StoryQuest Blog

Having a proper reference program in place in your organization is critical to the success of your sales organization and your business overall. As sales executives and professionals already know, in a complex system or solution sell, sooner or later the prospect will ask – “where have you done this before,  what were the results.”  such as an enterprise wide ERP implementation, almost always means a complex buying process and sales cycle.

The complexity can be seen through these lenses:

• People: The people you need to engage and work with on the client side and internally
• Documentation: Proposals, Bill of Materials, Scopes of Work, References, Insurance, Project Plan etc.
• Solution/System: The components and services that make up the system/solution being implemented
• Process: The process the sales and support team will follow in order to educate, advance and complete the sale.

Now multiply this by the number of sales reps you have, the number of sales opportunities being developed and the availability and capacity of your sales support resources and you start to get a picture of how busy your business can get pumping out proposals.

There’s a lot that needs to be done to be successful!

The Problem
In my 13 years working in the technology industry I’ve witnessed complete and utter chaos when it comes to proposal development, especially when it comes to references. Most Request for Proposals (formal and informal) require references to be provided.

In fact in some cases, depending on the industry, the proposal will ask for references from within their industry, of similar size and scope and within the last 12 months.

Imagine a scenario were your company has 10 proposals due by Friday next week and each requires 3 references. Each reference must have the name of the company, a description of the project and key individuals that can be contacted.

In my experience sales reps could do one of three things:

• They reuse references from an older proposal
• They use their own accounts as references
• They send out an email to everyone asking for references

What makes this a little more challenging is:

• Reuse of references from older proposals is a ticking time bomb without checks and balances. Is the reference still current? Is the contact still there? Are they still willing to be a reference (is the relationship strained)? Are they being put forward as a reference too often?
• Using their own accounts as references means that other reps won’t benefit from being able to use a quality reference for their sales opportunities.
• Sending out an email is what I call the “Hail Mary Pass” where, usually at the last minute, the bid team needs three references and usually within 24 hours.

In my scenario above you’d need 30 references by next Friday. Now, using the approach above, you could have:

• Proposals with old outdated references. This reflects poorly on your organization.
• Used a great reference too many times. Your happy client may become unhappy when s/he gets 30 voicemails.

The Solution
Reference programs are the answer to solving this nagging and systemic problem. StoryQuest has asked me to produce a series of blog posts on reference programs as a service to their customers and prospective clients.

Clearly, customer stories like the ones StoryQuest produces, can and should be an integral part of your reference program. We will talk about where they fit into a reference program in later posts.

You know all about it – there is too much information and content. Too much to consume, and not enough time for you to really get the most value out of it, – you have heard it all. In fact since you’re experiencing information overload, it’s fair to say so are your customers.

However you define it, information glut is the modern human condition. And while all this information can be good for many things, it makes it is harder for you to get your message to people in a way that addresses this issue. It’s harder to get them to open an email, navigate to your web page, consume it, focus and really consider your message. Getting messages “out there” – getting others to click on, watch, listen, and really consider what you have to say – that is a huge challenge.

Now let’s me be honest – this is a complex problem, and with lots of ways, maybe too many to help. Email tools, social media, better websites, videos, customized content, – lots of things can help. But I would like to suggest two simple ideas for you to consider first.

Continue reading “Use of Story and Voice – Getting People to Listen” »

Most of us view Facebook as a tool that teenagers and college students use to meet people, read the current trends in short posts, keep up with friends or expand their social horizons by attending a posted party, concert or gallery event. What most of us adults don’t know is that these same tools that connect them to people, places and recent trends are just as useful for a business executive as they are for a 20-year-old student looking for the next great kegger.

In a blog by Beth Warren she describes how businesses can develop work groups for collaboration, plan meetings, network to important contacts and events and post problems or successes the have had during their day.

You can read more about Beth’s experience here.

Telling stories. It seems to be something that we instantly relate to the spinning of long, drawn out tales of our exciting, or not so exciting, daily adventures. Sometimes we forget that telling our stories can have a life sustaining precedence, such as in an emergency room, to a police officer or in front of a jury of our peers.

In these instances the way we tell the story is just as important as the facts presented in the account. In a blog by PR and Marketing professional John Durante relays the importance of these facts in his blog, but also the way they are delivered.

During a visit he made to an emergency room he noticed that the medical professionals were “drowning in data.” In a broader context the importance of the story is just as important as the data presented to the listener. The span of events and how they took place is just as important as the events themselves.

The same is true for business. Executives do want to be presented with the facts. The number or errors in their shipment process, the number of new accounts acquired in a year, the number of redundancies in their company etc… Facts are undeniable and sometimes jobs depend on them. What we often forget is that the medium is just as important as the message.

The story of an executive’s failure and then his journey in solving the problem to ultimately triumph in the situation is just as effective, arguably sometimes more effective, than a statistic, PowerPoint presentation or pie chart.

For as Durante points out, “Without data, there are no knowledge. Without knowledge, there can be no context. But without the story pulling together the data, knowledge and the context, how successful can we be, in public relations, or in medicine?”

Here at StoryQuest we try to maintain a blog for many reasons. Of course there is the obvious branding, search engine optimization and good PR that usually comes along with a blog, but what most people neglect to remember is that blogging is also a great internal communication tool.

While I was tooling around on the web trying to gather some ideas and get some blogging inspiration, I stumbled upon this report entitled, “The Blogging Revolution: Government in the age of Web 2.0 by Dr. David C. Wyld.” This report was published by The IBM Center for Business of Government. According to them,

“Dr. Wyld examines the phenomenon of blogging in the context of the larger revolutionary forces at play in the development of the second-generation Internet, where interactivity among users is key. This is also referred to as “Web 2.0.” Wyld observes that blogging is growing as a tool for promoting not only online engagement of citizens and public servants, but also offline engagement. He describes blogging activities by members of Congress, governors, city mayors, and police and fire departments in which they engage directly with the public. He also describes how blogging is used within agencies to improve internal communications and speed the flow of information.”

