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.)

I have advice for you in this brand-spanking new decade: Create your own Customer Genome Project. As far as I know, this isn’t an official term anywhere, but I think it should be. The true essence of your business is knowing your customer well and delivering on what you know. To deliver the most to your customer, you must go to a level of understanding that is greater than what you know now. Dig deeper: look at your customers’ unique behaviors, desires, comfort zones, preferences, fears, passions and unique situations. Set aside your humanity for a moment and break each of these components down to a “variable of influence”, or highly detailed preference, that can be formed into an infinite array of combinations based on each unique customer. You now have the components of your “customer DNA strand”. New awareness always leads innovation, and this eye-opening exercise may trigger a serious round of innovation as your customer awareness deepens.. If you get to this “DNA” level with your customers, would it not be hard to miss how to increase the value of what you offer and how you serve them?

Recently I signed up for Pandora, an Internet radio service. In the first three weeks I doubled my music purchases. Why? They have analyzed my customer DNA so thoroughly, they send only music I like I like – and at least half of the music is new to me, yet it is exactly what I want. Every time I listen to a song, give it a thumbs up rating, click to pass to the next song, or bookmark an artist, I am honing my customer DNA profile. It gets better and better as Pandora uses my minute preferences (DNA components) to get better at sending only music perfectly suited to my tastes. Here is what my Pandora “customer DNA” strand of music preferences looks like:

My music variables (DNA components):
Basic rock song structures
Electronica influences
A subtle use of paired vocal harmony
Mild rhythmic syncopation
Intricate melodic phrasing
Major key tonality
A breathy male lead vocalist
Acoustic instrumental undertones
Spontaneous sound samples and vocal riffs

Ninety Seconds take away:

If you build your own customer DNA strands, what would they look like? What is a level of customer preferences that is at least one step beyond where you are now? Start building your strand here. What are the mechanisms and tools you will use to continuously improve your customer DNA strands? Can you get to a level that anticipates what your customer wants? Can you know them so well you can introduce something new you know they will be thrilled to see? This is the way most successful businesses will operate in the very near future. The tools are here now – it’s only a matter of building them into your business.