A Modern Sales Classic Spin Selling

I first read Spin Selling by Neil Rackham in 1999. Why blog about it now? Because SPIN Selling continues to be the book I recommend most often for professionals looking to increase their sales effectiveness.

Although this book may not be the newest book on sales (it was first published in 1988) it continues to be the most relevant. I find it the most relevant because it addresses the most common sales problem. The problem I am referring to is our collective tendency to pitch what we do to clients rather than helping to facilitate solutions. This latter approach is also known as consultative selling.

In my experience there are not many people who like being pitched, but most people appreciate when you are legitimately trying to help them solve real problems. When you become skilled at leading people through a discovery process that encourages them to take on tough core problems it can result in a steady stream of new business. It’s all about fostering win/win scenarios and SPIN offers a very simple, effective framework for consistently doing this.

Spin Selling is the outcome of Neil and his team going out on roughly 35,000 sales calls over a 12 year period. His team documented the sales processes followed and distilled what worked down into the SPIN approach. The types of sales they followed were medium and large corporate clients with complex, multi-stakeholder and high value solutions. They found that success boiled down to a four step discovery process abbreviated into SPIN (situation, problem, implications, needs / pay off.)

The beauty of the SPIN framework is in breaking down a complicated consultative sales process into four simple, logical and repeatable steps. The goal of this process is to uncover the fundamental limiting issues beneath a client’s current situation. The SPIN process helps to systematically lead a client from;

• seeing where they are now, to
• understanding what problems are holding them back, to
• appreciating what these issues are costing them, to
• knowing what benefits will accrue if they invest in a solution.

I have personally followed the SPIN method since 1999 and believe in it whole heartedly. I find that this method is a highly effective way to structure consultative conversations and I follow the approach consistently. I also find that the SPIN model translates well onto campaign landing pages used in on-line sales lead generation programs.

The main limitation of the SPIN approach is that it is not a complete system for selling. It only addresses one vital portion of the sales process. It does not address sales planning, prospecting or the post meeting process for converting a successful conversation into a closed sale. For insights into these areas you need to supplement SPIN with other materials.

For a complete and integrated sales process that aligns well with SPIN I recommend the Sandler Sales Institute Sandler International who offer an excellent over all process to follow. I must have listened to their CD’s a dozen times when I was first starting out.

I also recommend the 10 Steps to Sales Success by Tim Breithaupt of Spectrain from Calgary, Alberta. Tim’s book is excellent, offering a simple and easy overall process to follow. It aligns very nicely with both SPIN and the Sandler models.

As your ultimate success in sales comes down to your ability to engage your clients in meaningful conversations; I always go back to SPIN Selling as my number one recommendation.

John Watson is the president of Accrue Performance Marketing Inc. and is the author of Being Profitable™ : the earnings growth program. John has been consulting since 1993. He helps entrepreneurs Design Build  Grow™ market leading companies with strategic internet marketing, social media and sales lead generation programs.

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Know and Focus On Your Strengths, Says Strengths Finder 2.0

I’ve had occasion to recommend Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath several times in the last few weeks. I am also in the process of reviewing resume’s for a new position I am trying to hire for, so Strengths Finder is obviously on my mind.

I first read this book about 2 years ago and was very impressed, recommending it to at least 10 of my colleagues and buying it for several family members. Fortunately I can always find a pile of at least 20 of them at my local Chapter’s book store.

I like the Strengths Finder book for entrepreneurs for a couple reasons. The first reason is I like books that only take me an hour to read and yet have something profound to say. The second is that I like the message of the book. I find it extremely compelling, desirable and pragmatic.

The basic message is that we tend to under value what comes easiest to us. We believe that nothing good ever comes without hard work and sacrifice. As a result we orient ourselves to focus on the things we are not naturally good at. We forego our natural strengths where success might come more easily. The book makes the case that taking advantage of what we are naturally good at makes infinitely more sense, because we get to exploit our natural talents.

In developing marketing plans, we use this premise all the time. We try to determine what a company is outstanding at and make that the core competitive distinction. We orient their messaging around their strengths, where they have a legitimate competitive advantage. It only makes sense. The net result is clients who want and need that strength are attracted to the message and a cycle of reinforcement ensues.

I know when I started Accrue Performance Marketing one of my central goals was to create a company where my natural skills and interests would be exploited by the audience who would most appreciate them. The result is, I earn a living doing what I am best at and enjoy the most, while serving people I relate to and who appreciated what I do for them. I have cultivated a real win/win scenario for myself.