It is definitely a very informative and interesting document that may open up people more to the idea that blogging isn’t just for teenagers on MySpace.

Business Narrative; the concept leveraged more and more these days in the corporate world. But what is it? What are its components? How can it be used?

In essence, a business narrative is a type of storytelling. Stories, just the same as we were told at bedtime as children, which speak to the commonalities of us as people. These “Narratives” pontificate upon our strengths, our weaknesses, our triumphs, and our failures, but most importantly, the journey to get there

Corporations have realized that their greatest resource is often within its walls: their own people. Better than a memo or a PowerPoint presentation, they can inspire their people through their own personal stories and experiences.

As Robert Dickman explains in his article, “The Business of Narrative and How it Works,” every business narrative has four essential components.

Passion

“Every successful story must have passion, the raw emotion that is wrapped around our narrative’s central fact. Passion is the fire that draws an audience’s attention,” according to Dickman. The person telling the story really has to have a fire under his belly so to speak to keep the audience interested and engaged. Technical terms and statistics will only take you so far. A story of skepticism, defeat and then overcoming circumstances to triumph will stay with a person more than a number or a graph.

Hero

This is where all the passion is derived from in the first place. The hero isn’t necessarily super in nature, but is the main character and the voice that takes the audience on the journey, or story arch.

Action

Confronting the problem or challenge, which in a good business narrative, is a shared concern or problem with the audience listening to it. Without the challenge, the skepticism or even an initial failure, this story could very easily come off as a PR or more commercial piece.  Dickman states the important point, “Powerful obstacles in the narrative make it ring true. Problems help the audience identify more deeply with the story.

Transformation

The transformation is the most essential part of the process. This is the part in the book or movie where the hero overcomes the villain and gets the girl. On a more realistic scale, this is where our hero overcomes the obstacle or problem facing their business. Dickman says, “Sacrifice and repeated effort is demanded for the problem to be overcome. Somehow audiences sense how difficult it is to create real change. They feel satisfied when they see the hero emerge from the fires of hell and a changed and better human being.”

Though email marketing has been the industry standard for many years, many companies are now finding that adding content to your website via blogging has become an even more effective strategy to draw attention to your company and get a higher ranking on the ever so valuable search engine sites such as Google and Yahoo.

In the blog “Here is Why Blog Marketing Is Better Than Email Marketing,” on the Informationcrawler website, they detail this “key to long-term success on the Internet.”

http://www.informationcrawler.com/2157/here-is-why-blog-marketing-is-better-than-email-marketing-2/

Maybe Robert Fulghum is right; maybe all we need to know we did learn in kindergarten. The lessons that we learned from the Tortoise and the Hare and the Emperor’s New Clothes are moral constructs that transcend their fable form and become an architectural construct of lessons in our adult life

Carol Mon tells us in her blog “Applying Fairy Tales to Business” folk and fairy tales are full of values and morals we learn through repetition and that as an adult storyteller she sees these lessons applied to the business world.

“Business people see the tales as a frivolous waste of time, they want to learn from ‘real’ business situations experienced by colleagues…”

Mon thinks that the fairy tale/fable language can be translated into big business stories quite easily.

Her favorite example is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

By changing the character of the emperor to the Executive Vice President, the tailors to consultants and the courtiers to direct reports Mon claims, “The consultants fool the EVP and although the employees see it they fear the EVP’s reaction if they speak out against the consultants.”

Of course the result is the same as in the classic tale that the EVP finds he has no ground to stand on because he has a “huge bill with nothing to show for it,” Mon said.

Either way, old lessons from childhood are truly life long lessons that can be easily applied to business storytelling. With a little creativity and imagination we can place ourselves in the shoes of such archetypes as the emperor, the three little pigs, etc… All of our life lessons have already been given to us in-between our ABC’s and nap time.

As we navigate through the web today search engines are what we traditionally use to find that menu, that car, or that celebrity’s name we just couldn’t remember. The search engine paradigm may shift very soon as social media is looking to diversify revenue streams.

Check out the article “Is Google Turning Into a Social Media Company?” by Erik Qualman and find out why.

Last time I checked I haven’t seen or spoken to one of my best friend’s across the country in quite a few months, yet I know exactly what he is up to every hour of every day thanks to Facebook. We haven’t had a telephone conversation, but have communicated via instant message, texting and email. Come to think of it, besides photos and text, we haven’t had one-on-one person-to-person contact in almost two years, which makes me wonder if our friendship has disintegrated a bit because of it.

Social Media has succeeded at connecting us, but has it also succeeded in making us more socially disconnected? Well, in one way social media has made us more social. I am more connected to people from my past than I have ever been. I see their daily life, their children, their vacations, but if I email them asking them how they are doing I get probably less than a 30-word response.

Social media applications such as Twitter have taken this ideology and put it to work.  Dense, brief content that limits you to 140 -characters to describe anything you may be doing or feeling. Now with over 3-million tweets each day, Twitter has grown and expanded beyond most people’s expectations. On a broader scale, texting has also limited our verbiage as well as.

Any way you spell it, these platforms encourage us to be less articulate, create endless amounts of content while all the while become more detached doing it. On the other, I have connected to people and business prospects that may have never been possible otherwise.

Social media is a tool and a double-edged sword. Being that as it may, Facebook is the fourth most trafficked site in the world right now,thus we are all somewhat forced to pay attention. Either way, I’m along for the ride, wherever it may take my business or myself.