Assess Your Effectiveness at Trade Shows

Posted on March 5, 2010 by ellendnaylor

In honor of my competitive intelligence colleague, Jonathan Calof, I am writing this post on his subject of expertise, trade shows! Jonathon just won SCIP’s esteemed Fellow’s award which will be officially presented at SCIP’s annual conference in Washington, DC which takes place from March 9 – 12. Trade shows are one of the best venues for cooperative intelligence practices since if you display cooperative connection and communication skills, the floodgates of knowledge will be yours!

Most discussion around trade show analysis measures their effectiveness in ROI terms:
How many sales did we close as a result of connections at our booth? How many new connections did we make that represent customer prospects?

Many of the other benefits are more squishy to measure:

How much scoop did we collect on the competition, market trends, technical innovation, product development, or new technology that helps us develop a better strategy or adjust our sales tactics?

What infrastructure do we have in place to quickly report our findings to those in our company which might engender further collect during the trade show? And after we return from the trade show?

What infrastructure do we have in place to qualify prospects for our business?
This can start right at the booth as you can qualify the better prospects and have coffee or drinks later, since you don’t want to spill all your company secrets right at the booth area since you never know who might be listening in who is not a prospect, but might be collecting on your company!

I like to prepare a cheat sheet which helps me qualify customers when I exhibit. It’s kind of cumbersome, but it is fail proof since people’s answers to these questions guide me on how and if we should further our relationship.  Remember customers aren’t the only great connections at trade shows. For example, industry experts, newspaper reporters and bloggers help sell your company too. They have their biases just like anyone else, and you want to influence them to favor your company and your products and services so they write good things about you. Think: who else do I want to connect at this trade show mecca where people are so pre-disposed to share what they know?

Lastly, I assess if this was even the right show for the company to exhibit at. Many companies don’t think about this as much.  We tend to exhibit at shows since, “We’ve always had a booth at ‘X’ show.” Each year I like to assess our effectiveness at trade shows we’ve attended. Sometimes I use an ROI calculation. Sometimes I realize I can’t afford not to be at a trade show since all my competition is there connecting with a finite number of potential and existing customers. At other shows, product announcements are made: can you afford not to attend this type of show and blow your horn? Where it gets gray in decision-making is when results are gradually getting worse: do you just pull out of the show or do you change your behavior and tactics in hopes of improving your results? Marketing through social networks is also competing with in-person events like trade shows, which could be the subject for another day.

How do you assess your effectiveness at trade shows?

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, product development, SCIP, social networks, trade show | Comments Off

Improve Your ROI by Integrating Marketing & Sales Intelligence

Posted on February 25, 2010 by ellendnaylor

 

I (Ellen Naylor) will be giving a 2 hour session at the American Marketing Association’s Spring Marketing Workshop which takes place in Denver, Colorado from March 22 – 25 at the Westin Tabor Center. My talk, “Improve Your ROI by Integrating Marketing & Sales” will be given on March 23 from 2:45 – 4:45 pm, about a week before my birthday.

The Marketing Workshop allows attendees to mix and match sessions according to the following topics:
 
• Marketing ROI
• Pricing Strategy and Tactics
• Social Media and Marketing
• Branding
• Sales and Marketing Integration
• Customer Loyalty and Relationship Management
• Search Engine Optimization

Below is the write up which is buried in the AMA’s 20 page marketing workshop e-booklet.

Sales and marketing are often at odds. This workshop will focus on tools and techniques that are tried and tested, which integrate the smarts of sales, marketing and product development employees. Elicitation is usually used to collect competitive intelligence. Learn what elicitation is and how it can be used to improve your company’s sales intelligence by closing more deals and enabling Sales to collect valuable information from customers to boost your company’s knowledge about market trends, customer needs and the competition to name a few. Likewise, learn how win loss analysis and trade show analysis integrate sales and marketing often with the voice of the customer and other market intelligence.

You will learn:

Elicitation: what it is and why it’s a more effective means to collect information than direct questioning for interviews
Close more sales deals and collect valuable customer insight through the practice of elicitation 
Implement a cooperative win loss analysis process that integrates feedback from sales, marketing and your customers
Improve both your sales lead generation and collection skills at trade shows

Matt Kelly, VP Business Development at Strategy Software will be presenting, “Competitive Affairs: Leveraging Competitor Information to Drive Revenue and Increase Market Share. His session takes place on March 24 from 8:30 – 11:30 a.m. Matt is an engaging speaker who I have known for years through SCIP.

