Selling Power Blog

Say Goodbye to the Good Old Days of Selling

Learn more about the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference -- or register now.

As the founder of Selling Power magazine, I’ve watched the profession of sales change dramatically in the past 30 years. And I think it is very, very tough for sales leaders out there today. Possibly the toughest it’s ever been. 

Fact one: The average tenure of a sales VP is somewhere between 24 and 32 months. There is a huge amount of pressure on newly-hired VPs to come in to a company and magically fix everything. The problem is that 24 months is nowhere near enough time to implement strategic change. Not only is this a terrible scenario for the VP, it’s also a surefire way to hamstring a company and its strategic initiatives.

Fact two: The B2B customer has officially gone digital. And many companies are failing to adapt to that fact. Today, 57% of B2B buying steps are completed before buyers connect with a salesperson. That’s a staggering shift. Yet B2B companies are not leading the charge to embrace the digital customer. They are not setting up online sales channels. They are not exploring social selling solutions. They are not adopting marketing automation programs. They are not outfitting their sales teams with tablets and mobile phones. They are not implementing sales enablement solutions.

That’s why you see so many sales cultures that are stuck in a rut, and so many sales teams that are failing to meet revenue goals.

This year alone, I have hosted three Sales 2.0 events for B2B sales leaders -- in Philadelphia, London, and Boston. These conferences draw speakers and attendees from industry giants like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, to rapid-growth startups, to everything in between. The message I hear from these companies is the same: the good old days of selling are over. Everyone at some level is feeling the pain of being left out of the technology loop, and they’re unsure about what their next step should be to remain competitive in this new landscape.

I have always believed that selling is an art. Today, however, no sales leader can afford to ignore science. Sales 2.0 and technology solutions are making the art of selling measurable in actual numbers. And that is going to have a huge effect on the way we lead sales teams in the years to come. My opinion is that sales leaders who make strategic decisions to leverage a combination of data and social insight will empower their teams and be able to deliver predictably successful results for their companies.

In October, I’ll be discussing the future of selling in more detail at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco -- along with leaders from companies like PI Worldwide, Oracle, McKinsey, and CSO Insights. The agenda is packed with examples of how sales leaders can start taking those steps to push their teams to higher levels of success in a variety of areas. I invite you to email me with any questions at gerhardg@gmail.com or message me on Twitter @gerhard20.

Share your comment
Share this post on Twitter
Email this post

You Should Collaborate with Your Prospect

Today's blog post is by Pat O'Brien, founder and CEO of GetMyROI, a cloud-based application to help enterprise sales reps sell value. O'Brien has almost 20 years' experience successfully selling and managing teams selling complex solutions for young technology companies. 

 

Sounds cool, but . . . prospects don’t want to collaborate with you. Most of them don’t, anyway. At least not yet. Don’t get upset. It’s not you. Collaboration, CRM 2.0, Social, and their cousins are all the buzz right now within the enterprise, but there’s really nothing out there to help reps at that crucial point when an enterprise-class prospect has expressed some interest but isn’t quite ready to open up or be a “champion.”

Customer collaboration technologies (sometimes known as ESM, or enterprise social media) have made good inroads in the enterprise, but not really for enterprise sales reps interacting with prospects. There are internally focused technologies, like Jive or Chatter or SAVO or Moxie, and even Google+ now, that help me collaborate and communicate internally. There are technologies that help once a customer’s on board, say, from a support perspective, like Lithium. And there are lots of basic, more generic collaboration or Wiki technologies, like Atlassian’s Confluence or 37signals’s Basecamp, or even PBworks. I probably haven’t seen all of them, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t one focused on helping that initial prospect/sales rep conversation.

We need to merge the sales rep’s desire to understand the prospect’s business drivers, the prospect’s wish to quickly assess whether the vendor can help, and everyone’s wish to understand the intersection of quantified benefits with business drivers. The stronger the match, the more everyone wants to engage and move forward.

This is the essence of a focus on selling value: learn, align, quantify.

In the language of the challenger sale, we need to help the rep find that interesting, sort of hidden, hopefully provocative teaching opportunity, to make it a little easier to discuss economic drivers, and thus, to challenge. And to make it desirable for a prospect to participate – easy to use, valuable to all parties.

A focus on and discussion of value should be the foundation of any process or technology aimed at helping the sales rep and prospect to collaborate.

