A Publication Focused on Growth for Companies Like Yours | August 2018

Marketing • Design • Printing • Online Marketing • Promotions

A Publication Focused on Growth for Companies Like Yours | August 2018

Marketing • Design • Printing • Online Marketing • Promotions

Horrors in Advertising: What NOT to do!

Ouch!

Just gross. Begin early?!

Would you respond?

4

Letter from the Editor..............................................................................4

Marketing Autopsy ....................................................................................5

3 Lessons from Amazon, USAA & JetBlue ...................................8

B2B Sales Environment Series ............................................................13

Three Sales Horor Stories ......................................................................14

EDITOR: Eric Webb

Publisher: AlphaGraphics of Cary

Art Director: Bruce Harris

Writers: Stan Phelps

Bob Lambert

Eric Webb

Contact: ewebb@alphagraphics.com

919.233.7710

© 2017 - Eric Webb. All Rights Reserved.

This AlphaGraphics® business is an independently owned and operated franchise of AlphaGraphics, Inc.

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Letter from the Editor

The Horror of Growth and Sales is Common

Most of us have some type of horror story when it comes to sales and growth. In a business that is growing fast you will face many scary moments, problems and issues that are the consequences of your company growth. Sales offers a litany of horror stories of sales gone bad.

In our Halloween issue of Momentum we explore the scary moments others have experienced, lessons from LinkedIn’ growth and the is-sues they face as they seek more and more growth.

Instead of our usual Idea Generators we give you some of advertis-ing's worst moments. Not too worry, there are some happy stories in this issue from regular contributors Bob Lambert and Stan Phelps.

Enjoy

Eric Webb,AlphaGraphics Cary | N. Raleigh

Eric Webb,President of AlphaGraphics, Editor of Momentum

Please send comments or suggestions to ewebb@alphagraphics.com. We are always looking for unique stories about growth, and facts to publish, as well as ways to improve.

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Marketing Autopsy: LinkedIn Growth Creates Frightening Engagement Trendsby Eric Webb

LinkedIn’s goal is to have 3 Billion mem-bers and they recently crossed the 500-mil-lion-member mark. Just as our cover states, growth creates its own frightening prob-lems. One of the problems I’ve experienced as a long-time LinkedIn user is the mass marketing of connectedness.

LinkedIn Members (Global)Millions

Source: Linkedin, BI Intelligence Estimates BI Intelligence

364433

510

Q1’15 Q1’16 Q1’17E

I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen an in-crease in requests to connect from 2nd con-

nections. Once upon a time you had to get an introduction by a first party connection to even message a second connection. Un-fortunately, marketers have created what I call “zombie programs” that allow for mass emailing within LinkedIn, bypassing that personal connection.

Initially I connected with folks thinking they may have spoken with my direct connection

7

Horrors in Advertising: Creepy... Sells?

Jason's early years

Marriage Counceling anyone?

Say Aaaaa!Shaving commercial?

Can't...look...away...

8

and were recommended to connect. But I noticed a trend in these connections. The mention of my first connection disappeared and if you connect you quickly get pitched.

The screen captures on the page showcase what I’m talking about. There’s no attempt to get to know you, what you are interested in, nurturing of a relationship…just a quick pitch.

Then there are the Zombie programs that leverage a marketing automation system to continue to reach out to you and pitch at a next level.

I understand why LinkedIn’s community is so tempting because it’s a very qualified audi-ence that resides there and it’s huge. Unfor-tunately, when you leverage mass marketing as these individuals and companies are, you are polluting the environment.

LinkedIn’s own Sales Navigator offers extra advantages to connecting with people you are not directly connected with, but it has limitations that prevent mass marketing. LinkedIn wants their platform to be an en-gaging and professional community. As a Forbes Magazine article pointed out, exec-utives go to LinkedIn to gain education, and avoid Face Book because they don’t want to wade through offers, and pitches.

LINKEDIN DRIVES MORE TRAFFICTO B2B BLOGS & SITES90% of the social traffic was driven bythe big three networks, with half of itcoming from LinkedIn

others

There’s no doubt that LinkedIn is going to continue to grow, so you must learn how to leverage the platform and engage with the community based on what xecutives do on the platform and what they are interested in. Clearly, executives value the education-al content on LinkedIn. Offering content to engage a prospect, joining groups to create iscussions and getting to know your con-

nections is the best way to prevent LinkedIn from becoming a house of horrors.

Leverage native ads to draw executives and decision makers to your website. Just as the graphic illustrates, LinkedIn has the power to draw decision makers to you, but you must take the time to develop content that cre-ates action, not just mass market everyone.

Growth in your business will have conse-quences that will be frightening. But if you pay attention to those consequences and work hard to make sure your strategy and mission remain on target, your tactics should keep you from stepping into the quicksand that can take your organization down. Linke-dIn will have to rething their platform amd make sure their growth doesn't change the value of their platform.

