This past weekend we went through what was perhaps the most pleasant car buying experience of our lives. My wife and I visited the car dealer with our guards up, our strategy pre-planned and committed to memory and were prepared. What we found was a friendly sales person who clearly wanted to make a sale, but seemingly more important, was making us happy.  His approach was anything but hard. He asked us about our needs, what attracted us to the model we were looking at and where we wanted to be as far as price. Our approach was soft too, but at the same time, direct. I explained that we really didn’t want to play the “let me ask my manager” game. We didn’t have three hours to haggle and were not interested in negotiating the monthly payment, but rather the cost of the car. The approach seemed to work and he put together an aggressive offer. With one back-and-forth we had the deal done.

The experience reminded me of the benefits of soft selling. It may just be my personality that appreciates that, but I don’t think so. I tend to believe that most people would appreciate that approach to selling. Let’s take a look at the difference between the two.

The Soft Selling approach is usually focused on relationship building and trust.  You don’t apply noticeable pressure on the client, but rather, you gently lead them where you want them to go. It also includes providing the client with all of the information they need to make an informed decision. Most importantly, there needs to be a mutual benefit to both parties. The sales person actually cares whether or not the client is a good fit for their product or service so that they are left happy with the transaction.

In a Hard Selling approach things work differently. Relationship building and trust are not as important as getting the deal done. The sales pitch is much more deliberate and perhaps a little gimmicky. “Hey, it’s the end of the month and I need one more sale to make my numbers. I can cut you a great deal to get this done today.”

Before we left the dealership I asked our sales guy if he thought of himself as a “soft sell.” He said, “Absolutely. Most of my colleagues are a bit old school and can muster up a really high pressure sale. They tend to make their numbers but I don’t think their customers are always very happy. I usually see my customers again in a few years.”

I can’t say for sure how genuine the guy was being. Perhaps the soft sell is an act and just a mask for the hardest sell of all. Luring someone in with a nice smile and a trustworthy tone, all the while manipulating the deal to his/her own benefit.  I prefer to believe he was genuine and that his soft sell approach comes from a real desire to make customers happy.

I spoke with a couple of friends who are in sales. One sells financial products, the other, furniture. The friend who sells furniture thought that my description of a hard sell was a little unfair. “Sometimes customers need more pressure to make a decision. That doesn’t mean they will be unhappy or have buyer’s remorse, it just means someone needed to push them a bit.”  The other friend struck a similar chord. “With so much competition out there you have to be a bit aggressive to catch the fish. If you’re too passive about selling you could easily get passed over when the next great offer lands in their inbox.”

Well, it seems clear that you can make a strong argument for either sales approach. I suppose it really depends on being able to read your customer and determine which approach will work best. Of course, what you’re selling makes a difference too. If you’re selling expensive “major decision” products like vehicles, maybe you need to be a little more forceful, after all the next dealership is just down the road. I would just warn that an unhappy customer who thinks they were ripped off by a car dealership or pressured into a deal they were not comfortable with, is going to tell his/her friends. On the other hand, someone who has a truly pleasant experience with a car dealer may only write about it somewhere on a blog.

When asked about the possibility of life in the Universe outside of our planet, an astronomer working for NASA answered; “If you take a cup and fill it with water from the ocean, you probably wouldn’t see any life. To assume there is no other life in the universe is to assume that there is no life in the ocean because you didn’t find any in your cup. That’s how little of the Universe we understand.”  The vanity of assuming there is no other life in the Universe is symptomatic of a lack of information. A marketing campaign isn’t quite as grand as the Universe, but in your world it probably is. The Universe of marketing is brimming with possibilities and untapped resources that you may not be taking advantage of. Perhaps lack of information in your universe is robbing your campaigns of these opportunities.

Information plays a crucial role in two parts of your campaign. At the genesis of a campaign, your concern should be the quality of your list. It used to be that a quality list was just having all of the names current and addresses updated. Nowadays, you need a bit more. For example, it’s great to know that John Smith still lives at 33 Sherman Lane in New Haven, CT, but do you know anything else about John? If you’re selling insurance, do you know whether John owns a car, or is close to retirement, or has children that need insurance? Those are examples of the intelligence you need from the beginning. Now, I know this is all target marketing 101, but stay with me here. There are some really cool things you can be doing with this information.

