Are You Ready for 2012, the Year of Social Business?

by Ted Vinzani

Before we look at the how you can be ready for the “Are you ready” part of this article, let’s look at the idea that 2012 is the Year of Social Business. You can only understand the “why and how” of wanting and being ready to be a social business when you understand why it is the year. Only then can you develop your relevant-to-your-prospects approach to making your business social.

The reason why 2012 is the Year of Social Business is because just about everyone is saying it is. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy so to speak. At the moment I am writing this article a Google search for “2012 Year of Social Business” will return 2.55 billion results. That’s not a trend; it’s a landslide. Here are the four overwhelming reasons why it is the year:

1) Facebook and Google (Google+) are making noise about 2012 the Year of Social Business, though maybe not in so many words or using that exact phrase. All the other social sites are following along in their own ways.

2) Tons of those in the press – from print to broadcast to everything info on the Internet – are pushing for 2012 to be the Year of Social Business.

3) So called social media gurus/writers/bloggers on the Inernet and those many titles of social media services selling agents and agencies are all pushing the “Year of Social Business” idea to increase their followings and sign up businesses for their social media services.

4) Almost all of us not in one of the above categories of Year-of-Social-Business-Proclamiers buy into to the idea, even those planning to do nothing about it.

Are You Ready for It and Should You Even Care?

Should you care that 2012 is the Year of Social Business? Maybe so, and maybe not. It is very simplistic to say, but the three primary reasons a company should be on social media platforms is to generate and nurture prospects, and to facilitate customer service, and to build online community. To see a business type that doesn’t need to care about social, let’s look at one industry from this perspective – large passenger airplane manufacturers.

If Boeing and Airbus care that 2012 is the Year of Social Business, it has nothing to do with selling or servicing jetliners. Just imagine the following scenarios:

“I didn’t even know that Filbert Airlines existed, or that they had the $60 Million dollars to buy a new 737-600. Thanks Facebook.” Signed a Boeing jetliner sales rep.

“I buy aircraft for Filbert Airlines and we need a new jetliner. I didn’t know any reputable aircraft manufacturers to buy one from, but a buddy of mine on LinkedIn told me about Airbus, a company I’d never heard of.”

“We kept having landing gears fall off of our jetliners, and Boeing wasn’t returning our calls. I tweeted this to my friends with the hashtag #Boeing and their service techs tweeted me back in less than 2 hours.”

“After a long day of managing my fleet of 207 jetliners, I’m just looking for other fleet managers to pal around with online. That’s why I joined a Google+ Hangout with my peers.”

If you think any of those scenarios happen I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. There isn’t a single possible candidate to buy a jetliner that Boeing and Airbus doesn’t know about and have on speed dial. And they may not know which celebrities think like John Travolta – that a 737 is the only way to go because a Gulfstream is just too confining – but trust me, that celebrity knows who Boeing is.

The only reason why Boeing and Airbus each have a social presence is for stockholder relations. Heck, that’s the only reason why they advertise.

The Rest of Us

However, if you don’t make jetliners or build airports or sell battleships, you pretty much need to make your business as social as possible.

Just realize, making your business social is not the cure-all for all your problems and not the panacea for what ails your poor sales or weak service.

Of course a significant number of you won’t do anything social this year, and if you otherwise sell and market wisely, you can probably get away with it.

In spite of all the hoopla out there saying traditional sales and marketing is dead, particularly cold calling, there are plenty of prospects who will respond favorably to a well developed phone call crafted so the recipients realize the caller has a relevant message that will really help them achieve their goals and objectives, and/or solve their problems. Prospects will read a brilliantly created mailer that captures their imagination, starting with the envelope and delivering a story of success where the reader is currently frustrated. A well-written radio ad can cause a potential client to pull their car over to call you or go to your website.

And there is still a huge opportunity for your website to pull in prospects and serve existing clients, but before you spent a cent on SEO be sure you have a website message that is worth the effort – that is, a message that causes prospects to say, “Wow! This website is all about me!”

Remember, Social Media is one of many marketing/selling media. Most of them are usable for most businesses, but there are so many factors relating to which one(s) you should use for your business.

