COM

[ceo_name] [company_name]

[company_name] in Google News

[competitor_name] in Google News

[company_hame] in Google Blog Search

How to set up a Google Alert

1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts
2. Enter your search term(s), such as a company name, contact name or industry (just like you would in Google).
3. Select the Result Type (Everything, News, Blogs, Video, Discussions, or Books).
4. Select How Often you want to receive updates (As-it-happens, Once a day or Once a week).
5. Select How Many results you want (Only the best results or All results).
6. Select the destination for your alert, either an email address or a feed reader, such as Google Reader.

7. Click “Create Alert.”

See this example of some alerts for Salesforce. This is the page where you would manage your alerts as your contacts and prospects evolve.

2. Feed Readers

Feed readers are information aggregators that reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites and other online content for updates. They allow you to create a unique information space or personal newspaper providing content that is uniquely relevant to you. Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being pulled to the subscriber, as opposed to pushed with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some pushed information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed.

Aggregator features are often built into portal sites, Web browsers, and email programs.

Feed readers allow you to receive published abridged content from multiple sources (e.g., a blog, company web site or news site) in one place using a feed reader application. It saves you the time of visiting each site you’re interested in, rather than having to visit each one and browsing through all its full content to find what’s important to you. Examples of feed readers include Google Reader, Feedly and Bloglines.

When you see the following RSS icon on a blog or website,

simply click on it and then select your favourite feed reader application from the pull-down list.

Get started with RSS

1. Go to the Google Reader  web site and set up an account.
2. Once you have an account and you log in, click on “Your Subscriptions”
3. Click “Add a Feed” to add a feed you already know, such as the blog of an industry expert or feed from a trade magazine you regularly read.
4. To find new sources or check information sources that you regularly read for RSS feeds, just do a Google Search and look for RSS feed buttons on the website of your search results.

Example 1 – A search for “Aviation News” in Google Reader returns the webpage for the aerospace and defence trade magazine Aviation News. In the news section of their website, I found RSS feeds and I clicked on the news stream that was of interest to me to subscribe. Now Aviation News appears in my Google Reader, and I can even search within these feeds for a particular company or person before a meeting. It’s  that easy.

I hope this 101 guide to alerts and readers was helpful to you. Let me know what you think about FunnelBlog and this post by commenting or emailing feedback@funnelboard.com.

Thanks for reading!

Free sales intelligence 101 – Part 1

Salespeople are fortunate to have access to more information on their prospects and customers than ever before. The challenge is to navigate this ocean of content without drowning or becoming distracted.

For those who aren’t using sales intelligence, here are some of the reasons why you should.

4 REASONS YOU NEED SALES & SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE:

1.  Situational awareness drives lead conversion. Understanding the business and personal environment in which a person lives is critical to effective selling. How can you help? What challenges is their business facing? How do they spend their spare time? What are their passions? The answers to questions like these allow you to tailor your message and find rapport-building shared experiences and connections. Understanding = authentic relationship-building  + trust + helping = selling.

2. They expect preparation!  Demonstrate to the prospect or customer that you have done your homework and care enough to understand them. Today’s customers and prospects spend less time in sales meetings, do web research before meeting with vendors and expect that you’ve done the same.  Failing to meet their expectations by arriving/calling unprepared or “wasting time on a fishing expedition”, as one sourcing professional said to me, sets the stage for failure.

3.  Your customers are talking to you through social media. Are you listening? Individuals and companies are broadcasting their priorities, interests, activities and trigger points via social media. Ignoring social intelligence = ignoring the customer.

4.  Speak their language.  Information gathered from sales & social intelligence sources provides insight into personality and individual communication styles. Communication 101 tells us that people generally fall into several “types” based on personal preferences and age. For example, people born after 1979 (Gen Y) prefer to communicate through technology channels like email and social networks much more than via telephone . If their profiles  shows a tendency towards “introversion and thinking”, you’d want to adjust your communication style accordingly ( e.g.  plan to explain every feature of your proposal, respect personal-professional life separation, avoid humour in serious situations).

(If you’re interested in reading more about personal styles, I posted on the subject previously and shared some links at http://funnelblog.com/2012/04/05/personality-testing/).