Share your comment
Share this post on Twitter
Email this post to a friend

Are You a Discount Leader or Loser?

Today's blog post is by Chris Jones, chief sales officer for PROS, a big-data application software provider that gives salespeople the confidence to compete and win by taking control of their deals and directing them to opportunities that will close, products that will sell, and pricing that will win. Jones will present How Big Data Gives Your Team a Competitive Advantage at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference on October 22-23. 

• A global chemical company increased its revenue by 3 percent last quarter, despite seeing no volume growth.
• A global heavy-equipment manufacturer increased price realization by more than $300 million in one quarter. 
• A software company reduced discounting by 6 percent, on its way to drive 22 percent bookings growth.

What do the winning sales vice presidents at these companies realize about selling that others don’t? They know that mining and leveraging their data –- data about their markets, customers, and products – is the ultimate opportunity for improving sales effectiveness.

Consider this: a company with 500,000 products and 1,000 customers sells through direct, indirect, and e-commerce sales channels, with potentially 1.5 BILLION selling and pricing decision points. How are you managing that complexity in your own sales team?

World-class sales leaders realize that the complexity of managing every sale globally – or even regionally – is too great to rely solely on a sales rep’s individual experience. In fact, sales reps rely on imperfect knowledge. There is a wide gulf between what they think they know about their customers and what their customers actually want. The results are lost selling opportunities and over-discounting. In my own experience, I’ve seen variances of 70 percent between the highest and lowest prices that customers actually pay for the same product. By any measure, that’s an extraordinary differential. 

That gulf is bridged by applying data science that provides real-time, actionable insight to each sales channel. Growing sales in this economy comes down to three essential factors: 

1. Your ability to offer what your customer wants to buy. 
2. Your ability to match your prices with your customer’s willingness to pay.
3. Your sales team’s ability to sell value and out-negotiate tough buyers and relentless competitors.

Making the leap from being the market follower to the market leader requires a proactive approach that empowers your frontline sellers with the knowledge to negotiate confidently. With a cutting-edge sales effectiveness solution, you can harness the collective intelligence of your sales force across every transaction, gaining a clear understanding of what customers are willing to pay for your products and services.

This highly lucrative insight can yield critical opportunities to increase margins and sales, even as you increase your customer’s perception of value.

McKinsey & Company research shows you’ll increase your margins by 10 percent with every 1 percent price increase. Meanwhile, Gartner estimates an average 2 to 3 percent revenue lift with price-automation technology.

Regardless of your industry or company size, the revenue potential is staggering. Here are the top four strategies I’ve seen winning organizations use to outperform in their markets and increase revenue:

1. Create customer buying groups. You need to know what specific customer microsegments are willing to pay for each product, in every market, channel, and region. Armed with these guidelines, you can take your selling effectiveness to the next level.
2. Align resources against your biggest selling opportunities. Which territories and accounts have the biggest opportunity for revenue growth this year? Do you know?
3. Eliminate your weakest links. Drill into your big data across every disparate system to truly understand your gross and net margins. You may be surprised at what you find. Stack rank your sales reps, and lose the bottom dwellers. Arrange your customers in order of profitability, and cut unprofitable accounts. (Yes, you probably have them.)
4. Build margin awareness into your commission structure. Most companies don’t want to expose margin information to frontline sales reps, nor do they often have the capability to do so. But clear, simple negotiation guidelines give them a fighting chance with buyers who are more informed than ever before. It’s their cheat sheet to winning.

When you understand why your customers buy, you can also turn on a multiplier effect that jolts revenue in a way you’ve never seen before.

To win in a tough market, selling must become a science, in addition to being an art. Winning organizations invest in better technology to complement their investments in the art of the negotiation, so their salespeople gain the confidence they need to win more deals at greater profit – and with greater commission. 

Share your comment
Share this post on Twitter
Email this post to a friend

Selling Starts with Understanding the Buying Process

Today's blog post is by Christian Maurer, a consultant for B2B sales leaders wanting to improve the productivity of their organization with solutions based on modern philosophies.

 

Sales processes usually are linear representations of a sequence of activities a salesperson has to follow in order to be successful. While the sales process might provide guidance to the salesperson, it’s inadequate for monitoring the progress of a potential deal. In the end, it does not matter what the salesperson has done; buying happens when the customer has reached a certain state of mind.

