When I was doing research for this posting I found out something really interesting about solution selling. Before the 70’s the term did not exist. Without going into the entire history, the methodology of “solution selling” was a term dubbed by Frank Watts who was working for a technology company in the mid 1970’s. He later became a sales consultant and made the methodology popular in business circles. What I thought was interesting was that the term quickly became a cliché (as most popular terms do) and became popular as a product or business name, like “advertising solutions” or “IT solutions”… you get the point.

Over the past 35 plus years most companies have recognized that their prospects have problems and they are looking for solutions. It’s odd that such an obvious and successful concept is so young and yet many companies have still not fully adopted the principals of solution selling. For example, I recently called a popular phone company because I was thinking about switching to a less expensive VOIP service. Instead of answering my direct questions I got a sales pitch. The person on the other end responded to my questions by stating a benefit that was loosely related to my area of concern. It was an awful experience. They were not presenting solutions to my problems and they lost the chance to sell me anything after about 5 minutes. With my son beginning to scream in the background, I was able to convince the person on the phone that I really needed to go.

I have always wondered what is said during the sales meetings for these companies with high-pressure sales tactics. I am sure they talk about how to counter every objection, keep someone on the phone, get the commitment, close the deal! Do you think they ever discuss how to keep a customer, make someone feel important, solve someone’s problem? I doubt it.

I have been attending our sales meetings here at Structural Graphics for about eight years and we have always talked about solution selling. I think when you’re selling marketing products you have to be a solution seller. We could talk about all of the benefits of working with us, our great people, fast turnaround times, experienced design team, but what do our customers really care about? They want us to help them reach more customers. They want to engage more prospects and increase response rates. If we can’t do that, the benefits of working with us don’t matter. A large percentage of our clients are returning customers and that is because we are a solutions provider. All of the benefits are great too, but they come back for our marketing solutions.

It’s easy for marketers to get obsessed with numbers. Our marketing department reports on numbers like “web visits” and “twitter followers” to show how effective we are being. We must be doing well if thousands of people like our Facebook page, or visit our website. Right?

Not so much. These numbers are nice to report on and make cool looking graphs and pie charts, but they aren’t the pulse of our business. Our business is centered on engagement and loyalty. Our job, both in the marketing department and for our clients, is to create engagement and loyalty and as a natural result, sales-ready leads.

Avinash Kaushik, the digital marketing evangelist for Google presented to the audience of the well-known digital marketing event SES in Toronto. The message was “don’t use stupid metrics”. There’s a great summary of the presentation in BtoB magazine that I wanted to share. It’s a great reminder to all marketers that we cannot be measured by clicks, views, Likes, follows and all of those other words that meant something completely different 15 years ago. Read the full article here.

Last Friday I was one of the millions of people who logged-on or tuned in to watch the IPO of Facebook. I added the stock ticker to my browser and watched it through the corner of my eye for the remainder of the trading day. I’m not a day trader, or heavily invested in stocks, I was just interested in how Facebook would fare on Wall Street. It had been so widely publicized that I wanted to watch history being made in real-time. In reality, history was not made. Instead, Wall Street offered a reality check to the digital business model.

At about 11:30 the Google Finance ticker came alive and the stock slowly crept up. I remember thinking how nice it would have been to be able to buy into the IPO at the “bargain” price of $38. After a peak of $43 or so, it started to trickle back down to its initial price. It never regained momentum, and three trading days after the IPO, the stock sits at $31. Some commentators came out immediately and blamed the fact that the 28 year old CEO wore a hoodie to his “impress Wall Street” tour. Others said the valuation was so much higher than the actual value of the business; and added that to meet earnings expectations they would likely have to turn off a large percentage of their user base with an increase in annoying advertisements.

One undebatable fact is that Facebook needs to raise revenue. There has been a lot of speculation on how they can do this. There has been talk of an e-commerce payments product, similar to Paypal. Sure, why not? They know everything about you now; why not give them access to your checking account? Okay, that was sarcastic, but since Facebook has an iffy track record with privacy, this may not be the best idea. Can’t you see the notifications? “Four friends would like to know how much money you have, click here to post it on your wall.”

Perhaps the greatest opportunity is in attracting B2B marketers, something they have been lagging behind their competitors in. The chart below is from an inbound marketing study conducted in 2011 by Hubspot. You can see B2B and B2C customer acquisition through various digital channels.

To strengthen their B2B advertising product, Facebook needs to offer features that attract B2B marketers. For example, their ad analytics capabilities are still very basic and simple. They could also add more of a variety of ads, such as interactive banner ads, videos, and even an integrated instant response form that advertisers could add to their business pages, creating some type of landing page platform. Lastly, with the majority of Facebook users accessing their accounts on mobile devices, perhaps there is an opportunity to offer advertisers access to an integrated QR Code scanner, location-based notifications and more. The possibilities are really only limited by two things; the creativity of Facebook’s development team and the willingness of users to share their data.

