We hope you enjoy this guest blog post written by Michael Boyette, the executive editor of the Rapid Learning Institute Selling Essentials e-learning site and editor of the Top Sales Dog Blog. 

Contact Michael Boyette via email at topsalesdog@rapidlearninginstitute.com or connect via Twitter.

Growing your business is hard enough as it is. So of course the last thing you need is to worry about steady, reliable customers leaving you for no reason.

Here’s the thing; your customer could be sending you a message that could be a precursor to jumping ship. It’s up to you to notice that message and act on it before they’re gone. The good news is there is a way to spot these opportunities before they lead to trouble.

Think of your customers like an iceberg.

At best, about five percent of what they are actually thinking is on display at any given time.

Even the most loyal customers have reasons for keeping you in the dark. Perhaps they’re worried you will take advantage of their business. Maybe they’re also in talks with another salesperson and trying to keep it quiet. So they closely cling to their cards and say what you want to hear. Right until it’s too late for you to do anything about it.

But customers often drop hints that something’s wrong. These seemingly throwaway remarks are similar to icebergs: On the surface, they don’t seem like much to worry about. But, in reality, trouble lies just below the surface.

In business, there is no such thing as an offhand remark. Any comment that relates to the existing relationship, the customer’s operations, or your products and services requires your immediate, undivided attention.

Even more troubling, “conversational icebergs” often are buried in seemingly positive comments. Maybe your buyer is trying to avoid confrontation or soften the insult, so they bury the criticism alongside some good words. For sales professionals, it can be easy to listen to the flattering remark and miss the actual meaning.

Conversational icebergs generally come in the form of statements like these:

• “Your software is really powerful. I wish the user interface was a little easier to understand, but overall it was good.”

• “The new equipment works fine. It’s just that some of my people are really low-tech. We’ll have to spend a lot of time training them.”

• “Though your prices are a little high, I told my supervisor we appreciate your great service.”

• “I’m going to get your invoice paid as soon as possible. Accounting just needs to see an itemized list of your charges.”

Each of these statements has concerns embedded within them, which could easily be overlooked. But when you do spot them, it’s time to drop everything and mend the underlying difficulty. Some examples:

• “You said the user interface could be easier. What kinds of problems are you encountering?”

• “You said some of your people will need training? Is that something we need to address?

• “Help me understand why your boss thought our prices are too high.”

• “I’ll be happy to provide Accounting with that itemized backup. But they never asked for it before. What’s up?”

Of course, sometimes you’ll need to go looking for conversational icebergs. How can you do that? By sending out signals, or pings, and listening to the response.

Pings are proactive: They come from you – not your customer.

You send them out and listen for a response. Here are some examples:

• “We just sent you our first invoice – I just want to confirm it included all the information your accounting department needed.”

• “In the past, we have allowed three business days to ensure prompt delivery times. Is this still sufficient to meet your demands?”

• “I understand YOU recognize our value proposition, but is your boss on the same page with this? Should we explain it to him in further detail?”

Of course, you should not dwell on the downfalls or ping your buyers too often. You also don’t want to solicit vague questions such as “Are we doing well?” But asking specific questions designed to ensure customers are receiving what they want or anticipate can help you avoid disaster.

We’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to what it takes to create a remarkable client experience. There’s certainly no shortage of research and expertise on this topic. Sometimes, though, it’s the simplest of all concepts that strike you the hardest. Like this one I stumbled upon this week surfing the Web:

Delighting your customers doesn’t build loyalty. Reducing effort does.

The body of research behind this statement comes from the Corporate Executive Board and popped onto my radar screen this week from reading this post. What’s my takeaway from my cursory reading about the Customer Effort Score? Using its four dimensions—reducing thinking effort, emotional effort, physical effort and time—is a helpful framework for improving how you work with clients…and, if you’re a salesperson, how you sell. After all, according to other research by the Customer Executive Board, client loyalty is more a function of how you sell than what you sell.

I remember when you pulled into a station to fill up your car. You would wait for an attendant to come from running from inside or finish with another car. Almost all stations are self service now. Why? Because while it required a bit more physical effort from me, it reduced time as I could jump out, fill up my car and dash off.  Also, now the credit card reader is right at the pump—you no longer have to wait for the attendant to run inside. What a concept! Oh, and have you seen some of the new restaurant check out systems where the server can take payment right at the table?