What if your direct mail piece gave John a personalized URL to visit? Using the information you have on John, you could display personalized images that are applicable to him. You can offer him products and promotions that are targeted just to him, something that speaks directly to his needs. Target marketing on the most basic level is hitting the right prospects based on a few demographics. Target marketing has evolved into personalization. If you’re not personalizing your campaign, then you’re really not speaking directly with individuals, you’re just marketing to a group.

Having more information about your campaign prospects will help enhance your follow up capabilities as well. Going back to John and his insurance needs; let’s say John visits your campaign’s landing page and fills out a form because he’s interested in your personalized offer. Since you already know where John lives, what his interest in insurance is and, specifically, what product is appropriate for him, you can direct that lead to the appropriate sales person or office based on geography and also specialty. Someone can follow up with John’s request with the advantage of already knowing a little bit about him. Furthermore, you can use the information you already know about John and whatever additional details he provided to automatically send the data directly to your CRM software and have it categorized and formatted properly.

Another advantage to the personalized approach is that you can require less of your prospects. For example, when they get to the landing page you can have all of their information pre-populated in a form so that responding to your offer is very easy. They will also be more likely to provide additional details and qualifying information, because there is a bunch of information they don’t have to fill out. Don’t overlook how impactful this feature can really be in your campaign response. There is a coffee website that I order my coffee supplies from for my home office. I don’t order from them because they have the best selection or lowest prices. I order from them because they send personalized reminders every month to me. When I click on their emails it takes me to my personalized order page with all of my information filled out. All I need to do is select the coffee I want and hit confirm. I don’t even need to login because the personalized email is embedded with that information. I love the simplicity of it.

So allow me to assume this all sounds pretty good to you. But the question becomes, do I have all of this information on my prospects? Maybe not, and that’s OK. You can use the information you do have to enhance your personalized campaign and further enhance your database. For example, let’s say all you knew about John was his address. You could send John a personalized direct mail piece and email that invites him to visit his personalized landing page. On that page you could still add all of the information you do know about him and ask him for a bit more. Perhaps offer him a premium or special of some sort just for answering a few questions and confirming his information. We have used this approach at Structural Graphics many times to insure our database is up-to-date. We simply ask people to provide a bit more information about themselves so we can send them information about our products and services that are relevant to them and their business or industry. Finally, you’ll be able to feed all of that data directly into your CRM.

For as long as we have been creating campaigns for our clients, we have always stressed the importance of a solid prospect list. You can send the coolest direct mail piece with the best offer, but without being targeted and personalized, it’s just junk mail. Advancements in online and offline technologies have created some really powerful opportunities for combining print and digital in your campaigns. To take advantage of these opportunities you need the right information. There is quite literally an entire Universe out there that is yet to be explored, the same is true for marketing.

When the dean of Fairfield High School called my mother on that beautiful spring morning I am sure she was surprised. The dean had never called my house in regards to me. My older brother, however, was a frequent topic of conversation, but never me. The dean informed her that I had not shown up to school that day. That made perfect sense. It was senior skip day, and I was on my way to an amusement park with friends. When my mom questioned me about it that night I explained that skipping school on that day was a tradition that went back decades and I had to do it. She then offered up that all too familiar parenting cliché, if your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you follow?

When you’re looking for new marketing ideas or business direction it’s tempting to take a look at the competition. What are they doing to market themselves? What new products are they offering? What’s their secret? The fear is that the competition may be one step ahead of you. Maybe they know something you don’t know; or have access to vendors or technology you don’t know about. This is all possible, but gaining this intelligence can be a fruitless endeavor. You may even be following your competitor over a bridge.

Obviously it’s beneficial to stay on top of what’s new in the marketplace and how you’re doing in comparison to others in the market. However, the benefits of this information has its limits. Your competitor may be doing the exact same things, looking to your business for ideas and direction. This can create some bizarre circular reasoning and is no way to keep a business moving forward.

What prompted this blog posting was a solicitation I received for a whitepaper. It was titled, “Know what your competition knows”. Then, while browsing DM News I happen to see an ad for Compete.com. The headlined teased, “Monitor your competitor’s online strategies”. This just doesn’t seem right, though I suppose in our new Facebook’ish world of limited privacy this is par for the course.