I wanted to share this is the spirit of cooperative intelligence as it is pretty rare for the AMA to host events in Denver. March is also a great month to visit the Rocky Mountains if you like to ski as it’s our snowiest month.

Filed under: Competitive Intelligence, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, Denver, Elicitation, product development, Sales Intelligence, SCIP, win loss analysis | 1 Comment »

How well do you Emotionally Connect?

Posted on January 29, 2010 by ellendnaylor

I enjoyed Seth Godin’s blog a week ago on “too much data leads to not enough belief.” His bottom line is, “relying too much on proof distracts you from the real mission – which is emotional connection.”

I have noticed in my fields of research and competitive intelligence that we have this tendency to drown our customers with data, and while they might be impressed that we dug up all this information, they usually don’t want the details. We also talk the language of competitive analysis, which most people don’t resonate with, and there is no emotional connection—since competitive intelligence is not the issue. Solving a business problem or uncovering and entering new markets or product development are the issues.

Companies pay competitive intelligence professionals to provide them with what’s relevant and to weed out all the excess, which is most of the information that’s out there. Most of the time your customers will connect if you put together a crisp set of information and persuasively articulate your findings, and include some analysis, if it adds clarity and persuasiveness to your recommendations.

But whoa, remember everyone that you’re addressing has a different communication style, and it’s really all about them and not about you. This is a guiding principal of cooperative communication a key element of cooperative intelligence. Some people do want the details, and not just access to them “later”. You better present them and be ready to be grilled since they will have questions! Companies need these type of people to bring balance to decision-making and to avoid being blindsided. Not everyone can or should be a visionary!

Cooperative communicators know that they’re talking for their audience not TO their audience. Their attitude and practice is to listen to their audience, and to query ahead of time about how to connect with the key issues and concerns of their audience (or clients), and in a way that will stick with them.

There is another problem with all that data: it’s historic. The reams of research are helpful however, if you’re trying to put together some scenarios, since you need to be pretty thorough in developing scenarios to include all the factors that might change the scenario, to observe the patterns in the marketplace, including the competition and to conclude with a scenario that you believe is the most likely.

You ultimately want to get out your crystal ball and forecast where the market is heading, right? And better yet, be visionary and LEAD the market!

Back to Mr. Godin: emotional connection is what happens when you engage people. That doesn’t happen with some myriad of facts and figures. It happens because they believe. How do you communicate to make them believe?

Filed under: communication, competitive analysis, Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, product development, research | Comments Off

Integrate Emotional Intelligence & Selling into Competitive Intelligence

Posted on January 21, 2010 by ellendnaylor

Colleen Stanley

Last week I attended a webinar to improve my selling skills led by Colleen Stanley, Founder and Chief Sales Officer of SalesLeadership, Inc. Effective selling will help competitive intelligence professionals, product management and researchers gain respect, cooperation and appreciation from internal peers. Since many of us have no reporting employees, selling yourself is even more important in this “new economy”.

People obtain more knowledge than ever through the Internet, so they may feel like they don’t need you to provide them competitive intelligence. Due to the recession more people want to see a visible ROI for your solution. This isn’t always possible in competitive intelligence, but be creative and you can develop an ROI solution often enough. People are more skeptical due to the scandals which triggered this recession so really don’t like to be pushed into decision-making–not that they ever did.

Find the pain points and match your communication style to the decision-makers and key influencers in the buying process. This works for every business function I can think of!

People who are optimistic outsell those who aren’t by 33%. When bad things happen they realize that this is just temporary and their self-talk reflects this as they expect positive outcomes since they’re happy. They often find humor when others would be dragged down by unfortunate circumstances or stress. They live with an attitude of gratitude. Optimism must be real: people will see right through you if it’s feigned.

To really be successful in selling, your prospect needs to admit that they have a problem, and identify what it is costing them. This outlook works very well in competitive intelligence. I often ask what it will cost if we do nothing. Sometimes there is a very low cost to do nothing, so it’s not important enough to fix compared to bigger problems where we can more readily measure the impact of success or failure.

I loved Colleen’s Principles of Expectation:
1. Can the Sales person pass the pop quiz test? Make sure all parties in the meeting clearly understand the objective of the meeting.
2. Is there a Mutual Fit? Is the solution we’re discussing mutually good for all parties?
3. Examine your Intention. Are you there to Impress or to Influence? Influencers are intent on understanding customer’s issues; impressing is just selling.