When marketing executives were asked where the top places to find relevant, high-quality content was, the results weren’t even close. A massive 91% said LinkedIn, while only 29% said Twitter and 27% said Facebook. LinkedIn is the place decision-makers go to find valu-able content. As a B2B marketer creating content, LinkedIn is the place to be.

Forbes foundation Inc Co., September 18, 2018

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The tenets of being cost-conscious and focused on service excellence seem to be in direct contradiction. After all, investing in providing a strong customer experience comes at a cost to the bottom-line. Likewise, a hyper-focus on efficiency and cost-cutting can hamper the overall experience. Is it possible to have your cake and eat it too with service and efficiency? According to Jochen Wirtz of NUS and Valarie Zeithaml of UNC, the answer is a resounding YES . They showcase the three ways to achieve high levels of service and efficiency in a recent article in JAMS, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. They call this model CESE, an acronym for cost-effective service excellence.

Wirtz and Zeithaml share how 10 different organizations have achieved CESE. These firms have achieved the Holy Grail of aligning high productivity and high customer satisfaction. The article outlines how CESE can be achieved through three core strategies of Dual Cul-ture, Operations Management and Focused Service Factory approaches.

3 Lessons From Amazon, USAA And JetBlue On Achieving Growth Through Cost-Effective Service Excellenceby Stan Phelps

ACHIEVING CESECOST EFFECTIVE SERVICE EXCELLENCE

Company

CESE Model - Credit: Jochen Wirtz and Valarie Zeithaml PHOTO CREDIT: STAN PHELPS

DualCulture

OperationsManagement

FocusedService

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Let's examine each:

1. Dual CultureThe first main strategy is called dual culture. This approach focuses an entire organiza-tion culturally on the simultaneous pursuit of service excellence and productivity. It is driven by what Wirtz and Zeithaml describe as leadership, structural and contextual am-bidexterity. Ambidexterity speaks to the ability to do two things at once. Leadership ambidexterity sets the tone, ingraining a focus on costs with an equal emphasis on service excellence. In essence, the culture mandates being stingy cost-wise internally while being generous service-wise external-ly. Contextual and structural ambidexterity speaks to the ability for employees to be ful-ly utilized/empowered and departments to be aligned for efficiency.

Example: Amazon - Jeff Bezos is the driving force at Amazon. As Founder and CEO, he is famous for putting the needs of its customers first. An early practice at the company requires an empty seat at the table during meetings. That empty seat represents the customer.

In the book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Brad Stone shares that Bezos for known for becoming enraged when individual customers complained, while embracing frugality on anything that did not relate to customers. In Bezos words, “We try not to spend money on things that

don’t matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and inven-tion. There are no extra points for head-count, budget size or fixed expenses.”

Other examples of Dual Culture include: Sin-gapore Airlines, Ristorante D'O and Vanguard.

Dual Culture Takeaway: The dual culture ap-proach needs strong leadership who can sell in a motivating purpose. The purpose needs to be a rationale that employees can buy into. The mantra of doing more with less, in-cluding salaries and benefits, is a tall order. It must be sold effectively to employees.

2. Operations ManagementThe second strategy is called operations management. It is a combination of three approaches, each of which aim to reduce process variability. They are:

1. Buffering Front and Back Office - shifting activities from the expensive custom front to the mechanized and standard-ized back office.

2. Modularizing service - interaction is designed on the front end to be modular, thereby reducing customer choice and interaction flexibility.

3. Self Service Technologies - allowing customer to serve themselves increases the level of efficiency by reducing customer-induced process variability.

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That logo...

Horrors in Advertising: Once you see it...

Shoud I suit myself, or...

Bathroom break?

It makes perfect.

WorstLogo

12

Example: USAA - USAA uses remote delivery channels and self-service technologies. USAA was the first bank introduce remote deposit capture. The program called Deposit@Home allowed members to photograph a check and instantly deposit it, eliminating the need for physical check processing at USAA.

Other examples of Operations Management include: National Library Board of Singa-pore, Google, Amazon and Vanguard.

Operations Management Takeaway: The Operations Management approach is harder to implement in a services business. Success typically requires some degree of change in the customer interface.

3. Focused Service FactoryThe third approach is called focused service factory. It achieves CESE through focus and specialization. The company focuses on de-livering a single type of service to a specific customer segment. The resulting low oper-ational variability allows these companies achieve both service excellence and high productivity.

Example: JetBlue - JetBlue followed a fo-cused service factory strategy. Found-ed in 1999, the company offered low-cost, high-quality, point to-point airline service. According to Wirtz and Zeithaml, its focused operations were further supported with a young fleet of limited aircraft types which resulted in low maintenance costs. The air-line also operated longer haul overnight

flights to increase aircraft utilization. Its op-erating model resulted in low costs per seat mile, while simultaneously delivering higher quality service than full service airlines and other low-cost carriers.

Other examples of Focused Service Facto-ry include: Narayana Hospital and Shouldice Hospital.

