Customers don't like ABC's

I know my alphabet just fine.  I know my acronyms even better.  In every sales course, I've encountered the bible of selling that tells us to Always Be Closing.  I was told it's about finding a need and closing As Soon As Possible. Maybe this style of selling was extremely effective in the 80's and 90's but today's customer is not the same customer that existed 15-20 years ago.  Our customers have tools that can neutralize our desire to close on them.  Just like we have a tool kit of referrals, white papers, and demos, Customers have powerful tools.

Knowledge

Today's customer is more knowledgeable than the past customer.  In movies like "Boilerroom" and "Glengarry Glen ross",  Sales guys were able to intimidate the customer by using tactics to make them feel dumber.

"If you're not doing this, you're going to regret it Mr. customer."

You can't do this tactic anymore.  Relationship building is more important nowadays that you risk losing a relationship and lifetime customer value.  Every "salesy" movie has the "WIN AT ALL COSTS" speech.  Customers are seeing these movies and able to beat us at our own game.  Knowledge is a big advantage they have.

Internet

You could say that customers have knowledge due to the internet.  The fact is that the Internet changed how everyone has shopped for prices.  Whether you do cold call sales or B2B door sales,  Customer have mobile devices to review the integrity of your company and what you stand by.  Back 15-20 years ago, customers had to take a salesmen's word about not finding a better price anywhere.  The main advantage a salesperson had was the lack of information a customer had on their product.  With message boards, and online reviews, it's become impossible for companies to hide the flaws in their product.  The internet has forced sales people to truly know their products strengths and weaknesses.  There's a consumer purchasing process model and every step is now tied to the internet being a big reason why they may or may not purchase the product.



Unlimited Choices

The chances of your product truly being ground breaking from everyone is slim to none.  While companies that are truly a differentiator exist, there's so much competition within every segment.  Customers have choices and if you're closing on them too hard, they will just take their business to a less pushy salesperson at another company.  Customers can also  put your product against your competitors and ultimately play both sides for their benefit.  Having so many choices now minimizes the ABC approach.

In the end, Salespeople are in sales to make as much money as they can.  I'm in sales because I like the ability to persuade people.  I also had to stop reading these hard lined sales approach books and pay more attention to people.  People buy from people they like and trust.  ABC doesn't show salespeople care about the customer.  It just shows they care about meeting their quota.  Relationship selling is here to stay and if as a salesperson, you can help them, there won't even need to be closing.

Dressing for success

I've heard this since I was a little kid. At 5 years old, my father would constantly put me in bow ties and collared shirts.  He never let me wear "urban" clothing like baggy jeans, caps to the back and sports jerseys.  He always felt like this would perceive me to be a "goon" or less desirable person.  You see my dad came from Nigeria and lived in the 1970's where a simple shirt was considered a luxury.  He would blur the lines of exaggeration and truth telling me about how he only had 7 outfits for the whole year living with six siblings in Lagos.

I used to hate dressing in bow-ties and mini suits that once I hit 11,  I went through every fashion phase you could think of.  

Let's fast forward to my professional life that started in 2007.  I have had a mix of corporate jobs and start up jobs.  I worked at a start up where you could literally wear hoodies in the winter time and shorts in the summer time.  I loved this and began to wear what made me comfortable.  I received a harsh reality  when I saw businessmen in the elevators looking down upon me due to my dress.  Wearing a hoodie and jeans, while being young, still gives nervous signals to professionally dressed men and women.  My first initial feeling was how dare they judge me without knowing me.  I also started seeing that my mood varied depending on what I wore.  I started to realize my dad was preparing me for these moments of judgement.

The judgement to make a considered decision isn't always sensible.  I realized wearing that mini suit had more to do with preparing my mind to always represent myself in the best way possible.



When I walk in an elevator dressed to the tilt, I get  respect from people that most likely make 7 times more than me.  They don't know I make under $60,000 a year.  They don't know I have student loans I have to pay or that I only have two good suits.  I shouldn't care about their perception in reality but that's just the way it is.  They see my height at 6'6 and my confidence that I belong to be in that same elevator with them.

If both our business suits could talk they'd be saying,

"touche mon frere."

Automated Jargon

The Sales and Marketing world is due for change of wording.

There are far too many conversations where the litany of responses are:

"I'm just touching base"
"Is this a good time to talk?"
"I'll reach out to you"
"I'll break this down from a high level perspective."

