Influencer message development :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

If you were developing a set of messages for your prospects, you’d want to
understand their needs first. Then you’d develop a set of propositions that
mapped onto those needs, demonstrating how your offering delivered
value on those propositions. Marketing to influencers is no different. They
do, however, have different needs. Remember that influencers don’t buy
from you, so they don’t care what you’re selling. What is a very important
detail for a prospect, who’s comparing one competitor with another, is
irrelevant to an influencer. But they do care about their own agendas.

For example, journalists care about creating copy. They have deadlines
and column inches to fill. Their primary goal is to fill those inches. In a
Maslow-like hierarchy of needs, journalists can think about higher orders
of fulfilment, such as imparting insight or opinion, only if the quantity is
present. So give them content, not spoon-fed (most journalists are too
savvy for that) but through 1-to-1 contacts with your senior executives.

Journalists love a scoop, or insider information. Because you know your
journalist influencers you can target them specifically, and build a relationship
between them and your spokespeople. Your message to journalists is:
‘‘We have some great insight on xyz product category, and we’re only
going to brief you and two other influential journalists on this.’’
Note that we said that you should build a relationship between journalists
and your spokespeople, not with your PR operation. A key measurement
of success is the degree to which influencers external to your firm
interact with influential people inside it. You will have, or will need to
create, influential individuals working for you. Get them connected with
the wider influencer community. We’d hope that it goes without saying,
but we often hear of bad examples. So, for the record, don’t send your
most influential journalists standard press releases. Why would they read
them? They don’t care about you, any more than they care about the 200
other firms that also send them releases.

You do need to ensure that you are speaking in the appropriate language
to influencers. Each influencer category has its own vocabulary, and you need
to articulate your messages using the right dictionary. Just as vertical industries
have their own jargon, influencer categories have their preferred terms.
So when you’re talking to channel partners for example, make sure you are
talking bundles, ASPs and attach rates.1 Again, you need to develop a specific
set of messages for channel partners. The message might be something like:
‘‘You’re one of the most influential partners we have and we’re going to give
you special treatment. We want to be a preferred supplier for you.’’
Other messages you might use include:

& To analyst influencers: ‘We’d like to get your thoughts on our newvision’.
& To regulatory influencers: ‘You’re important and we’re listening’.
& To standards body influencers: ‘We want to contribute’.
& To venture capitalists and financier influencers: ‘We can direct you to
the next big thing’.

To academia influencers: ‘We want to commission a research project’.
& To competitor influencers: ‘If you join us we can further your career’.
And so on. Ideally, you’ll create not one but a series of messages, a
curriculum that educates (or re-educates) each influencer or influencer
type. As the term curriculum infers, influencer marketing requires a longterm
commitment from you, because that’s what you want from your
influencers.
There are two special cases to be treated even more carefully than
‘normal’ influencers. These are the influencers within customers and
groups or clubs of customers. We’ve said this before, but the most significant
type of influencer is a customer, preferably though not necessarily
one of your own customers. A variant on this type of influencer is the
collective, such as buyers groups, purchasing lists and procurement
authorities.

It’s tempting to create messages for these types of influencer
that are based on, or are copies of, your standard sales pitches. This is a bad
idea: influential customers will respond even less favourably to your
pitches than most prospects. This is because they are influential for a
reason, because they are early adopters or market leaders, or whatever.
The best message to a customer influencer is ‘‘We want to learn from you’’.
Humility is a rare thing in sales and marketing, and if your approach is
genuine you will get their attention.

Good, bad and ugly influencers :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

The channel and its importance
The sales channel is arguably the most important category of influencers
after peer customers. After all, your sales channel partners are the ones
that are talking to your customers and (you hope) selling your products.
The reality is that sales channel management is done badly. Although
there are several exemplary instances, typically our experience tell us that
most firms have a hard time in optimising their channel partners. Even
firms like Microsoft, which derives nearly all of its sales through its indirect
channel, have a remarkably patchy delivery record.

A leading European telecoms company was recently complaining to us
about the poor execution it experiencedwithin its channel partners. Across
13 European countries it numbered 700 separate partner firms, ranging
from top-tier consulting firms to one-man-band reseller agents.What struck
us most was not the ridiculously high number of partners but that the telco
seemed surprised that its approach wasn’t working. The assumption had
been that the more partners it had the more services it would sell.

