Laura's Winning Ideas

By the time a proposal is being prepared, your sales force may provide you with robust Benefit Statements. If not, you’ll need to help out here.

Borrow Industry Statistics

Jill Konrath suggests you “borrow industry statistics.” I like her way of describing the process of using current news to enhance benefit statements.

It makes my subscription to the Wall Street Journal worthwhile when I can enrich a benefit statement with a reference to a recent event in the prospect’s firm or industry. Jill recommends watching for industry statistics you can borrow to highlight your benefits.

I had a great example last year. We were struggling with a way to describe an issue in their industry when I picked up the Wall Street Journal one morning and read an article about one of their competitors that perfectly described the issue. We quoted the article and it nicely backed up our position.

Tonight I read that fewer than 36 percent of marketing departments track their contribution to profitable contracts. Yikes! I would not have guessed it is so low. I’ll be borrowing that statistic in a blog post pretty soon!

I just finished listening to an interview with author Jill Konrath on the B2B Lead Generation Blog. Her book, Selling to Big Companies explains the same good things we use to build winning proposals.

For example, she promotes Value Propositions built around your prospect. My clients recognize this as the same as a Benefit Statement. In order to do this properly, you’ll need to know the issues of their BUGS and their CASE.

I knew I liked Jill as soon as I heard her say she hates “Unique Selling Propositions.” In my opinion, unique selling propositions are right up there with elevator pitches to market/sell complex programs. The time wasted focusing on describing your core competencies to a prospect is better spent researching the “pain points” (issues) so you have something worthwhile to offer a prospect. Worse, is when the “Unique Selling Proposition” focuses on the difference between you and the competition. Ugh.

The competition is never the reason you lose a proposal. The reason you lose is that you didn’t have the best solution, described in a way all the stakeholders could adopt.

Focus First on the prospect/client/customer.

Today I visited a blog to which I would have posted a comment, but I couldn’t get through the gauntlet to register as a legitimate reader.

Spammers are a real problem with blogs. A great feature of blogs is being able to join the conversation by posting comments to any article on the blog. Unfortunately, the spammers flood most blogs with nonsense links to Viagra, porn and assorted other junk.

On this site, in order to comment on a post, you must first file a registration form from the home page, and then once that is completed, you must answer 6 questions before you can write a comment. Most casual visitors don’t have time to search for and learn all these steps in order to help someone out with a suggestion.

When too many barriers are present, we just move on.

The good news is that technology can be a huge help in managing spam. Some software has tools to help with spam that remain in the background, so no burden is put on readers. After the experience on this blog, I would rank this as a top priority for all business blogs.

Here’s where I’ve learned the power of using WordPress, the software that powers this site. This software takes quite a bit of work to learn as it is intended for professionals. I spent three weeks wrestling with it before having modest success and hiring help for the last few features I couldn’t create on my own.

One of the features available with WordPress is a spam filter that is quite excellent. I discard several hundred spam posts each week, after a quick scan to be sure it didn’t capture a legitimate post.

If your company is considering using blogging software, be a hero and forward this post so they can see the difference in user experience.

Scientists estimate there are over 2 billion databytes coming at us every second. Being mere humans, we can manage about 30,000 databytes per second.

The choice of what gets recognized and taken in for possible evaluation is up to us. Much of this is controlled by the subconscious, leaving the conscious mind to mull over things and form original thoughts from all that data.

However, you can steer the data intake by shutting down some of the portals so you have the bandwidth to take in more data from other sources.

CONFERENCE CALLS

In other words, you can sharpen your perception in one sense by shutting off one or more of your senses. If you shut your eyes, your hearing will sharpen to help make up for the lack of visual data. Many people have trouble staying in a long meeting via conference call. Try closing your eyes and you’ll hear much more nuance than you could when your eyes were roaming the room.

In order to work virtually, you need good auditory skills. These can be strengthened with practice.

I naturally have very good auditory skills and it’s no problem for me to stay engaged in a conference call for more than an hour. Most people drift away after 40 minutes. When the issue being discussed is particularly sticky, you can get a better read on everyone’s temper by closing your eyes and taking in more auditory databytes.