My path of discovering what I was naturally good at required a significant career change. I had invested 12 years (5 years of post secondary education and 7 years of professional work experience) in an area that challenged my natural abilities. When I finally saw the light, I realized that I would enjoy myself more and likely realize greater success if I went with my natural abilities. It is now eleven years later, and my business is custom built around my strengths and I do what I love for my chosen audience. I just wish this book was available when I was in high school. I might have reallocated my efforts and been happier in my work life as a result.

Strengths Finder 2.0 is a gem of a book that I am glad has resurfaced on my book shelf. When you buy the book, you get a pass code to a website that gains you access to a pretty long survey. The survey is timed which forces you to respond to each question without over thinking it. Once you complete the survey you are presented with your 5 most natural strengths. The majority of the book details the 34 strengths that you draw your top 5 personal strengths from. Each chapter outlines the strength and suggests ways to develop and apply the strength further.

My company direction was already well established before I read this book, but what this book revealed to me was evidence that I have made my new career choice well. It proceeded to detail that I would be well served by what I have chosen. The book was uncannily accurate with me.

The other benefit to knowing your strengths is that, you also identify your weaknesses and where you may want to consider adding people to complement you. This benefit is good if you, like me, are about to hire someone.

In all, I highly recommend this book for entrepreneurs, sales people, marketers, HR people or for anyone considering a change. Most emphatically, I recommend this book for students who might achieve more, be happier and reach new heights if they focused on their strengths rather than trying to compensate for their challenge areas.

John Watson is the president of Accrue Performance Marketing Inc. and is the author of Being Profitable™ : the earnings growth program. John has been consulting since 1993. He helps entrepreneurs Design Build and Grow market leading companies with internet marketing, social media and sales lead generation programs.

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Getting Started With Video and YouTube Marketing?

With video marketing becoming so popular, more affordable and favoured by search engines, you may be considering jumping onto the video band wagon, I know I am.

With YouTube having become the undisputed winner in the massive on-line video space if you are considering video marketing, you need to be learning more about YouTube.

In the last ten years I was involved in only three video projects, and just in the last year I’ve been involved in five more. I have seen the average production price of these small business videos go from $8-10K to $2-5K and now as low as $1,500. This is in the range of possibility for many small businesses.

I’m always looking for internet marketing books geared to small business owners and their on-line marketing teams. In this article, I introduce two very different YouTube books.

The first book is called YouTube For Business by Michael Miller with QUE Publishing and the second book is called YouTube and Video Marketing An Hour A Day by Greg Jarboe by Sybex and Wiley Publishing. Both books were published in 2009.
 

If you’re considering getting started with YouTube, YouTube For Business is the book to start with.

It is also the book to read if you, like me, prefer to digest books and quickly put their insights into action. YouTube For Business is pragmatic, very well organized, a quick and easy read. It provides an excellent overview of the video production and marketing process on and off YouTube.

The book follows the following outline:

1. Marketing Your Business Online with YouTube – broken into 3 subsections 
2. Producing Your YouTube Videos – broken into 5 subsections
3. Managing Your YouTube Videos – broken into 3 stages
4. Working with YouTube Video Blogs – with two subsections
5. Promoting and Monetization – broken into three sections 

Each section concludes with a case study to provide context for the teachings.

I spent the last 3 years researching and playing with various video technologies intending to develop training videos for my Being Profitable program. This book outlined everything I learned and more in a 2-3 hour read. This book will save you a lot of time and effort and is well worth the $25 US.

I really liked this book as the recommendations it makes matched most of what I ended up buying after my own research. It provided many third party resources to review and was a breeze to read. I recommend it to anyone considering getting into YouTube and Video marketing.

The second book, YouTube and Video Marketing is a totally different animal. This is a serious 446 page book for people who intend to jump into YouTube with both feet and make video marketing work for their business.

The basic premise of this book is you take 8 months to complete an hour-per-day program, so there is a lot of content and third party resource references to look into. This book takes a completely different organizational approach with a story telling format. The story telling is helpful in that it provides context in the form of 3-4 mini case studies you can review and relate to your business.

The book reads a bit like a text book but it is very friendly and conversational. The examples and the conversation provide the most valuable contribution as it attempts to shape the way you think and approach video marketing. The second most valuable contribution made are the third party references to key resources you will need along the way. This book is full of gems to follow-up on to take your marketing program to new levels.