Partnerships are a clear case where ‘less is more’ applies. You cannot
reasonably manage this number of partner organisations and expect
them all to deliver high returns, without serious investment in management.
For one thing, the chance that one partner’s territory conflicts
with another’s was not only likely, it was all but guaranteed. While some
overlap is inevitable, even desirable, this degree of clash proved counterproductive.
We know firms that don’t know how many partner organisations they
have, because the structure of the channel is too complex, with distributors
selling to intermediaries, who then sell on to smaller firms.

They lose track of who is selling to whom, even though they have licence
agreements in place that should stop the practice of selling on. The
channel operates within a law unto itself. In this respect, the sales channel
is not unlike peer consumers, in that suppliers can often lose control of the
market messages, and thus lose visibility of the sales process.
There are some endemic issues with selling through channel partners:

1. Sales channel partnerships are typically non-exclusive. This means that
you are fighting with other suppliers to gain attention from the partner.
You are in competition with your partner’s other suppliers even before
you get to market.

2. Suppliers and partners are rarely evenly matched in size or importance.
You may think it’s great to have Accenture as a partner, but if you are
regarded as a small-time player with a niche offering, they will bring you
into a deal at their convenience only. Conversely, if you are a major
player you can largely dictate the terms of your partnerships, because
you know the partners’ customers want to buy your products or
services. Understanding who holds the dominant status is critical in
making partnerships work.

3. Partners often see you as a tactical solution. Because you are nonexclusive,
and especially if you are the subservient party, you’ll often
be regarded as a nice-to-have. It often makes sense to focus on partnerships
where size and importance (to the market) are close together.
4. When partnerships are unbalanced you’ll find that your target markets
may be out of kilter. We’ve had clients whose solution is aimed at midtier
firms yet proudly proclaim partnerships with top-tier consultants.

They sold very little. The reverse is also true: high-end goods sold
through commodity channels undermines the value perception of the
product. That’s why Calvin Klein doesn’t want its jeans sold in Tesco.
The best partnerships are those where the parties are more-or-less equal
in stature, and that there is a strategic benefit in the relationship for both
players. Neither party wants to be a nice-to-have player.

How to influence the channel
Margin isn’t it! If you have to discount you haven’t demonstrated the value,
or your product isn’t appropriate to be sold via those channels.
Good ways to influence partner organisations are:
& Make sure your partner is aiming at the same market as you are. The
most common mistake we see is the mismatch between suppliers’ core
markets and that of their partners.

& Require your partners to make an investment in you. If partners put skin
in the game they’re more likely to execute on the partnership. Training
is the obvious investment to promote, but it also includes co-marketing
material and joint proposition development.
& Position your partners as influencers – promote their solutions, competencies
and customers in your own marketing collateral.
& Market your partners into your existing clients. This is you putting skin
in the game. If you’re willing to share your customers then the partner
is more likely to reciprocate. Note that if you can’t easily sell your
partner in to your customers then maybe your offerings don’t fit
together so well.

& Get your partners networked with other influencers in your market.
You’ll have to identify the appropriate person within the partner organisation,
someone that has the gravitas to network successfully in the
influencer community.
& Make sure your success is aligned with your partner’s. If they are
successful it should mean that you are. And the converse is also true.
Competitors as influencers One of the biggest sources of influence on your prospects are your
competitors. Many people react to this news with apathy. They think it’s
pointless to know this information, because they can’t see a way to
influence their competitors. We say, think again. There are at least three
ways you can influence your competitors, and probably more, but keep
things ethical. There’s no excuse for underhand tactics.
Talk to your competitors
The first thing you should do to influence competitors is talk to them. This
may seem a strange approach but it makes perfect sense. Talking to
competitors gives you a chance to discuss general market trends, find

out what the competitor culture is like and to network in the industry. You
may find that you are not competitors at all, or at least not on all fronts.
There may be partnership or referral arrangements that are possible.
One subject always on the agenda when talking to competitors is that of
your mutual competitors. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, and all that. You
can share insight and stories, and swap tips on how to deal with others’
strengths and capabilities.

Most of the top CEOs in an industry meet each other at least once a year,
either privately or at an industry event. What we’re suggesting is that this
practice cascades down the organisational structure. There are plenty of
opportunities to make contact with competitors, at trade shows, media
events, or wherever. It’s hopefully unnecessary to say, but just in case, we
would never encourage gloating or bad-mouthing competitors, or any
such nonsense. Always be professional – and legal – no price fixing or
such things.