Google has long been praised for their dynamic advertising network, Adwords, which opens up Google to businesses of every size. In fact, Adwords makes up more than 80% of Google’s annual revenue. One major problem with the ad network is its keyword selection feature. If you’re trying to find keywords for your campaign you can type in a word like “furniture”, and it will make recommendations of other similar keywords. This can make the process of launching your campaign very quick and easy. However, the data that provides the “similar keywords” comes from what other advertisers are using. So as a result you can end up selecting the same keywords as your competitor which causes the cost-per-bid to go up. Bidding on the most popular keywords can be a costly mistake for online advertisers. The keyword selection tool seems to be helping businesses compete directly with each other instead of each campaign creating their own unique strategy.

It’s a new year and a new opportunity to evaluate your marketing and business strategies. Try and resist the overwhelming amount of information that is available on your competitors. I don’t want to say, “be a leader not a follower”, because that’s just corny and who the heck am I to say that? But, in reality, the follower can never get ahead of the leader so long as he is sailing behind, trying to ride the same wind.  I have a long-expired sailing license to back that up.

Sitting in a freshman course on communications, I will never forget our first lecture. It was about effective communications between two parties and how messages go back and forth. It was actually really basic and I think I still remember it today because it seemed a little insulting to my intelligence. Heck, I had been communicating for years, and I knew how to transmit and receive messages.

When I got out into the workforce I began to realize that communications can be a tricky matter and that I wasn’t nearly as fluent as I had thought. I learned that large departments in an organization can reside in the same building but have no idea what the other is doing. At one company, thankfully not my current employer, I saw how management could build a fortress around each other and guard it like a castle in the dark ages. Most importantly, I began to realize that a lack of communications equated to a lack of understanding, which equated to a lack of respect. That’s an equation for failure every time.

If you Google “communication between sales and marketing” you’ll find nearly thirteen million results. It’s a classic business problem and it has been written about at nauseam, so my objective in this post is not to give you advice on how to improve your company, there are plenty of consultants that do that. I just wanted to highlight the issue and share a marketing story that is a perfect case study of the problem. Perhaps you can relate this story to your own experience and be motivated to start evaluating how your business communicates.

My wife and a close friend she went to culinary school with contacted a consulting company that helps people open businesses. Specifically, they specialize in the food industry and they offered a turnkey service that helps you find a location for your business, negotiate a lease, find the best vendors, acquire the necessary licenses and insurance, build your store, and then open for business.  It’s a pretty expensive service because essentially you get a business-in-a-box. It’s great for people who are passionate about their work but lack the necessary skills and connections to start a business.

They sat down and had a lengthy meeting with the head sales representative from the company.  He presented their entire process and convinced my wife that they were competent in the food industry and could make her business dreams a reality. It seemed like the perfect fit and my wife and her friend moved from the exploratory phase to the planning phase of their business. Then, oddly, the marketing department at this company seemed to take over!

My wife began to receive one or two emails a day about the consulting firm and the services they offer. I am sure it was marketing’s way of supporting the sales team and turning prospects into buyers. The problem was that many of the emails addressed issues that were already discussed with their sales person at the consulting firm. What’s worse, marketing sent these emails on behalf of the individual sales people so it really just looked like the sales person was sending a cold-email (also know as spam) to someone who was already in the buying cycle. It was really frustrating because she would respond to some of these emails and say, “hey don’t you remember me, we already discussed this”. She never got responses so the marketing department obviously didn’t forward email responses to the respective sales person.

It was a complete mess and it wasn’t the only reason my wife didn’t end up signing with this firm, but it didn’t help that their company seemed to be totally disjointed. If they couldn’t coordinate email messages, how could they possibly coordinate all of the different aspects of launching a new business?

I like this example because it goes right to the heart of the issue of communication between sales and marketing. Here at Structural Graphics, we’re not perfect, nobody is. But we use a powerful CRM program coupled with regular email communications from marketing to be sure we’re on the same page. Well, maybe not always the same page, but we’re at least in the same book. Of course, it gets frustrating at times when a marketing initiative goes seemingly unrecognized by sales, or a sales initiative goes seemingly unrecognized by marketing.  I say “seemingly” because perception often doesn’t match reality, especially with something as personal as your hard work. At the end of the day we maintain a mutual level of respect because we both know that those folks we sometimes roll our eyes at, ultimately keep us employed.