Factors for Your “Social Business”

Are you B2B or B2C? – Yes, everyone can easily have a Facebook Fan Page, but if you are B2B put the minimum into it unless you have a huge marketing budget. If you are B2C you really need to consider social media more seriously.

Prospect Age Demographics – If your typical prospect is mid-20s or younger, forget everything and live in Facebook. If you only sell to Baby Boomers, you need social and a website, because they may find you on Facebook while playing Farmville, but they will want to go to your website to seriously research your company/products/services.

Marketing Budget – The bigger your company the more you can do. Most who read this blog are smaller businesses with numerous restrictions on what they can spend. The previous factors seriously impact how you should go forward but assuming your typical customer isn’t 17, less money means less to spent on social. No budget for Facebook? Get the owner’s college-aged son to put one together but you write the copy. Make yourself figure out LinkedIn and build your company’s presence there on the weekends.

Price of Your Product – The more expensive what you sell the longer the deliberation time before the purchase. Social can make for an effective nurturing process, but then so can email marketing with good SEO/SEM and relevant content on your website. And believe it or not a good professional sales rep, without a sales manager breathing down his neck to sell, sell, SELL, will also be able to nurture prospects over the long-term.

Number of Potential Prospects – Everyone is a candidate for insurance products, but how many companies buy nuclear reactors? The larger the number of “suspects” and the less readily accessible the indicators of who is considering a purchase soon, the more a social media and web-based approach makes sense to seriously invest in to uncover and nurture prospects.

Not Mind Over Matter But Minding What Matters

There is a lot written about mindset and creating an attitude or the mental game of social business. There is talk about social media being the responsibility of everyone in the business. All that is true, but there needs to be a pre-decided effort and plan.

You need an overall marketing and sales plan. And it is not just the responsibility of the chief marketer or the sales manager or even the owner. All three have responsibility to lead the effort, but all sales staff, marketing, and customer support should have a part in the planning.

Most employees in most businesses are active in some way in social media, and the number and activities are skyrocketing daily. That fact is not a disaster waiting to happen so much as an amazing opportunity to galvanize your employees to help you. You may find the perfect person to manage your Facebook Fan Page is already doing a spectacular job of managing one for her local bowling league – believe it or not.

I know of a sales guy who is totally frustrated with his company’s website. No one will listen to him and he is afraid to tell them that he knows what he is talking about because he is making almost $7,000,00 a month managing the SEO of his 35+ niche affiliate websites. He doesn’t do online affiliate marketing to quite the job he loves; he just needs more money for his large family with several kids already in college. That employee is not a problem to be feared but an asset to benevolently exploit.

The Net-Net

Social Business is on the rise – 2012 is the year. But then again 2011 was a big year for it and 2013 will be even bigger.

Do social media for your business; do as much as you can. But do it intentionally and with a plan, don’t do it just because everyone else is.

Also, don’t call a social media expert until you decide what your overall marketing/sales plan is. Then make the expert prove he/she understands what your plan hopes to accomplish before you listen to his/her strategies and tactics – which you will pay for.

If you don’t know what you want to do overall or why, well, that’s why I am here.

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SEO Second, Relevance First

by Ted Vinzani

Have you ever made a Google search and gone to the top picks on page 1 and been frustrated with what you found? You said to yourself, “This isn’t what I’m searching for.” You wonder what the website was thinking when doing SEO to get to that particular ranking to post that particular information.

That is not the most important question. Its most important to ask yourself, “Are people going to my website just as frustrated?”

I am in the process of changing this site from just a blog to a website for my business as well as a blog.  I have been reading a good bit about SEO for years, and even more now that I am going through this planning exercise.  I don’t see a lot of meat in the SEO discussions about making sure that once your site hits the first page of Google and once a prospect lands on your landing page, that your site actual says anything the prospect can relate to.

People pay homage to Content Marketing, but then websites scramble after Google placement, and I cannot blame them at all.  SEO takes priority and sometimes you can find well-SEO’d pages that are painful to read.

