Year: 2006

Don’t like the four choices PowerPoint gives you for printouts (slides, handouts, notes, outline)?

I wanted a handout format, but with my notes typed in (not blank lines like the standard format). Here’s how to do it:

Take a look under the “send to” menu and send to Word. Of course, how obvious! Then you get this handy menu:

Saved by Google again. Found this tip here: Microsoft Office Assistance: Print multiple slides on one handout page.

UPDATE: A 60-slide, graphic intensive PPT presentation brought my computer to its knees trying to do this. Maybe it wasn’t such a neat trick after all. ;-(

Maybe its a sign of the economy, but I continue to get innundated with people selling promotional items like pens and embroidered shirts. The business’s low overhead must be attactive.

What these folks seem to not realize is that EVERYONE is selling the same stuff. Yet they all come in without a prepared sales pitch. They give a quick pitch, find out who I am, that I don’t need anything right now, then ‘hope’ I’ll contact them in the future with my next need. I griped about this back in September, saying these salespeople were caught in a MAZE (maximum activity, zero effect).

Today’s cold-call visitor was different. Yes, the same information was exchanged, but he also did the following:

• Had three bargain-basement specials on flyers that would be available all year.
• Told me he would send bi-weekly emails with more specials.

We’ll see about the quality of the emails, but this is more than any other cold-calling promo salesperson has done recently, and it doesn’t really cost him much time or effort. These are tools that we marketers can put in our salespeople’s hands if they are doing cold calling.

Marketing Eye Fashion Tip: When old styles come back, they often have different names and look a little different so they appear new. They usually come back for a reason, better than before.

And what fashion is coming back? Best Practices, now called ‘Guided Selling”, as this recent article Pointing to Profits (destinationCRM.com) defines as “any repeatable process that helps a sale move from prospect to close. “

While we all understand the concept, the article has specific ‘in the trenches’ cases where guided selling was successful, which is why I recommend clicking over to read it. And, in the spirit of this series, creating or supporting Guides is something the marketer surely should be doing.

Here’s two more bits on the subject from Seth Godin in his post: Why are you afraid of process?:

“What happens when a star salesperson starts tracking her calls, her time spent, her rolodex and her results? Her day isn’t intuitive any longer… just the act of selling is. The result: dramatic improvements. Measuring, and measuring in public, is a piece of process that can’t help but organize and leverage your intuition.”

Marketing Eye Hip Tip: Throw away those trendy and vaporous podcasts and listen to Motivation on the Run. Its a pod you won’t want to ‘cast’ away. (Read in a Carson Kressley style for effect.)

In case you haven’t gotten the hint in the past, I really think you would enjoy listening to Larry Hendrick’s weekly 20 minute podcasts. Last week Larry told us about his granddaughter’s two traits that successful salespeople (and marketers) need. Then he told a sales story about using those traits once landed him his largest customer.

Motivation on the Run » Motivation45 (a link to the page, not the mp3 file):

“Three year olds have many desirable traits that we seem to lose as we grow up. This week I look at two of those qualities and how they apply to sales and life. What are the two traits? You’ll have to listen to this weeks podcast.”

No, I’m not going to tell you either. 🙂

More good stuff from Mike Smock about salespeople. He breaks them into three distinct styles:

• Entertainers tend to be outgoing, gregarious, friendly folks who are likable sorts and fun to be around.
• Collaborators tend to be nurturing, creative folks who dislike conflict, look for common ground and strive for win-win relationships.
• Competitors like to win. Selling is a conflict for them with a winner and loser.

Obviously, there is some cross-over. But, I think the big problem is when a salesperson tries to be something he isn’t. Or is in an organization or sells a product line that demands one style over the other.

When I deal with salespeople calling on me, I try to be very non-committal and pretend to be just a good listener (which I am). Positive answers are easy to give out…platitudes really. The salesman plays along real well because he wants a positive first meeting. We talk about ‘future needs’ so that we don’t have to commit to becoming advesaries in negotiations.

Wait! Isn’t that what a salesperson really wants, negotiation? Moving toward a deal?

(There are salespeople who do the opposite, who jump into negotiating without establishing my need or interest. But that’s the subject of another post someday.)

John Jantsch shows us why getting your prospect to say no allows you to get to the next question…why. Here his list of objections (usually not verbalized by the prospect):

1. I don’t have enough information
2. I don’t trust you
3. I want proof
4. I don’t trust myself
5. I don’t see the value

Most likely it is number 2 or 5. Of course, “I don’t see the value” means “I don’t see the value to me” or, more succinctly: “I don’t care”. John says it is now a puzzle for the salesperson to figure out which one it is and take it from there.

Marketing Eye: What sales tools can you give your salespeople to overcome each of these possible objections?

Read more: Duct Tape Marketing Blog – What Part of NO Don’t You Get?

