A brand is what identifies one seller's unique abilities distinctly from other alternatives. People evaluate alternative brands in their buying choices all the time. They consider Coca-Cola versus Pepsi, Acura versus Lexus, McDonald's versus Burger King, or Apple versus Microsoft when evaluating the kinds of products or services that each brand represents. There is safety and reassurance in selecting a strong brand, because it represents a consistent ability to deliver on a set of buyer expectations and perceptions. Buyers know, or at least they think that they know, what they are getting when they buy a well-established brand.
Whether sellers are consciously aware of it or not, they are creating their personal brand through their actions. A seller's brand is his or her reputation—what the seller is personally known for. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.”3 A seller's personal brand is completely separate from the organization they represent.
Sellers who assume the Micro-Marketer persona recognize the importance of their personal brand. They actively develop their personal brand to differentiate themselves, so that buyers perceive them as credible, trustworthy, expert, and a distinct value-add, especially when compared to other alternatives.
To define their personal brand, sellers should first consider some introspective questions, such as, “What is it about me that makes me unique? What have I accomplished that I can share with others? What do I want to be remembered by?” Sellers can evaluate what they think their brand is today, and then examine whether there is a gap between that and where they want to be.
Sellers can then compose a personal brand statement—a promise made to themselves and to their customers. It should be a simple statement that summarizes their core values and beliefs and makes that seller stand out. It should be authentic and true to who they think they are. This brand statement should be simple (easy to remember and communicate to others), relevant (they can connect it to what they do), and believable (because seller credibility depends on it).
With a clear personal brand statement, sellers can then build their reputation by becoming better known in the world they service—their industry, accounts, customers, and potential buyers. They can begin to increase visibility of their personal brand in that world.
Gary Vaynerchuk, author of the New York Times best seller Crush It!, said, “I think that it is important to build a personal brand.… Your reputation online and in the new business world is pretty much the game, and so you've got to be a good person because you can't hide anything and more importantly, you've got to be out there at some level.”4
It is in sellers' best interests to consider how their personal brand is perceived online and to take steps to improve it on an ongoing basis. Micro-Marketers can monitor the development of their online personal brand, using tools like Klout and Peer Index, which track the extent and effectiveness of their developing presence on the social web. Other sites like BrandYourself.com and Reputation.com further help sellers improve their chances to be found online—and also to appear in a positive light.
Jill Rowley is an example of someone who has developed a personal brand. Rowley leveraged social media to become one of the top sales representatives for Eloqua, a leading marketing automation platform. As the self-proclaimed “Eloqueen,” Rowley used tools like blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to “socially surround” her prospects and add value long before any sales engagement took place. When Oracle acquired Eloqua in 2012, they hired Rowley to further the cause of what is now called Social Selling at Oracle, with the appropriate title of Social Selling Evangelist.
“The modern sales professional is actually not a seller, but is someone who helps people buy,” Rowley says. “This is someone who helps the buyer understand his problem, helps the buyer understand there's a solution to the problem, and helps the buyer understand why her company is uniquely qualified to solve the buyer's problem. Today's buyers are better informed by information available via the web and social connections.”5
By establishing a persistent online presence and using this to demonstrate expertise and thought leadership, Micro-Marketers can convey their personal brand to Buyer 2.0, and also help shape the buyer's initial vision of potential solutions to problems before any further sales engagement. By becoming a valued contributor to the conversation with Buyer 2.0, sellers can once again connect with prospective customers early in their buying process—and in so doing, they can influence the requirements and specifications required in eventual purchases.
Planning and Executing a Micro-Marketer Strategy
Once sellers have developed relevant situational fluency and defined their personal brand, they can then plan and execute a Micro-Marketer strategy. The five components of a Micro-Marketer strategy, illustrated in Figure 4.2, are:
Target. Identify the key audiences to focus Micro-Marketer activity upon.
Listen and monitor. Identify and track the most relevant resources for buyer conversations.
Network and participate. Connect with buyers and contribute to conversations.
Create and respond to demand. Cultivate any stimulated or expressed interest of buyers.
Manage and nurture. Maintain connection and provide value to latent buyers.
Figure 4.2 Components of Micro-Marketer Strategy
Target
In order to stimulate the interest of Buyer 2.0, sellers must first decide what kinds of buyers they need to interest. This may sound obvious, but few sellers take the time to think about the ideal kinds of problems that their capabilities can solve, and who owns those problems—that is, the specific jobs, in specific industries and departmental functions, that are held accountable for the business and performance issues that a seller's capabilities could address or improve. These key buyer roles are the ideal targets for Micro-Marketer activities. They represent the most likely prospects with the highest potential for buying.
