Small Business Wins David vs. Goliath Battle with Social Media

October 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Rock Art Brewery in a David vs. Goliath case uses a mix of social and traditional media to win trademark war before it goes to court (In under six weeks).

On September 14, 2009 Rock Art Brewery, brewer of The Vermonster beer and owner of a trademark for the name The Vermonster received a cease and desist letter from Monster Energy in California sighting infringement and threatening legal action.

Rock Art, well within its rights to use the name it trademarked was backed into a corner and knew that the way the court system is structured,  Monster Energy  could win by default simply by  exhausting the capital of the seven employee brewery by filing motions and appealing. Instead of giving in, Rock Art came out fighting. With a well placed news release and a public media campaign featuring a video on YouTube, the world started to hear the story. Radio, Television, AP, and the New York Times picked it up. Competitors of Rock Art and Distributors began to pull Monster Energy products off the shelves. Even Investors called.  At the same time the public was taking the story viral as fans of Rock Art began to use FaceBook and Twitter as vehicles to rally support. Within thirteen days of starting the campaign, Rock Art Brewery had 16,000 fans on Facebook and within twenty-one days the story had been mentioned on Twitter over 1.6 million times. On the 22nd of October, Monster Energy and Rock Art signed a legal agreement that protected the interests of both companies. A giant win for David.

There are a number of take-always here:

  1. A solid social media campaign with a cause is something that people rally behind. Everyone loves an underdog and the better your story, the faster the social collective voice will spread the message.
  2. A dual pronged approach helps. Using traditional media to get your story out gets it on the radar screen. This helps because traditional outlets now monitor the social media environment for breaking stories. Once it has broad appeal, major networks will run with it. Your communication campaign should include all relevant media, not just social media. Buzz is buzz, and you’ll need as much of it as you can earn.
  3. The other takeaway here is for the corporate brand stewards. With social media, the collective conscience of the world can wield allot of influence over your company’s reputation and therefore sales.

Here is the mini how-to from Rock Art www.rockartbrewery.com/uploads/20091022_rockartfinal.pdf

Filed Under: Social Media, Social Media Case Studies

How Well Defined is Your Ideal Market Profile?

December 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

How well does your business know its target market and why is understanding the target important? Let’s say we are going to a target range. At the range our goal is to hit only the bull’s-eye in the target. Sounds easy right. There is a hitch. If we hit anything other than the bull’s-eye, we have to hand $125 over to the nearest stranger. While this may sound strange, without a clearly defined Ideal Market Profile, your business is losing money. Why? Because for every $1000 its spends on marketing activities, only 10% of its efforts are landing in front of a buyer. Just to be clear, we are not talking about the Ideal Client Profile, just the market.

What are the key factors that define a market?

  • General Profile – An understanding of the best industry, geography, revenue, employee base, and other general factors.
  • The titles of the decision maker(s)
  • The names of the organizations
  • The names of the decision makers

There are a couple other things to consider. In a solution sale, your business may also need to define the influencers in the same way.

In our next post, we will talk about the Ideal Client Profile.

Filed Under: Brilliant Marketing, Inbound Lead Generation, Sales Converstaions

Before Naming Something Consider the Target

December 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

What is the most important factor to consider when naming something in the B2B space? For most businesses without money to spend on marketing campaigns, the most important thing to consider when naming a new business, division, product or service is buyer perception. A few marketers might take me to task on this, but I assure you that thinking like the person who has to take your proposal to the board or the decision maker is the key.

It is Wednesday afternoon at our fictitious company Credit Systems & Compliance and the board is meeting to review proposals for a two million dollar purchase. There are three companies on the shortlist. Each has a very good reputation in the market, provides outstanding service, and solid after-the-sale support. The bids are all within 3%. Which company do you think the board will go with?

Financial Playground?
Sampson Systems?
Financial Decision Metrics Corporation?

If you answered Financial Decision Metrics Corporation, you would be right and here’s why:
Of the company names above, which one:

Has a name that begins to describe what the business does?
Requires little or no explanation?
Is easy to recommend to a colleague without explanation as to why you would do business with a company with a name like that?
Reminds the buyer of themselves?

Dale Carnage once changed the name of a manufacturing plant to win a contract over a competitor. Very smart thinking. What Carnage understood was this – The buyer’s comfort is more important than a preconceived notion of self-importance. While we think new and interesting names are cool, they are, but when they require an explanation or a defense, they become impediments to starting a sales conversation at any level.