What are you doing to reduce your client’s efforts?

This image gas_station_2 is courtesy of Atle Brunvoll on Flickr and made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license.

For my 30+ years of selling, everyone that I sold was either a prospective client or a client. They were not customers. So many people use customer and client as interchangeable words. They are not.

All salespeople should stop thinking customer and think client. Not just think client, but ACT client.

Is spending time thinking about how you label the people who purchase your products and services simply a frivolous exercise in semantics? I don’t think so. Labels have the potential to motivate behavioral changes leading to more remarkable client experiences and thereby your success.

Traditionally, people who were paid for their advice – lawyers, accountants, advisors, agents, coaches and other professional experts use the label “client’. Quite simply they were paid to share their expertise.

Let’s look at the definition of a customer (dictionary.com):
Customer – A person who purchases goods or services from another.

Your contact is looking for someone who can spot their opportunity or issue and help them succeed. They are looking for you to be an expert. You must think of yourself as an expert, not as someone who people by from (remember the definition of a customer). In today’s world, your contact’s time is too valuable to think he needs someone to buy from. Be an expert and start by thinking what you would need to do to have your clients pay you for your advice.

Successful salespeople offer real value through the way they educate and even challenge clients’ thinking.

What do you do to help your client as an expert?

P.S. I highly recommend reading this four-part series of articles in Harvard Business Review: 1: Selling Is Not About Relationships; 2: The Worst Question a Salesperson Can Ask; 3: Why Your Salespeople are Pushovers; 4: How the Rift Between Sales & Marketing Undermines Reps.)

With that statement, “The Sales Lion”, Marcus Sheridan, roared his way into my life for the first time this week.

Anyone who superimposes his photo alongside a magnificent lion on his web site is already someone I want to meet. Marcus is a pool sales guy turned hands-on content marketing guru who obviously has mastered the art of attracting revenue by sharing his expertise.

At last look, the blog post that initially caught my eye had 55 comments! I encourage you to take the time to read Marcus’ entire post: The Incredible Relationship Between Content Marketing and Sales. The thought-provoking question posed by Marcus:

“Why do so many companies fail to integrate content marketing into their sales processes?”

My response:

1. Why do so many companies fail to integrate content marketing into their sales process? I think that the word “content marketing” has left many people feeling that content is for marketing – getting people to the website and “top of funnel” and it is not as important when the sales person gets involved. The sales person sells on building trust and does not need content to create that bond. What a missed opportunity.This is compounded by the fact that marketing and sales management is not driving how to get the content that marketing is using into the hands of sales people. I am amazed at how many companies have rich content libraries but when you ask the sales people do they use the content they say not much and they do not know how to get at it. They just grab a couple of pieces, often out of date and continue to use it over and over again. Not strategically, just so they have something to send.
2. Who is doing it well? I admire:

• Owen Blevins at Mid-Atlantic Concrete – http://maconcrete.com
• David Marinac at Standuppouches – http://standuppouches.net
• Andrew Sealy at MINDBODY – http://mindbodyonline.com

The stars are aligning right now such that content can serve as a bridge to bring sales and marketing together. In the world of content marketing, getting content into the hands of salespeople and helping them effectively use it is an easy, powerful win that will drive more sales. In our work with clients using Postwire, we see firsthand that sharing good content to educate prospects saves precious time for both buyers and sellers by shortening sales cycles–whether selling pools, concrete production equipment, food packaging pouches or expertise like “The Sale Lion”.

Expert salespeople have figured out that great content is the secret sauce for making sales. Share your expertise using Postwire. Sign up for free account at www.postwire.com.

Photo Credit: Tambako the Jaguar on Flickr

By sharing access to great thinking, we all get smarter. That’s what prompts me to share this graphical summary of how to write the perfect blog post created by Derek Halpern of Social Triggers. Thank you, Derek!

More great blog posts written = more great content items you can share with your clients using Postwire!

Like this? Get more marketing tips from Social Triggers.

Way back in 2009, 4mb of data were strapped on a carrier pigeon’s leg in Johannesburg, South Africa to raise awareness of growing public frustration with the region’s slow data delivery at that time. 
Al Jazeera’s coverage of the creative publicity stunt (as seen in this Youtube video) showcases “Winston” the carrier pigeon’s race against time. Winston actually delivered the data in less time than it took for the same data to be downloaded via the telecom company. But, I digress. I reference this event simply because it crystallized for me:

While efficient delivery of information is essential to effective online communications, how the information is experienced upon receipt matters even more.

