Barry W Thornton Blog

Over the last couple of years the mantra FREE has become a big deal in software and web stuff, the idea has attracted my attention but couldn’t see an application. I always looked at it as attracting bottom feeders. How do you build revenues when you give it away? (I know, you get them later or with more features or threaten to cut them off when they get used to it or some other scheme, but it was always about incremental cheap stuff.)

What do you do when your product cost $40k+, can you make that free too?

In some cases, yes. I made us one of those cases so we did it.  We give the hardware free at our dealers. Oh, and by the way, I make more income this way than I ever could selling it. In fact I raised the price to make sure no one buys it so they have to go the free route.

Confused, OK, mine is a special case. I have a product that renders a billable service.  Too expensive to sell easily and without a major marketing effort.

It dawned on me that since the word DISCOUNT sucks when you are on the selling side of the equation that the opposite of MSRP had to be FREE.   I simply said, let me put  it into your place for nothing and let’s split the revenues it generates.  You never buy it, I always own it, you sell the service, and collect the money which we split. Simple, not necessarily a new idea, but one I had never tried. All my life I have sold products as in it becomes yours and you do with it what you want, with it.  I go on to fine a new customer,

Anyway, some folks call it the ATM or Vending machine model.

It is great new world for me.  Now your customer is my customer too because we both get money from them. Turns out there are other benefits too. I now get to see inside a bunch of different ‘retailers” and since it’s in my best interest for the retailer to be very very good at selling and delivering our now shared service, and because of this relationship I have a say in how they do it (if they don’t do well I can take my unit back and get someone else to make money with it), I can make them better even against their will, or perhaps awareness. I learn best practices by watching the good ones and make the poor one learn how to do it right, they have no choice, they make great money with me and that is the glue. If ego gets in the way, if they are dorks, if they are screwing up the market, whatever it is that makes them a poor performer or a pain, I can now fix or flee but I don’t have to suffer. And the revenue flows literally forever.

So I say “Thank You to FREE”, it works in ways I had never imagined.

That’s why we must always learn and adapt.

One character issue we assume in good sales people is confidence, there is a whole industry of consultants that claim to be masters of this. Let me offer another view that is what we think of as confidence can in fact be indifference, indifference to rejection, fear, opinion, and the word no. Confidence is a state-of-mind wrapped in emotion, indifference is a state-of-mind wrapped in logic. Emotions are ephemeral, logic is eternal.

Indifference is cold, thoughtful, analytic, and liberating. Without the personal emotional attributes of confidence one appears to be confident in action yet free to be highly perceptive of the reality of a situation and thus its master. Confidence is a projection, frequently competitive in nature. Indifference to confidence is the root of power over a situation. Ever watch to confident sales people with opposing views clash, one must win by overpowering the other. Confidence and indifference is like a jujitsu match, the indifferent party takes the confident one’s energy and uses it to convert thoughts. Let me remind you that the assumption here is that both parties want to win and that is defined as one changing the other mind. Both are equally driven, both have the same goal.

Let me remind you that the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Love and hate are both passions, both emotions which blind the user. If you are indifferent to the passions they are easy to manipulate and dominate. If you are indifferent to the passions then they are easy to embrace with control and become part of the tool box that makes you flexible to the situation. This kind of truth lets you use passions as needed without your own passions getting in the way. This kind of knowledge mixed with action is real power, which is what is really about to make a sale.

Does this sound strange; I hope you think so, because the point of this wordjive was to make you think about it.

Welcome to Hard Times, not a town in a Henry Fonda Western but your front door. Everyone wants a discount, times are tough, they are special, everyone knows that you make too much anyway.

Your salesman are weakening, they don’t have a clue about selling the value of the product or service even though they read all the books, watch the CDs and you bring in ‘Experts” to prop them up.

I always felt that in general there are three weak spots in sales people that no one wants to deal with:

First, your salesmen are nice people. To be blunt you don’t necessarily want nice people, you want people who can be nice. You want people who have an almost vicious determination to get the sale at the terms they want; nice is one of the many tools they use to do. A good high-value closer is, just below the surface, well, not a nice person. That is cool, most of us deep inside know we may not be the nicest folks in that what we will do to someone else’s head to achieve our goal has limited bounds.

Was that a distasteful thought we just went through, feel that I am being insensitive and maybe even hurtful in what I advocate. If so you really don’t want to go any further with me in the realities I will be exploring in this series, go find a more sunshiny blog to read, one about kittens and puppies perhaps.