Great paid solutions that aggregate information from hundreds of sources and automate sales intelligence gathering are only a Google search away. But you don’t need to pay-to-play.  There are plenty of free sales intelligence tools that will up your sales game, so don’t let money stand between you and increased sales productivity!

Here are some free sales & social intelligence tools that I recommend (and use):

1. Google Alerts
2. Social Alerts
3. RSS, blog and news search and subscriptions
4. Job change alerts (www.jobchangealerts.com)
5. Bloomberg/BusinessWeek Business Profiles
6. LinkedIn

In my next post “Free sales intelligence 101 – Part 2”, I’ll discuss these tools in greater detail and describe how they’re used to drive sales productivity.

Sales lessons from a brain-eater

The sea squirt (a tunicate to fellow geeks and scuba divers) is a peculiar sea creature. It starts life as a tadpole-like larvae wiggling through the ocean in search of a plentiful food supply. It doesn’t swim for long, however, being incapable of feeding in the larval stage.

Once it finds a rich food source, the sea squirt sets down serious roots, cementing itself to the sea floor.  It then begins transforming into a sack-like filter-feeder. To fuel this transformation, the sea squirt turns self-cannibal.

The squirt’s tail and primitive eye are its first “meal”. Tadpole parts aren’t much use when you’re cemented to the ground, right?  Then comes the amazing bit: the sea squirt “eats its own brain”. Since the adult sea squirt is 95% stomach and 100% focused on eating plankton, it’s thinking days are over. It’s the couch potato of the sea.

Although the physical resemblance is hard to see, human beings have much in common with the sea squirt. In fact, we’re distant cousins (we’re both part of the class of animals called Chordata). They also have something to teach us.

LESSONS FROM A BRAIN EATER

1.  Don’t eat your brain, you need it more than a squirt

Homework sucks, but it works. Investing brain-power to learn how to use new tools, communication channels and methodologies can deliver amazing results.

For example, my experience is that effective pre-call research increases lead-to-opportunity conversion by more than 30% in a B2B sales context. Prospects today have very high expectations for you. They expect that you understand them, their company and their needs BEFORE the first call or meeting. That’s why long-term sales leaders  invest brain-power in listening through detailed research.

2. Recognize opportunity, then commit 100% to seizing it

Squirt larvae swim in search of a food source and, when they see an opportunity, they seize it with cannibalistic gusto.  No hesitation, even though the decision has life and death consequences. This is a good lesson to learn from the squirt.

Seize the opportunity by the beard, for it is bald behind.  ~Proverb

3. Mobility’s a must, unless you’re a squirt

Repeating what works is a natural tenancy; it’s human nature. Somewhat paradoxically, often the most successful reps are at greatest risk of getting stuck in cement. Who among us doesn’t lean hard on a winning game plan? But unlike a squirt, the life-cycle of a sales professional is long and their environment is constantly changing. Long-term success requires a commitment to evolving with environmental changes, such as the social selling revolution and Sales 2.0 process automation.

Lead assignment by social proximity. There’s gold in them thar processes.

Lead assignment is at the heart of every organization’s sales processes. Since people buy from people, not companies, the most important question asked of B2B sales managers is “who should work the deal or account?” It can also be the most complicated.

The importance of the process is directly proportional to transaction or account size. For medium to large B2B opportunities, a simple round-robin type assignment process just doesn’t make sense. For these deals, most businesses manage assignment using criteria like industry vertical, geography, opportunity size, product type and track record. Whether the processes are informal or formal, the objective is to apply these rules to maximize sales. Unfortunately, most B2B companies are missing out on a key opportunity to achieve this objective.

As every salesperson knows, people buy from people they know, like and trust. When offered roughly equivalent solutions, buyers will always pick the person who created the “know, like and trust” relationship. What’s more, common relationships, or social proximity, is THE most important factor in relationship building.  

People are psychologically wired with a trust equation that gives disproportionate weight to social proximity. That’s why sales leaders have always subjectively factored relationships into lead assignment. However, this approach was limited by its very subjectivity and perceptions of “unfairness”. Managers also didn’t have the benefit of social network visibility. Before social media, how many of us could list our “2^nd degree connections”? If you’ll excuse the cliché, lead assignment by social proximity was only  employed when an insider relationship jumped up and bit us on our collective  asses.