So we have to take the customer’s buying process into consideration. Most descriptions of buying processes focus on activities from the customer’s point of view. Understanding what the customer is thinking with respect to a potential purchase is what really matters. Considering the buying process as a type of change-management process has inspired the following simple, cyclical, four-stage model.

The Four-Stage Buying Cycle

The model is cyclical to respect the trend that selling is no longer considered to be about closing deals, but opening relationships. In my mind, this means that selling can be represented only by a closed-loop model. Focusing primarily on the transition between the four stages (which represent shifts in a customer’s thinking) is a way to consider the buyer’s point of view.

A cyclical process does not have a start or end. To discuss the principle, it is helpful to start by regarding the customer as maintaining the status quo. The customer will leave this state only by acknowledging that a certain frustration is no longer tolerable.

This realization will trigger the next phase, when the customer tries to define a vision to remedy the frustration. In this phase, three things can happen: First, the customer, after further consideration, decides to maintain the status quo and live with the frustration or, second, an internal remedy is found. Only the third option, however, will trigger a continuation of the buying cycle: the customer decides that purchasing a remedy is preferable. 

This second phase allows for the elimination of do-nothing opportunities. According to CSO Insights, about 20 percent of forecasted opportunities end up in this stage. So this allows for a huge improvement of forecast accuracy.

Now that the customer knows that remedies can be purchased, the next phase is to evaluate from whom to buy. The actual buying decision is at the end of this consideration. For many selling organizations, evaluating suppliers is the start of the actual selling process. Studies show that at least 80 percent of customers who reach this point will stay with the supplier that has helped them envision the remedy for their frustration. At the beginning of this phase in the buying cycle, requests for quotation (RFQs) are issued. For a seller entering the buying cycle at this stage – by answering the RFQ – the success rate is about 10 percent. This is further evidence that successful selling requires an earlier involvement in the buying cycle.

The loop is then closed at the fourth phase, when customers put the purchased remedy into use. While the seller considers the selling finished when the buying decision is made, the customer is finished buying only when he or she can actually verify whether the perceived value meets expectations. That is the fourth phase leading, then, back to a new status quo.

How I Use This Model

Monitoring the progress of a potential deal can be based on customer evidence. For this, one has to find a set of observable customer behaviors or statements associated with each transition from one phase to the other. The positive impact on forecast accuracy has already been mentioned.

This model also allows discussion about the type of messaging needed to help the customer come to the next stage of thinking. By using appropriate messaging, a salesperson becomes more relevant to the customer.

Discussions on marketing and sales alignment become more objective. The question now becomes, how do the two functions together help the customer make the transition to the next phase, instead of fight for supremacy over each other?

Finally, this model also helps when dealing with complex sales situations in which buying centers are involved. Salespeople can distinguish between the mind-shift of the individual members of the buying center and the institutional mind-shift, which occurs when the buying center members have come to a collective decision. This, again, impacts forecast accuracy.

Share your comment
Share this post on Twitter
Email this post to a friend

How to Get Your Reps to Update and Use CRM

Today's blog post is by Christopher Cabrera, CEO of Xactly Corporation, the industry leader in sales compensation automation.

Your sales team’s most critical data lives in the brains and spiral notebooks of your reps. Which means that losing just one rep could mean losing an important customer relationship.

Salespeople want to do what they do best – sell. As a result, they won’t learn to use a new tool unless its benefits are absolutely clear. And despite the advantages they can get from CRM (like instant access to lead contact information and account histories, for example), many sales reps still see CRM as a glorified filing system.

The good news is that sales leaders can absolutely change the way reps think about CRM. Here are four strategies based on our work with hundreds of companies around the world.

ONE: Consider plugin applications that align objectives across your entire organization. CRM alone can’t give your sales reps real-time visibility into their progress towards quota – or, for example, how much money they could make if they closed a deal. This is a missed opportunity for reps, of course. It also represents a lost opportunity for sales managers to influence sales results, and for the company to accelerate revenue. But you can give your entire sales team up-to-the-minute access to this information with other applications, like sales compensation plug-ins.

TWO: Make your data work for you. To understand your blueprint for success, dive deep into your data across multiple periods—months, quarters, years—and by product, territory, role, function, or even internal contests. Use customizable reports to improve your onboarding, sales training and coaching. Show your reps how to test what-if scenarios to see which sales they should spend time on, and how they can maximize their commissions.