Of course if you have buckets of money to throw at SEO and content you can solve this problem. But I am writing for small and medium size businesses on an Internet budget. And, I have scads of examples of irrelevant copy from Fortune 1000 company sites, written all about the company and the product and little if any about the prospects using and benefiting from their offerings.

Here is a slightly exaggerated example I have NOT posted assuming I want to rank for relevance marketing:

RelevanceSells.com is the premier site to learn about Relevance Marketing. Relevance Marketing is the practice of making sure that you have relevance in your every marketing effort. Relevance Marketing is the key to make sure prospects find all of your marketing relevant.

The Department of Redundancy Department.

As overstated as that is, I have read articles, blog posts, and other web content almost as painful.

Granted, Google has made better content more effective in SEO work through it’s efforts with Panda, but excellent internal linking of writing nearly as disconcerting as the example above can also give great Google juice to painfully redundant prose.

The New Battle – Equivalent to Sales vs. Marketing

There has been a battle between Marketing and Sales since the two disciplines became two disciplines. Both claim primacy over the other and both grumble about the intransigence of the other when revenue goals are missed – and even when these goals are met.

I do plan to discuss this historic battle in a future post, but I believe I see the startings of SEO and Content at similar odds with each other as the struggle for page 1 becomes more and more difficult.

SEO says, “We’d be on page 1 if they didn’t change our optimization work.”

Content says, “What they wrote isn’t going to make sense once someone visits our page.”

It has not come to this yet, but it could, unless there is a truly joint effort to work together.  I have heard rumblings of this sort of disagreement just a bit. Perhaps I’m trying to play the prophet.

Of course, having the other as antagonist may come in handy when goals are not met.  Just ask any sales pro or marketer if they’ve been stymied by the “incompetence” of the other.

The Final Word

It is a futile effort if visitors come to your site at number 1 on page 1 and then these prospects leave frustrated in, oh, let’s say seven seconds or less.

Potential clients have to relate to your message almost immediately if you want them to “hear” all you are saying on your website.  SEO has to work with good copy – no – make that great copy.

But the best copy in the world is rarely read if it shows on Google page 47.

So, it is best we all learn to work together with success as the true goal, and not solely great content or great optimization.

My stance on this issue is clear. That’s why I titled this article “SEO Second, Relevance First.” But rest assured, I emphatically state it must be both, a One-Two Punch.

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The 1st 7 Seconds Rule for Demonstrations

by Ted Vinzani

Part of an ongoing series explaining how and why to capture your prospects’ attention immediately with any type of marketing or sales message you offer.

In today’s ultra hectic business atmosphere you must immediately cause prospects to relate to you with the first sentences of any form of sales or marketing message – regardless of your sales cycle length – if you ever want prospects to buy. This is the very essence of Relevance Marketing – talking about your prospect’s goals, objectives, and problems, and not about your offerings.

The Relevant Demonstration

Whether you are demonstrating to a large crowd or just a few people, you need to capture their attention fast. True, they have agreed to sit through your demo and you will probably have a minutes or two, maybe more, to really grab their attention, but it is best to start out right away totally captivating them. People commit after brilliant demos.

When I was a regional sales representative with Quark, Inc. I performed numerous demonstrations on a weekly basis. Though my audiences were most often smaller – 1 to 8 people or so – on many occasions during the year the number of those watching my product presentations climbed much higher, even into the hundreds. Though these experiences come from well over a decade ago, I believe they are the best examples I have to illustrate these principles.

Quark, Inc. is the publisher of the page layout software, QuarkXPress. At that time PageMaker was the big leader in what was then more commonly called, desktop publishing. QuarkXPress, along with Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator programs, and the graphic capabilities of the Apple Macintosh, were the products that caused a monumental and radical shift in advertising, marketing, and printing that is still shaping those industries today.

PageMaker was the first big name product in page layout much like Lotus 1-2-3 was the first popular digital spreadsheet and WordPerfect was the first ubiquitous word processing program.

In versions 1 and 2 of QuarkXPress, though it was a superior product for eventual print output, the program was much harder to use and more cumbersome all around. Version 3 had major improvements in usability and many more effective features, but PageMaker wore the “industry leader” badge and the fame that goes with it.