Be talked about by your competitors
The second thing you can do to influence competitors is to talk about
them, and to get them to talk about you. As Oscar Wilde said, the only thing
worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
How do you ensure that your competitors talk about you? The answer is
that you get them to worry about you. Remember the rule of influence:
influencers don’t care about you or your products. They care about their
own agenda. This is just as true for competitors as for any other type of
influencer. When you carry messages to prospect customers you’ll talk
about what your product can do for them. But when talking to, or about,
competitors you must change the message. Don’t talk about features and
functions of your product, or pricing or subjects that you’d discuss with
prospects.

The things that will worry competitors include (but are in no way
limited to):
& Your percentage growth year-on-year
& Your expanding client list
& The fact you’ve been commissioned to write a book
& Invitations to speaking engagements
& Awards and prizes
& Quotes in influential journals and media

Pick three, but only three, things that you think would worry a
competitor. In fact, anything that gets them talking about you in a
positive sense (and we mean positive for you, negative for the competitor).
Stuck for things to talk about? What would worry you if you
heard them about your competitors? Use these things as a starting
point.
Now, how do you measure how worried your competitors are? A
powerful indicator of your influence in the market is what your competitors
say about you. You can find this information out by asking your
prospects, or by asking influencers. A key question that influencers like
to ask is, who are your primary competitors? Do your competitors mention
you? What do they say about you?

You want your competitors to talk about you, to acknowledge you as a
competitor. Why? Simply, it acknowledges you as a credible player. Don’t
worry that a competitor will rubbish you in front of a prospect or influencer.
It is generally accepted as poor form and reflects badly on the
detractor.

We’ve also noticed that competitors that are worried about one particular
player start to mirror the language that they use. You’ll see this in
marketing literature, where one company introduces a new concept or
terminology. They may even start blogging on the subject that you introduce.
This is a sign that you’ve got them worried.

How do analysts influence a decision? :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

Analyst influence increases with engagement with decision-makers
Influencer Marketing
& Assessment and selection: pure consulting, and a project may take
several months to complete. Usually offered by dedicated consulting
arms of analyst firms.
& Decision validation: may be conducted over days, rather than months,
leveraging the knowledge of a single analyst.
& Price comparison/negotiation. The hardest advice to give, but
arguably the most valuable. Suppliers rarely provide pricing
information (unless required to by regulation), but commodity
prices are available. Analysts are able to aggregate prices from
multiple sources and calculate averages, which can help in
negotiation.

Why analyst influence can be overstated
There is, frankly, a lot of nonsense talked about the influence of analysts.
In some markets they hold near god-like status, with the ability to make
or break deals. This may have been widely true a decade ago. But today
information, expertise and influence is dissipated across a much wider
array of individuals.

We have read that analysts are influential in between 60 per cent and
80 per cent of large sales, especially in the tech sector. The inference is
that analysts are the most important influencers, and/or hold some
position of exclusive influence on decisions. But this high degree of
involvement doesn’t translate into analysts then enjoying 60 per cent
to 80 per cent of the available influence. We can’t think of a major sale
where the winning supplier didn’t influence the decision. Or where a
reference client wasn’t used. Indeed it’s arguable that the greatest
influencers on a decision are the preferred suppliers and the reference
customer.

It’s meaningless to quote percentages of involvement. The range of
involvement in decisions might range from zero to 100 per cent depending
on the market. We know that a big four consulting and integration firm
estimates that 0.5 per cent of its sales are influenced by analysts. No, that’s
not a typo. It’s one half of one per cent. It even uses the figure in its
calculations for ROI on AR. And it’s a figure that’s accepted by the firm’s
senior sales management team.

The important factor is not involvement but share of influence. Our
own data, drawn from more than a dozen studies of influencers, shows
that the average share of influence for analysts is 16 per cent. But it is
highly variable, ranging from 4 per cent to 22 per cent, depending on the
market segment and maturity.

Eliciting sales objections :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

Sales should be pretty straightforward, identifying prospects and leading
them down a logical path that results in a cheque. Why then is it so often
hard to do? It’s because prospects, awkward as they are, raise objections to
block a sale. Despite your best efforts, the prospect has thought of a reason
not to buy from you. If you haven’t armed your salespeople with counterarguments
to these objections, then the sale cannot complete.

Sales objections differ for each firm and prospect. Examples include:
& ‘I’ve never heard of your firm’.
& ‘I don’t know what your firm can do’.
& ‘You don’t know my business’.
& ‘I don’t believe your product works’.
& ‘I don’t believe your product will make/save me money’.
& ‘Your proposal exceeds my budget’.
& ‘Your solution is non-standard’.
& ‘You can’t provide the support service I need’.
& ‘This is new technology and I’m not sure it will last’.
And so on.