Filed Under: Brilliant Marketing, Influence, Sales Converstaions, Smart Product Development

360 Brief: Ask Why and Increase Sales – A Marketing Story

November 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

In a time when automation and efficiently are at the forefront of internal corporate directives, Sales and Marketing need to stop and listen to not only the customer, but to each other.

A major player in the hardware arena known for manufacturing systems that are well engineered made a change in their product line that had major repercussions on sales of one of their lines. The change involves access to the hard drive. The engineers in the company were proud that they had reduced the manufacturing cost of the machine by a few dollars by removing the hard drive access panel. After all, their drives rarely failed so why would a customer need access to them? The engineering team scored this one as a win.
But did they win with the customer?

It turns out that most portable computers suffer cracked LCDs from being dropped and while a broken LCD can be remedied in an hour or less, the part is not always on-hand. Without a part, your customer may be without their machine for a few days. Smart corporate customers who were thinking about their internal efficiency saw the drive access panel as a time saver allowing them to hot swap machines. A customer has a broken LCD? Just pop open the drive access panel, pull the drive and install it in another machine and send the customer on their way. Order the LCD, replace it a week later and then swap the drive back out.
With the drive bay sealed up, a tech now has to disassemble the unit to remove the drive and place it in another machine. To the customer, this is not a win; it is a reason to switch to another vendor. For sales, they can no longer site the case study and use this as selling point.

R&D, Engineering and Marketing can all gain a wealth of information by sharing proposed line changes with Sales and then testing the feedback. Why test the feedback? We appreciate our sales people, but we know that sometimes they ask for features or functions that may benefit one out of hundreds of customers. In this case, simply asking Sales and then validating the response with the customer would have saved the company millions in lost sales.

Listen, ask questions, verify answers and then make changes. A small change that might save three dollars on a device costing hundreds may have have impacts in the place your business can least afford them. With the customer.

Filed Under: Brilliant Marketing, Smart Product Development

Complex Selling

October 5, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Lots of sales people and companies struggle with complex selling. As a culture, most of our purchases and transactions are commodity sales. Statistics tell us that once a sale reaches a certain threshold relative to how the buyer perceives their economic security, the sale becomes complex and a new set of rules apply. Most senior-level executives and owners from mature businesses make very good complex sales people. They know their product or service and understand the dynamics and challenges faced by their prospects. If the opportunity is qualified and the need is there, the principal of a company or executive will lose a sale only when the buyer is unable to finance it. So why do so many SMBs struggle to close sales? There are a number of answers and the mix of challenges differs from company to company. Here is our list top-three list:

The sales person overstated the prospect’s interest before calling in the closer.

The sales person attempted to close the opportunity one too many times before the prospect had made the buy decision.

The sales representative was focused on closing the sale and not advancing the opportunity.

In the first case, the sales person was excited about the opportunity and most likely was being measured by how far along his or her opportunities are in the sales pipeline. Measuring sales performance is important, but measuring the right things, asking the right questions and rewarding the right kinds of activities are critical to effective resource utilization.

In the second case, the sales person is not reading the level of commitment the sale will have on the prospect. In high-dollar sales transactions, it is important to know where the decision maker(s) internal pain threshold lies and to know that you have all the questions and objections resolved before moving to the close. Attempting to close a sale too early can cause the buyer to go with a competitor.

In the third case, the sales person is most likely getting the highest reward for closing a quota on a monthly basis. In complex selling, sales cycles can be very long, sometimes more than a year. It is important to have an accurate estimate of the sales cycle so that rewards can be distributed based on multiple types of performance.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Does Your Marketing Team Qualify Leads?

October 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Most organizations define a qualified lead as one that meets certain  sales criteria. While this may work for some companies, the result of  defining qualified leads this way often lead to a high number of sales  calls that end up in a loss. To avoid this situation, have your marketing team create an Ideal Market Profile (IMP) that includes sales qualifying criteria. This should be done for each vertical, but  performing this task at the campaign level will better define a campaign and curb costs. Here are some simple criteria we use:

  • The lead comes from an organization that meets your sales team’s ICP (Ideal Client Profile).
  • The target is in a position that is defined in the IMP.
  • They are aware of their pain and prepared to discuss a solution with you or your team.

By employing an IMP and tracking the loss rate between marketing  and sales on a campaign basis will help you measure the effectiveness  of your marketing efforts.

Filed Under: Inbound Lead Generation, Lead Generation, Qualified Leads
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