Walter Adamson

Review of @nealschaffer Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing

Through my observations and interactions in social media I have developed a high respect for Neal Schaffer, a true Linkedin expert. So when his latest book came out I pestered him for the Kindle release, and here is my review of Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing: An Unofficial, Practical Guide to Selling & Developing B2B Business on LinkedIn.

My review is quite short, and segmented into Positive, Negative, and Interesting.

Summary

Overall I rate the book very highly. There is a mountain of practical advice, and work if you follow-up on all that advice. I'm in the process of touching up my Linkedin profile and making more time for Linkedin again as a result of reading it. But I've deducted one star because of the Negatives. Those Negatives could have been easily avoided, so I assume that they are a conscious choice, and so I'm expressing a difference in opinion rather than fact.

Positive

The book reflects the author's deep knowledge of Linkedin and his own business results from using it in the way he describes. So this is a very practical guide for B2B.

It's segmented and easy to read - I read it in 2 hours - and includes specific Case Studies to illustrate the advice. It clearly explains how to get over the typical stumbling blocks, such as how people and their companies should be represented and interact, and reminds us about the value of the functions of Linkedin that we may have neglected, such as Questions and Answers, and Polls, for example.

Furthemore, by its practical nature it generates a big workload of audits and review and rethinking content and priorities and activies on Linkedin. That meaning that this book can deliver a big outcome if you take up its challenges.

I have developed myself a workload as a result of reading this book. That's a great outcome. If you want to brush up or learn about how to maximise your Linkedin presence value then I recommend this book.

Negative

There were a couple of aspects of the book which disappointed me. The least disappointing was the clear message by the author in the opening remarks, and then from time to time later, that this book is clearly intended to be a companion to his first book. I've never read Neal's first book, and I assumed that given his experience since then that the new one would be a superset. Actually it doesn't even matter what I think, but what I think does matter is that this point is not made clear in any of the product description on Amazon for example. I would not have been disappointed if this had been transparent when I bought the book.

The bigger disappointment was the constant repetition of basic points. The chapters all seem to have published as stand-alone pieces at some point in their life-cycle. They repeat the same things many times, up to 4 or 5, I lost count. They don't repeat them in a pedagogical way, rather, each seems completely blind to the existence of the previous occurrences. This was obviously a chosen format, but I found it distracting and disappointing, almost like things were begin padded out.

Interesting

Neal has strong views about managing your online personas, along the lines of "Linkedin for business, Facebook for personal". He explains this thoughtfully - at least it made me contemplate my point of view. And he provides a set of filters to run your posts through to ensure that you maintain your professional persona on Linkedin. 

It's interesting because personally I don't really subscribe to this theory. What I do agree with is that linking your Twitter to your Linkedin is not a good idea, and that there are things which you need to think twice about before posting on Linkedin. But ultimately everything will be exposed, so I'd rather put effort into working Linkedin to the max rather than worrying whether I should be saying something in Linkedin or my blog or Facebook or Twitter or Posterous etc etc. I think that you just be yourself but don't dance naked on the dinner table at a business meeting, or with friends that you've just met.

On Neal's side he has some compelling evidence to support what he says - and that is the business which he has built from following his own guidelines on Linkedin. That's irrefutable. You might be best to take his advice!

See my question on Quora.

What is your favorite tip for getting the most out of LinkedIn?

Please comment below.

Walter @adamson
http://xeeme.com/walter

Social media strategic, but no social media strategy - report

A recent HBR / SAS survey of how organisations are using social media is worth reading. Its analysis is biased towards SAS's interests in analytics and monitoring, but the data is interesting in itself.

For example:

• 75% of companies said that they don't know where their customers are talking about them - they're missing both the advocates and the detractors;
• 79% said they are using (58%) or planning to use (21%) social media, yet only 1/3 of those had a social media strategy in place;
• 42% said social media is integral to their overall goals and strategies; and,
• 32% said social media has been designated as a high priority by their organisation's executives.

There's a lack of alignment in those statistics between the perceived strategic value of social media and the lack of a strategy. Perhaps this is an opportunity?

Where do they see this "strategic value"?

This is the $64 question, because the respondents to this survey indicated that:

1. their social media efforts were directed by marketing (69%) followed by communications, PR and the web team; and,
2. the highest ranking challenge for organisations was understanding the potential of social media to make a difference to their business.

