They manufacture big pumps and mixers for general construction, which, in Arizona, has been an industry on its back (to put it mildly).  I’m their “marketing guy.”

I hadn’t been around for a while, but had been doing small tasks for David Jr. “until things picked up.”

I decided to stop by and say hi on my way back from another appointment.  “Well, looked what walked in the door,” was my greeting from Senior (he’s pushing 80 and can verbally spar with anyone).  He walked over to me, shook my hand, looked me in the eye and said “How are you going to help us if you’re never around?”

Great question and lesson.  This isn’t about Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or who does or doesn’t use them.  The lesson for me: social media includes the social medium of face-to-face.

In fact, there are three good things that normally accompany slowdowns: it shows us our weaknesses and forces us to get better; it gives us the time to fix things; and it thins the herd.

Our Weaknesses

You’ve heard to old saying “A rising tide floats all boats.”  Good times makes the job of growing a company easier.  It hides weaknesses.  Maybe, for example, your price is a bit high or your message is a bit muddled (you sound like everybody else) or your costs are too high.  But as your customers grow and their need for what you sell goes up, your sales go up.  Maybe not as much as your better-priced competitors or companies with a sharper message, but your sales go up regardless.

Then things slow down and who’s the first to feel it?  Yep, the muddled message and price-not-in-line-with-the-value and costs-too-high companies.  When things slow down it forces us to face our weaknesses and fix them.

Our Time

At the risk of sounding like an incurable look-on-the-bright-side guy (I’m not), when things slow down it does give us the time to work on our business.  Jason Calacanis, a very smart, very rich tech guy, said going into this economy the thing to do is work on your business.  And I agree.  And, unlike the times when you don’t have time to work on your business because you’re working in your business, the slow times create an opportunity.  Fix your website, get more training, finally do all those things that nagged at you when you were too busy to get to them.

The Herd

Yes, the herd thins.  Fewer restaurants, printers, consultants, etc.  The weak fall by the wayside.

One of the things I’m saying more and more these days is: it is what it is.  Let’s all accept this economy and get to work on improving our businesses.

You can play with dozens of the latest desktops, laptops and netbooks, see every conceivable monitor, satisfy your ZuneHD lust, talk to the experts at the Apple Genius Bar ripoff, play the most popular games and generally leave feeling Microsoft is a bit hipper than when you entered.

Are they eight years behind Apple (first Apple store opening: May 15, 2001)?  To the subset of the 8% of the U.S. population who own an Apple computer who are Apple hardcore fans, absolutely.  To the rest of us, we’ll feel a bit better toward Microsoft than when we entered.

It’s an expensive path to repairing a brand image, but smart all the same (branding as theater).  It’s fun to be in the store.  I want to go back.  Plus I got a cool Bing T-shirt. 

So, late or not, ahead or behind the curve, it doesn’t matter, what is your Microsoft store?  That experience you create for the people you want to attract that makes them feel a bit better about you than they felt before?

Smart people invite me into their companies all the time.  They’ve done things I could never do–build a product, patent a process.  And they’re blocked by some aspect of their marketing.  In the process of pushing for a solution they often gravitate down a more complex path,  setting up more layers between where they are and discovering the core of what’s holding them back.

The marketing problems I see as a marketing consultant are simpler than you think they should be.  Simple doesn’t mean easy.  It means not complex.  If the marketing problem you’re facing seems complex, go one level below the complexity, as many times as necessary, until you can state the problem simply.  Chances are good THAT is the problem.  I can honestly say that all the marketing problems I’ve seen can be put into just a few categories.  Trust me, the nuances in each category can be real beefy!  But the problems I’ve seen break down these ways:

People don’t understand why what you sell is better.  They don’t understand early enough in the decision cycle to make a difference.

Your message sounds like everybody else’s message.

You aren’t reaching enough of the right people with your message.

You aren’t reaching enough of the right people with your message often enough.

No congruency.  A little bit of this from two years ago, a face lift over there and nothing really fits together.

You simply aren’t doing enough to break through.  Or you just stopped.

A technology company started up around a patented manufacturing process that was truly cool.  It allowed the manufacture of their product, carriers for processing silicon wafers, to custom specs in low quantities.  Instead of having to order dozens of custom carriers to get a reasonable price, they could sell you five custom-made carriers for the same per piece price you were paying for 48.  At several thousand dollars each, this was an advantage for my client and something they translated into impressive sales growth.  Until their growth slowed.

The problem I found: over time they had muddled their message, making them sound like all their competitors, all of which were far better known and funded than them.

