What is the most important thing you want to establish? I would say that, up front, you want to establish trust. Trust, of course, is built over time. It is built through every positive, trustworthy impression you make. Is your elevator pitch designed to build trust? I dare say that were you to state something like, “I’m Bob Shawgo, the most trusted man in sales communication training,” it may have the opposite effect of what you are going for.

The Secret to Gaining Trust in Sales Communication

The real secret to establishing trust in sales communication is to focus on the other person’s needs. Be warned, this does not mean focusing on what they need to buy from you. You need to take genuine interest in them and be ready to uncouple what you sell from the relationship you are establishing with them.

How about this approach? You have thirty seconds to introduce yourself at a networking meeting. You stand and say something like:

“I’m Bob Shawgo. I’m in sales communications. Business is going well. Chris invited me here today. He spoke so highly of this group, that I thought I’d like get to know some of you who have services I can refer to my clients. I hope we’ll have a chance to mingle after the formal introductions.”

What have you communicated?

• Business is going well so you’re not here trolling for clients.
• You already have a trusted friend, Chris, in the group.
• You have a positive impression of the group.
• You are open to getting to know them.
• You are interested in promoting their services.
• You take care of your clients.
• You are open to more conversations.

I guarantee that this approach will go a long way toward helping you build trust. You will also stand out from the crowd of people who quote the bullet list from their company brochure. Focus on building trust; the rest will follow.

Some of my favorites are probably some of the most popular applications:
Intacct for business accounting
SalesForce for customer relationship management
Constant Contact for e-mail campaigns

Take a look and see what is available online to do the things you used to do on a local machine. And enjoy the luxury of continuous no-hassle updates, server security, expandable resources, and on and on. It’s a big cloud and I’m lovin’ it.

Many companies think of marketing communications as mere advertising, mass, direct, or otherwise. Public relations seems to also be a well-tapped channel among larger companies. Marketing communication, however, reaches way beyond the confines of advertising and public relations. Companies need to look at and engage all the communications avenues open to them, even ones currently buried in the back corner of engineering.

Don’t fail to engage the power of great documentation in garnering loyalty and feeding viral marketing.

One powerful communications tool that seems to be overlooked by marketing and owned solely by the left-brain communicators in engineering or product development is the vast library of instructional materials. Most companies have some sort of instructional material to go along with products, especially high-tech companies. Think of those lightweight software manuals being pumped out by every company that has put together a couple lines of code. They often explain how to use the product, but is that enough?

How much power goes untapped to build excitement around the product by using the manual to explain why and when to use the product? What if a manual actually built customer loyalty? What if a manual became a trusted professional resource, a mentor in print?

I know what some of you are saying, “If they’re reading the manual, they already have the product.” So what? Aren’t we always touting that the most valuable customer is the current, loyal customer. That customer, the one with the amazing manual, is the the one who will talk about your product to his friends. The manual is a catalyst to viral marketing. It’s a word-of-mouth revenue generator.

How does a company go about turning a manual into a marketing tool?

First, you need to stop asking the technical writer question, “What does the user need to know to use this product?” and start asking the marketer question, “What does the user need to know to succeed so they will love this product?” This is a tougher question because it means understanding the customer – what they do, what they aspire to do, and how some are doing it better than others. The manual writer needs to understand best practices and be able to integrate best-practice story lines into the manual. It’s not enough to tell a user the step by step for a feature. The writer needs to also tell them when and where the feature can be used to save them time and money (or just make them look cool).

Instruction and motivation need to go hand in hand. As writers move beyond instruction toward motivating users to integrate the product into their work flow, users turn into loyal advocates. They won’t want to jeopardize their work flow by switching products. And they’ll look forward to upgrades if they know that another motivational, trusted user manual will be included to help them along the way.

Put the power of your user manual to work by handing it to the marketing department or a marketing consultant for a user-centric re-write.

So much of business is built around things. A company banks its future on a hot new product. Product management is the hub of manufacturing, distribution, and retail. Large companies drive out small companies with the promise of saving money. Advertising links happiness to cars, houses, and things to fill up our houses and empty our wallets.

Product Centricis

Early in my career as a marketing consultant, one of the first things I used to do was look at the product line, immediately followed by a look at the cash-flow and debt load of the company. In other words, conventional business practice had taught me that marketing was all about what you wanted to sell and how much money you had to sell it. Then I would do consumer research to justify my ideas about repackaging, branding, and advertising the product.

The problem with this way of doing business was that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. A hit or miss approach can be good if you have a lot turns at bat. But in the bottom of the ninth, striking out often equals losing.

Another problem with focusing on products, is that some genius is always building a better mouse trap. We see it played out over and over again. An entrepreneur invents some nifty widget, packages it, and throws it out on the marketplace only to get stepped over by a newer, better widget. Product-centric companies spend all their time playing leap frog – fun, but tiring.

The business world is rife with books that advise following this exact model. Search for books on amazon.com using the keyword “innovate.” At the time I wrote this I found over 12,000 listings. That’s a whole lot of leap frog instruction.

In his best-selling book Purple Cow, Seth Godin cheerleads innovation, encouraging companies to spend more on finding the next big idea. Sounds simple. However, more circumspect research by Booz Allen Hamilton revealed a different story about innovation as a recipe for success.

“There is no easy way to achieve sustained innovation success-you can’t spend your way to prosperity,” said Booz Allen Vice President Barry Jaruzelski. “Successful innovation demands careful coordination and orchestration both internally and externally.”

Don’t get me wrong. Product innovation is important, and some of the books are absolutely brilliant. Innovation is one of the hallmarks of American business success. It is also very much like a lightening strike. The problem arises, as many of these authors point out, when you try to force lightening to strike in the same place twice. Building the biggest lighting rod is expensive, and even then, odds are that the lightening will still strike somewhere else. I strongly advocate building lightening rods – keep investing in innovation as part of doing business. Innovation and product management only become a problem – a destabilizing factor – when they are the central focus of a business.

When all eyes are on the product, businesses miss what matters most. Of course, you know what that is.

The whale can live without those ... for a while.

Lots of marketing and sales people try finger pointing. The best finger pointer may stay about two months longer – to enjoy 60 days of scrutiny in a company on the verge of collapse. The fact is, marketing and sales need each other. Sure, the occasional marketing superstar can get by with sales force of newbie order takers, just like a sales genius can get by with marketing team of college interns. Most companies, however, need competencies in both camps to reach revenue looking like success.

So how do you move your sales and marketing teams from the cutting edge to the leading edge? How do you make them so valuable individually and collectively that a CEO would sooner give up her annual bonus than touch one penny of sales and marketing compensation? The answer probably isn’t that hard to figure out. Companies have been doing it for decades. Well, they’ve been doing it half way – sort of like only plugging half the holes in a bucket at a time.

Companies have, for decades, sent salespeople to training and marketing people to conferences. Both approaches are great, until they try to work together. They have different playbooks, different expectations. They haven’t learned a common language and rallied around a common goal. The sales people see marketing as a support to their vital revenue function. The marketing people see sales as a mouthpiece for their latest campaign. Each group is much more than what they seem.

Training needs to bring them both groups to the same methods and goals. It needs to build competencies, knowledge, and skills in their respective disciplines, while at the same time reinforcing the team approach. The offensive tackle and the wide receiver have very different jobs and different skills (not to mention different physiques), but they work from the same playbook to move the team down the field. In practice, they don’t do all the same drills, but they have an intimate understanding of the other man’s job.

Bring your team together, train them to be the best at what they do and the best support for what the other guy does. Build a playbook the whole team can work from.