To me, this explains why these such factors as "fully utilising social media across the organisation" and "leveraging social media insights across the organisation" were ranked quite low as the "most pressing challenges", that is not too pressing at all.

If you don't fully understand the potential impact on the organisation, and the thought leadership is limited to marketing, then those other issues would not yet have been fully considered or appreciated.

Fully utilising social media and leveraging its insights across an organisation is a very challenging aspect of developing a social business.

Perhaps that will come to the fore in future surveys, as the experience with current activities grows.

What are your key take-aways from the survey?

How would social media efforts best expand from marketing to the broader organisation?

What is your interpretation of the mis-alignment of the strategic intent and the practice?

 

Walter @adamson

Why sales enablement should not be in Marketing

At OutsideIn View Jennifer Doctor asked "how do product marketing professionals, ensure that our sales team is effective and ready to sell our new products and have well designed sales tools aligned to the ever-changing sales cycle?"

This was in response to a recent blog post by Forrester CEO George Colony who wrote that CEO’s want better sales forces.

Sales Enablement

She describes the sales enablement function in an organization as providing "information, tools and technology that helps sales to succeed", and asks "who is better suited in the organization to understand the changing buyer’s cycle than product marketing?".

Where does it fit?

Jennifer Doctor is a product management person, so her leaning is that way. She asks the question rhetorically but I'm not sure that the answer is so obvious.

I agree in a sense with her observations about why it would not be Sales:

Would you expect sales to understand rapidly changing market dynamics? Usually sales is in repetitive motion and has difficulty with change.

But on the one hand Sales are the only people connected to the actual benefits and VALUE for a client, no matter how clever the persona development. (For more on this see The Value of Hutch Carpenter's Customer Feedback Innovation Model.)

On the other hand the Marketing people can only be connected to features and advantages. The advantages relate to the persona e.g. different features become different advantages for different persona.

I would have thought that among the Sales teams that the best of them would be acutely aware of the buyer's search for value, and the trends and dynamics influencing that over time. They would be the ones bringing back that information to the product development and product marketing people, would they not?

In fact the best that the product development people can do is background analysis and research including with social media, to determine trends and needs. That is, unless they talk to customers, and presumably they do that in tandem with their key sales people?

Sales enablement more informed by Sales

My conclusion is that there is a role for coordination of "sales enablement" as you call it. But that role is informed by Sales more so than product marketing, but in any case has multiple informed inputs. And where it actually lies in the oganisation can be wherever it works best, whether Sales, Marketing or elsewhere.

(To be fair, my headline is only being provocative, as sales enablement could well be in Marketing, and in fact Jennifer Doctor also says it could be anywhere, but makes a case for product marketing.)

Where do you think Sales Enablement best fits?

How is Sales Enablement best informed - through Sales or Marketing?

Can Marketing understand benefits and value, or is this only Sales?

Walter @adamson

The Value of Hutch Carpenter's Customer Feedback Innovation Model

Hutch Carpenter's Three Models For Applying Customer Feedback to Innovation is the best post on business innovation and social media feedback that I have read. For two reasons, one is that it provides a nice, succinct business-oriented model, and secondly it doesn't mention "creativity" - my pet hate when it comes to business innovation consultants.

Carpenter simply plots a nice graph with the X-axis representing the difficulty of getting feedback relevant to a particular objective and the Y-axis representing the impact on company results for the different objectives.

What a great image - something that could be left on the screen for the duration of a half-day workshop on the subject.

He also gives specific examples, applying his categorisation to My Starbucks Ideas which shows very clearly and simply the power of his model. I previously wrote about My Starbucks Ideas, noting that 0.03% of ideas get through - a simplistic analysis in the light of Carpenter's model.

Value = Benefits - Costs

I'm a bigot for my own model of Value = Benefits - Costs, along with the hierarchy:

• Value; is a subset of
• Benefits; which is a subset of
• Advantages; which is a subset of
• Features.

To my admittedly biased mind this maps nicely into Carpenter's model, where he categorizes suggestions into three groups, those which describe Features - product or service requests, or the Product's "job" - understanding the deeper purpose your product fulfills, or form a Proposal - putting a new concept in front of customer's to understand its key value drivers.