THREE: Regularly and publicly recognize your winners. Once you’ve drilled into the best practices of your top performers, share them with the rest of the team. Applaud winners over email, Chatter, and during staff meetings. Display contest results on TV screens near your sales cubicles or offices. Send out a simple-results dashboard to your team every day via email.

FOUR: Give both Sales and Finance what they want. Finance wants controllable costs. Sales wants to earn huge commissions. You can virtually test new incentive plans within your CRM to make sure you’ll meet forecasts – while also offering motivating rewards to your top reps.

At the core of these conversations is the user experience. It defines how fast you can drive CRM adoption, and even how much value you can enxtract from good, clean data to drive predictive sales results.

Want to learn more about how you can implement a robust CRM adoption strategy that delivers ROI? Learn more here. 

Share your comment
Share this post on Twitter
Email this post to a friend

10 Critical Sales Management Reports

Today's post is by Seema Haji, Director of Product Marketing at Birst. She is responsible for leading marketing direction and competitive positioning for Birst. Seema has 10 years of experience as a developer, evaluator, buyer and marketer in the Business Intelligence space from her tenure at Actuate Corporation, Yahoo! and Citibank. She has an MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. In addition to her passion for driving Birst's SaaS-based business analytics solution, she has a keen interest in sustainability management and eco-friendly living.

 

 

A lack of powerful analytics and good sales management reports are keeping many sales leaders from making the best decisions possible for their companies.  

SFA applications are the most widely deployed among all apps in CRM systems today. Birst commissioned a survey earlier this year on the state of Sales Force Automation business analytics. The results weren’t pretty – only 19% were satisfied with the analytics provided by their current Sales Force Automation (SFA) apps; and 86% of users experienced challenges with their apps.

The survey had other interesting results:

• 74% of SFA users require technical staff for in-depth analysis of their sales data,
• 68% use Excel as the primary tool to analyze their SFA data (more than any other tool), and
• 82% must augment the built-in SFA analytics with additional tools.

While sales managers love real-time visibility and confident sales forecasts, there is still an untapped gold mine sitting in SFA databases. This is where business analytics can help push your organization to the next level of effectiveness. Birst’s Salesforce Reporting and Analytics helps sales managers analyze critical SFA data to get a comprehensive view of the pipeline and change analytics so they can make better leadership decisions.

For example: using Birst, sales leaders can create a single, holistic view integrating their sales data with financial bookings, ERP data, and any other third party data – this allows them to compare committed and forecasted sales, plus see the overall cost of leads that converted to closed/won deals. Sales leaders can also use Birst to analyze what has changed in the pipeline, and compare those changes to the status of that same data last month/quarter/year. They can also find out if they have enough pipeline to meet targets and what might happen if deal sizes or close times change. Birst integrates with Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle CRM (Siebel CRM) and other popular CRM applications.

There are currently 10 sales management reports that Salesforce.com is not able to produce that can dramatically impact how well sales managers understand what is happening with their pipeline and forecasts. You can learn more in this free white paper download.

Most sales leaders today base their sales strategies and decisions on dated information that can be months old. As a result, actions can often come too late to make a difference. Organizations that fail to deliver real-time, interactive diagnostic capabilities to their salespeople fail to maximize sales effectiveness.

Learn more -- download this free report today: 10 Critical Sales Management Reports that Salesforce.com Can’t Generate (and 10 Reasons to Care). 

 

An $80,000 Mistake (and What I Learned about Comp Plans)

Today's blog post is by Christopher Cabrera, CEO of Xactly Corporation.

Note: hear Christopher Cabrera keynote on June 7 in London at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference. Email larissa@salesdottwoinc.com for more information.

 

Would you brush your teeth with a toothbrush duct-taped to a blender?

This is the question I posed to an audience of sales and marketing leaders last month at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I wasn’t being flip.

While many of us are out there selling cutting-edge products, we still somehow justify motivating our teams with a tool from 1982 (Excel).

I’m not knocking Excel. It’s a great tool. We use it at Xactly every day. But, Excel was not designed for managing the commission payments for a sales team, any more than a blender is meant to safely power your toothbrush.

