MarketingProfs.com has a superb, thought-provoking article regarding value propositions.  If you have read The Hire Sense of late, you know this is a topic we are exploring in many facets of sales.  I have to confess, this author’s take is completely different (irony there) than the other points I have read on this topic.

Here is the gist of his commentary:

So be different: Stop listening to the continuous pleas from consultants, marketers, and textbooks to be different… one of a kind.. .a shining beacon of newness in a sea of same-old same-old.

Focus instead on actually delivering the value to the market that you say you deliver (which, in and of itself, can be uncommon if not unique), and find ways to create a conversation with buyers around that message.

Well stated for sure.  He provides an example involving two oral surgeons which I don’t think carries as much weight.  The reason is that in sales you have to have some differentiation when you approach a prospect.  His example involves a committed prospect (toothache patient) looking for a solution.

But what if the prospect was simply a person who had a dentist they had been going to for 10 years and were relatively pleased with them?  Simply claiming you deliver on what you say you deliver is probably not going to be enough to get the prospect to change – you must bring unique value to them.  This is where his approach breaks down.

Nonetheless, he still makes some excellent points about this topic.  I particularly enjoyed how he unpacked this common-sounding copy:

Some firms seem to take the quest for differentiation literally, creating a spate of “we’re different” messages. Consider a top Boston law firm with the following message:

At [FIRM Name], we practice law differently. While our attorneys agree that results drive our business, building relationships with our clients and providing value-added service is the key to our success.

This firm might be amazingly good—and, from what I know of their reputation, they are. However, results’ driving business, building relationships, and providing value-add are pretty par for the course—both as firm goals and marketing copy.

I suspect that copy sounds a bit too common to some companies.  Finally, there is this list of how clients buy (emphasis mine):

So what is it that clients are, indeed, looking for? In my experience, and according to research such as How Clients Buy, most buyers want to tell service providers the following:

• Reliability. Do what you say you are going to do, and be on time about it. (This is listed first, because it’s so important. If only the service providers I’ve worked with in my life were better at keeping their commitments…)
• Accessibility. Be there when I need you.
• Impact. Help me buy the most helpful and impactful services from you, and help me translate your services into success for my business in my industry.
• Fit. Be a good fit for the specific needs that I have. If you’re not the best fit, help me find a provider that is. Don’t shoehorn your service into something that, in the end, won’t meet my needs as well as something else would.
• Importance. Make me feel like we are, as a client, important to you and your team.
• Service. Deliver great service as well as great services.
• Prudence. Be careful and do your homework before you suggest a course of action for me.
• Research. Stay on top of the developments and trends in your industry and in mine.
• Listening. Understand my business, my team, and my clients so you can come up with ideas relevant to me.
• Teaching. Help me understand what you’re doing. I might not be an expert in your area, but I’m pretty bright and I make the decisions here. Help me understand what’s new in your area of expertise so I can apply that knowledge in my business.
• Business management. Run an efficient operation and constantly improve so I don’t pay for your inefficiency.
• Relationship management. Be pleasant and fair, and work with me through communication or other breakdowns on your end or mine. In essence, treat me like a person.

As they say, read the entire thing.

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BusinessWeek.com has an excerpt from a new book from C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan.  They provide an interesting take on a topic we have been studying of late – value.

Salespeople have to know their company’s value proposition in the market.  That last part, in the market, is the key.  We have seen plenty of companies who have an internal perception of their value, but some times it is not based in reality.  Salespeople have to sort this problem out, which is an area in which we assist them.

At any rate, these opening graphs caught my attention as they elucidate a value trend we are seeing in the marketplace today.

There is a fundamental transformation of business underway. Forged by digitization, ubiquitous connectivity, and globalization, this transformation will radically alter the very nature of the firm and how it creates value. No industry is immune to this trend. It will impact traditional industries such as education, insurance, health care, automobiles, and footwear, as well as emerging industries such as video games, search engines, and social networks. Coming to terms with the implications of this change is critical for survival and growth.

This transformation, as we will examine in this book, is built on two basic pillars:

1. Value is based on unique, personalized experiences of consumers. Firms have to learn to focus on one consumer and her experience at a time, even if they serve 100 million consumers. The focus is on the centrality of the individual. We will designate this pillar as N = 1 (one consumer experience at a time).

2. No firm is big enough in scope and size to satisfy the experiences of one consumer at a time. All firms will access resources from a wide variety of other big and small firms—a global ecosystem. The focus is on access to resources, not ownership of resources. We will designate this pillar as R = G (resources from multiple vendors and often from around the globe).