How the models align

Carpenter's Features actually embrace my Features and Advantages. The reason? Features are just "messaging", hoping to hook into a segment which will respond to them. Where they do evoke a response, then the first level of that response is because of perceived advantages, to that segment, for some of the features.

Therefore some or all the Features become Advantages to that segment, while remaining of no advantage to other segments. Thus "Advantage" requires some form of engagement.

My Starbucks Ideas already has that engagement. By the very act of people saying that they want something it means that they see an advantage in having it. A segment of 1. Therefore the base level of input are Advantages, in my terminology.

These Advantages (Carpenter's Features) are essentially context-free - they would probably work in many other coffee chains and are without any linkage to business objectives.

When a suggestion becomes a Benefit

Next come suggestions for which it is possible to link into or align with the context of Starbucks mission and business purpose and therefore transform themselves into Benefits, or what Carpenter labels the Products "job".

By this definition, a Benefit can only come from a business perspective e.g. from a Starbucks' perspective, whereas a Feature/Advantage is from a customer's perspective. It drives at extending the purpose of the business, but not radically - that's the role of the Proposal/Value category of suggestions and analysis.

Proposals require business analysis

Suggestions which go beyond Features, far beyond, and beyond alignment with the current business model, are those which become Value, or in Carpenter's model Proposals. Here we are looking for ideas that are at the fringe, are potentially radical, are from the edge inwards, and are somehow visionary. Carpenter notes that Roberto Verganti would also say that they have to be "attractive, sustainable, and profitable" and that's the link to Value = Benefits - Cost.

At this Proposal level, the value can only be determined after clear definition of the benefits, and the costs, which would form part of a normal business case. Developing that kind of case, for a new visionary offer, is certainly hard work but with potentially outstanding business results, and that's reflected by its top position on Carpenter's Y-axis.

For me, combining Carpenter's model with the "Value = Benefits - Cost" equation and the hierarchy of Features, Advantages, Benefits and Value delivered clarity and new insight into how to apply customer feedback to business innovation.

http://xeesm.com/walter

What value do you get form one or both or the combined models?

Have you seen better models for applying social media customer feedback to business innovation?

What's your best example of these different forms of customer feedback and their results?

Related articles

• Changing Beliefs: Business Models (relationship-economy.com)
• Should the "Competitive Leadership Model" Really Be "The Value Leadership Model"? (leveragepoint.com)

Supercharging sales productivity with social business

Last month IDG released its 2010 Sales Barometer Study: Guidance for Sales and Sales Operations Executives, surveying the IT industry. It found there was a need to lift productivity:

1. The rise in sales costs outpaced sales growth
2. More leads are needed to close a deal than ever before; and the key,
3. Sales time was not optimized.

The need to optimize sales time stood out. Sales’ administrative time is about 20% of the average sales person’s work week; however, said IDG there should be more "focus more on improving the quality of the time invested by sales reps in preparing for customer interactions. (Sales reps spend approximately 17% of their time today on preparing for customer interactions)".

However, despite that time spent in preparation "feedback from IT buyers, indicating that over 50% of sales reps are insufficiently prepared for customer meetings", says the report.

The challenge of selling into a Selling into a socially connected business world is that

•  Lead flow has slowed down
• Customers connect with customers for experience exchange and product information
• Knowledge and information is omnipresent in the Internet
• Price information are more transparent than ever before.

Keeping on going with the old processes or "MORE CRM" is not going to achieve the outcomes, which in the past, one might have expected.

In Social Selling Axel Schultze explains how selling into a highly connected business society has changed. The new sales engagement model requires new tools, not separated from the CRM but an adjunct. The key tools needed are those which help identify clients and prospects in their social networks, and allow sales people to rapidly and effectively navigate those social networks to gather information and to chime in where it can be helpful.

This Xeesm 2020 slideshare presentation really explains the new technique well - Focus on relevant people; visit 20 clients in 20 minutes every day; know what is on top of their mind; become one of their trusted connections; know when the time is right to sell. If we think of the 20% of sales people's time week spent on admin then Xeesm 2020 might recover some of that which is being spent ineffectually.

The Xeesm tool is the first of these types of tools, developed to help the time management issue of keeping up with social networking, and aimed at the sales and marketing teams. And websites such as Social Business One are focused on this particular new way of selling and its relationship to CRM and customer engagement, as well as social business strategies.

