Selling to Business Tips: Say "No" to hear "Yes"

There’s a place outside Seattle that sells both Irish beer and Cajun food—it might work for them, but most businesses need more focus. Once you’ve thoughtfully decided on a strategic direction—including target market, positioning, value proposition, and message—stay with it long enough to prove or disprove its worth. Changing your mind every five minutes is bad for business.

“Did you ever have to finally decide? Say yes to one and let the other ones ride,” is how the Lovin’ Spoonful put it in the Age of Bad Rock ‘n’ Roll. It may have been schlock music but it’s good business sense: say “no” to everything that doesn’t fit your strategy. If you decide to go after small businesses, ignore RFPs from big ones. If you have a reseller channel, don’t compete with them by going direct. If your focus is domestic, don’t get distracted by a big international opportunity.

Once you cut out everything that’s not part of your tightly-defined focus, you’ll start hearing “yes” a lot more often. And while limiting yourself might seem like it’s limiting your business, I think you’ll find it’s easier to dominate one focused segment after another than to succeed while diluting your efforts across multiple targets.

Selling to Business Tips: Feed the Need

Visualize this: somewhere people will lose sleep tonight because they don’t have what you sell. They have an unfilled need that is urgent (that is, there’s a hard deadline), compelling (there are significant consequences of not filling the need), and unsolved (they don’t have a solution that works).
These are the Big Three of needs: talk to someone who only has two of the three and you’ll get head nodding and polite—but limited—attention. What you probably won’t get is the sale. It takes all three at once: compelling and unsolved, but no deadline? Mañana, baby. Urgent and unsolved, but no consequences? No rush to get this one done either. Compelling and urgent, but a solution (albeit not as elegant as yours) exists? Sorry, I’ve got more pressing issues to deal with.
Find the people who have a critical need that you can solve and you’ll get their full attention. But how do you find them? One effective approach is to define the characteristics of companies that indicate they might have the problem you solve. Once you’ve defined the qualifying characteristics, you can quickly create a list of companies who fit your criteria, then go ask if they have that particular problem. You might be surprised at the results.

Show me the pixels!

Ok, this has to stop.

I'm fed up with clicking on thumbnails of an image on a web site and getting a slightly larger thumbnail for my trouble. Costco is one of the worst offenders--go try to buy a BBQ grill from costco.com and click on the images. Microscopic.

Clearly newspapers and magazines have to limit space for photos, but the web? C'mon. What are these people who show you a 200 x 200 pixel photos as a "bigger view" worried about? Storage? I doubt it. Storage is cheaper than dirt and getting more so every day. Bandwidth? Are people still worried about dial-up users? Do you think dial-up users routinely click on links to get larger photos? Do you think they'll be surprised if the larger photo takes a while to download?

Maybe all these web developers think users are still running 800 x 600 screen resolution, so a 200 x 200 picture will be huge on their screen. Braap! Wrong answer, senator. First of all, more and more computers are coming with LCD displays, which not only support only one decent resolution (and it's typically 1024 or 1280, never 800) but also these displays have more pixels per inch, so photos display physically smaller on the screen.

People like big pictures! Photographers have known this for years, which is why they always showcase huge enlargements in their studios instead of 4 x 6s. If you're showing off something important on your website, why not use big pictures? It's not like publishing more web pages costs more money (ok, there's a small incremental cost in overall development, storage, and bandwidth, but really...is it that much?).

You see this everywhere. Try buying clothing online and look at the "larger view" that is offered. One notable exception is Lands End. Note how they use a panning zoom feature to show off details in the product. Another exception (sort of) is Tiger Direct. They use a photo gallery that shows details of their products--the images aren't particularly large, but they do show details well.

No way I would buy a $1000 BBQ from costco.com without more details. I had to find a store and luckily find one in stock to learn about a couple of key details that were important to me (no, it's not the One). But even if it had been perfect, I would never have known because I wouldn't take such a big bet on such little info. Their bad.

Negative Entropy

As anyone who has taken a basic college course in thermodynamics knows, entropy is the tendency in the universe to move toward randomness. In short, the universe hates order, which pretty much explains most technical data sheets.

If I stack blocks up, that's creating order, which is negative entropy. When the stack falls down, the blocks are scattered--that's positive entropy.

If we take a complex product and describe it in collateral in such a way that people can't make heads or tails out of it, that's positive information entropy. And that's not what we want, is it?

It's easy to explain simple stuff simply. "See Dick run. See Spot lick his butt." Everybody's familiar with that. And, frankly, it's pretty easy to explain complicated stuff in complicated terms, as long as you don't care if anyone gets it. Open any scientific/technical/engineering journal and start reading: examples abound.

It's also fairly straightforward to take simple stuff and obfuscate: "Employ optical nerve stimulation by reflected electromagnetic radiation in the visual spectrum as Richard ambulates rapidly." (We'll skip Spot for now.)

What's hard is negative information entropy: making complex ideas simple. Taking the jumbled toy chest of information blocks and stacking them up neatly is hard work. It takes trained people who ask questions like, "Why is this significant?" "What does this mean?" and so forth. That's called technical communication (when done well, one of the greatest information entropy killers known). To get marketing collateral, you need all that and more: the ability to stack all those information blocks up in such a way that people understand why they should care.

This whole discussion is (regrettably) a fairly entropic example itself. As Pascal said, I would have made it shorter but I lacked the time. Given time and energy, any idea can be expressed in simple terms, any product can be described simply, any service can be understood by even your mother-in-law. That doesn't mean that there isn't a place for the full Monty of technical details.