Once the ideal target criteria have been established, sellers can then narrow the scope of where they can find those potential buyers. What online social groups would they participate in? What industry or trade association resources would they find valuable? What specific companies and individuals represent the best fit with the target criteria? Do those companies maintain their own blogs and online forums? Sellers can use the target criteria to determine where they can find Buyer 2.0 conversations—and where they need to listen and monitor.
Listen and Monitor
Sellers can subscribe to RSS feeds on relevant customer and industry websites to receive regular updates and bulletins. They can establish keyword searches using tools like Google Alerts, Twitter Search, and Social Mention.
They may also set up trigger event monitors in tools such as InsideView, Nimble, and SalesLoft to keep a finger on the pulse of the latest trends and news that would be of interest to their buyers. For example, sellers could set the search term declining sales revenue in InsideView for designated accounts or industries, if that is relevant to their capabilities, and then periodically scan all related notifications sent to their e-mail inbox to see if any articles indicate a potential opportunity.
We recommend that sellers who are new to online communities approach them quietly at first. Observe the kind of questions that are being asked, the discussions that generate the most controversy, the resources that are most frequently shared and quoted, and the manner in which people who overstep the social norms of the community are treated. This kind of quiet observation is often referred to as “lurking,” a term that sounds more sinister than it really is. Lurkers watch others in an online community without actively participating, and doing this initially helps sellers to learn the community's accepted code of conduct.
We've heard sad tales about sellers who violated acceptable online community behavior, where they lost valuable social capital with potential buyers and current customers. No one wants to do business with someone who does not comply with behavioral norms, and it's easy to get that
reputation if you aren't aware of the expected social conventions used in online social groups. When in doubt, find and ask one of the founders or current administrators of the group, forum, blog, or website. Usually, they are happy to provide any formal guidelines or recommended dos and don'ts for engaging with other participants or group members.
By listening and monitoring, sellers can be alerted to situations that may be ideal for subsequent engagement in direct demand-creation activities, using relevant messaging that references the alert source. For example, after reading an alert about an event in a target financial services company, a seller may send a message to an identified potential buyer, beginning with: “John, I recently read an article on XYZ online news detailing your recent acquisition and merger, and the impact that was likely to have on revenue attainment. We have helped other financial services organizations surpass revenue targets during major acquisitions.…” This personalized message is more relevant to the buyer, and is more likely to be received and acted upon.
Network and Participate
Another important component of a Micro-Marketer strategy is to network and participate. Since Buyer 2.0 is using the social web to conduct their own research and interact with peers to discuss problems and solutions, sellers need to find those conversations, contribute to them, and be of genuine help and value, if they can. Once again, specific targeting criteria can help to identify the most relevant online resources and groups to join. These may include Facebook pages, Google+ communities, LinkedIn groups, and trade association and industry forums. An increasing number of companies themselves also host public blogs and forums, and sellers should routinely review any provided by targeted prospects.
Targeted prospect individuals may have their own blogs, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles and groups, and Facebook pages. By using LinkedIn, for example, sellers can review useful information about the identified contact's background, education, specialties, and employment history, as well as social web groups where the contact may participate. They can also see if they share common connections, which they might use to get further advice or insight, or to gain a warm introduction. Twitter Search can also help sellers gain further insight about the contact and the industry.
To build their personal brands, the best Micro-Marketers work diligently to develop their own online presence. In addition to monitoring and participating in social web activities, some also start their own blogs and post to them regularly, or they use approved blogging resources provided by their organizations.
Using a “microblog” service like Twitter to distribute links to relevant news stories, or to links to the seller's blog posts about the implications of such developments and what they could mean to buyers, can be of profound interest to a seller's intended audience. Some sellers use automated content-gathering technology, like Curata, Scoop.it, and Paper.li, to assemble useful websites for targeted buyers, which coincidentally help them to remain abreast of current business trends. (See Figure 4.3 for an example of a curated website—in this case, SPI's Sales Performance Review page at www.salesperformancereview.com, which uses Curata to collect information about sales performance improvement for our clients.)
Figure 4.3 Example of a Curated Content Website
By setting up information distribution processes with a service such as Buffer or Twitterfeed, and by consolidating online updates using a tool such as HootSuite or Sprout Social, Micro-Marketers can post simultaneously to Twitter and other online social networking sites with minimal effort, providing convenient links to useful news items of interest to buyers.
Create and Respond to Demand
As sellers network and participate in social web conversations, they will discover buyer situations that represent ideal opportunities for solving problems and creating new value. This is when sellers should follow up directly and attempt to create buyer interest in how they might help their specific situation. This must be done tactfully and in the context of the conversation, in order to be effective.
