If you want to sell anything nowadays, you need to know who is actually buying. When most companies put together a marketing or sales plan, they identify the most obvious customer groups or “segments” and build a plan to target each segment in the plan. These segments are usually the traditional buyer of the company’s products or services. This is a good practice, but it rarely goes far enough.

If you really look at how most companies buy, you will find a host of hidden buyers and influencers that have as much or more influence in the buying decision than the traditional buyer does. If you look deeper you will also see each influencer in the buying chain have very different requirements. In some cases they are gatekeepers such as procurement officers, a technical buyer such as a CIO, or an economic buyer such as a CFO. Any one may stop or approve an entire category of purchasing. If you are serious about your marketing plan, you will look beyond your traditional buyer and include those he or she must get on board internally to buy from you. Each company is different in this regard, but they often break down into these roles in the buying decision:

Ninety Seconds take away:

The most important part of any good marketing plan is intelligence gathering. Roll your sleeves up and get past the traditional buyers and get to know how your target companies make decisions internally. Make sure to include the important myriad of influencers and gatekeepers who can wave through or kill a purchase with your company. This is a deeper level of investigation than traditional market research. After you gather as much possible intelligence on the decision chain as possible, revisit how you are going to communicate to each of these buyers. This will assure you leave no weak spots in your communications approach. This exercise will also help you avoid being too narrowly focused with a “thin” message that misses addressing critical decision points.

Your biggest marketing opportunity is free and tragically neglected.
I have spent a good chunk of the past 15 years sitting through mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations. I am sure I’m not alone in this, right? Sadly, the owners of these incredible performances continue to this day, gleefully laboring over slide after slide, logically putting one damn bullet point after another until they feel satisfied their victims (the audience) are thoroughly beaten down by every factoid the presenter could possibly share in a single presentation. Now tell the truth: you have done a few of these numbers yourself, right? I have, and I have the glazed stares (and lost sales) etched in my mind to prove it. The lost opportunities and wasted time due to bad presentations every day is incalculable.

What do I mean by bad? Little or no real connection to the audience, too much information going too many directions (the infamous data dump), a presenter who reads content seemingly unconnected emotionally to the ideas presented…the list goes on and on. And this is very sad for most businesses. Why? Because the biggest deals – the most critical, life-altering decisions in a business – usually happen in some sort of presentation. That makes upping your presentation game a huge marketing opportunity.

The costs of  a great presentation may involve getting some professional help with your template and information graphic design, and getting help with content planning and editing, and throw in a little presentation coaching for the big critical presentations. All of this is a fraction of the cost of most advertising, marketing or branding initiatives and the impact can be far greater because you can’t beat having instant feedback right in front of your customer. If presentations are so powerful yet so cheap, why do people continue to put audiences well into REM sleep, leaving the thier moment of decision unmoved? I don’t know. But my guess is most people think of PowerPoint as…well, PowerPoint. The less confident the presenter the more they want to read bullet point after bullet on slides. Because so many people do this totally ineffective “bullet point hypnosis” practice it seems normal, so it goes unaddressed. It would be far more productive if you thought of your presentation as The Moment of Decision (which it so often is), or at least a blank canvas where you can paint a picture that moves the minds and hearts of your audience. If you thought this way, your last instinct would be to plop in one bullet point after another because you would know that is not how you say something important. Here are five things that will make sure your presentation will move your audience instead of hypnotize them:

Ninety Seconds take away:

1. Start with the end in mind: Don’t build up to your point. Lead with it and then recap at the end. You save your audience a meandering data dump. What do you want them to think, or do?

2. Make it visual: Cut down on words and pull as much of your message as possible into a single information graphic that plots your points in a single view.

3. Practice your delivery: When your slides are done, you only have your content. To connect with your audience, YOU have to deliver it well.

4. Get rid of endless lists and just tell a story: Presenters love lists; audiences hate them. Stories move mountains; lists are forgotten before you’re done reading them.

5. Connect yourself personally to the message. YOU are the speaker. If you don’t have personal conviction or a stake in your message, you would do almost as well emailing your slides to your audience.

Need a quick confidential review of your presentation? Send it to me. I’m happy to give you our 5 Point presentation assessment which will give you pointers on how to make it better (it’s free.)

A few years ago I hired an independent research firm to find out what our customers thought about us. I had them interview our current and past customers. Then, I had them interview our own people to see if there were gaps between our company’s and our customers’ perceptions. When our own people were asked the question, “What do customers value most about Merge Agency?”, our people listed our “skill sets”, good marketing strategy, good interactive execution, good creative execution, research, good writing, project management, etc. When we asked our customers the same thing, they had a completely different list of what they thought was the most valuable reason they chose Merge. These were the top answers: trust, patience, flexibility, easy to work with, forgiving, smart solutions and good under pressure.

I knew there might be a gap, but nothing this far apart. After reading this report, I realized something significant about my business and found this same disconnect exists in most businesses. We see our value as what we do, but our clients buy what we mean to them. Your clients likely have hundreds of alternatives to your product, features or “skill sets”. This means these things do little to differentiate you.

Ninety Seconds take away:

Unless price is your single tool for beating your competitors, stop thinking of your company as a product, service or collection of “skill sets. Stop articulating your business as a meaningless list of things you sell or do. Start thinking of what you mean to your customers. Think of how the experience of buying from you is easier, better, deeper and more meaningful. If you think of your meaning first, they will be open to your list. If all you are is a list of services, features and functions, then you certainly have lost perspective as to why your customers will want to buy from you instead of your competitors.

I am CMO-at-large for several companies. One of most important things I am doing for each company right now is finding the absolute greatest impact for the least possible investment – in some cases, no investment. If ever there were a time to put on the Zen monk hat, this is surely it.

So, with this hat on (or head shaved – whichever you prefer), let’s look at the essence of what we are dealing with right now: Less. Much less. You could say scarcity is our most abundant resource this year. Scarcity is your raw material, so get real, dump waste and focus like a laser beam on what matters most to you and your customers. If you handle this resource well you will not only survive, but you’ll also have a far better, more meaningful business in the long run. Here are a few thoughts for using scarcity as a marketing resource:

Ninety Seconds take away:

• Look at every line item in marketing. If you cannot tie it to something that addresses a fundamental need or shows a specific return greater than the investment, eliminate it.
• Consider dumping traditional advertising altogether. For example, opt, for more targeted and measurable social media and online marketing tools(such as the eBlast/blog you are reading now) over expensive, hard-to-track print ads instead.
• Look at your customers, potential customers and those with whom you do business. Focus on your lowest cost to acquire sales and new leads: your existing customers and those with whom you do business.
• Zen Master take away: “Pay it forward” with your clients. Think of what your customers are facing in this market and find a way to help them. Don’t worry about making a sale – just help. If you take this approach, the goodwill you generate will find its way back, especially if you don’t weigh your efforts down with expectations of how it will return to you. Just know that it will. Everyone I know who has run a successful business for more than 20 years knows this is true. It not only feels good, but it is a way to take scarcity (something we have always thought of as lack) and turned it instead into goodwill – the stuff that long-term companies are made of. And yes, sales, too.