MTV never killed radio, and the Internet won’t kill salespeople, or so says Mike Smock (vSente blog) in this oddly-titled post: Mark Babej, Nobel Prize Winners and the Coming Extinction of Salesmen.

Mike’s post picks apart this article by Mark Babej in Fortune Magazine that said:

“1. Salesmen in the before Internet (B.I.) world existed only because they held all the cards when it came to information.

2. That consumers in the A.I. (after Internet) world now hold all the cards driving salesmen into extinction.”

And while statement 2 can be true in some circumstances, Mike says the Internet has also boosted the power of the salesperson:

“In other words the signal to noise ratio is much greater today with the Internet than it was without. The need for a trusted, educated, experienced source of information is greater than ever. And the ability for consumers to really become educated consumers is more and more difficult due to the daunting number of alternatives and the complexity of the decisions. Smart sales folks will understand this and learn to use the Internet to make themselves indispensable. For better or worse, the Internet has tilted the playing field in favor of the salesman. Are salesmen going extinct? Quite the contrary.”

In case you missed the gem in that paragraph, let me repeat: “Smart sales folks will understand this and learn to use the Internet to make themselves indispensable.” To that extent, the Fortune article does provide good advice for being a salesperson AI:

1. Respect your customer.
2. Defy comparison.
3. Offer the best proposition to the right target.
4. Deliver what you promise.

Marketing Eye tip: Make your website a tool that your sales team can use to their advantage. One savvy salesperson said to me “we’ve got all the information our website when you need it”, hoping his company would be the one I turn to when I am ready to move forward. Be the marketing person whose website can back-up such a promise.

At the height of ‘the bubble’, the communications business was focused on the problem of ‘the last mile’. The last mile represented the challenge of bringing broadband internet to the masses. It was going from the poles and network to the individual consumers (or businesses) that was expensive and fraught with difficulties.

We B2B marketers face a similar challenge: We can bring the product to market, create a campaign to generate interest and explain the value, but we need to get the individual buyers. That’s why we have salespeople. But, boy, do we have a Last Mile problem!

These salespeople have only one chance to do it right, in most cases. And being on the receiving end of the pitch, I’m constantly amazed by how salespeople blow it. Top crimes, IMHO:

• Wishy-washy voice mails
• Not asking the right questions
• Barking up the wrong tree
• Not following up
• Pretending the Internet doesn’t exist

While we aren’t sales managers (or most of us aren’t), in we B2B marketers tend to be close enough to the sales process to influence (or adapt) to improve their efforts. Thus, I am launching a Marketing Eye for the Sales Guy Series.

I’ll be posting short rants on bad sales technique as well as links to articles and resources that I think a marketing manager will find valuable regarding sales. I’m not trying to solve the problem, just raise awareness and letting you figure out how to fix that bad “comb-over” of a sales pitch.

(BTW, if you haven’t watched Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, you need to. At least the first five minutes when they raid the straight guy’s pad.)

My first post here was four years ago. Amazing on several different points. Probably most amazing is how I’ve followed my original vision:

My first post. Lets list the current issues on my plate that I want to discuss in the future. Basically, I have several “directory listing services” to pick (or not). They are:

Thomas Register
Kompass
GlobalSpec
Industrial QuickSearch

Throw those on top of Trade advertising, website design/maintenance, and internal issues to make an interesting blog for like-minded people.

For a walk down memory lane here is my archive page from May 2002. Some sample posts:

• We came to the conclusion that sites with comparison tools attempt to make our product a commodity (not desirable).
• Marketing “Mystery Meat”
• This is a hysterical “Daily Sucker” from Web Sites that Suck!
• Directory day
• Friday’s cool links
• Despite my questioning bingo-deck’s future, I made another insertion order for one.

The one thing I do have to say is that I have written this blog as personal, a place to deposit my thoughts and reactions to doing my job that no one I normally talk to really understands or cares about. Not to pontificate, not to impress, but to just express myself in writing.

A very gracious thank you for all my readers. You have all been great listeners.

Maybe its not news or maybe you already heard, but Microsoft has killed Frontpage. Admit it, we all have used Frontpage. I actually found it to be quite powerful for what I was doing. Of course, I was smart enough to avoid using their Themes system (which is how it earned the reputation of generating ugly websites).

I’ve since moved on to Dreamweaver, but what is Microsoft going to do next? In the interest of knowing what’s going on (whether or not I’ll ever take a close look at these programs), here is the answer from PixelMill (a template site):

“SharePoint Designer 2007 and Expression Web Designer are both solid replacements to FrontPage. SharePoint Designer has been positioned as the enterprise solution to be used with Microsoft’s SharePoint solution, and Expression Web Designer has been positioned as the new ‘designer’s’ tool.”

Read more: PixelMill – April 2006 Newsletter