I was one of nine Quark representatives covering the US mostly through an excellent Macintosh dealer network, and our job was to show every business graphic department in the nation why QuarkXPress was better. Here are the major issues we had to overcome with our demos:

• There was no single drop dead killer feature or benefit
• There were a lot of specific features and benefits proving it was better
• QuarkXPress was now easier to use but extremely full featured
• Therefore PageMaker was simpler to use
• Most graphic designers already had PageMaker
• Printed pieces off the printing press showed the biggest differences
• Management was most concerned with print quality
• Actual designers were not as concerned with print issues
• Designers were a bit concerned with the QuarkXPress learning curve

Demonstrating to a Small Group

The smart Macintosh dealer – those who were selling solutions and therefore a lot of product – knew that they would gain many advantages with the more important companies in their sales areas if they took us Quark reps in to demonstrate QuarkXPress. So I would go to a major city for a few days or a week and the dealers would take me to visit the biggest prospective companies they could find.

I would typically talk to and demo to 3 to 8 people at a time. I would average 3 to 4 presentations a day. This was a great “laboratory” to experiment on specific demonstration techniques, clever word phrasings, and subtle attempts at humor to improve the over all flow of my demos.

I had demonstration example files for a magazine and a brochure. I could explained creating in my software almost anything the prospects produced in their graphics departments if I mapped their projects to one of these two demo types.

Therefore the first thing out of my mouth after introductions was questions about what they did.

This way I was talking with them about their two most important concerns – 1) what they had to accomplish and 2) what problems they had doing so. We were immediately talking about them!

Me, the Techxpert – I knew from those industry knowledgeable at Quark the main problems our software solved, but I earned the reputation as a technical expert on these problems because my prospects educated me on issues they specifically faced. Every company I visited had experienced the typical problems, but each industry had different priorities for these issues and additional concerns unique to their niche.

Not only did my dealers take me to ad agencies, marketing firms, and printing houses, they also took me to the in-house graphics departments of just about every Fortune 2000 company in my territory. By asking the right questions I eventually could explain to ad/marketing/print buying companies what was going on in these service providing establishments, and I could also explain to the ad people, marketers, and printers what their clients were interested in.

At first I very specifically asked question solely on what I knew QuarkXPress could solve. Eventually I could explore in a few minutes any problem they had and at least show them work-arounds to use if not solutions.

The Actual Demo Wording

Altogether too many demos are NOT about the prospects viewing themselves succeeding with the displayed product or service. You usually see one of two demo methods:

1) – “My product can do this, then it does this, that, and the other. Then you can either go this way or that. If you go this way this happens, and if you go that way….”

2) – “Today I am going to show you this, then this, then this, then this, and then that. First I do this. Watch me as I ______. Now I’ll do this. Oh, let me show you….”

Now the second example is better than the first, but it is still too demonstrator-centric as opposed to demo-viewer-centric. Here’s how I showed QuarkXPress in action as my demo viewers and I used it together. I said something like:

“Since you create a load of brochures, how about we build one together right now. Do you create many 4 page documents? Okay, here’s how we set that up. What are the typical page margins you use?

“Do you usually put product titles at the top or the bottom of the front page? Okay, we’ll put it there. Now, let’s import a picture. QuarkXPress puts pictures in a box on your page so here are the different box shapes available. Do you like the selection? Pick one. We just click Import and there you go.

“Oh, and do you remember the problems you told me about with low-res/hi-res swap out? Well QuarkXPress swaps out low resolution placeholders for the high resolution ones automatically. Collect For Output makes it no problem.”

In 129 words I:

- Asked participants 4 different questions
- Let them make 5 choices in how the demo went
- Showed them 9 ways the program did things
- Explained 3 significant improvements over our competitor
- Relieved one MAJOR problem they faced every day

And through it all, we did all of it together. Of course I had the mouse and keyboard under my control the whole time. I actually did the work. But by using words like “you” and “we” they were subconsciously doing it with me, and by asking questions they were actively participating in the process.