This view of value creation is 180 degrees different from the model that started the industrial revolution. The Model T from Ford, the icon of the industrial revolution, was built on two premises that are the opposites of N = 1 and R = G. Consumers were treated as an undifferentiated group, and hence the famous dictum “Any color is OK as long as it is black.” All resources had to be within the firm to capture value. Ford was one of the most vertically integrated firms, and its River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan, was the model. While no business today operates along the lines of the original Ford model, we must recognize that model as the precursor of modern business models. Most businesses today are variants of that model. That model served us well. It will not as we move forward.

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I have been noticing a common value proposition from distribution companies – “your one-stop shop for all things _________.”  Some of the sales reps for these companies use this value proposition as their main lever.  I tell them this is a mistake.

Here’s why – the web changes everything about sourcing.  I don’t need to limit myself to one vendor for all my _______ needs.  In fact, I have a subtle doubt about that approach – am I getting the best deal, product or solution if I go with one company exclusively?  The “catalogue mentality” is fading from our society and being replaced with a research mentality.

The proverbial old days were serviced by the Sears Roebuck catalogue where they had everything in there from clothes to tools to kitchenware.  I remember looking through that catalogue when I was young to check out the toys.  My kids think that idea is crazy.  They hop on the web and visit multiple sites to track down a specific toy or game.

Today, distribution sales requires salespeople to take more of a value-added reseller approach.  Customers are less impressed by companies that offer many different lines.  If needed, the customer can probably source the lines themselves from alternative channels.  Sales reps have to find the value their company brings to the marketplace and then leverage it in their approach.

One example is a friend of mine who sells office furniture.  He does not have exclusivity in this territory and there are bigger competitors.  His value is to provide certified interior design services.  I wouldn’t say that is a revolutionary approach, but his designers are quite skilled and the salespeople know how to leverage their designers’ abilities.  The fact that they are smaller than their competition allows them to provide highly attentive service to their customers.  Simple and effective.

Successful selling requires an detailed understanding of your value proposition.  If it is no more developed than “one-stop shop,” I would suggest you revisit your company’s offering to the market…unless your company is called Amazon.com.

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The Wall Street Journal pens an article about Coach purses and what they are doing to expand their brand.  Clearly it is a strong brand today, but they play at the upper end of the price curve.  Inside the article is a poignant comment from their CEO regarding marketing:

We want to be transformative in the way we look. You can’t be iterative when the economy is tough.

Simple, sound point he makes, isn’t it?  If you continue down a repetitive path, you are going to run into revenue shortfalls in this slow economy.  You have to change something up, refocus it, introduce something new, etc.  Some of the most successful lines were launched during a recession.

What do MTV, Trader Joe’s, and the iPod have in common? Yes, of course, they’re all now ubiquitous and make our lives much more agreeable.

But to us, the most interesting thing about all three is that these great brands were born during recessions. (Trader Joe’s: 1958; MTV: 1981; iPod: 2001, if you are scoring at home.)

And therein lies a point everyone seems to be forgetting in the midst of the current economic slowdown. If handled correctly, a downturn can be a good thing for your company. It can give you the opportunity — and the funds — to innovate and get a substantial leg up on the competition.

Stagnant companies get stagnant, or worse, results during slow times.  The same is true for salespeople.  Some get overwhelmed with the economy, assume nothing can be done and give up.  Or discount drastically.  Or change careers.  Whatever the outcome, now is the time for strong leadership from the sales manager and a unique marketing message that creates some buzz.

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LOVE this article from SalesHQ – Marketing Buzzword Bingo.  The author shares my disdain for marketing buzzwords.  The article is simply a list of buzzwords with his definition for each one.

Some examples:

Reputation management – controlling information flow to that which I want known

Lifelong value – guess at how much money we would make out of a fictitious customer who stays with us for life, however long that is.

Lifetime value – same guess

Out-sourcing – stuff we have given up doing because we thought it was too hard

In-sourcing – stuff we outsourced that we lost control over and had to do ourselves again to save costs

Intrapreneur- one our people who always seems to be full of ideas that won’t fly in our organization

Critically important – important, perhaps critical

There are many more in the article that will make you laugh, sigh or cry.

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Inc.com chronicles one Gen Y marketing campaign by BMW that I have not heard of.  The opening sentence forewarned me:

Generation Y’s indifference to traditional forms of marketing and advertising has some big companies and their ad agencies scrambling for creative ways to reach and engage this demographic.