Second, your salesmen don’t have the faith. They don’t have the faith that they can close the deal the way you want them to. The suffer from the ‘Stockholm Syndrome”, they sympathize with the customer and surrendered their own will. Lacking willpower means no Force-Of-Will. It is Force-Of-Will that keeps the good salesman working on the customers head until the customer believes the value proposition that justifies the cost of the product. The good salesman instills faith about him, the company, and the products in the customer’s mind. Only then is the value of the product or service well enough established that the discount is not the winning issue, faith drives the discount aside. It’s called a Value Proposition for a darn good reason.

Third, is Cohunes – Brass Balls. Some look at this as a lack of pride, the willingness to interact with people to n-th degree with a sole purpose. Don’t confuse this with Force-Of-Will, there is a fine and important difference. Force-Of-Will is about drive, Cohunes is about welding that Willpower without being bothered what people think of you. It is about using that drive, which is beyond having it.

Point of it all is that good sales people are animals inside, mental animals with few external signs of what is really going on inside themselves. True stealth creatures, how cool!

Let’s talk about salesmen for a bit.

First thought. It is said with confidence that 45% of salesmen don’t close. Personally I think this number is low, but I will run with the convention for this Blog.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t bring home the order, it simply means that in most cases they take the order, not develop it, THEY DON’T CLOSE! They function as clerks, not sales people, but of course they claim all the credit. In fact they will claim more credit for the sale because they know their weakness and will lie to cover it.

Because we managers are only interested in results we generally don’t seek to understand the difference. The problem is that this means we are out of control, our salesman’s performance is capricious, based on luck and Marketing in many ways. Is this bad? After all, we got the sale.

It is terrible for several reasons:

1 – We don’t know which of our efforts (marketing or sales) made the event happen, so where do we pour our limited resources, more marketing or more commissions?

2 – We loose predictability, the data about our sales pipeline is false or weak at best. If the salesman is really clerking then he in fact is doing three things.

A – Operating in the blind, most likely deceiving himself in the process.

B – Deceiving us, in essence selling us, most likely lying to us.

C – Not developing the customer meaning that customer retention is going to be harder and we are not getting maximum yield for that customer.

This lack of clear vision means that the actual effectiveness of our Marketing is not really understood, without this feedback Marketing cannot better tune itself, understand the success of that they are doing, get better at it.

Most important, we have a B or C player working for us in a time when A-players are on the market. If we understood the truth we could replace him with an A-player thus future-proof our company by increasing our overall quality of the process, moral, and power of our selling force.

I hope you like your clerks.

The other day I was involved in an email thread about bulk mailing. While we on the thread generally agreed that bulk mailing was a bulk waste of time I had brought up a process I had used with some degree of success.  This process involved sending out post-cards with only one word on them.  My theory for doing this was that a post card with one word on it can not be denied, that someone can’t pick the card up and not read the one word as they throw it into the trash.  With this action I have gained brain-space, even if only for a fraction of a second, I got in through the noise, my “word” was in their brain.

“So what?” you might ask.  What does this do for you?

Well consider that you do it a couple of times. That word becomes an accepted data-point.   One way to look at it is brand recognition, you know that brand word.  Maybe you don’t know anything about it but you know the word, it is familiar and in that familiarity it becomes comfortable and perhaps non-threatening.  But it comes with a question.   What is it?

Remember the book/movie “The Manchurian Candidate”? A post hypnotic set of commands is activated with a single word.  Perhaps this is the reverse, a post-hypnotic curiosity is activated by the word.

So you cold-call the individual you sent the cards to and say the “word” in the introduction, the first words you get out before they hang the phone up.   Could this stop them from closing their mind?   Could this keep the door open long enough to get a second or third word in?  Could they be curious enough to ask what it all means?   Could you have a dialog as a result?  Could it lead to a sale?

One word.  What word would you choose?

A little while back I wrote that the real job of marketing is to make the potential customer unhappy with what they have.  I caught some interesting flack about that thought, got accused of being to simplistic naive, and crude.  So to torture those minds I would like to drop the other shoe. . . . good marketers are good Propagandists, the “P”-word in this age of political correctness and propriety.

Propaganda.  What a neat concept.  We use it all the time, daily in fact!  I like Jowett and O’Donnell’s definition.

“Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”

Typically this is an emotional effort; after all, dissatisfaction has a lot of emotional content.  And yes, it is the overt manipulation of an individual or individuals.

Does that bother you?  If it does then you should take some time off and figure out why.  If you are comfortable with it then the real question is how can we get better at it?