Think of your collateral as an onion: each successive layer as you peel it takes you deeper and deeper. There's a place for a simplistic, benefits-focused description of whatever it is you're trying to sell--a statement that can pique your prospect's curiosity and get them to ask, "How do you do that?" The answer to that question can be in more detailed data sheets, white papers, documentation--again, it's like peeling an onion.

When presented with a new product idea, people (your prospects) first need to satisfy themselves that it is worth the exploring. "Will this product or service provide me a critical benefit? Will it address a need I have that is urgent, compelling, and unsolved?" If it appears so, then the next step is to get some basic belief. "Ok, it appears this would be cool. How do I know it's real? How do I know it will work for me?" The amount of "proof" a prospect needs in the first 10 minutes is far far less than they will need by the time they sign the contract--don't try to do it all at once. As many have said before me, sales is like dating--you don't meet someone and propose in the first ten minutes. Well, maybe you do, but it isn't likely to get the result you want.

Negative entropy--order out of chaos--if you can do that with your marketing collateral, you will have accomplished something noteworthy.

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This blogging stuff is fun, but am I getting through to anyone? Does anyone actually read this stuff? So here's a test: the first five people who email me some meaningful response that they have to this blog will get a free audio CD "Secrets of Niche Targeting." If you've already got one of those, email me anyway and you'll get a credit for a player to be named later. Email me a john@workpump.com and put the word "entropy" in the subject line. This offer expires Dec. 31, 2005.

Don't shoot yourself in the foot

Now that digital cameras are cheaper than a Kmart suit everybody's got one and I'm seeing people use their little 5 megapixel point-n-shoots to capture images they want to use on their websites and product brochures. Great idea, provided you follow some simple rules.

The fact that digital cameras make it easy to get photos onto websites, blogs, and collateral doesn't mean that the rules of photography are suspended. You still need to pay attention to composition, lighting, exposure, depth of field, and so on. You can do a lot in Photoshop after the fact, but you can't bring the dead back to life. Most of the time, you're going to be better off getting a pro in to do a shoot rather than doing it yourself. But sometimes that won't happen. Recently a client shot a tradeshow they attended and then (gulp) realized too late that the pictures were underexposed.

Not to replicate all the really good "how to" books on photography, both digital and otherwise, but if you're going to take your own business pics for marketing purposes, follow a few simple rules, ok?

1. There's never enough light. Your eyes are Really Sensitive, compared with a camera. If you can, set the ISO to 400 to 800 indoors, and 200 outdoors.

2. How do you set the ISO? Ok, the first rule is Read the Friendly Manual. The idiot-proof setting on your camera is designed to give you photos that look like they were taken by, well, an idiot. The adjustments and controls are there for a reason--learn how and when to use them.

3. If can take a picture outdoors on a slightly shady day, or in the shade, do it. If it has to be outdoors on a clear day, do it early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is low in the sky, not right overhead. Digital cameras run in terror from strong shadows, and so should you. But if it can't be avoided, at least use this one pro trick: stand your subjects with their back to the sun (so they don't squint). MAKE SURE THE SUN ISN'T SHINING INTO YOUR CAMERA! Stand so the sun is blocked by someone's head, for a really special effect. Set your flash to "on" (not auto). Take the picture. Your subject should have a lovely backlighted head of hair (hey, if they have a Yul Brinner look there's nothing you can do) and the flash will kill the shadows on faces.

4. If you've got to take the picture indoors, try to brace the camera on something steady. Like a tripod. But since you probably don't have one, try anything more steady than your hands. Let's say you're shooting your booth in an expo hall. Ask the people right across if you can put the camera on their booth table and use the auto timer. Or brace the camera against a support post. Even a tiny amount of camera shake will cause a picture to look soft and unfocused, and you can't fix it in Photoshop.

5. Always shoot at the highest resolution your camera offers. You can always downsample the image for a smaller need, like a web photo gallery, but you can't really make it bigger. A "bigger" picture just means you let the camera capture more data, data that you can use later to improve the picture.

6. If your camera supports it, shoot in "raw" mode. This is like taking a digital negative. But it will have to be processed in some sort of application after you upload it before you can view it as a photo.

7. Get in close. No matter what you're photographing, people want to see it. Too often we make the subject of the photograph a tiny part of the whole picture.

8. Many digital cameras can show you a histogram, which can tell you if the picture is exposed well or not. It takes a little bit of training and practice to learn how to use it, but it can save your bacon. Highly recommended. By the same token, virtually all cameras let you view an image on the little teeny LCD screen, but you can zoom in quite far and move around in the image. This is a good way to test for sharpness and whether the details are captured or not.

9. It doesn't cost more to shoot more when you're shooting digital. Shoot a lot, changing the settings, framing, cropping, amount of zoom, etc, and you'll have a better chance of getting the one perfect image. Pros know they have to blow through a lot of exposures to get a good one. What makes you think you're better than they are?

Those are just a few thoughts--hope they help you get that great image for your website, newsletter, or brochure.

World's Worst Sales Call

(Names totally withheld to protect the completely guilty and clueless...)

Sales rep comes in (she's just in from out of town) and fiddles with the handle on her carry-on bag. Can't get it down. Abandons that. Rummages around in Large Bag, mumbles "Hmm, what was it I wanted to show you?" Pulls out various rumpled pieces of paper with handwritten notes on them. Sorts through files and piles them on my table. Boots up laptop. Fires up PowerPoint presentation with 200 words per slide. Sits beside me, looks unblinkingly at laptop, and reads every word on every slide out loud.

How I'd do, coach?

Other professions beckon...