Such sales objections are an integral part of the selling process: in fact, many
have described sales as the process of overcoming objections. So, if objections
are an everyday occurrence to salespeople, why do they hate them?
The reasons are twofold: objections are numerous and they are varied.
This means that a prospect can declare any one of a dozen possible
objections at multiple points in the deal discussions. The result is that
salespeople must spend time addressing a prospect’s concerns, which
slows the sales cycle. The failure to successfully counter an objection ends
in a loss, which reduces lead conversion rates. Inevitably the finger then
points to marketing and its inability to deliver credible counter-arguments.
Firms across many industries tell us that they have three key issues

surrounding sales objections:
1. ‘We don’t know what the sales objections are’.
2. ‘We don’t know how to counter those objections’.
3. ‘Even if we can counter objections, the prospect wouldn’t believe us’.
Let’s examine these issues. Firstly, there are three proven ways to identify
sales objections. They are, in declining order of effectiveness: conduct a
win/loss analysis; hold a sales objection elicitation workshop; just ask your
salespeople.

A win/loss analysis project involves someone other than your firm
calling decision-makers that didn’t buy from you. You can’t do the calling
because it’s extremely unlikely that a decision-maker will tell you the real
reason why you were not chosen. They’re too polite, they don’t really care
and they feel rather awkward in telling you that your pitch leader had bad
breath (or whatever the real reason was). (You can call the decision-maker
that did choose you.) Win/loss is probably the most interesting project a
third party agency can conduct, as they can get some great insight into the
industry, as well as delivering juicy feedback to their clients. It is essential
to gain the sales director’s support for the process, as the results will affect
his operation. You should also treat win/loss analysis as a learning exercise,
not a blame game.

a top three mobile handset manufacturer :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

De-risking a product launch
The mobile handset market is fiercely competitive, nowhere more so
than in the business sector. Phenomenally successful in the consumer
marketplace, a top three mobile handset manufacturer is fighting hard to
displace a competitor as the enterprise market leader. The firm had
developed an innovative device capable of defeating its rival in a features
battle. But perception is everything, and the firm had relatively weak
awareness amongst its target business customers.

Influencer50 was commissioned to identify those individuals most
influencing the enterprise sector in Germany, in readiness for the
firm’s forthcoming new product line. Influencer50 worked together
with the firm’s global marketing agency, which was responsible for all
aspects of the company’s WOM go-to-market strategy.

The research uncovered the huge influence and buying power
exerted by Germany’s government-housed Ministry for Economy
and Technology and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft research facility.
Corporates were shown to follow the buying advice of such groups
to a far higher degree than in the UK or US.With the growing trend for
large organisations to outsource their IT infrastructure, the systems
integrators were seen to be increasingly influencing the bulk purchasing
of smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). And not just the
major SIs, but many niche or ‘boutique’ firms. In contrast, infrastructure
giants such as IBM and HP, trade magazines and industry analysts
exerted less than expected influence.

Using this insight, the firm targeted the top 100 influencers on
business-orientated handsets in Germany. It sent each influencer a
pre-launch handset and supporting material. It also created an online
forum to gather influencers’ views on the product’s feature-set, pricepoints,
launch strategy and choice of resellers. Using the forum, influencers
could contribute their own experiences and suggestions, and see
the opinions and comments from other influencers.
The feedback was used to make last stage modifications to the device,
to the user documentation and to the launch strategy. Importantly, high
visibility of the handset was established within the influencer community.
Influencers had trialled the product, fed back on its capabilities and each
had read the inputs of the wider influencer group.

The firm was able to launch the new handset into a market whose
influencers were already aware of it and its features. These influencers
started influencing the market, and the handset sold quickly and in
volume.

As the firm’s spokesperson commented, ‘The addition of influencer
identification and marketing into our WOM rollout campaign for the
new handset has been invaluable. We could already target our expected
consumer-base through our ongoing marketing, but identifying and
working with the top-tier of market influencers was beyond our reach –
and we knew it’.

Importantly, identifying and targeting influencers had substantially
lowered the risk in launching the handset. Mobile devices are expensive
to develop and market launch is a critical point in the commercial
success, or otherwise, of each product. Pre-influencing a market prior
to launch minimised the risk to the firm and underpinned a successful
product release.

Creating new routes to market :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

Influencer marketing provides new routes to market. Or it provides
routes into new markets, whichever is most constraining your sales.
A great example of this is Case Study H, in which the firm has begun to
pre-launch its handsets with influencers before public release. If you are
moving into a new geography or vertical market it makes sense to find out
who the primary influencers are before spending too much time and effort
in the wrong areas.

