Wide Angle

American Idol has dominated the airwaves for a number of years now.  While Simon Cowell’s outrageous lambasting of singing hopefuls is a draw for some, sales reps and marketers should pay attention for another (somewhat surprising) reason: Idol’s crowdsourcing of talent through multi-round competition is a powerful way to improve the delivery of your sales pitch. Sound far-fetched?  Stay tuned… Read More »

Surely you’ve seen the TV ads. Ex-football player Isaiah Mustafa, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” taking his audience from a bathroom, to a sailboat, to a beach scene on horseback, all the while spouting an absurd, deadpan hyper-masculine monologue. It’s great advertising, a campaign that I think has helped shift Old Spice’s image away from “little white bottle in my grandfather’s medicine cabinet” to “cool, masculine scent that [young] women love.”

Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”. Read More »

MLC has long extolled the virtues of “commercial teaching”—i.e., providing insight to customers in a way that makes them better appreciate your distinct value.  Despite our obvious marketing bent, our past research has perhaps inadvertently implied that the delivery of these insights comes down to a “moment of truth” between sales reps and the customer.  We’ve tended to focus on ways that Marketing can support Sales in this interaction, everything from working together to craft a teaching sales pitch to tools that reinforce key teaching points after the rep has performed the heaving lifting.

The rep interaction undoubtedly plays a crucial role in many purchase decisions; in fact our sister program, the Sales Executive Council, has put plenty of time into understanding the specific rep skills and manager characteristics that make this teaching effort most effective. Read More »

Social media enables any employee in any function to interact directly with consumers.  This makes employee engagement more important than ever – both to limit reputation risks and capture new opportunities for employee advocacy (i.e., employees promoting the brand online).

As a very first step, companies should limit downside risks by implementing a social media policy (MLC members, click here for tips and examples).  In addition to defensive guardrails, companies should also offer simple guidelines or training to help engaged employees make the best use of social media.

Beyond this, now is a good time to redouble efforts to measure and boost employee engagement. Indeed, 46% of executives agree that surveying employee satisfaction and acting on the results is the best way to protect online reputation. Read More »

Sometimes the things you don’t find in a study turn out to be as interesting as the things you do find.  One very consistent “non-finding” concerns the effectiveness of the classic ROI message. We’ve asked customers to rate the effectiveness of the ROI pitch they hear and assessed reps and managers on their effectiveness at delivering this pitch, trying to link the effectiveness back to a variety of commercial outcomes.  To our surprise, we’ve never found the delivery of the ROI message to have any significant explanatory power.  And since zero correlation means no causation, this is a finding that deserves some exploration.

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with business owners at a software company, who developed a new way of thinking about certain data problems.  Though customers generally agreed that this was a better way to handle the data problems, the solution spanned many departments, and the software company couldn’t convince customers that the hypothetical returns were worth the extra coordination efforts. Failure to generate a positive emotional response likely explains our non-finding with regards to the effectiveness of the ROI pitch. Read More »

Click to Enlarge | Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) Share Price vs. S&P 500, Dow, and Pizza Sector (PZZA) August 21, 2009 – April 13, 2010 (Red line denotes launch of new crust)

(This is a guest post by Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales leaders.)

Domino’s Pizza’s new crust has been making the company a lot of dough.  The pizza delivery chain announced a new and improved crust on December 16, and has been blitzing the airwaves with ads ever since—ads which you’ve no doubt seen many times by now.  Over that time, the firm’s share price has leapt by 84%, trouncing the S&P 500, Dow, and pizza sector.

That’s a meteoric improvement—and no doubt a relief to Dominos’ marketers, who spent “tons of time — about 18 months — and millions of dollars” experimenting with various recipes and testing them with customers, according to CMO Russell Weiner.

Those marketing dollars certainly translated into a mouthwatering share price, but what about the pizza?  Did the crust really improve by that much? Read More »

Sales and Marketing leaders don’t typically agree on a whole lot, but they’re certainly on the same page when it comes to messaging: it matters, and we’re not doing a great job at getting it right.  When there’s little message consistency across the different interactions with the company, customers lack a clear understanding of why they should choose one company’s products or services over another’s. Read More »

Looking across the 50+ campaigns on MLC’s B2B Marcomm Showcase, it’s clear that the very best get 3 things right: 1) they engage the sales force; 2) they maximize cross-channel synergies; and 3) they capitalize on a customer insight. 

As all 3 are easier said than done, we’ve surfaced tips and tactics from the marketers behind some of last year’s best campaigns – Alcatel-Lucent, National Instruments, and Qwest Communications. Read More »

Early results from our commercial integration diagnostic have been telling: fewer than 30% of sales and marketing leaders believe their company’s messages to customers are consistent and reinforce one another.

If that doesn’t startle you, it should.  As the number of different information outlets continues to explode, B2B companies must treat every interaction as a critical opportunity to convince customers of their unique value.  Everything—from the sales pitch to marketing collateral to corporate communications—is a chance to hammer home what differentiates you from the next guy.  And the more consistent you can be across channels, the more likely customers are to internalize this differentiated mantra.  But we’re clearly not getting the job done. Read More »

Launching a new product and want customer advocates to help spread the word for you?  See what you can learn from National Instruments’ LabView product launch (a software program for engineers).  The launch campaign, which won MLC’s 2009 B2B Marcomm Awards, generated more than 2,000 customer tweets and 80 customer blog posts in just one month.

What was their secret?  Building platforms and content around customer needs – not their own product launch.  Read More »