Welcome to the first 2006 issue of Spark, your virtual home for pragmatic and irreverent advice to accelerate technology sales.

In this edition, Jason Busch leads off by offering a pointed take on the art of blogging in the B2B world. If you’re currently writing a business blog or debating investing your company’s time and dollars on one, this column is required reading. Next, Brian Sommer tackles one of the best approaches for selling to C-level executives—point-of-view selling. Last, in Out Takes, we offer a candid perspective on making channel selling worth the effort. Put your seat backs in the full and upright position and read on!

To Blog or Not to Blog

“Blogging has become the cocktail conversation of choice among executives we’ve socialized with in recent months”

It seems that a week does not go by where one of our clients does not ask us a question about starting or getting involved with a blog. And it’s not just in a business setting that we’re being asked. Just as IPOs were the casual topic du jour in 1999, blogging has become the cocktail conversation of choice among executives we’ve socialized with in recent months. It seems that everyone wants to get in on the action—or at least understand more about what blogs can do for them.

While blogs have been around for quite some time, they’ve historically focused on the fringes of the business world, dealing primarily with politics and geek-stuff – not exactly a recipe for market influence or B2B brand building. But recently, blogs have started to cross over to a mainstream business audience. Many executives are starting to read them on a daily basis.

I can speak to this first hand, having written a business blog for over a year, but whose growth has only really begun to accelerate in recent months. My blog, Spend Matters, is well-known and influential in the procurement and supply chain market, yet only recently reached an average of 1000 hits a day—tiny by most media standards, but significant given its narrow focus. While this traffic will probably quadruple or more this year (it’s already up 2500% from the first month’s numbers in December 2004), it’s still a highly targeted readership. As I tell the sponsors of Spend Matters, you can’t measure success just by looking at traffic numbers alone. The quality of readers matters much more than the quantity. Based on in-bound phone calls, comments from subscribers, emails, etc. for Spend Matters, we know that the ‘right’ group of influencers form the core readership for the blog. This includes company executives, practitioners, and the most influential industry and financial analysts that cover the sector.

To evaluate the effectiveness of a business blog, organizations should look beyond page views or visits (which are classic B2C metrics for evaluating a site). What matters much more is whether the blog is reaching the right individuals—customers, prospects, and analysts, for example. In developing a blog strategy, CEOs and marketing executives should keep in mind the target audience from the moment they begin to think about entering the blogosphere. They should also think about their overall goals for blogging. Is it to influence the market? Or is it to get closer to customers and prospects, providing an open forum for the exchange of ideas and knowledge? There are dozens of individual goals a company might have, but simply getting into blogging because the rest of the market is doing it is a recipe for wasting time and dollars.

“What matters is whether the blog is reaching the
right individuals—customers, prospects, analysts, and journalists”

Once an organization establishes a basic plan and context for blogging, it’s necessary to look at the vehicle for meeting the objectives. Should an organization encourage grassroots blogging from within at the manager or developer level? Should an executive within the company author a blog? Should the blog be a collective of voices? Should the organization sponsor an outside blog? Or should a strategy encompass a combination of the available options. On many levels, developing a strategy for setting up a business blog is the easy part. Keeping the content fresh, relevant, and timely can be just as challenging. And don’t get us started on how blogs can backfire—there are dozens of reasons, which we’ll examine in Spark’s virtual pages in the future.

At Azul Partners, we’ve both formally and informally helped dozens of enterprise software and professional services organizations think through their company blogging strategy. We’ve both encouraged and discouraged executives from making an investment in blogging based on their motives and goals, and whether they make sense. What should you do? Drop us a line and let’s talk.

Reach Jason at jbusch@azulpartners.com

Want More CXO Sales? Try Point of View Selling

“CXOs like their time. They have too little of it.
They like people that respect the shortage of time they have”

At Azul Partners, we are frequently asked to help firms move their sales and marketing effort upwards. Quite often, our client’s executives decide that they want to sell to CXO executives—not just to middle management operations or IT leaders. However, their previous attempts to do this have been met with devastatingly poor results. 99% of the time their efforts fail for the same reasons because they’re:

• using the same marketing materials with this new audience
• deploying sales professionals with little or no experience in selling to this type of executive
• lacking empathy with intended prospects. Their lack of understanding of the basic demographics and psychographics of CXOs is appalling.

This newsletter format does not permit the space needed to address all of these problem areas; however, we will dive into the first: the use of tired, familiar sales techniques with a prospect pool that does not respond to these methods.

