Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

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  • Newsletter drop at 1 PM ET

    My personal newsletter will be dropping at 1 PM ET today. If you’re not subscribed, now’s the time.

    In this issue, a blogging tool you probably haven’t heard of, a productivity tool you have heard of, a career-boosting trick that yields huge rewards for 5 minutes a day, some stuff about McDonald’s french fries, and the winner’s of last month’s Stuff You Did column.

    If you’d like to get in on the action, you have until 1 PM ET to subscribe here.

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  • How much too much is it?

    One of my absolute favorite sales closes is the how much too much close. It’s a recession. Times are tough, budgets are tight, resources are constrained. We get that. I’m sure you get that many, many times a day from everyone you talk to who’s a potential customer. The trick with objections over price is amortization of the price.

    Let’s say you’re a web designer. You make beautiful web designs that cost $1,500 and perform very well for your clients. You know that a client with a good internal sales process can make that back in weeks, if not days, with a design that converts visitors to qualified leads.

    One day, you’re pitching a potential new client. You’ve established your credibility and demonstrated that you’ve got the chops to do what they want to do. There’s no question that they believe you can handle the work, and there’s no question in your mind either. It’s a home run…

    Greg, what did you say?… until the first thing out of their mouth at the proposal stage is a price objection. “It’s too expensive” or a variant of that phrase. Rather than cutting your prices immediately (which is the most common tactic for a rookie salesperson), get specific.

    Mr. Penn, how much too much is the design? Are we a dollar over your budget? Help me understand where you are.

    The object of this close is to get them to name a number: it’s 500 too expensive for me. It’s100 too expensive for me. Whatever the number is, that’s what you need to get out of them. Once you have the number, go to work. In this example, let’s say the site is $500 too expensive. You’d amortize that at a daily rate over a year (500/365=1.37), then you might say something like:

    Mr. Penn, I understand how you feel. We’ve agreed that a new web site design could do wonders for your business, haven’t we? We’ve agreed that if it brings in even 1 new customer a month, your business will grow beyond your current plans and expectations, right? Think of your web site as an employee who never sleeps, who never calls in sick, who is always working for you day and night.

    Mr. Penn, do you have 1.37 right now? Yes, on you at this moment. Mr. Penn, that’s how much a day too much you’ve said your new web site is. Tell me, Mr. Penn, is1.37 a day too much to pay for such an incredible employee?

    Then shut up and wait to see what they say.

    Is this close guaranteed to work? Of course not. No sales close ever is, despite the marketing materials of the sales trainers out there. But as a tactic to help you sniff out whether price is the true objection and how far off the mark your proposal is, the how much too much close is invaluable. For green sales staff and freelance consultants with no sales training at all (like many, many folks I’ve seen consulting in social media), this close saves you from the gut instinct of cutting your worth (price) right off the bat – a useful tactic that could save you and your company thousands or even millions of dollars over time.

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  • Ben & Jerry's, thank you for surrendering

    Brand OverextensionI read with great interest about another company forsaking email marketing – this time, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s. Good. Thank you very much!

    Why am I thanking them? Here’s the thing about marketing in a global digital economy: you’re not competing with your regular competitors. Ben & Jerry’s isn’t just competing with rival ice cream maker Friendly’s. Ben & Jerry’s is competing with me. They’re competing with you, too.

    In the digital age, attention is the most prized commodity we can possibly have. Every message you receive has the potential to consume your attention for a split second or longer. A well-known, trusted brand like Ben & Jerry’s will automatically command more attention than a message from you or me. Think about that for a second. Ben & Jerry’s is known for doing lots of good things and for being generous. If there’s a message in your inbox with a free ice cream cone from them, chances are anything that you or I have to offer is probably going to pale in comparison.

    Happily for us, they’ve put themselves out of the running for attention in the inbox, clearing space and attention for the rest of us, and so I thank them.

    If you’re a competent marketer in the digital age, understand that you compete with everything and everyone for attention. Use every channel and avenue at your disposal, or risk losing share of mind with your prospects and customers.

    Disclosure: I work for an email marketing company. My viewpoint had better be biased or I’m doing it wrong.

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  • More customers doesn't make you a better company

    MarketingProfs AudienceI’ve been shopping around the past few days for a terrific lead automation system for the day job, looking at all of the different vendors out there. One thread that’s been common among all of the comparison discussions on LinkedIn, on blogs, etc. that baffles me is this argument:

    “We’re better because we have 42x more customers than any of our competitors, which shows that clearly we are the LEADER in our space!”