The seeds of dissatisfaction, in essence fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD) should be woven into every message and communication you make to your potential customer, and it should be done purely out of habit.  Happy people rarely change, and selling someone something is all about change.

Propaganda is not evil in and of itself.  Like all tools of mankind, it is the intended use that possess good or evil values (compare its use by Joseph Goebbels’ opposed to Billy Graham’s).  Your values are good if your product or service makes someone’s life better in some way.  Be proud of that.  Propaganda is a powerful tool, use it.

I was talking with an old friend, he has problems with some property, the zoning, and it’s future use as perceived by the city he lives in. Seems the city wants turn the area into a hipper, more modern area and didn’t like his industrial use of the property, they wanted to fine him and directed him to make some expensive changes. As we talked about it I realized that the only way to beat them (the city) was to take over the leadership. The old ‘find a parade and then get in front of it’ approach, something that politicians understand intuitively which why they are politicians; they have nothing to offer but the appearance of leading. In essence, I told him to “out politician the politicians”.

Politics is perhaps the best marketing in the world. The best of ‘someone is unhappy and we will lead them out of the wilderness and onto the blessed fields of plenty, sign here, and here, and, oh yea, sign here too!’

My friend is an entrepreneur. After our conversation he made up a sign to put on the wall of his office, he FAXed me a copy and I used it as the title of this blog.

He went on the attack, got a meeting and sat down with his City Councilman who immediately explained to him that he, the Councilman, couldn’t influence the zoning enforcement people. My friend didn’t complain about zoning but explained that he wanted to become a participant in their plan and do it now. He noted that the expensive work for the present zoning (which would be different in the new use plan) would mean he couldn’t spend the money on an architect to create the new plan to fulfill the City’s dream. And he wanted to be the first to get this dream going. The now cordial Councilman meeting ended, they shook hands and smiled.

A couple of days later my fiend calls up the enforcement agent to try to get a couple days extension on the compliance review. The agent’s boss remarked that the Councilman called and said that they had a good meeting, the review got put off because the zoning guys were suddenly busy, and that they would like to see his ideas to work with him on the direction. My friend is now leading the parade, not being trampled by it.

Now I know this is a long story but what does it mean to you as an Entrepreneur?

This is not about honey rather than vinegar. It is about getting those who you thought were leading to instead be follower. Your power is in your movement, it is mental jujitsu; use your antagonist’s energy to get what you want by stepping up the pace, get ahead of him. Sometimes your antagonist is an association you work with, sometimes it is associates that can’t focus or move clearly.

Just something to keep in the back of your mind as you work to change the landscape of your world.

Copyright Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

I had noted in an earlier Blog that the key to marketing is to make someone unhappy, it is then the job of sales to them make them happy again, that’s how the two work together. - - So what are the tools of unhappiness?

Try F.U.D. the acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt!

If someone is happy with what they have you clearly aren’t going to sell them a replacement. Only when you break the relationship between what they have and how they feel about it can you expect to get new brain space, and brain space is what you need to convert them into a customer.

So F, U, and D are three great pry-bars or tools you can use to loosen up some brain-space. All of them start out as probes, until one hits a chink in the armor and gets some traction you have nothing, you just slide around on the outside of someone’s “satisfaction shield”.

You must probe with constant FUD questions to elicit response that will start someone thinking. Do this and in most cases a door will open.

Is this marketing or selling? Maybe it’s both.

Anyway, you must do a series of probative adverts, always asking questions that center around ‘what makes you think you are happy?’. Maybe you communicate a message that shows why they should be unhappy or happier. Maybe you do positioning statements or explanations that are really questions in disguise. Statements with words like ‘new’ or ‘better’ or the like are really questions, they ask ‘why don’t you have the newest or the best?.

Ever consider that the opening of any sales pitch is a marketing message or proposition? You bet it is! Every opening sales pitch is essentially an advertisement. Even if the target says no and walks way, just how is that different than having looked at an ad in a magazine or on TV ,and passed on it? It only becomes a sales pitch when some brain-space opens up and an idea enters the mind that can feed the unhappiness and start a change to occur.

In most ways technology marketing and sales is the easiest. Technology offers an addictive solution. Whatever the customer has, it is on the way to being out of date, not enough, too slow; whatever was good about it making the customer happy is now fading away. Technology is about change and change means something better is coming. It is only a matter of time.

What does this mean to the entrepreneur? - - It means two things. One is that the range for new ventures is almost unending and virtually unlimited, it is as wide as the scope of human endeavors and ideas. The second is that you only need to change one thing to make it new; only one problem has to be solved to tap a market. Your business will be based on what makes someone unhappy.  It really is simple after all.

copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton all rights reserved

An oversimplified generality that is reality.