The funny thing is that I know sales and marketing people who talk like this outside of work.  They bring their work home, literally. We all sound alike with the same response and reactions.

We wonder why people don't listen to our messages because we were taught if you use a :) or emoticon in your email, it shows you're not professional.

Meme's and things

If you ever get on Facebook, nowadays you rarely see people typing long posts about their feelings.  I remember when I got on Facebook in 2005 and seeing posts that rivaled best selling novels in length. People don't have the patience to write long posts nor do they have the patience to read them.

Twitter taught us we can say what we need in 140 characters of less.

Memes have brought that down to a third.  People value funny and relatable content.  I'm a curious man and I had to figure out the history behind the meme because it's an ingenious way to be memorable and connect with people.

Richard Dawkins was actually the first person to coin the term in his book "The Selfish Gene." A meme was explained as a way cultural information is spread.  While his original interpretation of meme referred to a virus that spreads; that's exactly what internet meme's do on social media.

In marketing, we have seen experiential marketing and content marketing explode.  Meme's are doing a great job at representing a state of mind or mood people have for brands.  I actually love this Meme at the bottom for marketing.

Self SWOT

As marketers, we spend a good amount of time researching the competitors.  Some of us become obsessed with what others are doing that we don't realize where we truly stand.  I'm working on a virtual fitting start up project with a CEO and CFO.  I've realized society constantly puts "Keeping up with the Jones-es" in the back of our minds on decisions.

SWOT is an acronym that stands for: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.  Since college, we all have done a SWOT on companies and competitors but what about you?  When you work with a start up, your job role has you doing things that may not be your ultimate strengths.  Yesterday, I decided to actually conduct a SWOT Analysis on my skills.  I figured if I'm relied upon to make sound decisions for direction, I should truly know who I am as a marketer.  I need to show my employer what I am consistent at, and what I may need assistance toward.  I can give you a brief example of how I assessed my strengths and weaknesses.

S-

• Very good at interpreting data to tell a story.
• Creative thinker for problem solving
• Very good with copy writing engaging marketing content
• Great presenter

W-

• Experience lacking in leading marketing campaigns.
• Not very strong in visual graphic design (HTML,Adobe)
• Conducting marketing statistical analysis.

O-

• Become better at graphic design concepts and programs
• Becoming more patient with reading metrics and KPI's
• Sharpening my critical thinking skills for market analysis.

T-

• Marketers with more graphic design skills while being solid writers.
• Marketers with greater resources available 
• Companies promoting from within than outside.

Of course I have a more in depth analysis but that's just a preview of what you could do to have a SWOT analysis on yourself.  I believe this has helped me focus my attention on what could be opportunities and what I should be better at.As marketers, we work for brands to fulfill their promise to consumers.

Why not work on our personal brand and help fulfill our promise to people that believe in us?

My Music Box

It's Friday, Friday
Gotta thank God it's Friday.

Enough of my shameless attempt at pop culture references, I am glad it's the weekend.  Fridays are usually a "busy work" day for me because most of my prospects leave the office and start their weekends early.  My previous blog post talked about how music can improve productivity. This post is more about insight into what I currently listen to when I'm working on projects.

Madeon-Pop Culture



When checking my emails and doing redundant busy work, this is a great song to listen to.  Madeon is an incredible music producer that mixes songs across all pop culture in one mash-up. If you are a Millennial like I am, you will appreciate how he mixed Brittany Spears, Daft Punk, Michael Jackson,etc all in one sensational mix.  The title "Pop Culture" really captures popular music of the last 20 years.  There is a ridiculous 39 songs sampled all mixed together  I am actually listening to this right now as I write this post.

Major Lazer-Lean On



Major Lazer is one music production that has been a fixture in my playlists.  Their hypnotic melodies coupled with percussive world rhythms put me in a work zone where it's just me, the work, and music.  This is one of the newer records out and I recommend it.  It's a chill, but hypnotic percussive record that's perfect background music.  The female vocalist also has a distinct voice.

Logic-Buried Alive



This record by Logic is true Hip Hop at it's finest.  The record has a great mellow vibe with an empowering tone.  Hearing the words, "Buried Alive" can be interpreted in so many ways.  Sometimes when I'm at work and given so much responsibility I feel like I'm buried alive.  This song really resonates with people that are given pressure to perform well and feel overwhelmed.  It's a therapeutic song that I've listened to when I feel stressed out over a situation.