Thankfully, for much of the world broadband data delivery issues are largely solved. We’ve all become accustomed to visually rich ways to interact and exchange information on our web sites, Facebook pages, Youtube channels and blogs. Yet when we engage directly with our customers, we still give little regard for their experience as a receiver of our resources. We attach documents and insert links and hit send. How different is that than strapping data to the leg of a carrier pigeon? Our information is typically delivered, but is our message? Over time, the info gets lost in the receiver’s Inbox and the thread of conversation becomes disjointed across multiple transient emails. Worse yet—we never know when or even if the receiver ever looked at our content.

We created Postwire to improve the experience of sharing information privately with one or a few people. Many of our Postwire users are the rainmakers in small businesses or personal service providers who care—a lot—about how their information is packaged for the receiver. As creators and collectors of valuable multi-media content, they invest dearly to educate prospective and existing clients. The varied ways they communicate their expertise publicly helps them establish credibility and differentiate their products and services. So it’s no surprise Postwire users also give careful thought to how they personalize communications and share information privately, one-to-one. Why? Because they care more about building relationships than delivering data a’la “Winston”.

How do you share your valuable resources (documents, videos, images and web links) with prospective and existing clients? Sign up for a free Postwire account to experience firsthand how Postwire helps you attractively package your expertise, creating a private place to interact and build each client relationship over time.

Image Credit: www.gurustump.com and ZDnet article: In South Africa, carrier pigeon faster than broadband

Enabling informed purchase decisions…

Owen Blevins is VP Sales & Marketing for Mid Atlantic Concrete Equipment, which sells and services concrete plants and equipment to concrete producers throughout the Mid Atlantic and Northeast U.S.

Mid Atlantic Concrete Equipment attracts customers (affectionately dubbed “Crete-heads”) by leveraging its web site with over 500 pages of information and entertaining Youtube channel, Concrete Answers TV.

By educating prospective and existing customers on all-things-concrete, Owen’s sales team provides customers a rock-solid, one-stop shop for researching solutions to customers’ needs.

Before Postwire…

Owen and his four sales reps invested 15-45 minutes following up each sales call with an email containing links to relevant educational videos, product sheets and ROI calculators.

Using Postwire…

Owen’s sales team can now:

• in just a few minutes–immediately get the specific info the customer needs to them on a private page that they can easily find and reference.
• be ultra-responsive to a customer’s needs by knowing when he or she views or comments on the content shared, thanks to Postwire’s notifications.
• help the customer make decisions by adding more information and resources to the same page throughout the life of the customer relationship. (No more hunting through email threads to find web links or file attachments!)

The results?

• More sales in less time.
• Postwire shaves an hour off client follow-ups for each sales rep each day.
• One place for organizing personalized, relevant information and building each customer relationship over time.

Hear more from Owen…

So how will YOU use Postwire?

We’re eager to learn! Get a free account at www.postwire.com.

OK, the pressure is on! We felt great honor in Postwire being selected as a TCDisrupt finalist. The experience of getting ready for the Battlefield Stage competition was awesome for our team. I so agree with Joel Spolsky’s take on the value of launching at Disrupt: “It’s all about your team…After months of toiling away, the feeling you get from seeing real-world people actually start using your product is the best feeling you will ever get.”

The challenge we now feel as Angel Investor Cynthia Fedor advises is how to tell our “product’s story”. As I shared in Name That Tune, my Post-TechCrunch Disrupt blog, our team has been pulling out “our respective hairs” on how to quickly capture people’s hearts and imaginations about our heart throb, Postwire. Inspired by Cynthia Fedor’s advice (“give it context so that it is relatable…fills their need; solves their problem;…easily integrated into their life…”), I would like to share with you my newest (user case) love affair with Postwire!

First some context, after all I am a shrink:

In addition to consulting to VisibleGains, I have a second life as a practicing clinical psychologist and teacher. I co-lead a weekly speaker series at a local teaching hospital to help mental health professionals stay current in the field of  behavioral medicine. Topics vary from the perils of synthetic pot to challenges of treating depression in pregnancy to connection between overbreathing and anxiety.