Well, no longer. Thanks to the emergence of business social media, sales managers can now access hard social proximity data . When salespeople share social accounts with their employers (which is happening increasingly), it becomes possible to create objective rule-based lead assignment, using LinkedIn “degrees of connection” and Facebook “common acquaintances”.

The most important factor in the “know, like and trust” equation, social networks, can now be used as a primary means of lead assignment.

For those of you who aren’t yet social media converts, below is an example of how it works. I did a search on LinkedIn for Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce. Two of my connections are directly connected to him, which I would never have known without LinkedIn.

Assuming I am a candidate to work a deal with Salesforce, a sales manager could (i) evaluate my connectedness to decision-makers at Salesforce, (ii) compare my social proximity to other members of our sales team, and (iii) make an informed and objective lead assignment decision.

Successful selling is becoming more relational than transactional. Social selling is accelerating this evolution. Sales leaders cannot afford to ignore the opportunity to assign leads based on social proximity. It makes common sense, and it also makes money.

If you have any experience, processes or tools that you use to take advantage of social proximity in lead assignment, I would love to hear about them.

How social is B2B sales? Very.

People often ask me “is social media relevant in B2B sales?” The answer is absolutely YES! People buy from people they 1. know 2. like and 3. trust…that’s Sales 101. Social media makes it possible for salespeople to listen, learn and communicate with potential buyers like never before.  It’s never been faster or easier for salespeople to build relationships and earn trust.

These three stats give a strong answer to the B2B social selling question:

1. IBM saw a 400% increase in sales in a recent social selling pilot project.
2. Companies that blog generate 67% more leads than their non-blogging peers.
3. Companies that Tweet generate 2x more leads.

The infographic below was produced by InsideView. It’s well worth a look.

 

http://www.insideview.com/social-selling?utm_source=infographic&utm_medium=howsocialisb2b&utm_campaign=social-selling

75% of people don’t think like you, 25% don’t like you. Now what?

Admit it. You have a colleague, employee or customer that you just can’t stand working with. For me, let’s call this person Mike Minutia.

Just the thought of meeting with Mike triggers my “fight or flight” response. He turns meetings into endless recitations of tedious details. He has no interest in people. He lacks intuition, rendering him unable to make decisions without reams of data. He talks only about work. And his voice…my god…it should be patented as a treatment for insomnia. You know what I’m talking about, right?

Actually, maybe you don’t. If you are one of the many precise, disciplined and conscientious “introverted thinkers” (as Jung called them) out there, you may hold an equally negative view of “Helping Inspirers” like me.

From Mike’s perspective, I lack discipline. My optimistic nature leads me to take dangerous risks. When I’m not interested in a project, it’s twice as hard to get decent work out of me. Sometimes, he just wishes I’d leave him alone…do I think work is some kind of cocktail party?

Mike and I are “opposite types”. I am what Quadrant Personality Theory calls an “Inspirational Helper”, which means I get energy from people, am comfortable with risk and value intuition as much as analysis. Our communication styles, passions and aptitudes are diametrically opposed. Because it takes effort, patience and understanding to collaborate, we regularly drive each other nuts. But we’ve also achieved great things together, bringing a diversity of strengths to our work.

Viewed objectively, Mike is dependable, analytical and persistent, regardless of the task at hand. He tackles challenges systematically, consistently finding solutions to big problems. He’s everyone’s go-to person for a challenging project. Lastly, his sense of duty and responsibility is unparalleled.

Quadrant Personality Theory, which was first pioneered by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in 1921, tells us that understanding self (both strengths and weaknesses) makes it possible to interact more effectively with others.

It also tells us that people fall into the following four personality types in roughly equal proportions:

Whatever your type, 75% of people don’t share your worldview. Their communication, decision-making and working-style preferences differ significantly from yours. What’s more, 25% of people are “opposite types” like Mike and me, who often struggle to work together effectively.