In conversations with customers they kept saying the same thing: they bought because they could get custom-spec carriers in low quantities at standard prices.  Over time, the client had added layer upon layer to their message until the thing that made them unique became one of seven bullet points in their literature, website and sales presentations.  With the other six bullet points also available from better known, better funded competitors.

We simplified their message (custom-spec carriers in low quantities at standard prices) and, as if by magic, sales started growing again.  Simple.

This one almost doesn’t seem fair it was so simple.  A for-profit university for working adults wanted a marketing plan that would drive growth at their out-of-state campuses.  I found the campuses that did the best had either signage on their buildings visible from a major freeway and/or they were led by a business executive, not someone from the academic side.

My recommendations: move to buildings that allow signage and face a major freeway; and hire branch managers, not deans, to run the campuses.  Duh!!  Right?

They did, and had a happy ending.  If I had only bought the stock. . !

My experience after almost three decades solving marketing problems for small business: your problems and the related solutions are simpler than you think.

Simple doesn’t mean easy. It means not complex.  If the marketing problem you’re facing seems complex, go one level below the complexity, as many times as necessary, until you can state the problem simply.  Chances are good THAT is the problem.

So where does that put you?  The reality of innovating, in my experience at least, is you don’t have to shock the world to goose sales a good bit.  What I mean is sometimes simple changes or steps forward (baby steps!) can have big impacts.

Two quick examples from the past-

John Wanamaker started one of the first department stores in America  in 1876, Wanamaker’s.  He’s known for several department store firsts (first to use electricity, first elevator in a store).  But the innovation that took him from just another department store to a leader was. . .wait for it. . .price tags.   Huh?

You see, before that there were no prices.  You haggled.  Price tags made shopping easier and gave stores a new dimension to promote.

Have you heard of Lee Iacocca?  Chairman of Chrysler, father of the Ford Mustang?  You know what thrust him into the spotlight as a junior executive at Ford, long before the Mustang?  Installment payments.  Before Iacocca if you wanted a car you wrote the check.  I don’t need to tell you what happened to sales.

We can look back on price tags and installment payments with a chuckle; oh, how quaint, right?  Sure.  But both had major impact because they significantly changed the buying experience.  Price tags made shopping easier and engendered a level of trust that did not exist.  Installment payments made buying a car significantly easier.

What can you do to make buying what you sell significantly easier?  What can you do to take risk out of the process of buying what you sell?

Two quick examples from today-

Sponsored search, or pay-per-click.  Show ads that relate to the topic of people’s search when they’re searching.  Simple, adds value to a search in a way that doesn’t bother anybody and, the real innovation: an advertiser doesn’t pay until someone takes an action (clicks through to your website).   Very smart.

The free trial or the free version.   And you’re right, this isn’t even very new.  But, it’s hard to find a piece of software anymore you can’t use for a month free, or use a free, albeit stripped down, version of it forever.  This fundamentally changes the selling dynamics, doesn’t it?

I was looking at a relatively pricey inbound marketing tool; $500 per month per user.  They offer a 7-day trial free, but I had some questions, so I called and wanted to talk to a salesperson.  He was totally uninterested in talking to me or selling me.  He simply said, just try it for a week.  This company’s sales job changed from convincing me their tool is worth the $6-12,000 per year cost I’m looking at to, hey, just download it and play with it for a week.

So, I ask you again, what can you do to make buying what you sell significantly easier?  What can you do to take risk out of the process of buying what you sell?  It doesn’t have to be complex to make a major impact on the dynamics of buying what you sell, but it does need to  make a major impact on the dynamics of buying what you sell to make a major impact on your sales.

The real joke with FFB selling: it was old when I learned it.  Exhibit A:

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm1IxHOXm00[/youtube]

So, why does it creep into most sales presentations and sales copy today?  Beats me.  But the why isn’t important.  The let’s-change-it is.

What’s wrong with feature, function, benefit selling?

Simple.  It was invented when companies actually had technological advantages.  Most of what I sold for IBM you couldn’t get anywhere else.  So you better believe we sold features (this unit comes with 50 separate memory channels), the function of those features (so, if you are a lawyer, for example, you could store 50 different standard parts of a will) and the benefits (which means to you less time spent producing the standardized parts of legal documents and more profit in your pocket).

Sort of brings back the magic that of newly designed brake pedal from the video, doesn’t it?!  Today, with few exceptions, technical advantage is measured in months.  Maybe.  Competing on features is an arms race nobody wins.