The number one thing to remember when selling to CXOs is that they like their time. They have too little of it. They like people that respect the shortage of time they have. They are the executive version of adults with ADD. As a result, they:

• don’t have time to peruse your website, catalogs, brochures, webinars, sales emails disguised as newsletters, etc.
• won’t sit through demonstrations of software and could care less whether your product has 2–3x more functions and features than your nearest competitor
• will not sit still for 1–1 _ hours while a sales person asks them questions like:
  • “What are your top three strategic objectives?”
  • “What issues are you responsible for solving?”
  • “How is your performance measured?”
  • and, of course, “What sorts of problems are keeping you awake at night?”

For those trained in solution selling, the first task is often to craft a compelling ‘hook’ that will get a salesperson a meeting. The hook is intended to tap into some sort of latent or explicit need that most prospective buyers have. If enough prospects take the hook, the sales person then fills their calendar with meetings and begins the 90 minute, face-to-face interrogatories with prospects. If successful, the solution seller uses restatements, open-ended questions and other techniques to slowly move the prospect into becoming a buyer. This sales method requires the prospect to be patient and to give the sales person a lot of their valuable time to answer these wide-ranging, open-ended, seemingly irrelevant questions. CXOs have no time for this.

CXOs are busy people and sales/marketing people who don’t understand and respect this will find themselves experiencing a lot of poor sales results.

CXOs expect from a professional sales and marketing team:

• individuals who have taken time to research his/her firm
• a highly personalized sales presentation (not the same generic sales deck you show every other prospect)
• a unique point of view about his/her firm, its industry standing, the steps needed to improve, etc.

A great CXO meeting probably requires 3–4 hours of preparation and takes all of 15 minutes to complete. Why just 15 minutes? Because if you’ve done your homework on this prospect, you should be able to:

• define the top 2–3 issues professionally affecting this executive
• illustrate how severely these issues are affecting his/her employer
• crisply show how your product/service addresses these 2–3 issues
• close the deal.

Poorly trained sales people will want to demonstrate all sorts of extraneous functions and features that actually un-sell the deal. They will want to extend the sales call to an hour or more “because we have the meeting” and not because the extra time is being used to dive deeper in the ultimate 2–3 concern areas for this prospect. Wasting an executive’s time is showing disrespect or contempt for the prospect. The opposite shows respect and a level of business professionalism that CXOs want and reward with sales.

“Poorly trained sales people will want to demonstrate all sorts
of extraneous functions and features that actually un-sell the deal.”

The development of the point of view is a new task for many Sales and Marketing professionals. Done well, the Marketing team will have already:

• developed or acquired industry rankings by key performance metrics for all major players in targeted verticals
• crafted specific sales messages and supporting sales materials based on common business issues specific CXO types face in targeted verticals
• identified the top 10–12 issues the sales force should be looking at when assessing what the top 2–3 issues each key prospect faces
• categorized the firms within a vertical as to their receptiveness to your solution based on factors like the degree of IT sophistication, role of prospect as an innovator, etc.

The requirements on Marketing to assist point of view selling are material but not overwhelming. The rewards to the technology company using this technique can be phenomenal.

Do you have a point of view on your sales efforts? If you do, test it on us. We’ll be happy to give you our feedback. If not, get in touch. We’ll point you in the right direction to successfully selling to C-level prospects.

Reach Brian at brian@azulpartners.com

Out Takes…

If we had a Euro for every time a colleague of ours asked our advice on tapping potential partners as a sales channel, our revenues would soon surpass the GDP of Luxembourg. But the truth is that selling through large software vendors , systems integrators or outsourcers can be more trouble than it’s worth for many small and medium sized technology outfits.

But there are a few tell-tail signs that an organization is ready to examine the channel route. What are these? In our experience, when vendors already have a successful direct sales model in targeted industries, have packaged their IP in such a way that their applications (or services) can be sold by someone on the outside with minimal or no assistance, and can provide a highly compelling rationale about why a channel prospect should prioritize their capabilities over other partners, then it might be time to get started thinking about building a channel offering.

Don’t bank on the success of a channel deal just by inking a relationship. Our experience leading partnership efforts at several leading technology firms (and several smaller companies as well) suggests that some 75% of signed channel deals aren’t worth it for either party.

Stay tuned as we examine why later this year in Spark.

This newsletter is published by Azul Partners, Inc a market strategy and content advisory firm. Founded in 2004, Azul Partners advises the worlds leading software and professional services organizations, along with a handful of high-potential upstarts as well. We work with companies to develop persuasive content and novel strategies that incorporate rational arguments, deep research and subject matter expertise. Curious? Learn more by visiting us on the web at www.azulpartners.com or drop a line: info@azulpartners.com