Much of marketing is about the message.  And what is the message about?  It is about making someone unhappy.

The message is that what they have now makes them unhappy and what you have to sell will make them happy.

A primitive view of one of the most elusive crafts in business but it is true.  They won’t pick up the phone or tap the keyboard to find out about you unless they are motivated - and being unhappy is one of the best motivators there is.  Your message is not about making them happy, it is to remind that they are unhappy and that there is a way to eliminate that feeling.

Too short and too simple, it must be right.

Think about it.

I once had a project manager working for me (actually he was in Marketing but I had special pull as the Fonder). Once we had a very cool idea for a whole new product line and he went out to test customers on it. From my talks with customers I had envisioned just two items in the line, when he came back and talked to the engineers they presented us with 15 products to build. At the product meeting I was amazed at my ability to not lift a 20 foot long conference table up and roll it through a big set of beautiful plate glass windows (I m getting better in my age, the adrenalin was there, but wisdom prevailed) with the ear-defining scream of “what the fXXX are you clowns thinking !!”. Which of course they weren’t, thinking that is, they were reacting.

I repeated the story of Steve Jobs coming back to Apple and reducing the product line from 20 some-odd major products to 4 and turning the business around. I then described to them what is called the “Tyranny of Choice”

Psychologist have long recognized that too many choices cause considerable stress in individuals. We know a family, good friends of my wife and son (they tolerate me, my son is falling into the same class as I because he too sees the reality of the situation and has started to asking the common sense questions) who, when searching for a new car, almost had to go to a therapist. The stress of deciding made her physically sick, him neurotic (I know, I am not a clinical professional so this is an opinion based on his conduct and not a legitimate analysis) and the kids (two) distanced and abstracted themselves as a shield.

Why so much detail? Simple, it is an exaggerated but real example of what you do to your customers when you don’t apply common sense to what they want.

Margaret Mead, the famous ethnologist, demonstrated to the world (much to her humiliation and discredit) that people will tell you want you want to hear because of the context and content of the questions you ask combined with their desire to please and be of value.

I always tell you to go first to the customer to get the truth about what you should do. The real truth is that you have listen with the ear of common sense. In between the dreamy maximum and the abbreviated minimum is reality, the reality of what they will buy because it does just enough to solve the problem, not too much to create more problems, and represents both safety and value. Delight to the upside is based on the old tome, just solve one real problem and you have a good product. You can always (and should) come back with more solutions, but don’t overwhelm the customer, do one thing excellently as Bill and Ted would say, make it easy to see the value, KISS, and build the relationship and reputation for doing something excellently, then look for another good problem.

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved.

The other night I went to a meeting to listen to a guy who wrote a book about marketing. I took my 19year old son; I try to expose him to everything even though his current ambition is to be a code monkey. I was smart enough to sit us in the back so we could sneak out early; the guy talking was a putz. A college professor who saw some simple things and churned a book out on it. He did studies, set up and ran three years of tests, in essence he re-invented the wheel. He was so full of himself for his discovery, and most of the audience was mesmerized. Why do people think they can find IT in a book? And what had he discovered and proven in such a complex way?

COMMON SENSE

When I was 18 through 21 I worked in a carriage-trade hi-fi salon run by an old merchant named Paul Holtz. He had sold cloths, jewelry, and at that point hi-fi. [Carriage-trade refers to retail stores a couple of generations ago. Hi-end shops did not have street access, you had to have your carriage driven through a port into a courtyard where you alighted onto a portico, customers stepped out the carriage right into the salon. If wanted to walk in you used the trade entrance and you were not a customer. Thus you started your buying experience for that store with a grand entrance.].

I didn’t want to be a salesman but I needed the money so I did what Paul said, constantly think about your experience as a customer and it’s easy. High-end sales were and still are an experience event. Always KISS to the ‘n’th degree, way beyond just the words Keep It Simple Stupid, and always remember that value was in the eye of the beholder, which is driven by his dreams. It is your job is to manipulate, fulfill, and harvest those dreams. Always offer three choices (avoiding the ‘tyranny of choice‘, good stuff for my next blog) and keep the best one locked to create a final theatrical stage to work on. Most of all always remember that from the first awareness of the product (or service) to the final delivery it is dance and both partners know it. Dance well!