    This argument makes no sense to me. More customers doesn’t make you a better company. More customers just means you have more customers. In fact, it might make you a worse company. If you and your competitor both have 60 people on staff but you have 42x more customers, all that means is I’m 42x less likely to get customer support when I need it.

    If more customers were the benchmark of excellence, we’d all shop only at Wal-Mart for everything in life. They have more customers than anyone, right? Are they the best? If absolute numbers of customers were the mark of truly excellent service, logically wouldn’t the IRS (which has every taxpayer as a “customer”) be the best organization in the country to deal with?

    What’s at work here is a bit of Robert Cialdini’s bandwagon influence techniques (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Amazon link). The hope of these marketers, I suppose, is that by seeing lots of people doing business with a company, I’ll be persuaded that it’s somehow better, in the same way that social media “experts” try to convince you that because they’ve got 20,000 followers, they’re somehow more knowledgeable about social media.

    Sorry, gang. I’m not buying it. In this day and age when service, support, and care is needed more than ever, more customers as a sole metric of your worth means you just have less time for me.

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  • My upcoming webinar: email marketing for the 21st century

    New England XPOI’ll be doing a webinar on July 23 at 2 PM Eastern on 21st century email marketing, put on by my employer, Blue Sky Factory. In the webinar, I’ll be going over the 5 things every email marketer wants:

    1. More audience
    2. More delivery
    3. More opens
    4. More actions
    5. More/better metrics

    In terms of value, I’ll be covering a lot of new material, including what things you should be testing (we all talk about the importance of testing but no one ever helps you judge what should be tested in the first place), new ideas for content, and nearly instant ways to measure ROI.

    I’ve given previous versions of this talk at marketing conferences that charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars to attend. This webinar will be almost-free. There’s no out of pocket monetary cost, but in the spirit of full disclosure and setting expectations, you’ll get email and probably a phone call from a sales rep afterwards. The price of attendance is your attention, time, and a little bit of disk space for the email and voice mail message. If you think that’s a good value, then please feel free to sign up by clicking here.

    Lame FTC disclosure: Blue Sky Factory is my employer and thus your attendance at this webinar provides direct financial benefit to me. If I don’t suck at what I do, it should provide indirect financial benefit to you, too via making you a better marketer.

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  • Did you subscribe?

    When was the last time you heard a really great speaker?

    When was the last time you read a really insightful blog post?

    When was the last time you acted on a follow recommendation on Twitter or a LinkedIn connection?

    I’d bet recently. The beauty of social media is that there’s an infinite choice of people to interact with and some of them are really, really worth your time. Insightful, witty, funny, amazing, smart, beautiful, whatever you want to describe them as, you’re swimming in a knowledge pool with thousands of these kinds of people.

    When was the last time that any of these people who you got or gave accolades to in the moment impressed you so much that you were willing to take an extra 30 seconds to click through or Google them, find their blog, and subscribe to it?

    I’d wager it’s been a while. For some of you, it’s been a long while.

    Here’s why this is important: you’ll lose touch otherwise. The curse of social media is that there’s so much to pay attention to – even legitimate, good quality stuff – that you lose good people in the noise. You’ve had this experience – someone’s name will pop up in your Facebook birthday reminders or a passing mention in Twitter and you’ll kick yourself for forgetting that person existed…

    … and in the meantime, you’ve lost the benefit of whatever they were sharing during that period. Sure, you can always catch up, but if they’re really valuable, then your competitors have been reading and taking advantage of their ideas the whole time, putting you behind the curve.

    If someone really impresses, subscribe to their blog. Take that extra 15-30 seconds to copy and paste to Google Reader. Keep them on your mental radar screen so that you can continue to benefit from their shared knowledge.

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  • Marketing lessons from the kitchen

    SashimiAs a marketer, half of our job is analytical – figuring out what works and optimizing our methods for better results.

    Half of our job is also creative – coming up with new ways to create demand for our ideas.

    No one would eat at a restaurant where the sole measure of its performance was food output. All gruel, all the time? No thank you.

    No one would eat at a restaurant where the sole measure of its performance was food creativity if it meant that only one patron a day could get to eat.

    You as a marketing chef must balance inventing and cooking new dishes for your patrons to try along with creating enough food to satisfy the patrons who show up at your doorstep.

    Imagine for a moment you’re a new chef. You’ve got the basics down, you can make scrambled eggs, steak, and sandwiches. You can create enough food to be satisfying but not necessarily remarkable. Where do you go to take things to the next level?