You are creating real problems when you use Excel to motivate a sales team of any size. Gartner estimates that errors can amount to 10% of commissions. How much money is that for you—$10k a week? $100K?

The math is too big; the equations too complicated. The system is too slow to truly reward and actually encourages communication breakdowns. When you try to turn Excel into a sales motivator, you create real business problems.

Consider an example I shared at the conference: Back when I was a sales manager, I was mistakenly paid $80,000 instead of $8,000 in commissions. When I reported the mistake, my manager said to me: “Wow, Chris, do you realize we would have never caught that?” Turns out, my employer overpaid three of us $72,000 each and didn’t realize it. Combined, that’s more than $200,000!

And just imagine all of the incorrect payments they didn’t catch over the years. These errors happen all the time. They cost companies millions. But this isn’t the only cost. Salespeople who don’t trust their paychecks aren’t motivated to try for incentives. Why should they if their pay is essentially random? They may even waste time tracking their commissions.

But more and more companies are eliminating the sales roadblocks -- like errors -- created by running commissions in Excel. When they swap Excel for automation, they tap into the science of human psychology—the desire to compete and win.

Research from CSO Insights and the Aberdeen Group even shows that companies that use new incentive solutions sell more, more efficiently. Xactly’s customers, for instance, see 146% revenue growth and 36% shorter sales cycles once they ditch manual compensation processes. What these leading companies understand that others don’t (yet) is that the science of effective motivation can be built into incentive compensation tools.

To see what I mean, consider these not-so hypotheticals. Would your sales reps be more motivated (and capable) to outperform quota if they could:

• Track their performance against goals every minute of the day?  
• Know exactly how much they’d get if they closed a potential deal?  
• Trust the accuracy of their payments?

What about your sales managers? Would they be more effective if they could compare sales reps’ performance by territory, product, and margin? All with the click of a button?

We all know the power of human motivation. When sales leaders ditch the thing that stands between incentive programs and real motivation -- Excel-driven errors -- they create a company culture that encourages top performance, healthy competition, and accelerated revenue. So why are you trying to force 30-year-old technology to do something that it was never meant to do?

Publisher's note: Join me on June 7 in London and hear Christopher Cabrera’s keynote, "The Science of Sales Performance," at the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference. 

Are You A Leader of Change in Your Business?

Today's guest post is by Jeffrey Hayzlett, Best-Selling Author, Global Business Celebrity, and CEO of The Hayzlett Group. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffreyHayzlett. 

I had the pleasure of keynoting recently at DocuSign Momentum 2012 in San Francisco to a group forward-thinking change agents. For those sales leaders who haven’t heard of DocuSign or recognized the impact eSignature can have on your business -- watch out. There was a whole ballroom full of business leaders who get it; these folks understand the need to increase speed-to-revenue, drive sales, simplify workflow and process, and to change.

And change is tough. Here's a tidbit I shared with the crowd (this is also the dedication in my book, Running the Gauntlet): "To the naysayers, opportunists, and obstructionists who stand in the way of driving change and progress in any organization, take note: WE WILL BEAT YOU!"

Driving change can sometimes feel like you’re running the gauntlet. You come up against obstructionists, backstabbers, and opportunists who do their best to stand in the way of change.

People who don’t like change are going to fight it. Whatever they can do to resist change, they will -- because change makes them uncomfortable.

As a leader of change, you need to create tension, constantly seek ways to improve your business, increase sales and speed, and learn new technologies. Failure to adapt and change in sales or any business is a surefire way to sabotage your own success.

So adoption of eSignature is a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t you want to do things faster, better, more efficiently? No more paper. No more chasing a wet ink signature. Instead, adopt a totally legal, legitimate, and trackable way to continue on driving change in the gauntlet of business.

In my business I look for problem solvers, not problem seekers. And I found myself among a group of problem solvers at DocuSign Momentum 2012. Innovation is always a key driver for any business leader, so show initiative by introducing innovative ways to drive your business. Adapt or die!

Publisher's note: Want to learn more about how you can fill orders faster by getting sales contracts signed electronically in minutes or hours? On Wednesday, June 6, I'll host a live Webinar showcasing tips from experts at DocuSign and Yamaha Corporation. To join us, register here. 

Selling: Art or Science?