The coming months will reveal Facebook’s plans for increasing revenue, and I wouldn’t bet against them. I wouldn’t necessarily buy their stock either, but keep this in mind. Facebook has access to an enormous amount of talented entrepreneurs, experienced executives and creative designers and programmers. They’ll find a way to fulfill the promise they made to the public last Friday.

Stemming from the overwhelming success of AMC’s Mad Men, a spinoff has been born. Premiering last month, AMC has opened the doors to the chaotic, unpredictable and sometimes cutthroat world of ad agencies. The narrative centers around two agencies that are chosen to pitch new campaign ideas to a major brand. The show doesn’t feel overproduced, like most “reality” TV, but is heavily edited to squeeze in a week of agency work, and a big pitch all in one nice hour-long package. You don’t have to be in advertising to enjoy the show. My wife and I watched the first two episodes of the series last night and I found two interesting takeaways.

Funny doesn’t always translate.

McKinney, an agency in Durham, was pitching two ideas to the executives at Subway. One of their ideas was very well received and they ultimately won the business. However, the other idea just didn’t translate from the creative sanctuary of the McKinney offices. As they were explaining the idea to the executives, there were uncomfortable blank stares of boredom and confusion. In fact, you didn’t really get the sense that the pitchman was into it either. Though you were only given a few minutes of what was likely many hours of discussion between the creatives at the agency, the viewer was led to believe the idea was ill-conceived and perhaps a bit forced. The idea that was funny, creative and edgy to the team at McKinney just didn’t translate to the executives at Subway.

It’s easy to get an idea or concept stuck in your head that you just believe is brilliant. And it may be, but you may be the only one that thinks so. In fact, there’s a bit of science behind it. Studies have shown that people with specific political persuasions tend to process news very differently. News stories that support a point of view are often given far more credence than stories that oppose one’s views. The truth should just be reality, but it rarely is. This phenomenon isn’t surprising to anyone who watches cable news in today’s divisive political climate.

Is there a lesson here? I suppose it’s that taking risks and thinking differently is good, and you should defend your ideas vigorously. But, know when to wave the white flag.

Trampling a project to death.

Back at WDCW, an agency just down the road from our west coast office in Culver City, the creatives had an idea percolating. They wanted to sell Subway’s breakfast to a tough demographic, 18-24 year olds. They were working on a concept “zAMbies” that likened the young breakfast seekers to zombies who needed a fresh new breakfast routine.

The concept was new and creative, but risky. It didn’t look like anything Subway had ever done. While the agency was working on the idea, overseeing the project was the agency founder, Tracy Wong. He made a great point about the creative process. While pointing out how hard the entire team was working on the project, he reminded viewers that it’s easy for ideas to get stepped on, suggesting that too many people were involved.

I would venture to bet that everyone in advertising has experienced this frustration. An idea starts getting kicked around a team, then another group weighs in, then senior management puts in their two cents, and eventually the concept is trampled to death, crushed by the overwhelming weight of too many opinions. Maybe that’s how the process is supposed to work. Or maybe it’s the result of a process that isn’t working. I really don’t know. I do know that advertising and design is largely subjective. By definition, something that is subjective cannot be right or wrong, true or false. But somehow, we let a pure idea get tossed around, torn apart, painted over, until it’s not recognizable by its originator. In my experience, fewer opinions are almost always better, but that could just be the bias in me, discussed in the third paragraph of this posting.

The technology world was taken aback last week when Facebook agreed to purchase Instagram for one billion dollars. The valuation seemed to be a bit random and perhaps without merit. In this deal, Facebook made the offer with 30% cash and 70% stock, which assumes an IPO of $30 per share when the company goes public. Instagram is taking a bit of a gamble, but one that worked out well for the folks at Zappos in 2009. According to the New York Times, Amazon acquired Zappos in exchange for 10 million shares and some cash. The market value of those 10 million shares today is $1.9 Billion.

Instagram, a photo-sharing startup, had about 30 million users at the time the purchase was announced. Within a week they had an addition 10 million users, due to the overwhelming publicity. Even so, Facebook probably didn’t make the purchase because they wanted to court 30 million additional Facebook users to add to their current 800+ million members. It’s likely that the vast majority of Instagram users were already Facebook members anyway. I think the more likely explanation for Mark Zuckerberg’s move was to keep it away from the emerging social network, Google Plus.

In an interview, Zuckerberg explained that Instagram had developed a really great mobile experience for sharing beautiful photographs, and that he wanted to bring that to Facebook. What he surly must realize is that he could have easily developed that functionality on his own mobile platform.

The ability to add cool filters and effects to photos is nothing new or proprietary, so I am not sure I totally buy that claim, but it really doesn’t matter. What really matters is that two large social-sharing sites, Facebook and Google Plus are competing for your attention (and user data). They each want to own their user’s life, in the sense that they know where you shop and hang out (geo-tagging), who your friends are and what you “like”.

I don’t know who originally said it, but it’s absolutely brilliant, true and creepy all at the same time; “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” The Instagram app is free.