This book is targeted to internet marketers more than your average small business owner. However if you are serious about marketing your business with video on YouTube, this book is worth a quick read for the big picture context. It will help you see what you are getting yourself into. Then if you decide to commit to marketing with YouTube, this book will lead you through the implementation and video promotion process.

The first chapter offers a history of YouTube and the online video segment as a whole. It is very interesting and makes a compelling case to get moving with video marketing on YouTube or get left in the dust. The table of contents is 7 pages long with 12 chapters in all.

1. A Short History of YouTube
2. The Online Video Market
3. Map Out Your Video Marketing Strategy
4. Optimize Your Video
5. Create Viral Video Content
6. Create A Channel 
7. Engage the YouTube Community 
8. Learn Video Production 
9. Become A YouTube Partner and Video Advertiser 
10. Trust But Verify YouTube Insight 
11. Measure Outcomes Vs. Outputs
12. Mysteries of Online Video Revealed

Chapters 3 to 10 are broken down into four weeks each and structured into daily assignments.

Being a bit on the impatient side, there is no way I am going to follow the proposed 8 month timeline. However I think the outlined approach is very thorough and in alignment with current best practices for internet and social media marketing in general.

In summary, I enjoyed both these books. I got pragmatic “How To” direction from YouTube for Business and “What To Do” direction from YouTube and Video Marketing. If you’re considering YouTube for your business I suggest you buy YouTube For Business first. If you decide that video marketing is a fit and makes economic sense for your business, then go purchase the second book and read it cover to cover to validate and ground your thinking. If, after this wake-up call, you still intend to market with videos on YouTube, then consider working through the outlined program.

John Watson is the president of Accrue Performance Marketing Inc. and is the author of Being Profitable™ : the earnings growth program. John has been consulting since 1993. He helps entrepreneurs Design Build and Grow market leading companies with internet marketing, social media and sales lead generation programs.

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Duct Tape Marketing, A great primer for small business owners

I’ve had Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch on my reading list for 3 years and I finally got around to reading it over the holidays. I help entrepreneurs grow market leading companies in my marketing consulting and business coaching practice, so I am always looking for good books to recommend to entrepreneurs. 

The process that Duct Tape Marketing outlines is the closest match to what my company offers that I have found so far. I rate it as one of my top 5 book picks for outlining the entire small business sales and marketing process. One caution is that the coverage of each topic is very general, making it more of a road map, a good big-picture overview, than a practical how-to book.

The book starts out with the assumption that you are a small business owner about to market your business and leads you forward from there. It’s divided into two sections: The Foundation and The Lead Generation Machine. There is also a small third section with some after thoughts and resources for learning more about the topics introduced in each chapter.

The Foundation section outlines a process for getting ready to market. A priming of the lead generation pump if you will. The Lead Generation section outlines what the components of a sales lead generation promotional machine look like and how they work together to generate results. Each chapter directs you to some useful resources and tools that might help you along the way.

The book is very readable and can be digested fairly quickly. I suggest reading it once from cover to cover and then again chapter by chapter as you develop your go-to-market plan.

One of my pet peeves with nearly all marketing programs is they make the assumption that an entrepreneur is actually ready to market. Unfortunately, this book makes the same assumption. In my experience, many marketing programs begin with little to no professional due diligence; due diligence in determining if an entrepreneur’s business is sufficiently well defined and economically capable of supporting a sustained marketing effort. Without it, an entrepreneur runs the risk of wasting his limited time and money on marketing before he is ready to benefit from it. I’d like to see this book offer some wisdom in this regard to prevent costly pre-mature marketing investments.

As a marketing consultant, one of the hardest things I do after a due diligence review, is say to an entrepreneur “Your business isn’t ready for marketing yet. I’m not going to do you any favours, by helping you market until a number of issues are addressed.”

I always say to entrepreneurs, “you need to be able to answer these questions specifically and with commitment before you spend any money on marketing”:

1. Who are you and what do you do?
2. Whom do you serve, specifically?
3. What core problem do you solve for your clients?
4. What is your key competitive advantage?
5. How does your business make money on first time sales?

The last question is the most problematic for a would-be marketer and where he often needs to rethink his plans. When an entrepreneur works out the likely cost of a sale from marketing and realizes there is no margin left in an average first sale, there is no point going further until a solution is found.

This “am I ready to market” discussion continually gets left out of marketing books. We need a more sober discussion about how time consuming, expensive and risky marketing can be. I think this book would serve its audience better if more emphasis were placed on core business definition, marketing planning, budgeting and forecasting. This would help an entrepreneur make informed decisions about how ready he is for marketing before he gets excited and jumps right in.