FFB selling is fundamentally manipulative.  It, by design, takes the sellee down a path toward the logical conclusion that they need to buy what you’re selling.

Plus, it tends to be one-sided, pitting the salesperson against the prospect.  Information wasn’t that available; at least you had to work much harder to do your homework than the few clicks required today.

All the reasons this type of selling worked are gone.

What’s replacing it?  Fundamentally, two ideas: it’s your story, stupid; and free.

Story

As I said in the video, if you don’t have features to talk about, what are you left with?  Your story!!  The thing you should have been talking about all along.  The thing that, IF understood, connects you with your customers.  The thing or things you can say nobody else can.  That which is truly unique about you.  I have an entire site devoted to story.

Free

It’s hard to find a piece of software that doesn’t have a free trial or free version.  The basic idea behind free is to reduce the barrier to use your product to almost zero.  This does two things.  First, it doesn’t require as much selling up front.  And two, it gets you using the product so the product can sell itself; AND so the company can focus its efforts on “qualified prospects” (the people who are in the free trial period or using the free version).

Not everything can be free.  But how about risk-free (send it or bring it back if you don’t like it)?

Okay, okay, so what does this mean if you don’t sell software or you already have a risk-free return policy?  It means increasing your footprint beyond your website.  So bloggers are writing about you, customers are talking about you and you are part of the conversation in the places where the people who buy what you sell are spending time.  Online and off.  It means striving for a new level of engagement with people in the social space.

It means asking yourself THE BIG QUESTION:

If my sales revenue was based on how well I educate (for free) people who want what I sell and how many of those people I educate, what would I do?

Breathe that in a while.  Because I believe that basically this is where we are today.

I’m rooting for the new Palm Pre.  I get nervous when I see more hype or buzz than anything else about a product as it launches.  Present a great product as a revolutionary life-changing product and you may kill it.  That’s why I try to practice balancing realistic expectations and buzz.

Palm is hyping the crap out of the Pre.  Countdowns, sexy spinning images of the product and over-produced video demos.  Careful fellas (ladies too)!  By all measures the Pre is a great phone.  I owned one of the first Palm Treos and liked it very much.  I own an HTC Touch Pro and am very happy with it.  Both great phones.  But if you had hyped either product as “touched by God,” I would have been disappointed.

My advice to Palm: get information out about the Pre, lots of it.  Set expectations.  Educate people in addition to getting them excited.

We’re in the middel of launching a great new Plantronics wireless headset for a Plantronics distributor Headsets Direct.  The Savi WO100.  Terrific product: let’s you take land line and VoIP calls on the same headset; longer wireless range; simple to install; solid sound quality.  My inclination is to hype the daylights out of it because it really is a great product (it’s replacing two of my headsets).  I hope I stop well short of the “touched by God” expectation.  If I do, we’ll probably sell more of them.

Take context away and what happens?  You need to “turn up the volume.”  Ninety-five little characters suddenly become a joke.  You need a half or full page print ad, you need color, images.  Or you need a celebrity endorser or exotic locale to display your product.  And on and on.

Deliver your message when someone is looking for what you sell — context — and all you need is 95 little characters.  Deliver your message in more of a broadcast medium, a magazine, for example, and you need to work much harder to get someone’s attention.

I believe how you add context to a print ad, for example, or any ad that isn’t a sponsored search ad, is by taking the time to revisit the problem your product solves.  Too many marketers get right into the solution.  Yak, yak, yak!  No context.  No power.

Take at least 60% of the message and devote it to re-connecting the prospect with the problem your product or service solves.  Let them know you understand and feel their pain.  BEFORE you talk about the solution.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it gives power and context to traditional marketing messages.  Try it.

The point is the same.  Advertising has evolved from scream/push to whatever-you-want-to-call-it-now (pull, collaborative, contextual, micro-cast). 

The best way to understand contextual advertising is to understand Google Adwords, or sponsored search in general.  You bid on search terms that relate to your product or service, and based on your bid, your ad is served when people search on that term.  Your ad is shown in context.  It isn’t broadcast.  It isn’t shown in a magazine subscribed to by people who loosely fit your demographic or reside in your industry.  It’s shown in context of when people are demonstrating an interest in what you sell by searching on a related term.  As the cartoon guy used to say in the beer commercial, “Brilliant!”

And brilliant it is.  Think about it.  The billions generated in ad revenues for Google and the billions in sales this form of advertising generates for its advertisers from 95 naked little characters (including spaces!!).  How else could something so stripped down be so powerful, without the benefit of context?