So how do you become a rock star on the new marketing  stage?

First, show up on the computer screen on a Google search for what you sell.  Then, your website must engage and create action.  And finally, you need to be back on the stage when they call you on the phone.

This post focuses on the stage most of us are a no-show on: the phone call.

From No-Show to Rock Star:

Choose a screen-sharing tool and get good at using it.

I’ve looked at several and have probably 50 hours in GoToMeeting, DimDim and Acrobat ConnectNow.   I use ConnectNow.  It’s easy to use, includes a video window so prospects can see me and doesn’t require a  download to use it.  “Excuse me, you’ll need to download this 12 mg file and we’ll wait awkwardly together for the next 90 seconds while it happens.”  Not something you want to say to a prospect three minutes into your first conversation.

Buy a Logitech 9000 webcam.

“Oh wait, I’ve got this crappy one in someone’s drawer from two years ago.”  No, buy this one.  Google it, everybody sells it.  It’s cheap at about $80, simple to use and is simply the best webcam on the market right now.  You want people to see you and you want the picture to be a good one.

“Dress the set.”

Do you look like what you are?  A successful, respected resource/vendor/whatever?  Or some schmuck in a closet?  See what other people see; what you look like, what’s behind you.

Get a good telephone headset.

You need great voice quality and you need to be hands free.  Speaker phones (below average sound quality) create attention fatigue.  Same with webcam mics.  I use a wireless Plantronics Savi 200, $290 from Headsets Direct, the only place to buy from and the best money I’ve spent in a long time.  There are headsets you can buy for less and still achieve good quality.  Talk to them about your budget and they’ll find you something.  Headsets Direct is a client, so I’m prejudiced.  But that doesn’t change the fact they’re experts, give great advice and service and offer discounted pricing.

Use presentation materials that move the conversation forward.

By materials I mean everything from a PowerPoint deck, pdfs, your website open, their website open, etc.  By moving the conversation forward I mean materials that both present AND capture content.  Slides of your PowerPoint, for example, should let you capture notes you make and comments your prospect adds.  Notes your prospect can see you taking.  This honors them and underscores your interest and understanding.  And isn’t building trust and comfort an important part of a marketer’s job?

As generally used, PowerPoint is just plain awful: presenters seldom do more than simply read the bullet points on the screen.  “Wow, great presentation, come closer so I can strangle you!”  Want to really make your presentations rock?  Use PowerPoint the way Bob Lane teaches.  It’s what I practice; and I say practice because it isn’t easy and I’m still learning.  But it breaks PowerPoint out from its linear constraints and takes it to a whole new organic level.  If you want to know more, go to Bob’s site or contact me, I can train you on what I know.

To summarize. . .

Test drive a few screen sharing tools, or go with ConnectNow.  Practice.  Get a good webcam and telephone headset so you look good and sound good.  Create a good looking stage.  Use presentation materials that both deliver and capture content.  Then. . .rock and roll !!

I don’t mean price.  I mean saving money.  I mean creating value that far exceeds the price of what you sell.

Cisco introduced Telepresence about a year ago: meeting rooms that include HD monitors and video cameras that create a hyper-realistic presence of people anywhere in the world, as long as they are in another Telepresence room.   At a price of $100,000 to $400,000 per room.  Not an inexpensive proposition.  Yet, these babies save money by reducing travel.  And saving money is at the beginning, middle and end of every sales message Cisco sends.  As it should be.

Telepresence is also a huge “gotta-have” for egotistical top management at big companies.  But Cisco doesn’t position it this way; as leading-edge technology for leading-edge companies.  Save me money and I’ll buy from you.

Pentair introduced a variable speed pool pump.  You can set it to run longer, at a lower horsepower level, with short full-power intervals.  The bottom line, you’ll spend 90% less on electricity to keep your pool clean.  For me, that saves $90 a month.  It costs $2,200 (a premium for pool pumps) and pays for itself in less than two years, after rebates.  Save me money and I’ll buy from you.

The pump also has other important benefits.  It filters your pool water more effectively, maintains water chemistry better, you’ll end up using fewer chemicals and a pump running at lower RPMs lasts longer.  But Pentair puts cost savings front and center in every sales message.  As it should.

Here’s another great thing about the Pentair saving money positioning.  In the history of swimming pools, you replace your pump when it breaks.  Now, it makes sense to toss your current  pump and start saving money!