Jim Holden and Ryan Kubacki are CEO and President of Holden International, a global sales training and advisory firm. Their latest book, The New Power Base Selling: Lessons from 28,000 Sellers and 50,000 Deals, will be released May 1st. You can download Chapter 1 here. You can contact Ryan at r.kubacki@holdenintl.com and (312) 476-8704.

Having been in the sales training business for more than 30 years, we have seen all manner of sellers; strong performers, average sellers, and those who just don’t make the grade.  But behind all of this has always been the debate as to whether sales is an art or a science, almost to suggest that for some, sellers are born and not made. 

Let’s look at what we mean by “art.” For us, art is an expression of one’s imagination and talent.  It may result in a painting or sculpture, or it could be a wonderfully designed building, or something as intangible as an ingenious strategy to defeat a competitor, in order to win an important deal. Or is it?

Artistic ability is generally considered to be innate; coming from within an individual. A person is simply born with it, suggesting that if you’ve not been born with it, don’t expect to paint like a Picasso. In addition, such talent is difficult to understand and explain -- we see the result of talent, but not the talent itself. Who can say what was in Picasso’s mind when he revolutionized European painting and sculpture with something like Analytical Cubism, an example of which is the following.   

Science, on the other hand, is quite different.  It seeks to systemically organize knowledge in a very reliable way that can be repeated and predicted.  So, if you hold a tall glass of beer above your head and let go, the result is predictable, not to mention, tragic.  As such, science seeks to eliminate all unknowns, precisely explaining cause and effect relationships in the natural world.  But, the laws of physics do not apply so neatly to people, their abilities, and actions.  And so, we must rule out sales as a pure science. At the same time, if you are able to define the intangibles of selling, the stuff that people generally don’t see, but know exist, perhaps we can move away from the view that selling is totally innate in nature.

For example, let’s take into account How to Run a Successful Customer Meeting. There are two aspects to conducting a successful customer meeting, the tangible and the intangible. On the tangible side, we know that a successful meeting requires the right process, which is shown in the following checklist:

On the intangible side, a successful meeting is as much about managing emotions, as it is about implementing good process and conveying information. High performing sellers know that productive conversations are actually less about what they say or what they think the customer individual has heard, as they are about how the executive feels at the end of the meeting. Will he or she support the seller and a particular solution with enthusiasm? Will the executive be indifferent or perhaps feel challenged?  Sensing emotional reactions, reading them correctly, and responding appropriately in real time are essential to executive meetings. To accomplish this, sellers are trained to observe carefully, ask the right questions, and excel at listening. The same could be said for giving presentations that are both informational and powerful.  Sellers don’t need to understand the psychology that drives emotional response, but instead need to know what to look for and how to respond to what they see.  So, in this example, selling, while not pure science, is also not entirely innate, as in an art.  But where does that leave us? The answer lies with a new perspective on selling, which views it as a management science.  This viewpoint is presented in depth in our book, The New Power Base Selling, which is published by John Wiley & Sons and is scheduled to hit bookstores in early May 2012.

Holden has also developed a Four Stage Model that addresses key factors (intent, focus, relationship, value and knowledge) within a context that describes the customer and competitive environments. True to any management science, it enables sales proficiency to be documented, measured, understood, and managed. This in turn, increases sales proficiency, consistency of performance, and scalability within sales organizations. Success is based on both tangible and intangible factors. These factors approach art and science, sales as a management science conceptually sits in between them bridging the gap. 

Five Things Marketers Can Learn from the Meaning of Stories

Today's blog post is by Jim Signorelli, founder and CEO of ESW Partners, a Chicago-based marketing firm, and author of the new book StoryBranding: Creating Stand-Out Brands Through the Power of Story. For more information, please visit www.eswpartners.com.
 

Stories are one of the most powerful tools in our communication arsenal. Since the beginning of language, they continue to inspire, motivate, and engage us like no other form of communication can. There are good reasons for this, and some of those reasons provide lessons for marketers. Here are five worth noting:
 
1. Stories clothe facts with “big M” Meaning: All stories have meaning or some reason for being told. Consider this story:    
 
The young athlete who trained by doing 100 squats every day ended up winning the marathon.  
 
In effect, this is a story about the functional benefit of squats for runners.
 
Now consider this revision:  
 
The young athlete who trained by doing 100 squats every day ended up winning the marathon. He has a prosthetic leg.  
 