Music AND productivity

This might be one of my favorite posts to write today.  Everyone who knows me knows I am a passionate music aficionado.  Being a musician, music is literally in my DNA and each strand represents my mood that makes up who I am.  When at work, I notice various people who listen to their music while doing their job.

If my job took away internet and online shopping, I could survive.  If you took away my ability to listen to music while doing my job, I'd bid you "Good day sir."


 I can't speak for others but music has always made a productive me.  I'm like the kid in the movie Hardball with Keanu Reeves.


 The young kid couldn't play baseball good unless he had his headphones on. For anyone that has played baseball, it requires an intense amount of concentration. I look at this kid and relate to his razor sharp focus listening to his favorite song.

 Facts on productivity with music

There have been so many studies on music in the work place.  While one genre of music may not be another's favorite,  the beauty of having headphones solves this problem.

According to Gregory Ciotti,

"When evaluating music's effectiveness in increasing productive output, one element to consider how "immersive" the task at hand is."

He basically talks about in the study of experiments, he found that playing music in the work place improved mood and creates a bump in productivity.

Another study conducted by Dr. Teresa Lesiuk stated that IT specialists who listened to music completed tasks more quickly and came up with better ideas than those who didn't.

There you have it, listening to music is not as much a distraction as some managers may think.  

How I manage my content

Before I got into Content Marketing, I found myself complicating the difference between recycled but useful content and content that was simply best left in the trash.  Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to still produce relevant and meaningful content.  One of my favorite resources was the Content Marketing Institute.  CEO Joe Pulizzi has amazing tips that have helped me become better in content marketing.  Creating content is easy, It's managing it that can be most difficult.

It appeared to me that writing content is similar to how television producers create TV content.

Brainstorm


Being a musician, the brainstorm concept was easiest for me to grasp.  I literally have 2-3 pen pads that have ideas for writing concepts in marketing.  Some of these ideas I am proud of and some of them are best left in a notepad buried deep amongst other note pads.  My approach to brainstorming has always involved outside the box thinking with one foot in the box for practicality.  Being  memorable is great but if it's not related to your brand, it doesn't help It's so easy to take other blog posts and recopy them.  I try very hard to not do that and find writing concepts that are relevant and (hopefully) fresh.

Outline

I started to research some of my favorite blog writers and see how they were keeping track of all this content they produced. I noticed a lot of them utilize outlines to keep their ideas focused and concise.  I hadn't used outlines since college writing but it's still very pertinent in content production.  It takes a lot of discipline but after about 10 posts, I was able to get to my work flow quickly with constructing outlines. Here is my normal framework:

• Main Title (I usually change this after finishing my post)
• Subject ( I usually have 3-5 themes I discuss in my writing)
• Introduction (two or three sentences to help me narrow my focus on the subject matter)
• Purpose (I think to myself, "Why should you read this content?")
• Main points (I take 3-7 of my main points that sum up within)
• Conclusion (How I want to create a lasting impression for people to read)

This really shouldn't exceed past a page but it really does help you organize writing your content.

Content Calendar

When I began writing my blog, I wrote about 13-17 posts ahead of time.  My main reason doing this was I have a 9-5 job and still wanted to maintain a consistency in writing.  When I was finally finished writing those posts, I didn't know how I would organize everything. I noticed a lot content marketers utilizing calendars to keep track metric wise or what day they write certain posts.  I've happen to come across some extremely technical content calendars so I had went with a more streamlined easy to digest approach. The image above is one of my favorite looking calendars.  A major benefit of using a content calendar is it improves your ability to write on certain subjects that may be a hot topic during a specific time period.

example...  If your start up consists of online shopping, writing articles around Christmas and holidays may be crucial to increase your presence.

Erase what's not good

When I write a lot of content, I had to remove the fear of losing bad content.  Is it better to have 20 great useful posts or is it better to have 60 posts?  This is the question I ask myself when creating content.  Professional content marketers create audits to track what's useful and what needs to be disregarded. This also helps from an SEO standpoint as certain articles may be useful to use again.  The content audit really helps organize and prioritize effective posts.  It's OK to use a theme and re-purpose the content if it was successful.  It's not cheating if you take that same post and update it with added value to maintain its freshness.  Like me, don't be afraid to get rid of content that's just frankly, not good at all.

Effective content marketing is about publishing systems-not waiting on creative inspiration. - Ben Stroup