    Ultimately, you have to experiment and explore. You have to go to new cultures and cuisines to try new foods, taste new tastes, see how things are done differently. When you’ve finished your chef’s journey, you’ll come back to your restaurant with new ideas, new spices, new ways to apply everything you’ve learned. You’ll have some new dishes on your menu, but you’ll also have new twists and flair to add to your existing dishes. Scrambled eggs become scrambled eggs with truffle oil and a sprinkling of dill. Steak becomes stone seared steak with a cayenne rub. Sandwiches suddenly find slices of fresh mozzarella and basil chiffonade in them.

    As a marketer, ask yourself what new flavors and spices you’re learning, and if you’re not learning anything new, if you’re cooking the same old scrambled eggs, go explore. Go read some books on design, architecture, or photography to give your presentations and collateral some new spice. Read different literature, literature from different cultures, poetry and prose to enliven your copy. Get away from tools like Pandora which serve up more of what you might like based on what you already like and start hunting down random Internet stations.

    After you’ve refilled your marketing spice rack, come back to your kitchen and see how different your marketing can be.

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  • Why Awaken Your Superhero?

    A funny thing occurred to me recently as I was redesigning this blog. (by the way, if you haven’t stopped by the actual site lately, it’s got a whole new look) There’s a very specific reason why it’s named Awaken Your Superhero – you’re already a superhero. You have only to realize it, to awaken it within yourself.

    Consider this: from where you sit reading this right now, you have access to streams of real-time information from all over the world, knowledge spread the moment it’s created. You can watch far-off places, have immediate or near-immediate access to the sum of publicly available human knowledge, communicate with thousands, if not millions of people with just a few clicks of a mouse, influence and affect people next door and thousands of miles away.

    In another time, in another place, these would have been powers reserved only for the greatest of superheroes. Comic books would have been written about such a person with these powers…

    … and that person is you, here and now. You have superpowers that a generation ago would have been not only legendary, but even absurd. Comic books of years past would have called infinite knowledge an amazing feat; we call it Google. Action hero movies of yesteryear would have called global mindreading an astonishing power; we call it Twitter.

    Here’s the snag: we have superhero powers, but we don’t necessary have superhero awareness. We don’t necessarily know what we’re capable of, don’t necessarily understand all of the different ways we can use our powers.

    That’s what this blog is about, ultimately. We’re on a never-ending quest to understand not just the new media space, but to understand our role in it and how we can be more effective, more powerful, and more heroic through it. We have to awaken ourselves – awaken our superheroes, and it’s a journey I hope you’ll join me on.

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  • You are independent, right?

    For my American friends, happy Independence Day!

    You are independent, right?

    • You read multiple news sources from around the world, different nations, different viewpoints
    • You read multiple different viewpoints in commentary, even writers whose politics and perspectives you disagree with
    • You listen and watch trending topics in social media broadly as well as have a selected set of trusted friends
    • You use sites like Open Secrets and Bloomberg to follow the money whenever something in the news doesn’t make sense
    • You read a wide variety of blogs on different subject matters across the spectrum
    • You subscribe to as many free trade publications and magazines as practical to see what hot issues are in different industries
    • You do your part to act when you see obvious threats to everyone’s independence and liberty taking place

    Independence is as much a state of mind as it is a political state. Celebrate your independence today, and commit to reinforcing and defending it by doing one or more of the above if you don’t already.

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  • Twitpocalypse postponed due to vuvuzelas

    It’s true, as posted in the Twitter API group:

    as you’ve all probably noticed, with the world cup going on, twitter is experiencing record load. because of this, we’re moving the oauth switchover date to august 16, 2010.

    we want to make sure that you all have calm waters to test your new codebases where you’re not dealing with whales, robots, and whatnot. with the world cup ending on july 11th, you will all have over a month’s time of calm waters and site stability to finish the switch over. also, with the vast majority of media providers already switched over to OAuth Echo, you now also have an additional month of time to work out your integrations with them.

    just to review what we’re going to be doing: starting on august 16 we’ll be ramping down the rate limits on basic auth roughly by 10 calls/hour/day ending on august 31st. on the 31st, you won’t be allowed to make any other basic auth calls. in other words, if you don’t do anything, you’ll get more and more frequent rate limit errors as you approach august 31st. starting on august 31st, any basic auth request will get a HTTP 403 response back. as always, please reach out if there are any questions or concerns. for those who have already switched over, thanks!

    So grab your vuvuzela and celebrate – you have another month or so before the Twitpocalypse.

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