Sales people with high emotional intelligence outsell those with low EI. I think high EI benefits anyone.

Here are some tippers to improve your EI:
Improve your Self-Awareness. Most people don’t take enough downtime to be reflective and introspective to learn why they react a certain way to situations. Solitude triggers the right brain where creativity often kicks in.
Be Assertive: Express your feelings and ask questions without being aggressive or abusive. You have the right to ask for what you need to know to do your job whether sales, marketing, research or competitive intelligence.
Delayed Gratification is usually worth it: Look beyond the immediate. Adopt a long term outlook when selling as relationships are always in development. Be a planner and work on time management towards connection and building these relationships.

Combine these emotional intelligence practices and selling with the collection skill of elicitation and cooperative intelligence, and watch your effectiveness as a competitive intelligence professional soar!

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, connection, cooperation, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, creativity, emotional intelligence, product development, research | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Purposeful Cooperative Leadership in Competitive Intelligence

Posted on January 15, 2010 by ellendnaylor

Cooperative Leadership

I was led to the Purposeful Leaderships’ blog, “Leading from the Heart” by Janna Rust earlier this week. Leading from the heart is a trait of cooperative intelligence, namely cooperative leadership as it rings of caring and authenticity.  Janna also discusses taking care of your reporting people by being there for them and listening. Another great point is to “be protective” of your reporting people and let them know you’re all on the same team.

So many things I read about leadership focus on “managing up”, that is impress your bosses. This often comes at the expense of managing your subordinates, who are doing the work! Yet it’s a delicate balance since your boss decides on your pay raise, can open a lot of doors, and often controls or influences budget moneys allocated to your projects. Whether with bosses, peers or subordinates, cooperative leadership is more about “them” and less about me.

In competitive intelligence and research, many of us don’t have any reporting people and report into another functional area of the company such as Sales, Marketing, Strategic Planning, Product Development or Research & Development. Often enough, they aren’t quite sure what to do with us.

Cooperative and purposeful leadership skills are all the more essential when you rely on other people to give you great information or intelligence who don’t report to you, and your boss perhaps views you as an outlier since competitive intelligence doesn’t quite fit into anyone’s area.

I spent a lot of time meeting with people and listening to their business problems as a competitive intelligence manager. I was really attuned to emotional intelligence as I dealt with my network of contacts and internal company customers and was sensitive to how they were motivated. I would attempt to match my communication style with theirs, including my body language. This was how I behaved whether dealing with peers, subordinates, my internal clients, my sources or my superiors.

I was protective of my sources, especially Sales. Everyone in marketing wanted Sales’ input into their projects. Over time I became the “unofficial” marketing liaison person to Sales. This almost eliminated the number of requests that went to Sales for quick turnaround corporate projects. I made it my business to have more interaction with Sales, and to let them know I reduced their work load, and appreciated that their time should be spent selling. This was the most purposeful leadership I had while at Verizon. I knew I needed to be cooperative in order to gain sales intelligence and customer’s input to be successful in competitive intelligence.

In what ways are you purposeful and cooperative in your leadership and management?

Filed under: communication, Competitive Intelligence, cooperative, Cooperative Intelligence, emotional intelligence, leadership, product development, research, Sales Intelligence | 3 Comments »

AttaainCI wins AIIP’s 10th Annual Technology Award

Posted on November 2, 2009 by ellendnaylor
AIIPTechnology2009

Daryl Scott & Marcy Phelps

This time last week I was at Internet Librarian in Monterey, California. AttaainCI earned AIIP’s technology award. Founder and President, Daryl Scott was present to receive the award from AIIP’s President, Marcy Phelps. Every year, the AIIP Technology Award is presented to a company whose product, in the panel’s opinion, best assists independent information professionals in locating, analyzing, organizing and delivering information.

AttaainCI software, was launched in early 2008, and provides real-time intelligence gathering, analysis, sharing and reporting alerts. One of my favorite uses is company tracking: your company, one you want to acquire or a competitor, for example. Track what’s being said about your company’s products or your key customers. It is reasonably priced at $149 per month for the first user and $69 for the second user for unlimited usage on a month-to-month basis. Discounted annual plans are negotiable with Attaain. Watch 10 instructional videos and learn in detail how AttaainCI will work for you.

AttaainCI continuously monitors, filters and integrates intelligence from a wide range of sources.