At 8 or 9 people it becomes difficult to ask so many questions. At 12 or 13 it was just about impossible. If I was in a specific company’s meeting room with more than 8 or 9 people I’d ask the group if I could basically talk to the 3 or 4 right near me, and then anyone else could comment or ask questions about what we’d missed.

Smaller demonstrations are a great venue to practice and gain confidence before talking to larger groups.

Demonstrating to a Large Crowd

Two or three times a quarter a dealer would have a big show in my territory and I was asked to demo to a crowd. Attendees usually numbered between 30 and 120. One dealer put me in front of over 250 people in a hotel conference room.

Also, three or four times a year Quark would have a large booth at a tradeshow like MacWorld, GraphExpo, or the Newspaper Association of America Conference. Quark would rent a booth big enough to seat about 30 people and the crowds would end up with 60 or more packed in the area and blocking the aisles.

On the hour and half hour a new demo would start that lasted 20 minutes. Time was closely guarded and we were slaves to the timer facing the demonstrator from the back of the show booth.

My Large Crowd Demo

My QuarkXPress demonstration for big audiences covered the same substance as my small group demos, but not in the same execution. I couldn’t meet everyone ahead of time and catch their names, nor could I ask them a number of specific questions about their individual and business needs.

In a single company visit I’d usually have at least 30 minutes to demo and quite often I had an hour, if not more. I could tailor everything to their goals, objectives, and problems.

In large diverse groups I had to hit on the most common problems that most attendees would face and try to relate whatever I did specifically to all possible viewers in as few words as possible. At exactly 20 minutes my boss got antsy, and at 22 minutes she cut off the sound system.

And yet, I could always create crowd participation almost instantly.

Here’s how I’d start:

“Hi, I’m Ted with Quark. That’s enough about me; let’s hear about you. How many of you are from right here in (the city we were in)? Now, how many of you are from another continent?”

In 7 seconds or less I’d made them chuckle and in another 10 seconds I’d asked questions that caused all to answer in their minds and respond accordingly – and most people chuckled again.

“Now, how many of you use QuarkXPress? All of us here at Quark thank you. To all of you current users today we will look at a number of new capabilities we are announcing. Those of you who do not currently use our program, all of us users join in welcoming you to look at a few of the many reasons we all love it.

“In the next few minutes we are going to layout the first few pages of a magazine. Most of the magazines you read are 8-1/2 inches by 11 inches, correct? So we’ll make our magazine that size as well.

“We’ll put the title here on the front cover. Call it out; do you prefer a serif or sans serif font for the title? Okay, let’s use Garamond Bold.

“Here’s how you will place the front cover image. How many of you find you have issues with image bleed on your printed pages? Ah, now I know those of you who don’t use QuarkXPress.

“Show of hands, how many of you are plagued by color trapping issues? Don’t feel bad, thousands of graphic designers and printers consider this a major concern? Let’s look at how QuarkXPress eliminates most if not all of your problems.

Throughout the rest of the demonstration I asked both rhetorical questions and quick questions the audience could actually shout out in a word or two. I kept at the humor whenever possible.

I quickly moved through as many features and benefits as possible, creating as much “Wow! Look at that!” as I could.

All the time I keep subconscious participation going using the words “you” and “we” and all the accompanying verbiage to support the idea of us building the page together as I did the actual work.

I encouraged conscious participation with my rhetorical and actual questions, and by talking about issues and solutions all present there dealt with daily.

How You Sound in Your Demo

Public speaking to this day is still one of the most prevalent fears in society. If you are the demonstrator you have to get over it. The best way to improve your speaking skills is to start speaking. Join Toastmasters. Take the Dale Carnegie Course. Read books on speech giving. Make yourself do it. I promise it doesn’t hurt.

And if you give demonstrations I feel the following is your duty:

• Not only do you owe any one you demo to great information
• You also owe them information in a way they will want to pay attention
• You must spice your speaking with changes in inflection and tone
• You have to avoid a monotone
• You must allow your demo viewers to see themselves doing what you do, and in their mind they are all exciting experts at doing what they do – never dull or boring

Start off as a demonstrator by copying as much as you can of the style and verbiage of the best demonstrator in your company.