The Problem:

Information overload is definitely a problem for us baby boomers. Those of you who read my Name That Tune blog might remember me as #oldestwomanatDisrupt; and I am NOT the oldest woman in this group! Well, the problem we have is that each presentation is action-packed with valuable information and useful tools. But, we are all busy and we each repeatedly lament the fact that if we were more organized and/or had better (younger?) memories, we would be able to do MUCH better clinical work–as well as better self-care. You know, walking the talk by heeding the advice from the resources we share with our patients.

Before Postwire:

• I can’t tell you how many times we have emailed each other: “What was the name of the speaker who ….? Can someone please email me with the attachment from Dr…? I never received the PowerPoint, can you please send it to me? … I can’t get the link to open!”
• Clinicians were frustrated that they were not using the learned material with their clients because they could not remember it, organize it or find it.
• Many wasted hours were spent searching through old email attachments searching for course content, or even worse, reinventing the wheel by searching for needed resources, having forgotten that we already had it somewhere???

Using Postwire:

• I created a visually engaging and smartly organized Postwire Page that contains many of the golden nuggets provided by our speakers: videos of thought leaders, links to research papers on hot topics, recommended books and blogs, slide presentations from lectures, handouts for clients, and websites for psycho-ed (our lingo) resources.
• The Postwire Page grows week by week as the semester moves along, taking only minutes of my time to update. Using the Postire bookmarklet makes the addition of content “automagical”. For group members, simply clicking a bookmark to their Postwire Page gives them immediate access to all their coveted resources. As the content grows, a flexible filing system, called “Collections”, enables content to be organized for ease of viewing.
• The “Flipboard” feel of the page makes reviewing the material fun and contributes to better retention and usability of the information.
• As the page administrator, I get daily alerts regarding members’ activity on page views as well as which content is viewed – giving me useful feedback on the groups’ interests. Further, “Comment” threads, which contribute to group cohesion and enhance learning, also provide a mirror of members’ interests.

The Results:

• Amazing organization in ridiculously little time.
• One beautiful place for organizing information and enhancing group cohesion and learning over time.
• Happy clinicians: “This is incredible!” “What a wonderful resource!” “I am really impressed!” “Thank you so much!”
• More time to learn new material as less time wasted on reviewing older forgotten material.

Peggy Kriss, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Newton, Massachusetts and  Communications Strategist  to VisibleGains. Stay tuned for more psychology informed blogs by Dr. Kriss.

We were all vaguely aware that Craig stayed up late April Fool’s night to submit an application for Postwire to compete at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY 2012. In fact, he whispered the narration of the requisite product demo in the wee hours from home, careful not to wake his wife and young children.

Meanwhile, startup life marched on. In the next few weeks, feedback from early beta users contributed to a decision to make a major shift (dare I say “pivot”?) in the Postwire user experience. Turns out the ease with which users could beautifully present and share content was, well, too “automagical”, and consequently, confusing. We realized we needed to fundamentally change the experience of sharing content in Postwire.

So the dev team had just begun coding to the new vision when Craig got the email from Conference Program Chair Susan Hobbs on April 26^th: “Congratulations! You are a Battlefield finalist!” One of 30 finalists out of a 1000 applicants!

We had 3.5 weeks to finish building out the new UX/UI and create messaging to publicly launch Postwire on stage May 22 at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. Gulp. “Are you in?” All eight of us agreed we were.

Already well versed in lean product development and agile project management, Craig became more disciplined than ever in prioritizing design decisions. What do we absolutely need for a viable product? Does this feature add complexity to the user experience? Will not having it prevent use? Craig’s leadership and the talents of each of the developers gave birth to Postwire.

Meanwhile, as Craig led the back room through design iterations, Cliff led the charge in the front on messaging. Do users build a Postwire “page” or “web page”? “Personal page” or “private page”? Or, is it a “resource page, “guidebook”, “portfolio” or “touchstone”?! Tick, tock, tick, tock…with time running out, we circled back to where we began—“private web page” it is!