Understanding is the key to harnessing the power of diversity. Companies that do this best use personality testing as a matter of course to encourage effective communication, and get the best out of their talent. Good tests provide actionable information such as:

• Key strengths and weaknesses
• Potential blind spots
• Communication tips for your opposite type
• Development suggestions
• How to motivate and manage each type of personality

I did the Insights Discovery test, which I recommend. It provided plenty of actionable advice, including these points on how to deal with my opposite type Mike:

1. Avoid bursts of emotion, which make Mike uncomfortable
2. Give Mike time to gather his thoughts and express his feelings
3. Stick to facts and data if you want to be persuasive
4. Never exaggerate, even for effect
5. Avoid humour in serious situations
6. Allow Mike to keep his personal life very private

Do you know your type? Do you have a strategy to deal with your “opposite”? If the answer to either of these questions is “no”, it’s time to Google “personality testing”.

Sources and additional information:
http://www.colorfulleadership.info/papers/4-quadrant.htm
http://www.insights.com/

Whole-brained leadership and influence

Chris* has a beautiful mind, devouring information at an astonishing rate, calculating like a human spreadsheet and breaking down problems with faultless logic. His gifts naturally led him to a top-tier management consultancy, where his talents were augmented with proprietary methodologies, strategic frameworks and best practices. He succeeded early and often as a consultant, and earned an MBA at a prestigious business school on the East Coast. Sounds like the kind of talent employers would kill for, right?

Yes…at least initially. Ten years later, Chris was struggling to keep his job as corporate strategy leader at a Fortune 1000 technology company, after leading a change initiative that failed spectacularly.

Crestfallen, Chris couldn’t understand where he’d gone wrong. He clung to the only explanations that seemed logical to him; he was a victim of politics, weak C-suite leadership and an underperforming team. The problem couldn’t be him, right? Unfortunately for Chris, this wasn’t his last failure. He was ultimately fired.

Chris then did a very brave and difficult thing. He openly owned his failures and learned from them. Seeking out honest assessments from old colleagues and friends (including me), he embarked on a personal change management initiative. He even engaged an industrial psychologist to improve his chances of success.

His efforts paid off and he learned that several factors were hobbling his performance. Foremost among them was an over-reliance on his gifts. He viewed IQ is inherently superior to EQ, that the strength of logic and analysis will break down any barrier. What he did not realize was that the barriers he was breaking down were people. It wasn’t that his analyses weren’t sound…it’s just that no one gave a $@#%%^. They tuned him out.

We often describe people as “right brained” or “left brained”. Creativity, emotion and imagination are said to reside on the right side. Logic, objectivity and analysis are on the left. Split Brain Theory is an overgeneralization, but it effectively illustrates the fact that people are two-sided. Personal preferences are the norm, but the vast majority of people are a mix of left and right.

Psychologists tell us that effective leadership, especially when it comes to change, depends more on the ability to pull than to push. The challenge of leadership is to take others to new places they wouldn’t otherwise go to. To pull this off, full engagement of both brain hemispheres is a necessity. “Pulling” requires capturing the whole brain.

Chris learned the importance of the “whole brained” approach the hard way. Here are his top three lessons learned:

1. Importance of self awareness & mindfulness: To understand one’s communication style and “sidedness”, we need to be self-aware. Seeking 360 degree feedback from people we trust is one way to achieve this. Once aware, the bigger challenge is to be mindful of our weaknesses and develop strategies to overcome our preferences. For example, Chris benefited greatly from adding the following to the top of EVERY meeting in his agenda: “spend 5 minutes talking about family, vacations, hobbies and interests.” It didn’t come naturally at first, but his efforts were authentic and with practice he became more effective at building personal connections.
2. Engage people at the emotional level: Cutting to the chase and focusing only on analysis may be right for some audiences, but will be ineffective for most. The best approach is to use narratives that are both emotionally engaging and analytical. There is a good reason we hear so much about storytelling in the business press these days. Storytelling combines hard facts and emotion in a way that is both persuasive and engaging. For mixed audiences, the only effective strategy is to apply a full-brain methodology like storytelling.
3. Watch out for the corporate “tough-guy” culture: Corporate cultures that treat fun, storytelling and emotion as frivolous wastes of time are missing out on a huge source of energy and passion in the workplace. Research clearly shows that happy, well-rested and healthy people far outperform their workaholic peers. For a left brainer like Chris, it’s all too easy to fall into the corporate tough-guy pattern. It is easier to believe that emotion has no place in the office, than admit that one has a weakness. Taking this path to the dark side is guaranteed to put you on the path to underachievement. For more on this subject, I recommend The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor.