Smaller demonstrations are a great venue to practice your own speaking styles, techniques, and humor. Remember, you are always the expert in your demonstration.

Humor and Other Factors

Those few of you who know me in real life know I enjoy public speaking. I tell very few actual jokes if any, but find plenty of natural humor in most things and love relating one-liners, subject-specific quips, and pertinent punch lines throughout my speaking.

Bill, one of my compatriots in selling at Quark, was the exact opposite of me in most ways. He was not shy and fearful of speaking, but when we all took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test at a sales meeting, Bill was at the top left of the top left quadrant and I was at the bottom right of the bottom right quadrant.

Both Bill and I were considered among the best of the demonstrators even though our personal techniques were very different. He was subtle and droll; I was boisterous and comedic. Bill mastered careful inflection and I just raised and lowered my speaking tones without really changing my volume much at all. Bill would step back and confide in you. I would lean forward and let you in on a secret.

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Find yourself in speaking and in your demos, and make it so your audience can eagerly listen and easily follow along.

Demonstrations can make or break the swift movement to a positive purchasing decision. No one has ever told me “No” because I made the demo more pertinent to their situation. People love to buy what they can relate to and see themselves succeeding with. Relevance Marketing in a demonstration takes prospects where you want them to go.

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A Relevance Marketing Birthday Rant

by Ted Vinzani

Yesterday I hit the double nickel, 55 years old. I joked that I’d go out first thing and order a senior coffee from McDonald’s, but didn’t. Instead, I experienced one of the most important basics in Relevance Marketing — Segmentation — used in direct marketing.

When you segment a mailing list — divide it up into smaller categories such as male/female, profession, education, interests, hobbies, income level, number of family members, age groups, etc. — you now have the primary tools needed to focus very carefully on a relevant message crafted for the individuals in the segment and/or segments.

My favorite failure to segment was a mailer about a hospital’s new birthing center sent to a 63 year old man who’s wife had a hysterectomy in that very same hospital over 25 years before. Digital Printing allowed for personalization throughout starting with “Dear Fred,” so you cannot say this was a mass mailing to all past patients. His wife had been a patient in the hospital more recently than he had. (She did not get a mailer.)

How Proper Segmentation Just Bit Me

Yesterday I received in the mail several birthday cards and one direct mail piece addressed specifically to me.

Hats off to Cedar Glen. They practiced great segmentation, and they were very timely in their marketing efforts revolving around the new demographic I had just entered.

On the day I turned 55 Cedar Glen, an “Affordable High Quality Senior Living” facility, sent me an invitation to come to an informational meeting.

It is entirely too coincidental for this to have just happened on my 55th birthday. They are paying some sort of list provider to receive names and addresses of those entering my new situation.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of assisted senior living facilities, and plan to enter one in 25-30 years. But…

So, well done, Cedar Glen, great Relevance Marketing. And thanks for the reminder that I am not as young as I, in my delusions, like to think I am.

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Think, Think Again, and then ReThink to Relate to Your Prospects

by Ted Vinzani

If your marketing efforts and sales propositions don’t engage your prospects where they live in their minds, all you’re doing is wasting budget allocations. Remember, no one wants quarter inch drill bits, they want quarter inch holes.

Helping a Client Rethink

I recently started a client on re-examining his company and services as he tries to define a new major sales emphasis. His company basically installs, repairs, and cleans – like many competitors. The company gets repeat business by doing an excellent job, but they get new business by being lowest bidder. Also, his prospects consider his services a “cost of doing business” and therefore contract with him only when they absolutely must.

To attempt to change this he’s starting with one significant service he provides that can be very lucrative for him, and is building a new marketing campaign from scratch: new ways to present his services, a new website, and a whole web approach.

He wants store owners to sign annual contracts with him to regularly performs his services. He’s building a body of evidence that doing so will save money. He’s also developing ideas that will help the stores draw and keep more customers because they use his services.

If you can transition in your prospects’ minds the “cost” of your offering into a revenue enhancer, you will succeed.