Despite this gap in coverage, I think Duct Tape Marketing is a very useful book for helping map out what your marketing program could look like. I also think it is a useful book to refer to as you implement your plan as it offers very practical advice at each step along the way. Just don’t be too eager to jump into marketing until you are confident that you can afford to finish what you start and can make money from the effort.

John Watson is the president of Accrue Performance Marketing Inc. and is the author of Being Profitable™ : the earnings growth program. John has been consulting since 1993. He helps entrepreneurs Design Build and Grow market leading companies.

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ProBlogger: An Excellent Blogging Overview

Over the Christmas Break I read ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett and Wiley Publishing, 2008. While I’ve been an internet marketer for over 7 years, I am relatively new to blogging. Now that I have decided to blog, I want to get good at it.

While I am not interested in blogging for a living, I am interested in learning about blogging from those that do. ProBlogger is likely the 5th book I have read on blogging this year and it is by far the best I have read so far. I wish I would have read it first.

What I like about this book is that it is straight forward, practical and easy to read. As a busy consultant and entrepreneur, I am a bit impatient if I have to slog through a book. ProBlogger outlined a very logical, linear process to follow. Darren and Chris, the authors lead you from ground zero to blog promotion in just over 200 pages. They outline;

• what blogging is,
• how to chose a platform,
• how to setup a blog,
• what to write,
• how to write it, and how often,
• how to promote your blog, and even
• how to make money at it.

The book is not a technical book, so it does not get into a lot of detail. However, it does tell you what to do and in what order. It also points you in the right direction as to where to get more info.

The other thing I linked about this book was the absence of hype. The book offers practical advice for people serious about getting into blogging without a lot of self-promotion or bragging.

As I was reading the book I could not help but see the overlap between best practices for blogging and those for websites. From their description they are very similar. As a result, I started looking at this book as an all around good primer for anyone interested in promoting a website or a blog. So here I am plugging the book 2 days later.

If you are just starting to blog or have recently built a website, I think you could do a lot worse than give this book a read. Even if you ignore the sections on making money from your blog, you will still find at least 80% of this book to be relevant and useful.

If you’re an experienced internet marketer you are not going to find many surprises, but you will get pointed to  key resources specific to blogging that you may not have been aware of. If you are not serious about blogging to promote you business or make money I suggest you give this book a miss.

John Watson is the president of Accrue Performance Marketing Inc. and is the author of Being Profitable™ : the earnings growth program. John has been consulting since 1993. He specializes in helping entrepreneurs Design Build and Grow market leading companies.

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140 Characters, a lesson in the way of the Twitter Samurai

I’m talking about the new book 140 Characters: A Style Guide For The Short Form by Dom Sagolla and Wiley Publishing.

A lot of people say to me that they do not get Twitter. I hear questions and comments like:

• Why would anyone care what I am doing on a moment by moment basis?
• I don’t know what to write.
• How can I write anything meaningful in 140 characters?

Dom Sagolla offers answers to these questions and more in the Twitter Equivalent of The Associated Press Style Guide crossed with a book on poetry and English literature.

I have to admit, it took me a while to get my head around this book as I started out in a pragmatic small business and internet marketing headspace. When I finally slowed down and opened up to the message, what I got was an introduction into a new literary venue, complete with its own style guide. I got a glimpse into an expanding Twitterverse by one of its key influencers. It’s kind of like reading the Lonely Planet guide for Nairobi.

Approach your 140 characters as you would a Haiku poem, a memorable one-liner or a powerful truth and you are getting close to the message of this book. Twitter can be more than a micro broadcasting venue. It can be a real-time conversation and a publishing medium at the same time and what matters is who you are on Twitter.

In reading this book I found myself looking into the world of a dedicated and artful Author and wondering if I was willing to take on that role and learn to be good at it. I think ultimately that was the indelible question for me in this book. It showed me what I was up against in Twitter and what it is going to take to be a leader in this space. I was left in a quandary about who I want to be with respect to Twitter? The funny thing is this question is what inspired me to read this book in the first place. The difference now is I think I have a better understanding of how to make my decision.

John Watson is the president of Accrue Performance Marketing Inc. and is the author of Being Profitable™ : the earnings growth program. John has been consulting since 1993. He specializes in helping entrepreneurs Design Build and Grow market leading companies.

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