enter:marketing

You have the marketing in action and the sales talent ready to go! The only thing is that the leads are not converting into meetings. The meetings are not turning into pipeline. And the ROI that you initially predicted for the campaign is still at….$000,000. You are spending so much on marketing but the message is not interesting the prospect enough to meet with your team of IT specialists. The problem is not the suite of technology solutions that your company offers. The problem is not the uncertain and dynamic state of the economy. The problem is that you might not be marketing what is remarkable about your business as a Value Added Reseller. Are you marketing in such a way that your prospects can make a remark on and actually talk about it?

You have to make your value and expertise seem remarkable to the prospect. Yes, reducing costs, going green and optimizing performance are all great results but the prospect does not consider them to be remarkable. When the competition is offering the exact same assessments and solutions as you are, how do you differentiate your value? Have you figured what’s remarkable about your company?

This is where the Purple Assessment comes in (inspired from the Purple Cow, by Seth Godin: (http://www.sethgodin.com/purple/).

That’s right, what if you offered your customers a Purple Assessment. A black-label, unbiased approach to marketing your company’s ability to connect its customers with the solutions that will fit their specific needs. You have exclusive rights to this one-of-a-kind product offering.

The Purple Assessment is so connected with the industry and so wise in its implementation that prospects come from near and far to consult the thinktank behind the offering. The Purple Assessment will make heads turn, be talked about everywhere you go, and people will start calling it remarkable. The Purple Assessment is what your company is going to be known for. Nobody offers the Purple Assessment…except you!

Oh, do you offer the Purple Assessment?

My college friend Buck and I used to play inter mural soccer - and yes, we were awesome.

No matter who we played with or against, Buck and I would work together to break the other guys’ spirits and then their egos. Buck would stall a guy charging down the field while I snuck up and stole the ball.

We’d blow kisses to our opponents girlfriends after we scored. We ran harder, played harder and frankly were just better than the other dudes. Maybe we just really wanted that free round of beer more.

Then something terrible happened.

During one of our regular Thursday matches, I made this sweet no look pass across the field to Buck who made the perfect one-time kick past a sweating overweight goalie.

Real time slowed. A white dove flew in the background. An ancient moaning voice sang from The Gladiator soundtrack. A cold and evil hand crept into Buck’s soul and stole his ability to see the very real connection between all the hard work and the incomparable glory of that shining moment. Right then and there, he made the decision: no more running or defense, just sick goal scoring. From that moment on, we never won another game. Buck would hang out around the other team’s goal waiting for the perfect pass, thinking we were idiots for wasting our time - while he was focused on what really mattered. We on the other hand, were thinking about beating Buck up and making him pay for the other team’s beer.

I think of Buck often. And not just when my friends get together to pour a little out for him and make sure nobody squealed about where I hid the body. In fact, I thought of Buck this week when I met the owner of an IT services firm who told me that he doesn’t believe in marketing and that the only thing that he knows can drive his business is sales.

So, I told him about Buck. I told him that when marketing (Mark) and sales (Buck) work as a team together across the entire sales cycle from awareness to passive opp to active opp to engagement (from one end of the field to the other), it’s a beautiful game. And you win (drink beer) a lot.

The problem isn’t that marketing doesn’t work. It’s simply that doing it right requires a team-wide commitment, patience, and a lot of hard work. People tend not to like that so much. So, they pull a Buck. And who is Buck? Buck is dead baby. Buck is dead.
Final note: As you might have guessed, I didn’t actually kill Buck. Also, I don’t really know anybody named Buck.

Unless you count “Buck Hunter”. And yes, I am awesome at that too.

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7 thinking habits of every brain

“Every morning in New York, an enter:marketing marketing director wakes up. They know they must think more like a sales person or they will be ineffective as a marketer. Every morning in New York, a VAR sales person wakes up. They know they must think more like a marketer or they will be ineffective as a salesperson…

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a salesperson or a marketer-
when the sun comes up, you’d better be thinking like both.”

You might as well as call us enter:selling. Because what makes us so damn effective at what we do is that we bridge the gap that traditionally exists between marketing efforts and sales follow-up. You can have the best marketing firm, run the most effective marketing programs, and generate the highest quality leads….but tell me- what good is it all if youdon’t have a sales team ready to pounce on the leads that you’ve generated?

On east 11th street, we believe that marketing-sales is a one-two punch effort… making these 7 steps to Sell Anything to Anyone a valuable read for everyone.