For example, in response to a recent exchange of ideas on an industry forum, a seller might send a message starting with: “John, I'm glad you found my response to your question in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group on LinkedIn to be helpful. I have been thinking about your challenge, and I wanted personally follow up with you.…” The seller can then outline some potential ideas, and recommended next steps.
Nurture and Manage
Even if executing the Micro-Marketer persona does not result in immediate sales opportunities, it serves another important purpose: it enables faster and more proficient development of situational fluency in a seller. As they hear relevant news and trends, sellers become more knowledgeable about their buyers' industry, businesses, and best practices. As they build their expertise, sellers will develop greater confidence and more insight and passion about how they can be of help to their customers. The Micro-Marketer persona enables sellers to build the situational expertise they need to differentiate themselves from other sellers. They do this by managing and nurturing their understanding of buyers, and in so doing, developing better relationships with them. The result is a greater propensity for developing new opportunities as they emerge early in the buying process.
Marketing Automation as a Micro-Marketing Tool
A marketing automation system (MAS) can be an effective nurturing tool for Micro-Marketers, enabling them to foster the development of potential buyer relationships. A MAS allows for the creation of nurturing campaigns that will automatically send relevant content to potential buyers based on trigger events, such as downloading a white paper or signing up for a webinar. These applications score the levels and types of interaction of early-stage buyers with the seller's organization, and encourage higher levels of engagement by providing useful content based on explicitly expressed or implied buyer interests.
Historically, leads were given to sellers to qualify—not a bad idea, if the person who expressed interest was ready to buy. However, this is not always the case. MAS applications such as Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot can help nurture “not yet sales-ready” leads to the point where it makes sense to transfer them to sellers. Figure 4.4 shows a sample nurturing campaign dashboard screen from a MAS system from Pardot, a Salesforce.com company.
Figure 4.4 Example of a Marketing Automation System
Enabling the Micro-Marketer Persona
Even though the Micro-Marketer persona is very useful for engaging early with Buyer 2.0, we find that many sellers are nevertheless uncomfortable with this persona and developing their own personal brand. Some sellers believe that branding and buyer interest stimulation should be consigned to their organization's marketing department. They fear that by taking on the Micro-Marketer persona, they may be overstepping into job responsibilities that are claimed exclusively by marketing.
Sellers may also lack the technical know-how for logging into and participating in the social web, where Buyer 2.0 is having conversations. They may assume that this is a technical subject that is best left to social media experts in the marketing team.
More commonly, sellers who avoid becoming Micro-Marketers simply don't know what to say that would be of interest to their buyers. Either they have not yet developed sufficient situational fluency or they lack the confidence in their own knowledge and experience to believe that buyers would find their opinions of value.
In order to overcome these obstacles, organizations should consider the following:
Sales and marketing management must publicly embrace the Micro-Marketer persona for sellers by establishing company policies that provide sellers with the authority to develop their own “brands of one.” Managers should allay concerns about the appropriate use of social media by establishing clear guidelines for social media ownership and content.
Because situational fluency and the confidence to apply it with buyers is the foundation of being a Micro-Marketer, training and educational content on buyers' industries, business issues, and best practices should be made
available to sellers—in addition to training on product and service capabilities.
Next, identifying relevant social media tools and technologies and mapping them to execution of specific Micro-Marketer sales activities can give sellers a logical framework for knowing when to execute these methods and what tools to use to do so.
Provision of relevant social web tools to sellers, along with any required training on their proper use, will enable sellers to accept and execute the Micro-Marketer persona with more proficiency.
Finally, charging the marketing team with the development of suitable thought leadership content for use by sellers can help to “prime the pump” of material for use in Micro-Marketing activities, and sustain it as an ongoing practice.
In some regulated industries, such as health care or financial services, the boundaries of what a seller can or cannot say to a buyer are strictly defined. But even under these kinds of restrictions, organizations can help their sellers to be effective Micro-Marketers and develop their own personal brand with their customers. Technologies such as rFactr's SocialPort application can be used to distribute approved content for use in conversations with Buyer 2.0 and still meet regulatory requirements (see Figures 4.5 and 4.6). This puts more responsibility on product and strategic marketing teams to create that content, of course, but it ensures legal compliance while still helping sellers to engage with Buyer 2.0 early in the buying cycles.
Figure 4.5 Example of a Social Messaging Management System
The content management screen from the rFactr SocialPort application, which allows sellers to monitor social media posts and content relevant to their interests.
The Collaborative Sale Page 7