How the butcher taught me to go up the Sales Value Chain !

Full disclosure - I have never visited a butcher but this story I heard about one tempts me to confer a Sales Guru title on the protagonist ! The story goes something like this - an old lady in a village went to the market to buy supplies for the home every week. She would buy meat from which ever butcher had the better product on the day at the best price. She was buying a Commodity which offered the sellers little opportunity for differentiation or for longer term customer retention.

Over time she started  buying meat more often than not from the same butcher because he seemed to usually have better quality goods & a reasonable price. This butcher had made the transition to selling a Product with some kind of assurance of quality & potential for garnering customer loyalty.

After a few weeks of this the butcher told the lady that he had noticed that on each visit she bought items from a few different shops & he offered that if she would give him a list of all the things she wanted in the week in advance he would buy all the items & keep them at his shop for her to pick up when she came to buy the meat. This would save her time & effort & she could still get everything she needed.  The lady eagerly accepted the Service the butcher was offering. The move from a Product to a Service allows much greater scope for differentiation & for tailoring unique benefits for customers that could potentially reduce the need for the customer to consider competitors.

It then transpired that the lady fell ill & could not make it to the market for a couple of weeks. While recuperating at home she was surprised by a visit from the butcher. He had with him a bundle of goods typical of those the lady usually ordered along with some portions of meat. In response to the lady's incredulity he said that he had inquired from one of the lady's friends at the market the reason for her recent absence & learnt of her illness. He thought of paying a visit to check how she was doing & of getting some supplies along since she would not have been able to stock up on provisions for two weeks. Clearly the butcher, apart from being a nice guy, was a true sales genius. In one move he stepped up the ladder to forming a genuine Relationship with his customer - something that most sales people dream of. After achieving this stage as long as one can consistently deliver value you could have a customer for life. 

The story of the butcher & the lady serves up a road map for those of us in sales - the aim should always be to move up the value chain from a Commodity to a Product to a Service & finally a Relationship. The higher one goes the greater the opportunity for differentiation & for cementing customer relationships that last. The other lesson to be learnt is to pay attention to those that we buy from - after all they're sales people too & may have a nugget or two of wisdom to offer !

The dreaded "Let's Keep in Touch" - How to ?

A Pod of Podcasts !

One of the biggest challenges I have personally encountered in the B2B sales space is how to "keep in touch" with people we have presented ourselves to in the past but the compelling event (funding for the purchase, organisational preparedness for adoption, external factors etc.) that heralds a "live opportunity" is still some way off. It would be ideal if there was a steady stream of "non salesy" but relevant information that could be shared with such prospects with the view to staying on their radar, taking on a thought leadership position, forming a relationship & so on ! Let me introduce you to the podcast interview - done right this could do all that & also offer you the opportunity to form a warm & real relationship with the leaders in the industry.

The suggested method is :

1. First identify some well known or respected voices in the industry relevant to your product / service & approach them with the view to interview them to create a podcast. People usually want to help so in most cases where the intent of the interview is clearly to present something of real value to the community without commercializing it they will try to do so within their own constraints of time & schedule. It's important to make it as easy as possible for the interviewee to participate - so no downloading of software, no calling into international nos. & so on.

2. The topic of the interview should be mutually agreed upon - clearly this cannot be directly about your product / service. Remember the intention is to present something of real value to the audience so stick to talking about genuine problems, solutions, advances in technology etc. 

3.  The actual interview should be recorded, edited & published in as professional a manner as possible – on your own web properties as well as any third party sites & groups that allow this (for eg. Linked Groups).   

4. The podcast should also be promoted over the various social media channels - this gives you something to talk about over the lifecycle of the event. You should also request the interviewee to promote the podcast to their own followers, friends etc. This should help drive up traffic to your web properties.

5. This is also a communication that should then be sent out to the customers, partners and "warm" & "cold" prospects in your database. This is a golden opportunity to communicate with them in a “non-threatening, obligation-free manner” with the added benefit of allowing you to take a thought leadership position - almost by reflection ! 

6. The process of approaching, confirming & setting up of the interview also offers ample opportunity to build a strong & warm relationship with the leader being interviewed & to leave them with a positive feeling about your organisation. 

Even a couple of podcasts a month can feed a reasonably steady effort to reach out to your customers & prospects. What's more "Ye olde podcasts" can always be recycled when they relate to events that come up in the news cycle or when there is a need to re-establish contact with someone with a specific interest area. As an example I can point you to http://www.techpostmedia.com/podcasts - the host is perhaps not the greatest (blush, blush) but the guests are usually top notch !