Deadlines and disciplined prioritization during the push to TechCrunch brought clarity to fuzziness. We knew Postwire doesn’t yet have all the desired features and “private web page” is far from perfect. Our messaging especially needs lots more work. But could we tell a compelling-enough story at TechCrunch? We decided yes and the very act of making that decision was empowering. Cliff & Craig ultimately committed to the words we settled upon and nailed the 6-minute pitch on the TechCrunch stage.

During the 3.5 week TechCrunch prep period, our team re-formed, stormed and began to norm.  It wasn’t always pretty. Not surprisingly, we were all stressed-out as we heads-down sprinted to the finish line. One of the developers called out the widening gulf between back and front room activities. We all knew it to be true and flagging it was just the shock to the system we needed. Brewing team communication issues were immediately brought out in the open.

What I realize now as I reflect upon our TechCrunch experience is that we gained so much more than good press (TechCrunch.com, Forbes.com, BostInno.com, MassHighTech.com, nibletz.com …) and validation of Postwire as a disruptive innovation. Being a Battlefield Finalist, also gave us the gifts of:

• A hard—and unanimously motivating—deadline to rally around;
• Confidence to make good-enough decisions;
• Discipline to continuously test our assumptions;
• Words to tell our story;
• Respect for the unique contributions of each team member; and
• The foundation for a new team culture.

For all that and more, the VisibleGains team thanks you, TechCrunch.

P.S. Check out the fruit of our labors by signing up for a FREE Postwire account. We’d love your feedback here!

Just back from TechCrunch Disrupt with Battlefield Finalist Team Postwire. Sitting in my porch on Memorial Day Weekend, I finally have some time to process the experience.

What has most stayed with me this week is the challenge and power of messaging. Distilling our message to the five or six most descriptive words–as few notes as possible so that the listener can name that tune–has been extremely challenging. As I visited other Battlefield and Start-up Alley teams, I noticed huge differences in how quickly I was able to “get” the what, why, how and how-easy of the hot new products. (I was, after all, probably the #oldestwomanatDisrupt.)

I was particularly obsessed with this because our own team has torn out our respective hairs trying to get the message down. When co-founders Cliff Pollan and Craig Daniel practiced their talks with theTechCrunch staff at the AOL office (thanks to  John Biggs, Eric Eldon, Heather Harde, Susan Hobbs and Alexia Tsotsis), even their focus was on trying to help us “nail down” the  essence of Postwire.

So, it was really eye-opening to see and hear how others talked about our product. Postwire’s TechCrunch “coming out” story from writer Matt Burns explained that Postwire “Aims To Be The Flipboard For Client Communication”.

Bostinno’s Walter Frick reported that Postwire is “as easy as Dropbox & as visual as Pinterest… marry[ing} personalization and privacy with the visual pop of services like Pinterest and Springpad”.

So these two writers went for the “anchor to familiarity” tactic.

One gentleman my colleague spoke to on the Battlefield said that we had the messaging all wrong: he adamantly asked why we were not just focusing on the hallmark video sharing capability of the product and strongly suggested we should be talking about “boards” not pages. Everyone is searching for the just right noun: Frick tried by referencing us as a “compelling receptacle”.

Our team all enjoyed TechCrunch winner Uberconference’s creative ability to tap the “Why” of their product. The low-tech homespun “everyman-or-woman” style of this video resonated with everyone’s struggles with teleconferencing and helped our team realize we had more work to do with our “Why” message.

We call this the “OMG I have had that problem” tactic.

Our team’s favorite  gadget was found on display at Bedphones: “Headphones so flat so you can sleep on them.” They all returned to our booth giddy with delight at their newest find.

Let’s call this the “this is so cool” tactic.

My favorite find was TechCrunch finalist  SnipSnap the coupon app which allows you to “scan, save, and redeem printed coupons on your mobile phone.”

A video played in their live Disrupt stage presentation caught my attention–people were saving a lot of money! “Prepare to save some serious moolah.” Indeed!

I’d call this the “save money easily” tactic.

But one message won me over hands down. I was following our Postwire Twitter feed on the last day of Disrupt and saw this tweet by Walter Frick from Bostinno:

@wfrick: If Don Draper were real and alive today he’d use this Boston product #tcdisrupt http://t.co/Xhy55bvS @postwire

That was it! Why hadn’t we thought of that?

Peggy Kriss, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Newton, Massachusetts and  Communications Strategist  to VisibleGains. Stay tuned for more psychology informed blogs by Dr. Kriss.