* Names and ancillary details have been modified for the purpose of de-identification

10 ways to get what you want, without violating your conscience (Part 2)

The greatest ability in business is the ability to influence; it’s at the core of leading, deal-making and problem solving. This post continues last week’s exploration of the 10 principles master influencers use to outperform their peers. Employed correctly, they’ll make you more persuasive, while enhancing credibility.

The five discussed last week were: (1) Visibility, (2) Supply-Control, (3) Negative Sensibility, (4) Authority and (5) Highlighter principles – you can find the post here.

Here are principles 6-10 to get what you want:

6.   The Evidence Principle. This principle is one you likely know well – information that’s backed up with research, experiences or, in the best case, the firsthand knowledge of the listener, is very persuasive. For example, when you borrow an experience from someone like Steve Jobs, you’re pretty hard to disagree with! Even CEOs need help to sell their vision. It’s often why they spend millions on management consultants like McKinsey & Company. Convincing their bosses (the Board of Directors and, ultimately, the investors) to make BIG changes (e.g. entering new markets, restructuring a business, selling a business) can be very difficult. It can even get you fired. Enter McKinsey as the “safe” way to sell tough decisions and earn trust. The more difficult the audience, the more evidence you’ll need to get what you want.

7.   The Likability Principle. It’s simple. People are influenced by those they trust. People trust people they like. People like those who are similar to them. The best influencers apply this principle by talking to people in their own language, listening actively, tapping into genuine common interests and experiences, empathizing, and communicating openness and accessibility. The only watch-outs here are don’t try TOO hard to be liked or be inauthentic, or your efforts will backfire.

8.   The Reciprocity Principle. Studies have shown that it is a general social rule that a person should try to repay fairly what we have received from another person (see this post for sources and more info). If somebody performs a favour for us, we usually feel obliged to return their favour. Since what goes around comes around, influencers regularly help others. Servant leadership is an excellent example of this principle in action.

9.   The Experience Principle. Confucius wrote: “I hear and I know. I see and I believe. I do and I understand.” He was spot on. Influencers apply this principle by involving their audience emotionally and visually in their objective. Story telling is the best way to do this. It helps your audience connect with your message by creating a “virtual experience”.

10.    The Passion Principle. Harrison Monarth described this principle well: “Passion can’t be explained. It is felt. Whenever you are looking to influence someone to accept your ideas and share your vision, you have to have a feeling that energizes…and stimulates the heart as well as the mind. It doesn’t come easily, think about it and focus your thoughts on the aspects of the idea that you can feel in your gut. Then amplify that feeling and share your message.”

I would love to hear your thoughts on effective influencing. Is there a principle 11 that should be added to the list? Join the conversation by sending me an email or commenting on my post.

Thanks for reading.

Source: Executive Presence by Harrison Monarth.

10 ways to get what you want, without violating your conscience (Part 1)

Success as a leader, salesperson or entrepreneur depends on the ability to influence. Whether you are a CEO, salesman or an entrepreneur selling a vision to investors, influencing is how you get what you want.

What tools do you have in your “persuasion toolbox”? There are a variety of principles and tactics that can increase your natural ability to persuade, without sacrificing authenticity or credibility. This is the focus of my post, but before I continue, it’s important to differentiate influence from manipulation.

Manipulation is a short-term strategy relying on power tactics (such as positional authority, fear), dis-honesty and win-lose outcomes. It ultimately benefits neither the manipulator nor the manipulated. Influence is about empathy, changing attitudes and win-win outcomes. These are the ingredients in building a long-term relationship.

People start developing influencing techniques in childhood, which you’ll know all too well if you have kids (must that candy be at the supermarket checkout?).  As we navigate relationships from childhood through adulthood, our most effective tactics get added to the toolbox (e.g. “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”). Depending on our experiences and natural influencing abilities, people may use anything from a few favourite “tools” to a broad range of persuasion tactics.

I’m betting that you know a master influencer. If you do, what makes them so effective? How are they different? Chances are they have a high EQ (emotional quotient, the empathy equivalent of IQ) and a VERY full toolbox. The following list of principles work individually, but are even more powerful when used together.