Figure out how what you sell saves people money.  Show it.  Demonstrate it. Prove it.  Start with it.  Makes sure it’s front and center.

Does this apply to everyone?  No.  Frankly, there may not be a good argument for how what you sell saves money.  I’m not sure how you demonstrate that buying a $100K Steinway piano saves you money, for example.   And no, “it’s the last piano you’ll every buy” doesn’t work (see “tortured logic” below).

My advice here is consider how you can collaborate with another company to demonstrate a cost savings.

But here’s the deal.  It needs to be real, not a stretch.  You can’t just change your headline.  No tortured logic either, please, just because I say it’s important.  Get feedback and input from customers to help you craft your money-saving message.

Then show it.  Demonstrate it. Prove it.  Start with it.  Makes sure it’s front and center.  And, save me money and I’ll buy from you.

You have your customers’ emails, right?  You can start collecting email addresses from prospects that don’t turn into customers, right?  Then you have enough email addresses to start an email marketing campaign.

Whatever your reason for not using email, forget about it and start.  There isn’t a good reason not to.  In fact, here are seven reasons email marketing rocks-

1.  Email is still the communication method of choice for businesspeople.

It just is.  It is for you too, right?  The reasons it works for you are the same reasons it works for everybody else.

2.  Email marketing is inexpensive.

No printing.  No postage.

3.  Email is immediate.

Ninety-plus percent of your response will happen within 48 hours.  You can send, assess results, make adjustments and send again in a matter of days.  Compare that learning cycle to direct mail.  Days instead of weeks.  Heaven for direct marketers.

4.  Email marketing builds relationships.

When you send something in the mail you have a real investment.  So you feel the need to ask for the order.  “Hello, I’m Hamilton, we just met, but here’s who I am, here’s what I’m selling, how many would you like?”  Sounds stupid, right?  Why would a mailing that does the same thing be anything but stupid?  Email isn’t expensive, so you’re more inclined to have a more natural relationship with people.  “Hello, I’m Hamilton, we just met, so I thought I’d share an article with you that helps you understand more about this topic we’re both interested in.”  Isn’t that relationship off to a better start?

5.  Email marketing is convenient.

Click to read.  Click to read more.  Access just about anywhere, anytime.  If getting your message, if beginning a relationship, if doing anything related to you is difficult, I’m not doing it.

6.  Email doesn’t kill trees.

No printing.  A nice reason to use email marketing.

7.  Email isn’t hard.

It might be hard based on how you have done it in the past, but it isn’t.  Use an email service that provides design templates for the email messages, manages your name list, sends the emails and tracks results.  I use myemma, MailChimp and Constant Contact for my clients.  MailChimp is free.

But wait, there’s more. . .

You sort of have wanted to use email marketing but you don’t use because starting small just doesn’t feel right.  You wouldn’t bother with a 65 piece direct mail campaign, why bother sending email to 65 people?  Old rules, new world.  For all the reasons above, you should bother sending email to 65 people.  Because as you add email addresses every week and every week, those 65 people will grow to 75, then 90 and eventually 300 or a 1,000.  And by the time you reach those types of number you will have communicated with most of those people 50 times.  That’s called having a relationship.  Compare having a relationship with, say, 300 people — contacting them 12 to 18 times over a year’s time — to mailing four times to 5,000 people during that same year.

Yeah, I know, email still rocks!

Related blog posts:

Boost Email Readership 3 Way

8 Lessons Learned from My First Million Emails

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.

Message to established publishers: uh oh!  Message to established publishers that see themselves as publishers that must kill trees to publish books: oh sh*t!

Yes, the book market is changing.  I have “read” the past four books I’ve bought on my MP3 player thanks to audible.com.   And that’s how I consume books until something better comes along.

I say in the title “. . .Before Our Very Eyes” like another market changing is something unusual.  It isn’t.  Markets are changing all around us.  Including yours. 

Here’s the challenge (think frog in the pot of slowly heating water): unless the change happens quickly, we tend not to notice it or be too concerned until it’s too late.  Markets are changing all around us.  Including yours. 

The “Fresh & Easy” grocery chain is changing food retailing.  Progressive Insurance has changed auto insurance forever.   Cloud computing is changing the way software is delivered.  Markets are changing all around us.  Including yours. 

Did I mention that markets are changing all around us?  INCLUDING YOURS?  I thought so.

Whoa. . .is that frog I smell boiling?