Well this professor had discovered some of what this old merchant naturally did based simply on watching people, no collage education needed. And guess what? Every bit of it is common sense. There is no magic, only an honest understanding of how you buy, and how others buy. No special words to write down in a lecture, no special SEO stuff, no book long explanations, only simple thoughts you already know. We are all trained consumers, your mom pushed you around in a shopping cart when you were a year old and your education began. - -So what is my point? KISS! You don’t need gurus, mentors, professors or the like. You do need to look inside yourself because you already have experienced all you need to market and sell successfully; only your personal fear (my definition of ‘the box’) blocks you from seeing it and executing it fearlessly and flawlessly.

And remember, everything starts with a sale. Sell first, then analyze

copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved

Let’s explore the GREEN CTO a bit more. GREEN is a state of mind that thinks about the INs and OUTs of your company. Both INs and OUTs want to have the least amount of impact on the real environment.

Your Department of Technology (the Office of the CTO) serves the whole company as well as the specialized areas of Engineering and R&D. Many of the rules about how a company exists in the world are environmental regulations that are changing all the time. All of this relates to technology so ultimately the CTO needs to be involved. Someone has to understand the whole works from the upstream vendors to the down stream customers with the goal of protecting the interests of both the company and customer. Let me point out that GREEN is both a physical and mental state. The regulations handle the physical, but just as important is the mental.

Let’s take a dumb example. I go to the widget store and buy a thing that comes in a package that is both the pilfer protection system and the container for both the shipping and shelving of the product. Cool, an efficient use of clear plastic that works for both of uses, we get and easy way to pack for shipment, out customers gets a pilfer proof product that sits on the self well and displays itself.

What about the real customer, they guy who uses it? We virtually assure that the real customer’s fist experience will be the struggle to get it out of the package. He will then send that now mangled plastic to some landfill.

But the package is great! And if left to Packaging Engineers, Marketers, and Ops it will just get better at stopping pilfering and stacking on shelves. Who speaks for the real customer in this chain? Who looks down stream enough to see:

1 – Physical - The packaging is bound to the landfill because the user threw it in the regular garbage can. He did that out of frustration and disgust with opening the package.

2 – Mental – We left a bad taste in the user’s mouth. He bitches about it to a friend. We spend all kinds of Marketing resources to get that friend to buy our Stuff. We now have to pay to overcome the negative our own package created.

Someone has to see past departmental walls, to see the whole as it affects the guy who really pays the money. The whole business, the company itself, is a technology to generate profits. Someone has to see that technology through GREEN glasses and who better than the CTO to look to that responsibility?

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton 2008, all rights reserved

The Chief Consumer Officer has the job of talking to the company from the consumer’s viewpoint. The job of being the consumer’s advocate, and from that perspective managing a new angle on the customer relations.

The average response to this statement is NO!. In our company everyone is customer-centric and we have tons of touch with our customers. From you to him maybe . . . just maybe. From him to you, virtually nothing.

In a humorous way let me suggest that a company is a lot like a fishing enterprise. Marketing casts a net, sales plucks the fish off, engineering makes new nets Hopefully lot’s of energy, each party talks to the other, everyone watches and knows the fish, after all the goal is to get lots of them.

But who is paying attention to the fish’s world? From a fishes viewpoint? And why should they?

So much for the fish, let’s talk customers –

You have a Marketing Department that is constantly probing the customer about what he wants to buy, what services he needs, what hardware is a must. They come back and report the future. The company CEO does lunch with the customer, plays back the reports, gets feedback, pays the bill,and everyone goes home. The company is secure in its handle on the customer.

Sales knows the customer, after all they get the orders! Living in constant fear of the dreaded ‘No’ word, only sales really hears the customer; after all, they are in the trenches together (someday I will put my short sales book, The Dance, up here). No one listens to the customer better than does the salesman.

Engineering knows the passion of the customer, the guy behind the curtain, in fact they talk to the only truthful people in the customer’s company, fellow engineers. For the truth is logical and thus only logical people speak the truth.

Time for a short story – One of my disciplines is anthropology. There was a woman ethnologist named Margaret Mead who visited and brought back the first records of life in Pacific Samoa Islands. She brought back tons of exotic sexual stories directly from these people, wrote a seminal book call Coming of Age in Samoa. International acclaims. Later visiting ethnologists did not find the same stories and myths. One of Miss Mead’s greatest discoveries was that people tell you what you want to hear because your questions tell them how to answer. Even to the best observer has this trouble. What a surprise. You see what you want to see, and don’t see the rest.

With that my time is up for today, more later in Part 2 and on….

Copyright 2008 Barry W Thornton, all rights reserved