The first 5 principles that need to be in your “persuasion toolbox” are:

1. The Visibility Principle. People gravitate toward the familiar and are inclined to trust what they know. Conversely, the unknown is generally treated with skepticism. The best persuaders make sure they are very visible, because interaction breeds familiarity. Face-to-face visibility is still the gold standard, but social media is revolutionizing the visibility game. It is now possible to stay on the radar of hundreds of people in parallel through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ by posting valued-added content for your audience and demonstrating authentic interest via “likes”, “shares” and “retweets”. For salespeople, this is already being hailed as the Social Selling Revolution.
2. The Supply-Control Principle. Any salesperson can tell you that a limited supply of time or benefits is a key influencer (does the Best Buy sales guy really only have one TV left at that price?), when it is credible. This is the law of scarcity, which you have no doubt heard of. The challenge in applying this principle is staying on the right side of manipulation. Artificially limiting supply is a sure-fire way to damage credibility. Think Apple, not the Best Buy sales guy, when applying this principle to increase demand.
3. The Negative Sensibility Principle. Harrison Monarth described this well in his book Executive Presence: “Research shows the unconscious mind cannot hear and does not process a negative sensibility; this means that the word not doesn’t even register in the mind.” When Bill Clinton said “I am not a racist” during Obama’s campaign, the only words that were heard by the audience were “I am a racist”. “The unconscious mind, which records the entire experience on an emotional level, retains the memory of the word racist.” Master influencers avoid negative labels.
4. The Authority Principle. People trust information that comes from a perceived authority. Expertise from a credible source fosters trust. If you position yourself as an authority or bring an authority to bear, trust and influence are much easier to achieve.
5. The Highlighter Principle. Everyone has a natural tendency to focus on what confirms our preconceived ideas and arguments. This isn’t manipulative, it’s just human nature. The problem is that the tendency to highlight can be perceived as manipulation by an audience that disagrees with your message. Effective influencing means controlling the urge to highlight, because a balanced argument is a stronger form of persuasion.

My next post will be on the remaining 5 principles. If you want to read more before then, the book Executive Presence by Harrison Monarth is a great resource for leaders and entrepreneurs looking to improve their presence and influencing abilities. It was also my primary source for this post.

What is your go-to technique for influencing others? Please add yours to my list!

Why people buy (or how to increase lead conversion)

Ask top salespeople why people buy and they’ll give you a simple answer: trust. The bigger the purchase, the more trust required to get the buyer to “yes”. The reason is common sense. Large purchase decisions can have a big impact on a buyer’s career, especially when things go badly. Physiologists call this “loss aversion”; people are more motivated by fear of a loss than hope of a gain.

In these situations, “who” one buys from is often more important than “what” solution one buys. This is nothing new. Even the social sales revolution hasn’t changed the basic nature of how people buy. Take the example of a salesperson in the 1970s named Don Draper.

Don is a real sale pro. Knowing instinctively that people buy from those they know, like and trust, the first step in his sales process is information gathering. On the weekend at his golf club, he asks around to see if anyone knows Jim, the prospective buyer. It turns out one of his foursome met Jim, a fellow Western University grad, at a local alumni event. Much of their conversation that night revolved around fishing.

One of Don’s best customers is also a graduate of Western, so he calls him up to find out if he can get an introduction. Fortunately for Don, the customer comes through and provides the warm introduction he was hoping for.

At their first meeting in Jim’s office, Don looks at the photographs, awards and sports paraphernalia on the bookcase. From these items, it appears that Jim has a daughter and son around 10 yrs old, is a major Boston Red Sox fan and is a real mover-and-shaker at his company with multiple awards to his credit. It looks like he’s also a Republican, based on a Nixon campaign button sitting on his desk.

During their meeting, Don starts off by talking to Jim about their mutual friend. They share a couple of stories about him, and Don talks about their last company fly-fishing trip together. The next 15 minutes they talk about nothing but trout and Don offers to send Jim his favourite brook trout fly. Don then asks a lot of questions about Jim’s role at the company, their recently released financial results and a disastrous recent product launch that was written up in the newspaper. Don does not talk about politics or the Red Sox. He is not a fan of Nixon and has no interest in baseball.

At the end of the conversation, Don finally gets down to business. He talks about how he helped his customer (the mutual friend), increase sales by 30% with a national marketing campaign, and he lists the other customers  using the solution. He sincerely states his belief that it may be possible to turn-around Jim’s recent product launch challenges. They agree to talk more over lunch the following week.