I gave my client a set of questions from his situation to help him think like his clients and prospects. The main points are not really new, but the wording is different and will help you think about your sales and marketing from a different angle.

New Questions, Vaguely Familiar

1) What do the owners really want?

2) Under the current situation why is it tough for owners to accomplish this?

3) How can you accomplish this for them the Easy Way?

4) If you do this for them, how do things improve? Tangibles and intangibles

5) How can the outcome of your assistance be turned into selling points for your prospects?

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Think Again and Then ReThink

You really have to think from the prospect’s point of view. Sales and Marketing typically think and therefore talk/write from the perspective of their products and/or services.

Don’t believe me on this about yourself? Look at your website and your product brochures. Sales folks, record your next sales conversation on your smart phone. If the first impressions, statements, and verbal exclamations are NOT about you, your product, or your company, then you are a rare communicator.

Think Again. If you are still reading then your next reaction is that all owners want to improve their profits or get rid of problems. “That’s what they want but everybody knows that.”

True. But if you say it basically using those words they will ignore you. In the ’80s I could get an appointment by saying “I’d like to talk to you about increasing your profits and reducing your headaches,” but the ’80s were at least a hundred years ago.

ReThink. Look at these questions from a different angle. The client I wrote these question for calls mostly on grocery store owners. How does this refined question sound:

“If you are like most grocers, the electricity for your refrigerated cases is one of your biggest single costs to running your store. You know there are ways to reduce this expense, but it’s such a pain to come up with a way for your already too-busy employees to do the work.”

Start with that sentence and the store owner will at least listen to the next full paragraph you send his or her way.

Make This Work for You

Take each question above and:

• Think about what you now say/write about your products/services.
• Think Again about the first reaction you have about what your typical prospect thinks.
• ReThink that into a way the prospect can hear you talking/writing all about their problems, goals, and issues form their perspective.

With each question try to go beyond your existing understanding. Really think again and then rethink how your prospects ponder their goals, issues, and problems.

Rest assured, they are not thinking about you and your products/services 10% of the time you believe they might be – at least not in relation to their goals, issues, and problems.

It’s not their job to understand what we want to talk about.

It’s our job to make it so they can see themselves benefiting from working with us.

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A Lowest Price Guarantee You Can Believe

by Ted Vinzani

People will relate to an honest guarantee. It is brilliant and profound Relevance Marketing to give them an effective and believable lowest price guarantee, if you can – one they can know gives them the lowest price without any work on their part.

In most cases we know even though the company “says” they’ll beat any lower price, the onus will be on us to prove what the lowest price really is in town (or in the country or on the planet), and only then will they give a lower price.

AND YET – If some business could come up with a program where they believably prove their prices the lowest, wouldn’t you at least consider them above all their competitors?

Milwaukee Tire Dealer Richlonn’s Delivers a Guarantee You Can Relate To

With five Greater Milwaukee Area locations, Richlonn’s Tire and Service Center advertises they have the lowest prices on tires – guaranteed. Here’s how you’ll know their tires are the lowest in Milwaukee – They tape to their store windows all their competitors’ advertised sales flyers from the newspaper and the mail.

Tires Are Still Mostly Analog in Our Minds

You probably don’t go to the Internet to decide on what manufacturer of the tires you need when it’s time to buy, and you probably won’t go there to figure out what design or style of tires you need. Most people just want the best price on what’s on the car already, though most nowadays don’t insist on the same brand – you just want the lowest price on the same size and style by ANY name brand manufacturer.

I’m going to need new tires for my car soon – winter’s here in Wisconsin. Normally I’d Google “lowest tire prices in MIlwaukee” or “Milwaukee lowest tire prices.”

Tire Web Opportunity in Milwaukee

Both Google searches above gave me little conclusive on where to buy the lowest priced tires in Milwaukee. Sadly, even Richlonn’s effective and believable lowest price guarantee is missing from it’s website.

It’s been years since I bought tires, and though I think of myself as very digitally aware, the last time I re-shod a car I went through all of the ads from the Sunday paper, made a number of calls to other dealers, and after several hours work I picked a dealer.

This time I’m just driving to the nearest Richlonn’s.

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