Engagement is the key these days, isn’t it?  If you read the marketing campaign in the short article, you won’t read about magazine ads, TV commercials or radio spots.  Instead there are short films on YouTube, Facebook pages and micro-websites.

I think the author best sums up this new marketing approach (my bold):

It seems to me that the campaign is less about the actual product than it is about delivering a specific message to a target market: we understand what gets your attention, so we’re going to plant our brand where you live, give you fun stuff to look at and play around with online, and we’re going to facilitate an ongoing conversation that will engage you far longer and more intimately than a 30-second television commercial.

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What emails do you open?  The “From” field and subject line are the first draw for most people and a determinant for gaining a higher open rate.  MarketingProfs.com has an informative article that breaks down examples of awesome and awful email subject lines.  The article is a good read and worth your time.

I’ll skip to the end where the author, Josh Nason, provides a handful of tips for writing effective subject lines:

• Don’t discount the importance of the From name. Keep it your company name and not an individual’s name or drawn-out term. In addition, keep your company name out of the subject line: It’s redundant—a waste of valuable real estate.
• There is no point to using all caps in a subject line. OK? (Unless it’s “OK.”)
• Write a compelling subject line that won’t deceive people. If people aren’t opening it, that’s OK, as you’ll have many more campaigns to intrigue them. If you break the receiver’s trust early, you’ll have to work twice as hard to get it back. Never forget the Golden Rule.
• Most important, have some fun with subject lines! If you’re struggling that much with how to talk to your audience in a single-sentence format, give it to someone else to writes. Just make sure that you don’t explain the task in all caps, please.

And here are a couple of examples from the article:

From: AAA Northern New England
Subject: AAA Newsletter—February 2008

Ah, the dreaded (Company X) Newsletter with the month and date. Fun! When I opened up the newsletter, there were all kinds of great discount offers; but, instead, this subject line reads more “library” than “block party.”

From: Bob Marley
Subject: Comedian Bob Marley Returns To Boston!!

It’s a direct statement that his fans in that area would likely open. Since “Bob Marley” is already in the From line, there’s no need to repeat in the subject line. I’d try “Boston dates coming up soon!” instead. Why waste the valuable real estate?

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In case you ever wondered why your marketing campaigns were not working:

(h/t Seth Godin)

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Interesting history lesson in a short Inc.com post:

William Wrigley, Jr. arrived in Chicago in 1891 with just $32 to his name. The 29-year-old entrepreneur began manufacturing soap, first enticing customers by offering free baking soda with every purchase. He later tried offering customers free chewing gum. The gum soon became more popular – and profitable – than his soap venture. Like many of the famous companies which have sprung up during recessions, Wrigley sold inexpensive goods that could be easily mass produced. Now, I’m not saying that chewing gum actually served as a distraction from the strife of the times, but what kind of startup do you think fairs particularly well during a recession? Do consumers need distraction during downturns? If you have a great business idea, does it even matter when you launch your business?

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Clearly newspapers are the poster child for this topic.  ABCnews.com approaches this topic with research that forecasts industry changes over the next 5 years.  Some of their predictions and suggestions:

Another way to avoid disaster? Diversify. In response to decades of declining circulation and shaky print advertising numbers, newspaper publishers are expanding their holdings in non-traditional ways. The two largest, Gannett and Tribune, own a stake Careerbuilder.com, the online job search Web site. In 2005, The New York Times Co. bought About.com, a general information site. Will it work? The jury is out. Worth noting, though–the industry’s most successful transition is also its most radical. The Washington Post Co. secured their future by buying Kaplan Learning centers, morphing the company into an “information” firm and leaning on the new entity, rather than their news operations, to drive growth.

The Washington Post has done a good job of adapting ahead of the trend.  However, I wonder if it is simply too late for these other papers to make such a shift in their business model (I think it is).

Here is one I didn’t think about, but it is a certain trend based on Gen Y:

The most surprising find: While technology is changing the face of many industries, the firms within them are often doing quite well. One strategy for surviving a technological onslaught is to control the change itself. AT&T and Verizon, the largest wired telecommunications firms, are hardly worried that more than 1 million phone “land lines” are expected to be switched off each year between now and 2012. Both of those firms saw their wireless subscriber numbers surge in 2007.

True.  I suspect home phone lines will disappear in the very near future as cell phones eventually become the standard.  The article is a good read if you have the time.

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