In this example, Don is well on his way to a sale because he did these five key things that build rapport:

1. Gathered sales intelligence. Knowing your customer, and showing you care enough to do your homework, is step 1 for rapport building. It’s simple math: knowing=caring=liking=trusting.
2. Found authentic common ground. Studies show that people like those similar to themselves*. It’s a very strong psychological bias. Finding common ground, speaking in the buyer’s language and even mirroring body language is closely tied to likability. Like Don, you need to stick to authentic common ground (i.e. fishing not baseball).
3. Used social proof. Don used a common relationship to show that he was a “safe choice”. When someone the buyer trusts purchased your solution, it provides “proof” that it is a good idea.
4. Took advantage of the “Bandwagon Effect”. This is common sense, but worth adding to the list just the same, given its importance to the selling process. People tend to do or believe something because many others are doing or believing the same. It’s what makes customer success stories, good white papers and recommendations powerful.
5. Applied the “Principle of Reciprocation”.  Studies have shown that it is a general social rule that a person should try to repay fairly what we have received from another person*. If somebody performs a favour for us, we usually feel obliged to return their favour. Don’s offer of a fly increased the likelihood that Jim would say “yes” to their next meeting. Authenticity is, again, very important. Don’s gift worked because his shared interest was authentic.

Email, social selling and the web have fundamentally changed the selling landscape since Don’s time. Sales intelligence is just as important, but information gathering has undergone a revolution. Buyers have less time for meetings and phone calls, zero interest in Q&A and you’ll get some pretty funny looks using the tired “I see from this photo you’re a Sox fan” strategy. Buyers expect salespeople to know about them, their business and their problems BEFORE you’ve even spoken to them.

Salespeople have access to more information than ever before, often directly from their customers’ own mouths. However, buyers have higher expectations than ever before, so sales “homework” is more important than ever.

Successful, sales professionals now get their intelligence from web-based sources. What differentiates leaders from the laggards is how efficiently and effectively intelligence is used. Here are the top 8 sources of sales intelligence on the web:

1. LinkedIn. By far the best tool out there for sales intelligence. With 150 million users (and growing), you can access descriptions of people and companies in their own words. This is far superior to the traditional sales intelligence databases like Hoovers. By showing connection paths, it also greatly accelerates networking to a target.
2. Company website. It is amazing how many B2B salespeople don’t take full advantage of this resource. Press releases, financial reports, biographies and other information are often available right on the web.
3. Offline networks. Social selling has not eliminated the need for talking and meeting. Resources like LinkedIn can make your networking more efficient, but business people are still far more likely to build relationships face-to-face. These networks are powerful sources of unpublished (and un-tweeted) information.
4. Commercial databases. Sources like Salesforce’s Jigsaw (recently rebranded data.com) are helpful for clean contact information ontargets. I find Jigsaw less useful for larger B2B deals, but perhaps their partnership with D&B may increase the depth of both the D&B and Salesforce offering. In addition, they don’t intelligently incorporate web-based info from sources like Google, Slideshare or YouTube.
5. Social media. If your customer is talking, you’d better be listening. The challenge here is volume, but it does save time to do searches for relevant content rather than monitor the whole flow. Social media is also a good way to see what targets and connections are reading and sharing.
6. Trade press. The move to electronic versions of traditional trade press made the resource much more valuable. Now you don’t have to read every issue to find relevant content…you can just search! It’s a great source for industry-level challenges/opportunities, movers & shakers, products and companies.
7. Web news. Google news searches, aggregators and industry sources (like Techcrunch and VentureBeat) are powerful sources of company and industry intelligence. Again, these sources are easily searched and do all the work of aggregating what is relevant to a particular business.
8. Blogs. Most companies are either blogging or being blogged about. There is no better source for information on what people are saying about your target customer or industry. I regularly use Google blog search to find this content.

 How are you gathering sales intelligence? Is there a source of intelligence that I should add to my list?

Sources

1. Dr. Gouldner reported that the rule of reciprocity can be found in all human societies the rule of reciprocity in his classic 1960 publication: http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1979/A1979HT60900001.pdf
2.  Publication except on the phycology of persuasion:  http://www.media-studies.ca/articles/influence_ch5.htm