The first story conveys meaning in the form of useful information, i.e., squats build running endurance; however, the second story is more than just useful. It's inspirational. By contrast, it has Meaning – “big M” Meaning. The additional five-word sentence makes the second story about the same runner far more significant.
 
One of the most important questions marketers need to ask about their brand is whether it conveys meaning or Meaning. Facts about unique features and benefits may be useful, but that are not Meaningful. To go for Meaning, brands have to associate with personal values, such as exploration, determination, hard work, or ingenuity, to mention just a few. And if the communication of those values provokes an emotional response, all the better.
 
2. We are more drawn to stories that leave the Meaning to us.  
Andrew Stanton, creator of the films Toy Story and WALL-E, refers to his “unifying theory of 2+2” as our desire to come to our own conclusions. We do not want to be told the answer is four. We'd rather figure it out for ourselves. This is one of the principles of story that attracts us to stories as a communication device. Movies, novels, poems, or songs do not explain the meaning behind their messages. Meaning is left to the audience’s interpretation.
 
This is very unlike much of what we see in advertising. Advertising often gets in its own way when it sets out to convey Meaning. By telling us what values to associate with brands or how to think about a given brand, we often resist or put up our protective BS shields. Consumers don't need or want to be told that your brand believes in caring about its customers or works hard for its money.
 
Taking a lesson from stories, it is far more engaging and believable to pull Meaning from the mind of the consumer than to push from the voice of the brand. Notice in the second story above, there was no mention of what to think or feel. If you thought or felt anything about the winning marathon runner with the prosthetic leg, it was because of your interpretation, not mine. Storytellers cause you to see what you see but do little to cause the way you think or feel about what you see. Doing so would be like the comedian explaining the punch line of his joke.  
            
3. Audiences gravitate to Meaning that arouses identification.  
Another reason we are so drawn to stories is because of their ability to help us see ourselves. Identification is a story’s ability to help us feel recognized for who we are and what we value. Besides helping us realize that we are not alone, identification also helps us examine what are sometimes unconscious beliefs that motivate our behavior.
 
Too often, brands that set out to create their identities ignore the benefits of creating identification. Creating a brand identity involves telling or purposefully positioning a brand to help consumers see what makes it different or better vis-à-vis alternatives. By contrast, creating brand identification is about helping the prospect relate to what the brand stands for or its cause. It’s about helping prospects see that your brand is for people like them. Creating a differentiated brand identity may influence buying, but creating strong brand identification will influence joining. It’s always better to have joiners than buyers. Joiners are the ones who stay buyers and wear your logos.   

4. Story writers don't use focus groups to decide what their Meaning should be. Story writers don't manufacture meaning on the basis of what will sell to the greatest number of people. Rather, they start with an authentically held core belief that they want to share and express in their own way.
 
Lack of authenticity is one of the many reasons consumers have become cynical about advertising. Today’s consumer is just too smart to fall for forced intimacy. They know when you are trying too hard to fit into their lives. Consumers want and need brands to be true to their own causes, and if you think that what you say or even imply about yourself is enough, think again. As far as consumers are concerned, your brand's truth will always be revealed more through actions than anything advertised. Trustable people don't tell you they are trustable, and friendly people don’t put you on hold for 30 minutes.  
 
If consumer research is required, better that it be used to compare expressions of Meaning than to derive Meaning. Meaning is an inside job.
 
5. For great story writers, Meaning is expressed in a similar fashion from story to story.
If you go to any best seller's list of books, you'll often find it consists of many narratives written by authors with whom we are familiar. Having enjoyed their previous works, we clamor for their newest work, and we do this out of an affinity for both their interesting perspectives and individualized expressions. We are not drawn only to messages they want us to read, but also to the way they consistently write them.   
 
The reason some people will camp out in front of an Apple store the night before a new product launch is simple: the new product is from Apple. As the excited consumers’ thinking goes, if it’s from Apple, it’s got to be something worth having.
 
Each new product Apple produces is recognizably linked to the one it updates. The new offering may provide improvements, but more importantly, it remains a continuance of Apple's “big M” Meaning. Just as writers remain true to their voice, Apple takes great pains to make sure its products deserve a rightful place within its family.  

These are just five things marketers can learn from stories. The parallels between good stories and strong brands are rich with more.

Share your comment
Share this post on Twitter
Email this post to a friend