In fact these new approaches may be the only way to achieve some of the productivity objectives which IDG advocates. More of the old isn't going to cut the ice anymore, because the buyers world has moved out of alignment with the sales persons' tools. The new approaches will also address two other IDG recommendations - improved cross-functional sales enablement, and better leverage of sales automation.

This is the beginning of a new era of relationship selling, and the chinks in the armour of old sales and CRM are going to widen in 2010. Fortunately the new methods and tools have arrived in a nick of time!

http://xeesm.com/walter

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• Social CRM a strategy, a philosophy, a technology? - Social Media Academy (wendysoucie.com)
• Your Sales Process is Old | XeeSM and Social CRM | In My Opinion (wendysoucie.com)

The Reverse Elevator Pitch

I liked this from Maria Umbach, VP and Chief Marketing Officer of individual products for Guardian Life Insurance Company of America:

It's not what you say inside the elevator [to somebody about what you do] but it's about what they say about you after you have left the elevator - she calls this the Reverse Elevator Pitch.

I might also call it the "Residual Elevator Pitch" since it is was is left after you leave the conversation - but reverse is simpler. Maria talks about innovating around language as an aspect of engaging customers. An important topic.

Also important to website design and digital engagement, for Software as a Service companies for example. How to use the right language for the right customers at the right time for the right purpose of their engagement.

http://xeesm.com/walter

Social media brings 100X improvement in customer insights

In a report called Social Media Monitoring: Why It Pays to Listen to Online Conversation Aberdeen Group concludes that Best-in-Class organizations are 2.6-times more likely than Industry Average companies, and 93-times more likely than Laggards, to improve their ability to generate consumer insights that drive new product/service development.

That's a remarkable difference, and if you added up the money spent on investment in innovation you would probably find the Best-In-Class companies are spending significantly less and achieving much better results also because of their use of social media.

It's these kind of reports and figures which can provide essential input for a business case for social media, among those firms still to be convinced or wishing to increase their investment.

The report, covering 250 companies, adds to the unabating trend for business organisations to invest in social media, despite, for example, the GFC.

In fact, the research found that, despite the substantial cutbacks that most companies have been forced to make in light of the global economic recession, 50% of all companies are increasing their investment level in social media monitoring initiatives.

Aberdeen is a rock solid research group, so this research is quite significant. It comes on the back of Inc's recent study showing an accelerating use of social media among the Inc 500, and the Social Media Academy's recent survey showing that 75% of the Fortune 500 are engaged already in social media.

In fact the Social Media Academy uncovered the fact that many of the Fortune 500 are coy about their activities because they seem them as a competitive advantage.

It's a tsunami

This all adds up to one big wave pounding over the corporate world and how it interacts with its customers.

The Aberdeen study, found a series of other significant differences between Best-in-Class and Laggard companies in their survey:

• Best-in-Class are 3.3-times more likely than Industry Average companies, and 82-times more likely than Laggards, to improve their ability to identify and reduce risk to the brand;
• Best-in-Class organizations also outperformed Laggards when it comes to improving customer advocacy and decreasing customer service costs.

In addition to deploying the right set of enabling technologies, success in social media monitoring requires a combination of strategic actions and organizational capabilities. To that point:

• Best-in-Class companies are 42% more likely than Laggards to have a process for disseminating insights gleaned from consumer-generated content to key decision-makers and also twice as likely to have a process for applying the insights in the context of specific needs;
• Best-in-Class companies are 1.9-times more likely than Laggards to have dedicated operations resources devoted to social media monitoring, analysis and reporting. 

The report includes a number of recommendations which it says companies must do in order to achieve best performance, including:

• Integrating social media monitoring activities with customer feedback management activities at a granular level;
• Defining event triggers and implementing alerts to communicate insights that are urgent in nature.

In addition to hiring resources that have social media monitoring as part of their job description, recommended actions also include conducting online consumer sentiment analysis at a granular level, identifying and measuring the value of key influencers, and implementing time-sensitive performance metrics.

So, what's the bottom line?

Firstly, if you're "not yet convinced" or "your customers aren't ready for it" then you're already a terminal Laggard.

Secondly, if you're getting going then stay on track and have a good strategy and organisational implementation plan because if you're not committed to staying ahead then you are going to be passed by others who are.

Thirdly, if you're building a business case and you need some "facts" then go figure how much you are spending on some of these key customer and product activities today and extrapolate a conservative achievable saving if you could approach the current best practice.

Fourthly, if you are about to invest in new product development research, or brand monitoring, or customer service, then step back and think hard about the full opportunities for social media investment to bring better and more cost effective results.

Finally, because I work with a lot of Software as a Service companies helping them rebuild and shape their business and marketing models, I noted the following statistic from the report:

• 78% of Best-in-Class companies, compared to only 8% of Laggards, have improved their year-on-year customer retention rates.

That's gold, and very very expensive if the Laggards have to play traditional marketing/sales catch-up with the Best-in-Class.

Social media is game changing for business, and it is in play today, now!

http://xeesm.com/walter

Trust, GFC and Australia's most trusted brands

The latest 'Eye on Australia' report by Grey and Sweeney Research found some major groups had lost public trust over the global financial crisis. Banks and telecommunications companies topped the list of brands and companies Australians had lost trust in over the past year. 

The survey, conducted in August 2009, asked 1,500 Australians to rank 153 brands, politicians, government organisations and business sectors. Airlines were the most trusted sector, followed by food manufacturers, sporting bodies, supermarket chains, other retailers, pharmaceutical companies and gas, water and electricity suppliers. 

But several high-profile brands ranked low on the scale, including Twitter, Telstra, GE Money, Aviva, Axa, News Limited and American Express. 

Australians base brand trust on foundations including:

1. consistency;
2. delivery on promises; and,
3. open communication, Grey Executive Chairman Paul Gardner said.

"Trust is based on hard, ‘provable' actions rather than softer options such as supporting the local community or potentially trying to disguise a bad offer with a good loyalty program," Gardner told The Financial Review. I thought that was a very interesting result as one of the common big corporate PR pushes is about "supporting" the community. Some businesses even make it the key plank in their advertising e.g. IGA Community Chest.

Australia's most trusted brands: 1. Salvation Army 2. Google 3. Australia Post 4. Medicare 5. Bunnings 6. Cadbury 7. Sanitarium 8. Uncle Toby's 9. Kellogg's 10. Nokia

 http://xeesm.com/walter

Why Press 5 for Customer Service When You Can Twitter?

Good article. I liked your examples. I work in this space but always looking out for different ways to explain to clients and these are useful to me, thanks. Walter Adamson @g2m http://xeesm.com/walter

| 09.09.13 | Ramblings in social spaces and places

Where I've been this week in the social web's places and spaces:

• For Linkedin members, SaaSblogs Software as a Service Group, the discussion rages over the question "SaaS & XaaS: What Makes Up A Service - Part 2?",  latest poke:

SaaS and many ISVs have made the transition – however difficult that might be. But when it came to marketing the product – they are still selling it as a technology – even if they see it as embodying special expertise for their market and not as a service.

• Also for Linkedin members Why do so many marketing professionals not know how to use linked in properly? caught my eye.
• Facebook is king of the social networks, but the New York Times claims there is a Facebook exodus. If you have nearly 300m members and 5% churn then that is a lot of people who potentially want to broadcast their "bad news" story about FB. From a social media strategy perspective it makes no difference whether they exit or not.
• Signed up for the Black Diamond continuing education program of the Social Media Academy. It's an exciting professional program, and I'm looking forward to participating with the other Certified consultants and business managers.
• Is your brand taking advantage of some of Twitter''s lesser-known marketing opportunities? iMedia has a good set of examples.
• Read that J.C. Penney Co., the third-largest US department-store chain, bought ads on Facebook to draw users to its own page (as US back-to-school shopping got under way). Said Nick Bomersbach, vice president of the retailer’s jcp.com. J.C. Penney’s Facebook page went from having about 22,000 "fans" to almost 500,000.
• Forrester Research says that Australians spent $23b online in 2008, with estimated growth of 9% annually to $32b by 2012. eBay's Deborah Sharkey quoted statistics from the Australian Payments and Clearing Association indicating that 43% of the $23b spent online in 2008 went overseas, reported David Trewern from the Australian Online Retailer conference.
• Telstra announced the closing of its original blog Now We Are Talking "After a review of where we were headed with our online communications and how best to engage with important stakeholders like you, we have decided to close our nowwearetalking website and develop a new, more engaging, interactive site under the main telstra.com umbrella".