Influencer marketing also helps with repositioning your firm in your
marketplace. Firms often start selling their products to middle managers
and operational executives. Sooner or later they outgrow this market and
want to gain access to C-level management. There they can sell a broader
value proposition and increase sales per customer organisation. The trouble
is that having spent time in the middle management layer, that’s where
the C-levels assume you should be. How do you get your new target
audience out of this mindset?

Similarly, selling business solutions to business people rather than
products to support staff is an oft-cited shift in strategy, yet in practice it
is extraordinarily hard. This is because you have to shift perceptions. ‘I’m a
business person: why are you talking to me? My technical people are over
there . . .’. An approach that works is to identify influencers in the new
target audience, and then get them to carry your message. And you use
influencer-led collateral to support your legitimacy in the market. The ROI
from this activity is easy to measure: do you successfully penetrate the
market or not?

Success is not always down to having a great plan though, so make sure
you invest in the implementation and execution elements. Influencer
marketing may tell you the most influential people in the market, but
your salespeople may not be trained talking to C-level executives or business
managers, or whatever your new target audience is. One of our early
mistakes was to assume that client firms knew how to engage with their
market, and just needed us to point them in the right direction. Not so, and
we had to develop sales training courses to bridge the gap in skills.

Selling more :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

RoI in influencer marketing is measurable in cash terms. If you orientate
your marketing programmes around influencers, then align those influencers
with your sales objections, you can create a set of marketing
messages that directly influence sales. The disclaimer that it’s all in the
execution still applies, but your salespeople will have fewer excuses and
less cause to blame marketing! In fact, a predictor for RoI we offen use it to
measure the perception uplift of marketing’s usefulness by the sales force.

Influencers increase the velocity of sales because sales objections can
now be predicted and counter-arguments prepared. And because influencers
are more likely to be believed you are more likely to get past these
objections faster – certainly faster than your competitors! Sales cycles will
reduce, close rates will increase and you can tangibly measure the impact
on sales from your marketing programmes.

Lead generation
Our views on lead generation are very closely tied to those on marketing in
general. Leads are difficult to generate when marketing doesn’t work very
well. Particularly if no one is listening to your message, all messages sound
the same and prospects don’t believe what you tell them.
It makes all the difference if you can get influencers to break down some
of these barriers. For example, plenty of firms set up seminars or webinars
in which their senior management just give a pitch. Why would a prospect
turn up to listen to this? Instead, why not get an influencer to speak?

You could invite a customer or analyst or regulator or academic: someone
to draw in a crowd, get people thinking and engage them in discussion.
Many firms use hospitality as a means of breaking the ice. So salespeople
can call a prospect on Monday and ask whether they enjoyed the match on
Saturday. Why not invite them to dinner with an influencer instead? The
prospect might actually learn something, and the conversation is businessrelated
so the prospect stays focused.

It might not be so much fun, but let’s stay in touch with the core purpose of marketing. The example we provide
in Case Study A is illustrative. It constructed an innovative format for its
seminar (a debate), hired an influential chairperson and two engaging and
outspoken protagonists. In fact, the event was fun, as the debate wasn’t
too serious, and lots of interesting points were covered. Importantly, the
issues raised by the audience reflected their reservations – objections, if
you like – to homeworking, which proved useful in building successful
sales campaigns to prospects.

You can use influencer-led collateral in your direct mail pieces, webcasts
and podcasts, PR, research and (if you must) advertising. If you are
using influencers appropriately you should get better returns from your
lead generation activities.

We have noticed that, for some firms, the number of leads goes down
over the course of an influencer marketing programme. This is because
more time and effort is being taken on the type and quality of leads, rather
than quantity. So returning from an event with the glass bowl filled with
business cards (delegates only wanted to enter the prize draw) is replaced
by a smaller number of engaged and informed prospects. It’s not the
number of leads you generate that’s important, but the number you
eventually close.

Price increases
It’s easier to increase profits by raising prices than by cutting costs. In fact,
according to McKinsey, a 1 per cent rise in price can lead to an 8 per cent
profit increase. Nobody buys solely on price. If you need proof of this, take
a look at the cars being driven on the road. They are all functionally the
same, yet some people (or companies) pay five or ten times more than
others, based on their perceptions of value.

Influencers increase the perception of value. Why? Because they are
influencers! They are the most important, most respected, most listened to
individuals in your market. Weaving them into your marketing strategy
appropriately means that they implicitly are aligned with your firm. They
confirm the value of what you are selling, and convey confidence in your
solution. So you should be able to sell for more.