AttaainCI

The software had its start mostly tracking social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn among others.  Recently AttaainCI included Hoovers as a resource for information, greatly boosting its one-stop shopping appeal for research. You can use it both for a one-time research project, for example a company or person; and you can receive email alerts delivered to your mailbox according to a personalized schedule. It is cooperative in that you can share results with co-workers and view results more visually.

The typical output for a one-time company research query might be 3 or 4 pages of data that is easy to scroll through, as the abstracts appear neatly in 4 columns: Search Results, News & Announcement, Blog Mentions and Additional Intelligence. You can quickly connect to the best articles or reports to get up to speed on the topic you’re researching. You can also find out who is talking about that topic through your social networks. I find it is useful since I have a huge LinkedIn network, so I always find relevant people to follow-up with. Similarly I often can connect to good people on Twitter, who lead me to others once I determine the # for the topic in question, like #eldercare.  If you need more information than what is on those several pages, AttaainCI provides links to even more data right off the initial report.

AttaainCI is a good software package to get up to speed on just about any topic, and it’s great to use at the outset of a project whether it’s competitive intelligence or general research for sales, marketing, product management or strategic planning. AttaainCI is an effective tool for daily monitoring on topics to get the latest and greatest while you’re working on a project, which goes on for two weeks to a month, for example. Find out what people are saying about you, key executives, your products, and your company through AttaainCI.  AttaainCI will greatly reduce your communication time for intelligence deliverables.

Filed under: AIIP, communication, Competitive Intelligence, cooperative, LinkedIn, product development, research, social networks, Twitter | Comments Off

Real-time Collaborative Architectural Modeling Enhances Complex Product Development

Posted on September 24, 2009 by ellendnaylor

Bryan MoserBryan Moser spoke to our Denver PDMA (Product development Management Association) chapter about the value of models such as the one his company, Global Project Design (GPD) developed  to forecast, optimize, allocate and measure coordination in complex product development projects. These models take into account different cultures, time zones, language barriers, and dispersed decision-making. They also incorporate engineering behavior among different cultures based on their typical interaction.

Today there is pressure to succeed in a dramatically concurrent fashion, which increases the risk of rework, quality and design. The thinning of the workforce affects production as does the loss of deep knowledge and connection from workers who have been laid off or who have retired. Another finding in these complex product development initiatives is that the cost of coordination is high and is on average 30%-35% of the time consumed.

Bryan walked us through the example of the Sikorsky S92 helicopter product development project. Their biggest concern was defending their intellectual property as they selected companies in various countries to work as an integrated team. The team was spread across the globe in countries such as Brazil, Taiwan, Spain, China and Japan, and included big company names such as Embraer of Brazil and Taiwan Aerospace, for example. Sikorsky USA was the decision-making company. 

Sikorsky had predicted that it would take 5 years from product spec to prototype development. It took 9 years, and GPD’s model prediction was only off by 2 months from the actual time. Sikorsky hadn’t taken into account the dynamics that would add considerable time to product development, such as coordination, culture, language, time zones, and a lot of dead time that one team would experience if another was late in delivery, for example. 

We can’t turn the clock back on product development since the expertise for various segments of complex product development is best served by a global team. However, putting on a nationalist hat, previously teams all worked for one company, in similar time zones and had strong connection and communication since they all spoke the same language, and could develop products more expeditiously from having worked together extensively over the years. This is lost in these complex product development projects where people who have never worked together, are thrust together to develop a product. 

This real time collaborative model takes into account the various languages and points of view, and the time needed to build relationships with people who have never worked together before.

One of the key findings for these complex projects is that there is a fair amount of wasted time as work time averages:

~54% Direct Work
~30% Coordination
~16% Less Useful Time

The key takeaway is that coordination is often way underestimated in these complex product development projects across multiple countries. It’s better to run the model earlier in the process, so as to re-schedule or re-work pieces to reduce the less productive coordination time. GPD’s model is agent based on simulation models about how teams make choices and includes the last 30-40 years of research of behaviors in engineering work.

In conclusion, product development professionals face:

A decline in judgment based on experience alone. Traditional centralized and detailed plans ignore and misrepresent the complexity of projects.

Coordination – Interaction of teams to satisfy dependence across subsystems can be 35% of the effort, cost and duration of these development projects.

Choosing the best coordination architecture can lead to a 20% improvement in time/cost performance and will improve your competitiveness! Judgment through situation awareness is also gained.

Filed under: communication, competitiveness, connection, Denver, product development | Comments Off

« Previous Page
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,788 other followers

%d bloggers like this: