And here I am – Mr. ADHD and Mr. Digital – I like it when things are flashy and blinky. I like the internet. I like the busy, I like the constant, I like the now. The newspaper, well that was printed last night, and honestly by the time it hits our doorstep, it is old news. But there is one thing that draws me to the Sunday paper, especially the NYT, and it is the ads. Print ads are wonderful. They are sensuous, even the all text ones, they are stately, they are composed. And they draw me in and capture me in a way that the digital advertisements that surround the rest of my life never do.

Perhaps it is because for the advertiser, the printed page really is a blank canvas. There are no limitations to what you can express other than maximum size and minimum legibility. In the digital world, there are limitations like text character limits, image size limits, file size limits. It seems to me, as a marketer, that print is like the luxury form of marketing.

But as a consumer, the print advertising, although wonderfully delicious to behold, is hardly relevant to me. Unlike the web, where everyone rushes to make the right impression on me at the right time, print has no idea who the f*@# I am. And to some extent, I hate that. For the magazines that I subscribe to (Inc., Fact Company) I am starting to resent the intrusion of ads that aren’t relevant to me. These publications know where I live. They know how long I have lived there. They know how I engage with them digitally. They have an enormous trove of online and offline information about me. I would suspect that only my iPhone, in-car GPS, and debit cards know more about me. So why don’t these publishers leverage what they know about me an make their advertising programmatic. As online publishers know, programmatic buying can improve yields on pageviews. Perhaps print players could keep some spots available for personalized ads. I know that I did some very sophisticated print of demand stuff for direct mail 10 years ago – could it be time for large scale print operations to move away from a 100% premium (and potentially irrelevant) ad model to a mix of premium and ads printed just for me? After all, the newspaper delivery gets the paper to my house, I invited it there. What advertiser wouldn’t to be part of that platform and provide me with relevant advertising in its most luxurious form. Ad think of the ad sales opportunities – print, digital and personal – all in one.

Could this be the thing to make print relevant? Is relevant advertising an opportunity for success?

It is Amazon 4Q earnings day. Normally this is a day of both joy and despair. The e-commerce community revels in the sheer scale of Amazon’s revenues, thinking that they can capture some fraction of that. Amazon is ongoing proof that e-commerce is a rocketship. At the same time, there is despair because at the bottom line of the earnings report, there is marvelously little left over. Profits, when there are any, are minuscule.

But Amazon, when it’s results come today, will surely show that it won the holiday. Amazon is simply killing it in e-commerce. The world’s e-commerce poster children, like Fab.com, and Wayfair, and One Kings Lane, in aggregate, do less annually than Amazon does monthly. (In 2011, Amazon did something like $4b in sales a month. Good luck catching that any time soon.)

The question remains, however, is why anybody else even tries? Amazon has nailed the logistics of e-commerce. They have nailed the essence of customer service. They have nailed the ease of payment thing. They offer added services that make it hard to want to shop other places (Prime, Video, Music).

So, why do we even try to compete?

The answer is really simple. Amazon sucks at telling stories. When you buy a suit, you want to see how you might look. When you buy a couch, you want to imagine how your room will look. When you buy a toy, you want to see the wonder in your kids eyes. In its essence, Amazon has come as close as anyone to perfecting the transaction engine. And Amazon is great for making refinements to your purchase process. You can find alternatives to what you want to buy, or options, or what have you. But Amazon is simply too big to endorse. And unless the shopper is really a buyer (namely, someone who is in the transaction zone rather than the discovery zone), Amazon is a hugely overwhelming place with no sense of context.

Amazon has everything, so they have no idea what you want.

That is why the rest of us try. That is why the rest of us can make more profit on a dollar of revenue. Because we share the human element of story and context that allows us to help you discover what you want. Shopping – the discovery part – is fun and social and engaging and somehow elemental to our societal experience. After all, here in America, we’ve built thousands of shopping malls to give us the opportunity to shop socially and collaboratively. Window displays work because they help discover. Glossy print ads create desire. Believe me, I am not bullish on the prospects for most real-world retailers, and while I am an Amazon fan, Amazon does retail a disservice because of it’s mastery of the narrow end of the funnel.

Shopping and selling are fun. There is joy in the discovery of the right sweater for you. There is little joy in deciding amongst 25 versions of a yellow sweater from 60 different sellers. Customers want to have romance, and curation, and serendipity and joy in their purchase experience. And those things don’t have to happen in a store. They can happen on your website. They can happen in your e-mails. They can happen in your display advertising.

Don’t chase Amazon at its strengths. You will never be able to do Amazon Prime. Attack it at its weakest point – the essential human activity of storytelling.

Nobody ever asks that question.

For many companies, how to treat your visitors is an entirely separate exercise from getting visitors. There are “Acquisition Managers” and “Site Experience Engineers” and “Director of Low Intent Consumer Engagement” (that is a real title, by the way). Each of these chops up the consumer experience into silos. But customers don’t perceive your efforts that way. Acquisition and engagement are part of a continuum for consumers.

So, as my client and I started to talk about ways to engage the new visitors that we were starting to drive. He immediately jumped to reviews as a method of engagement (and I can also share that they have a measurable impact on search engine visibility). And I think when I was an SEO guy, I would have stopped the conversation right there and dialed up PowerReviews. But my experience as a CMO of a $200mm fashion retailer tells me a different story. We had product level reviews on many of our 20,000 products. The SEO boost from those reviews was 1-2%. But we were redesigning our pages and were trying for simpler. So we started doing some multi-variate testing of the new page design. Amongst other things, on the new page, there were no reviews. At the end of the testing, we saw a meaningful difference in conversion on the cleaner page. And when we did all the math, removing the reviews resulted in about a 9% increase in conversion.

I, to put it mildly. was shocked. How could this be? Reviews are supposed to add the texture and nuance that drives consumer trust and conversion. In our case, it was the exact opposite. Why?

Our brand already had a high degree of trust with our consumers. We were the authority in our space. This is where math fails a little bit, because we couldn’t do a sophisticated sentiment analysis, but it was our opinion that reviews are too subjective. Products got bad reviews because they didn’t fit, or the color was not as expected, or the shipping was too expensive. Reviews tended to be experientially-based rather than product-based regardless of how they are written. And reviews are written by two kinds of folks – those with an axe to grind or those who are cheerleaders. And to be honest, neither is unbiased.

So, I started to reflect on my other experiences in online retail over the last two decades, and at the largest online furniture retailer, we tried to improve the customer experience by adding all of the product specific Q&A from our customer service department to the product page. We had questions like “How heavy is this item?”, “Will it fit through my door?”, “What is the seat depth?”. These aren’t sexy questions. But we saw real conversion lift with this tactic. But my client doesn’t have 200 call center employees with reams of data at their fingertips. What he does have is 7 years of customers who have experience with his product.  They know the facts about his products. And by shaping the information that is asked for from those consumers by making them specific questions about the product (“Will it fit in a space X by Y?”, “Does it work in Europe?”, “How long is it from shoulder to cuff?”) it removes the subjective nature of experience into objective fact distillation.

It is the answers to questions that make you want to buy. It is the product as solution that justifies the purchase (honestly, shopping online isn’t all that much fun, so if you end up on a product page, the impulse to buy is probably pretty high). UGC does make me want to buy the product. It is the information that removes the reservation. But why doesn’t that work in the review space? Frankly, the review justifies what you want to hear. If you have enough reservations, inevitably, you will gravitate towards those reviews that make it easy to walk away. If you want to make the purchase, you will, of course, focus on the positive reviews. Product reviews can be self-reinforcing events. The cheerleaders hang out with the cheerleaders, and the axe-grinders hang out with the axe-grinders. Reviews are a self-reflexive lens.

I’ll share a personal holiday shopping anecdote – I bought a Chromebook for my kids for Christmas (shhhh…don’t tell them). I read a million reviews and they were all positive…but too high-level. I don’t actually care about processor power or inane memory specs, those things that professional reviewers care about. And the product reviews definitely fell into the “GOOGLE ROCKS – The Chromebook is the end of Apple!” or the “It isn’t as good as Windows because you can’t install a faster graphics chip, who would buy this….” And, truthfully, those reviews were just noise. I had one simple question – is there something like Skype for the Chromebook? That is what I needed to know. That was my point of reservation. I travel a lot, and I love to video chat with my kids while I am away. It is meaningful to me and them. So I asked that question on a product forum (NOT on the product page, mind you, but rather a forum that I had to search for…). As it turns out, it doesn’t do Skype, but someone was nice enough to tell me that you can do a private Google Hangout, and someone else told me that Skype was actively working on a browser only plug-in, so there would no need to download a client. These were objective answers to my objective question. And that single bit of information that was relevant to me, when answered, made the purchase decision simple.

Consumers are looking for information, not opinion. Decision purchases are made on rationalized facts, not influence. Passion and emotion run high on the engagement end of things (Do I like the site? Is this a good price? Is my credit card safe? Will my friends laugh at me for buying this?) All of that happens before the decision to buy. What drives the “Add to Cart” button click is information that helps me make the decision.

And just like Detective Joe Friday, we all really just want the facts, ma’am.

This post was originally published on the Turn To Networks blog – they do Social Q&A like none other.

But today, with the request that website owners who have structured data begin to tag that  data, Google raised a white flag. They have essentially said that they can’t figure this stuff out fast enough. Because they have invested the engineering resources to create tools to make that tagging easy, Google has reached some kind of dead end in terms of their processing or capability to understand structured data.

Now this isn’t  really a admission of failure, but it is a very subtle way of asking for help. Google doesn’t do that often. So today, Google has essentially asked everyone on the web to help them categorize their own content. Most marketers, will be really well-inclined to do this very thing, because these microformats help get more information into the search engine, which translates into better search rankings, which translates into more visitors, which translates eventually into more dollars. So a little tagging,  can be really beneficial.

But I want to focus on the remarkable thing here – Google, the benevolent overlord of indexation, has just asked millions of webmasters to pick up the slack. Google has recognized that there is a limitation in their understanding of structured data. So rather than wait for some kind of breakthrough, Google has just asked everyone to share the load. Eventually Google will not need microformats and rich data snippets, but today those things help with relevancy and context. Google can’t grok that adequately now. I’m quite sure, that in a year or two or three, Google have such an amazing database of RDF data that they will be able to more intelligently recognize structured data when presented with it, that microformats will not be necessary anymore. But today, Google has just turned us all into data monkeys.

I’ve said for long time, that it’s really Google’s Internet and we just play in it. But today, by raising the white flag and asking for help, Google  has just turned us all into unpaid web crawlers. Google will finally understand what were talking about, right after we explain it to them. Google’s mission is to categorize all the world’s information, but apparently they can’t do without our help.

Hey, Sergey & Larry, can I get some Adwords credit for every RDF I drop?

1. It’s NOT the right time:  Listen, when you are selling, often, all you have is a hammer, so every prospect you have look like a nail. And regularly, that prospect IS a nail. You can solve their problem. But the big issue is that the C is not ready to solve that problem. The C-level suite, regardless of how proactive they are, is constantly force-ranking the available solutions against the friction they feel in their business. The friction may come from the board of directors (profits, velocity, etc…though this is pretty rare), department owners (VPs and below that handle the divisions that report to the C…this is, I daresay, the key part of the force rank), or another C (the CEO is pushing against a CxO to accomplish some metric) and sometimes, the force rank is driven by the vision that the C has for the business. So, it’s not the right time, it means that your solution is not the answer to the top problem on the C-level list. This means that you either did not present your opportunity in its best light (which rarely is the case), or that you have fallen off the force rank. Let’s imagine, the C has the bandwidth to handle 6 initiatives this quarter, but your hammer hits nail number 7 or higher. What do you do now? This is the time to keep your prospect in the flow. They aren’t going to close this quarter, so how do you manage this result? By keeping your prospect informed. This slides you into relationship and expertise development. Keep plying your prospect with intoxicating information. Keep the case studies coming, keep the invitations to social and professional events coming, keep the questions about your prospect’s business coming. You are no longer closing in on the sale, but rather bringing the prospect closer and closer to the engagement. Be especially sensitive to questions and concerns during this phase, because while you have lowered the prospects concerns about the solution, you haven’t sealed the deal. Imagine that you are a hunter. You’ve weakened the prey, buy not claimed the trophy. Another hunter may be on the prowl. Keep the trophy safe by insulating them with layers of information and a real personal connection.
2. Money: If your prospect did not know you existed during their last budget planning cycle, they didn’t plan for you. You aren’t a line item in their budget. Few companies have an unassigned budget item to fund an unknown expense. So, it may be if you have an unexpected expense, their is NO budget for you. Or they have a significantly smaller budget than your solution costs. What do you do? You need to start focusing on the ROI or the unique opportunity that your solution presents. You need to help your prospect understand the math…paint this as higher ROI, unrealized ROI, cost savings, or any numerically-based solution to make the position in the budget undeniable. The prospect isn’t saying no, but rather, “I want this, but can’t afford it”. Think of yourself as a problem solver now. Go to war inside your company to find a way to meet your prospect’s budget. Become their advocate and find a way to bend your company to the prospect’s need. At the same time, make a full-out assault on your customer. Make them understand that your solution becomes self-funding (that is, increased revenue or decreased costs pay for for your fees). Make them understand that the benefit of your solution creates funding for other initiatives. At this point, you are on your own. You are at war with your company to bend their pricing to your prospect’s will, and you are war with your prospect to make them fund your project. This is the most difficult time for the sales professional. But at this point, let’s figure out what your advantages are. First, you have a new prospect to bring to your prospect. Your company LOVES this. You have the prospect saying, “Yes, but…” So, you have a company hungry to get new business, and a company hungry to say yes. This is where your experience as a business person comes into play. Make sure that you can position this to your company and your prospect as a win. Find ways to give on some pricing, and get on some others. (Maybe you waive the upfront fees, and add more on the backend, or offer a lower-cost 2 year deal rather than a higher-priced one year deal. Focus on the total value to both sides…you will find that spot where your company makes money and the prospect is happy..)
3. Value: Value is different than cost. Value, for the prospect, is the combination of ROI and intangibles. For me, as a C-level executive, the goal was always for the vendor to do as they say, obviously, but also to make my company smarter along the way. If all I got from my vendor was results, then I would feel as if I spent my money poorly. I needed added value, I needed to learn as much about what my vendor offers and the market space that they inhabit as possible. If I fired them after six months, would I have more than a campaign? If the answer was yes, then I had value. The second part of value is, in fact, financial. If I offer a 3x ROI, and the prospect has said that to be comfortable, they need a 5x ROI, am I providing value? The short answer is no. If you can’t stretch your ROI calculation to 5x, then you need to make your prospect feel so comfortable with the financial worth of your added-value that the disparity between 3x and 5x is moot. Can you do that? This is 100% on you. See above (Money) to handle the issue if your cost isn’t in line. But focus on making the softer side of your offering more valuable. (Maybe this is the time to offer some free passes to a great conference, or perhaps an introduction to the data scientist at your company who can do a free project for the prospect?) There is a lot that you can do, here, without focusing on cost. Maybe you can provide a good introduction to another client that makes value, or perhaps you offer a case-study and free consulting to the prospect.) This is an exercise in your creativity. How do you barter what you have to close the gap between the cost and return metrics that the prospect wants? Look carefully at your arsenal. You cannot win by adding quantity…you MUST offer quality. Ask the prospect what creates value for them. Ask the prospect what makes their life better. Then deliver it. It is the only way to win.
4. Competitor: This is the most difficult answer to get from the C. That they understand the need for your solution, but have chosen from another’s offerings. I’ve been through this…many times. It sucks. I will tell you two stories, briefly. Before I was a C, I was a VP, tasked with driving revenue for a search agency. We were a nascent company in the space. We had skills, a great story and super competitive pricing. The prospect, a storied brand with international recognition, chose a more expensive, slower moving competitor. GRRRR. I was a little crazed. And to race ahead to the end of the story, we never got the business. But the prospect told me, flat out, that they picked the competitor because they were more mature, not better. They essentially decided to make the safe choice, rather than the choice that excited them. I tried drawing a corollary between our clients and their needs, I tried adding free audits and opportunities from our other business lines, I tried making the price lower (I added value, and lowered the cost…) There was no winning the business. What to do? I focused on what we could do. I never sold against the competition (that, regardless of how good it feels, is rarely productive…prospects buy because you are better, not because the competition is worse), I focused  on our best attributes. It didn’t work. Why do I share a success that never happened? Because the next time we faced that situation, we trumpeted even louder what we did well, but moreover, we captured our weaknesses and make them strengths. Rather than be a nascent provider, we were a disruptive force, rather than the lowest cost provider, we were uniquely focused on high-ROI and mutually-aligned business goals, rather than  an industry that we hadn’t worked in before, we were laser-focused on products and services that were similar to theirs. This isn’t spin, it’s jujitsu. We use our strengths to compensate for our weaknesses. We won the next nationally known brand we encountered. This was an exercise in learning. In the second anecdote, when I picked another provider, the jilted vendor assaulted me with why they were better, and why the competition was worse. This wasn’t helpful, but a singular point of excellence that this vendor mastered was burying me with information. They focused on making me smarter, they focused on making me a better user. I did not rescind my choice of vendor, but at my next opportunity, this vendor was at the top of my call list, and, in fact, I hired them the next time. Competition does not end the dialogue. Focus on what you do best, focus on why you are the leader, focus on why your prospect will thrive, and focus on why your are the right choice. It may not be this quarter, or this year, but when you create the right nexus of cost and value, competition will not matter.

The primary message here is to get feedback and be ready to respond. Create better value through knowledge (and potentially cost) and drive depth of relationship through knowledge transfer and social engagement. Saying NO is hard for C’s to do. They WANT to says yes. I have found the the C-level is always focused on opportunity and what happens next. Take advantage of that. If they aren’t ready, bide your time wisely. If they say no because of cost, create more value. If they say no because they chose someone else, then stay in place. Create value and they will says yes.

Paid Search is pretty close to magic. Find some keywords, type a few characters, and bingo, instant success, right? Well, not quite. This is a very short primer for the small businesses out there who are running their own campaigns.

7 Things to Know About Paid Search

1. Pick Your Keywords Carefully (Marketer Know Thyself): Let’s imagine that you sell antique pet items. Before you write one single ad, you need to work backwards.Who is your customer? What will they be searching for? In our case, the antique pet item enthusiast isn’t likely to search broadly for the word “antiques” (BTW, Google gets about 5,000,000 searches a month for that word). Don’t be seduced by volume. Target the terms that are the most relevant to you. Your target customer has a unique language. Learn it! “Antique pet items” gets almost no volume, but when your ad show to that searcher…it will be a mutual win!
2. Broad Match Is Not Your Friend: Google has two top-level options for keyword targeting – Broad Match and Exact Match. Broad match is allowing Google to match your query to things that are similar to your keyword. So, if you are selling “antique yarn toys for cats”, your ads may show up for queries like “cat toys” or “pet toys”. While they are very similar, it is unlikely that your ad for a specific antique cat toy will have broad appeal to the general audience. But you will be getting a LOT more exposure. So, part of you thinks, “Great!”…but if you follow it through, lots of exposure could mean a lot of clicks…to an audience that is very broad. That means lots of CPC cost…at little return. The promise and premise of Adwords advertising is efficiency. A targeted ad to an interested party. Broad match defeats that and drives your efficiency down.
3. Don’t Let Google Set Your Bids: Despite the fox watching the hen house theories, I believe that Google tries to do the right thing in paid search. They are in this for the long run, so they aren’t out trying to steal your money through inefficient bidding. But, bidding according to algorithms is hard, especially on the fringes of volume. If you are bidding on lower volume keywords where the data isn’t all that great, Google is going to guess…and they can guess badly. I did a test with Kilroy Critter Care – I let Google set the bids on small volume keywords in a really narrow set of zip codes…so the data set was tiny. I was paying an average of $7 a click using Google. When I set the bidding per keyword, my average click now costs about $0.53. Google wasn’t trying to scam me…it is just that the data set that I asked it to model wasn’t sufficient, so it failed. Handle this yourself…or hire someone to think about it for you.
4. This Is Advertising – So Advertise: Google doesn’t give you a lot of real estate to work with, so you will have to be creative. If you don’t have a strong brand, you have to give potential visitors some reason to click on your ad. Creative matters. It could be free shipping, or gift with purchase, or that you are a family-run business…but try to cram a little of yourself into the handful of characters that Google allows. It will result in higher click through rates. Our tagline of “Kid Run Pet Care” pulls twice as many clicks as “We Care For Your Pets Like Our Own”. Marketing matters, even in the math-focused world of paid search.
5. Track Your Conversions: You aren’t buying a billboard. You aren’t buying a TV ad. You are buying a click. And you can track that click. You can find out what word attracted the visitor and what they bought. Install the conversion tracking pixel…so that you can calculate your return on spend. It matters. Traffic isn’t worth paying for…sales are. If you aren’t in e-commerce and want to track calls, or newsletter signups, or contact forms, you can do all of that too. It can get a little complicated, but I know that you can figure it out. Data helps you make decisions. So capture it. If you can’t or won’t install the conversion pixel (or a similar tracking protocol) I would suggest NOT using paid search…it just defeats the real benefit of targeted keyword-based advertising.
6. Watch Your Margins: Lots of business only focus on retail price vs. item cost (or service cost). You need to think about your marketing costs (on a transactional and lifetime basis) vs your margin (on a transactional basis and lifetime basis). PPC gives you the opportunity to drive traffic efficiently, but it has incremental cost. PPC, used inefficiently, tugs at your margins. (And for a quick look at at the economics of paid search and discounting, read George Michie’s blog post at the RKG Blog). So target carefully (tip 1&2), gather data (tip 5) so that you are driving a campaign that is making you money.
7. Test: Paid Search is NOT a set and forget it marketing activity. It requires active management and testing. From testing keywords to bidding to creative to geo-location targeting, gathering data and testing is what makes you successful. Test as many times as you can, test as many options as you can, and let the data tell you what to do.

Watch for the rest of the SMB series coming soon!

I’ve been in e-commerce for a long, long time (since the 1990′s…back when there was dial-up, no Google, and I was smarter than my phone). And technology has evolved massively since the early days. But for many e-commerce players, their thinking about presentation hasn’t changed very much. For many, products are static things that are only sold through the application of traffic. Products are presented, largely, without thought of who is looking at it. The product page is a static and dull place. Sure, there may be some dynamic product recommendations from folks like MyBuys or iGoDigital, but the product is exactly the same, no matter who is looking at it. It is time to change that thinking.

The equation Traffic x Conversion Rate has two variables. Traffic helps, but at some point, traffic generation becomes noise. You will do all kinds of stuff to drive people to your site, hoping that encapsulated within all that traffic, there is the audience you were really hoping to find. It is pretty inefficient. For the rest of this post, let’s imagine that now until forever, the amount traffic to your site will not change. What would you do? The formula is still true, but now traffic is a constant.

You focus on conversion rates. For many marketers, this jumps quickly into things like shopping cart design, or pricing strategies. These things are important, of course, but they aren’t causal. Recently, I was speaking with a large online retailer who was told me that he couldn’t afford to increase conversion rates. After picking my jaw up off the ground, I asked him why. He stated that increased conversion was tightly correlated to declining margins, so the the net result was that increased conversions lowered profits. OMFG.

So, of course, increased conversions mean lowered margins if pricing and promotions are the only weapons in your arsenal. But online marketers have incredible tools. They have purchase history(what have you bought before), they have entry data (did they come from a search? Did they come from an affiliate?), they have frequency (have you been to this page recently?). These are all the tools that we use to do retargeting…off of our site. Retargeting is a great form of activation, but why don’t we leverage the same thinking while the customer is on our site? Why don’t we create a dynamic environment that leverages the same data? If someone comes to a site looking for blue skinny pants, you should be able to give them a page that is about blue skinny pants (this is the stuff that Bloomreach does…smart folks…see why they are changing SEO for the better). If someone comes to you from an affiliate ad on a content site, why not have a widget that shows how the content publisher contextualized the product? If this product was recommended by a friend, why don’t you highlight this? Does this customer typically pay via Discover? Remind them that they can get cash back on this purchase with that card.

We live in a world of big data. And online marketers capture so much data about their customers. There are thousands of actionable data points available to marketers to make their experience unique for each customer. Marketers should be jumping into this world of micro-personalization with both feet. There are services like Monetate that are a start, but each marketer should be thinking from the ground up. Your customers and their experiences are static. With every interaction, you have the opportunity to create relevance. Grab it, leverage it, and change the equation!

I’m excited to be working with Dominic, Allan and the team.

1. Don’t Think That An Hour Is a Small Investment: I get dozens of requests for “just an hour”…hours are precious. If you are selling, don’t make the initial request for a meeting. Get me interested in your value proposition first. If you ask for a meeting to explain your value, you won’t get it. Think of the meeting as your first trial close…I have to be sold on your value before I will spend my time. For many C-executives, their currency is time and attention. Before they will invest their currency, they have to be sure that there will be some return.

2. Your Solution Is Not a Magic Bullet: Regardless of how incredible your solution is, it doesn’t put out all the fires in the C-suite. While you should be authoritative about your solution and the impact, never assume that yours is the solution to the biggest fire in your prospect’s day. The C-prospect has a million issues to deal with, from internal and external constituencies, that all demand resolution. Try to contextualize your solution so that your prospect can see where it fits into their list of things that are on fire. Ask questions, probe and help your prospect see why yours is the answer. It may not be self evident to the prospect. But remember, every vendor is trying to promote their product or service as the thing that needs to be acted upon now. Distinguish yourself by asking great questions, by confirming some intuition you have about the client’s business, by helping your prospect understand that you understand. Hard to do with a quota hanging over your head, I know, but understanding how your solution fits into their world will distinguish you.

3. Don’t Pester: It never helps. If the C-level person doesn’t respond to your VM or e-mail, it means a couple of things – either your value proposition wasn’t clear and compelling enough, or they are just busy! In the space of four days, from one intrepid sales weasel, I got an e-mail, 2 voice mails, and an exasperated e-mail with the subject line of “????!!!!”. That e-mail essentially berated me because I didn’t respond quickly enough. From my perspective, I didn’t know this person, their company, or frankly, what they did. There was no compelling reason to call them.

4.Don’t Sell Against Someone Else: You have competitors. Other people do what you do. Don’t sell me on what they do that isn’t good. Sell me on why you are the best. Sell your strengths. If you bash the competition, you are simply creating an environment where you have me wondering about your holes. Customers buy strengths, not because they wish to avoid your competition’s weaknesses.

5. I Don’t Have a Budget: if you ask me for my budget, it is very, very likely that either I don’t have one for you, OR I am not prepared to tell you what it is. If I tell you that I have a budget of $25K, I can be certain that your product or service will cost very close to that. If I don’t tell you the budget, we can negotiate in my favor. That’s what the C-level gets paid to do…

6. Don’t Ask Me to Link In If We’ve Never Met: I get about a dozen requests a week from people I’ve never heard of on LinkedIn. They are often sales people. If you ask me to become part of your network before I know if you have any value, you have asked me to engage with you without providing value. That is the inverse approach. Provide value, then engage.

7. It Isn’t Always About Price: This is hard. Companies make purchase decisions around a lot of metrics, and price is certainly one of them. But it isn’t the only one. Companies buy because of trust, because of past successes, because of insight…telling me that your solution will cost less than the competitor or whatever will not make the sale.

8. Make It About Me, Not You: The most successful sales efforts come from the point where the vendor has gone out of their way to show me how their solution benefits ME. Rather than focusing on what you do, position this so that I easily understand how your solutions fit inside my experience. Use publicly available data to make guesses, spend some time thinking like your customer, make the effort to make the connections for me. Even if you are wrong, the good C will be able to understand your thinking, and more importantly, make the connections themselves.

9. Listen Carefully: Any executive will tell you what their pain is, if you listen. It may be sales, it may be costs, it may be processes, but when we start talking, the C-suite will always tell you what they need. Why do we tell you? Because we are in the problem solving business. We talk about our problems so that we hope someone will help us fix them. Listen to what we are saying, and you will know how to contextualize what you sell.

10. We Don’t Fix What Isn’t Broken: If we have solution that is working, we aren’t likely to change providers. Even if you are better or faster or stronger, the C- suite is always fixing points of pain. And while we may be change agents, we don’t change for changes’ sake. If we tell you that we have a solution that works, think of that as an opportunity to have an extended dialogue. We’ve just taken you off of the fast-track, but that means that we have the opportunity to explore the fit over time. Seed us with information and content. Fill our head with case studies. Make us want you. Seduce us. Slowly.

11. Make Us Trust You: As a C-level prospect, I have probably been around the block a bunch of times. I know a lot of people. Use my network to influence me. As your customers who they know. Ask if they will make introductions. A referral from a friend or other industry contact will make me listen. If you are selling to the C, you should know the folks that the C knows…other C’s, investors, etc.

12. Know Something About My Business: You should have some idea what my company does. You should know how big I am. You should know if I am a high-margin or low-margin business. You should know why I think my company is special. You should know the value that I provide to my customers. Do some research. Prepare. Don’t wing it. It won’t work. (And show me that you did this research, get me to confirm all of the stuff that you know…)

13. DON’T WASTE MY TIME: This is the most important point of all. Never come to a meeting without a goal. Never make a call without a point to it. We are all looking for incremental steps towards improvement. If you don’t have a purpose, don’t make contact. Don’t be afraid to decide that there isn’t an opportunity. Be decisive, be on point, and don’t be afraid to cut your losses. I will be more receptive the next time you call if we made progress the last time. And if there isn’t a fit, and you pull the plug, the next time you reach out, I will respond because I will have assumed that you’ve discovered a fit. Make every communication high value.

There are thousands of complexities when it comes to C-level sales. These are just 13 quick thoughts. We want the vendor vetting process to be simple, seamless and successful. How can you help?

There are swaths of the market that are open go from higher end (The Iconic) to the curated (Surf Stich) to the mammoth (The Nile). Today’s Australian e-commerce scene is advanced in terms of design, functionality and business model. This is a country where a pure-play online company can capture meaningful revenue through differentiation. While they compete with the offline stores, the Australian e-commerce scene isn’t trying to beat traditional retailers, but rather pursue an independent path of success.

What is truly refreshing is that the online players are trying to win at their own game rather than by stealing share from someone else (that market share swap inevitably happens, but it isn’t the point…). What I mean by this is the online player in Australia is thriving because of their skill at their business, not because they capture customers because of discounts, gimmicks or esoterica, they win business because they efficiently serve their markets. They maximize their efficiencies and minimize the friction. On some level, I attribute this to the lack of Amazon effect. While Amazon serves Australia, it does not have a domestic presence there. Amazon has not yet entered the market with its margin eroding model. This absence of economic disruption has allowed the eco-system to thrive in a way that allows for more players to survive. This is no small advantage. Without the Amazon lowest-price pressure, there is more breathing room. Businesses fight each other on a more level playing field, and the race to the bottom has slowed. It is, perhaps, a kinder environment that allows more flora and fauna to thrive rather than the austere landscape of the Amazon desert.

So what does all this mean? First, it means that Amazon has an opportunity to be very disruptive in this market, so be prepared. But also it means that for the time being, Australian e-commerce players have the opportunity to grow their businesses with reasonable margins so they have the luxury of innovation WITH resources. With focus on the beauty of the customer experience and wrenching the friction out of the transactions, these businesses have the opportunity to innovate out of profit dollars rather than loss-leading investment dollars. By growing out of profit, the opportunity is tempered by the size of the profit. This requires more rigorous decision making than having a trunk full of VC dollars. With a smaller pot of cash, the innovation will happen incrementally, rather than with the madcap frenzy of boom and bust investment cycles.

The end result may be that consumer innovation happens more slowly, but the economy will be more diverse, more healthy, and more stable. Stability and health will drive trust, engagement, and happy customers.