Focused Service Factory Takeaway: The fo-cused service factory combines smart pro-cesses and new technologies. It only works when you can provide tailored solutions for well-defined problems, with narrowly de-fined customer segments and high volume markets.

Final Thoughts - Cost Efficiency and Service Excellence is not a matter of OR. Following these three approaches of dual culture, op-erations management and focused service, it is possible to achieve both outcomes. In the case of Amazon and Vanguard, both companies have been successful pursuing Dual Culture and the Operations Manage-ment approaches. Perhaps the best way to think of CESE is using the restaurant acro-nym of FOHBOH. FOHBOH stands for front of house and back of house. The front of house (FOH) waitstaff, which is customer facing, needs to deliver service excellence. Meanwhile the back of house (BOH) kitchen needs to run efficiently to support the front and maintain profitability. How are you run-ning your business to achieve cost efficiency AND service excellence?

About Stan PhelpsStan is an author, keynote speaker, and workshop facilitator focusing on customer experience, employee engagement, technology, differentiation, and purpose at StanPhelpsSpeaks.com. He is based at The Frontier in Research Triangle Park. You can reach him at stan@purplegoldfish.com or call 919.360.4702.

Horrors in Advertising: Cooler heads should have prevailed.

What is up with Nicolas Cage's arm?

(Shame on you, Photoshop!) Bad Anatomy

Fatamins!Now called"Pajama Jeans"

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The B2B Sales Environment Series: Who Buys and Why? & The Evolution of Customer Expectationsby Bob Lambert

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that, to get the things you want, you need to help other people get the things they want. This advice is especially applicable to selling. Focus on the buyer first, and the sales will follow.

Sales teams and individuals learn how to accomplish this buyer focus by completely revamping the traditional approach to sales. Much of this approach is based on the recog-nition that knowledge comes before action, so understanding the habits of buyers is a must. Here, we will follow a similar mindset and take a brief look at who buys, why they buy, and what this means to you as a seller.

Business-to-business transactions are no different than consumer decisions—they’re personal. Why? Because businesses do not buy and businesses do not sell—people do.

This is the first rule of thumb a sales team should follow when selling a product to an-other company: focus on the perceptions, beliefs, and motivations of the people making the decision. They are in control of the business’ buying decision. It is the seller’s job to connect with the buyer on a personal level.

Customers obviously have a different set of needs than do the sales organizations, and

they want salespeople who can address those needs. The salesperson’s product knowledge is of very little use to them un-less it is put into the context of the custom-er’s business.

Sales effectiveness, which is based on the competence of the salespeople, and the resources and support provided by their companies, has risen to the top the of cus-tomer’s influence list. All the other factors; price, features, quality, service; have become givens or “expected”. They are not compet-itive advantage, only the basic requirement for being considered in the first place. In almost every market today, all the major competitors are offering roughly equivalent solutions, which in effect become standard expectations of the customer.

Another reason why sales effectiveness has emerged as the most influential factor in cus-tomers’ buying decisions is that the compe-tition among vendors tends to increase the number of choices presented. Sometimes, the more choices a customer has, the more difficult it is to choose the right one, the lon-ger it will take to decide, and the less likely they are to buy. It will depend on how the choices are offered and how well the sales-person helps guide the customer through the buying decision process.

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Preparation that Scares We had prepped material, did our research and each of us had read through the numbers to “wow” the prospect with everything we learned, along with recommendations. We all get in the car to head over. It’s a 30-minute drive. Five minutes into the drive the lead partner says, “Ok, how do we want to organize our presentation? Who’s first? And with what information?”

We knew everything but stepped on each other, neglected key points, and our ending was a flop. The key to this horror is your not ready for the sales call till you are truly prepared from beginning to end, especially if you are in a group presentation.

Timing is EverythingA prospect downloads a case study. Dutifully the “lead” is handled by the salesperson. She calls and mentions to me that she saw that I had an interest in XYZ issues based on the case study I downloaded. I immediately apologized to the sales person and told them that I’m still educating myself on the subject and not yet ready to discuss a product. I then explained that she should speak with the person responsible for having her call a prospect just for downloading a case study.

Executives are 60% down the sales funnel before they ever feel the need to speak with someone, so interrupting their discovery process by interjecting a sales call is the wrong step. It’s too soon. It would have been better to send more information on the topic and maybe offer a call with an expert.

Zombie ProspectThe prospect keeps engaging you; having discussions. They even seem to be ready to buy at one moment then pull back again to ask for something else. The opportunity seems valid. They are talking seemingly real numbers, but they just keep coming without ever going live. That's because they are not offering a real opportunity but the opportunity is not alive. They are either seeking to leverage your conversation and offers against the real supplier or are just exploring how far you will go to get the deal.

In either case, just start pulling back. A zombie prospect will keep chasing you until you are left for dead.

Three Sales Horror Stories

The Creepy Old Days: Modern customes have nothing on these classics!

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