Today’s marketplace is both dynamic and complex; changing rapidly and possessing interrelationships between products, services, and commodities that are often difficult to perceive. These changes and interconnections favor organizations capable of responding to the evolving supply and demand for their current products as well as fulfilling new consumer needs.
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I got an (unsolicited) email offering a webinar to teach me about how to measure, and the importance of measuring, the ROI of social media.
TOTAL JOKE. And a bad one at that.
Social media, business social media, is running wild – with or without you. Your customers and prospective customers are posting on Facebook whether you have the balls to have presence there or not.
And I am not just talking to companies – I am talking to YOU – the individual.
CONSIDER THIS: Of all the grassroots revolutions that have occurred on social media, none of them were started by companies or a governments. They were all started by people – people who were excited, people who were afraid, people who were pissed, and people who wanted change and spoke up. They spoke over CEOs, media, newspapers, government, lobbyists, and politicians.
HERE’S WHAT THEY SHOULD MEASURE: LRI otherwise known as Lost Revenue (and goodwill and customer loyalty) of Idiots.
While Macy’s and most other department stores are/were measuring ROI, Zappos is cleaning their clock, delivering value, connectingwith and responding to customers one on one, and building a billion dollar empire in less time than it took Macy’s to expand to a second store 100 years ago.
Webinars on the subject of ROI of social media are likely run by the same people who thought Amazon.com wouldn’t make it. If Bezos measured the ROI at Amazon in the first five years, he would have quit. He accomplished domination while Barnes & Noble was measuring ROI, and Borders was going broke.
Amazon now has total market dominance based on leadership, vision, and technological excellence. Same with Apple. Microsoft used to laugh at them, now their employees all have iPads and iPods at home.
Measure? No, INVEST RESOURCES IN SOCIAL MEDIA WITHOUT MEASURING. NOW!
It’s way too soon to measure.
MAJOR POINT OF UNDERSTANDING: If they had measured the ROI of TV, or the computer, or the automobile, or the telephone, or the Internet after 5 years, NOBODY would have gotten involved, and we’d be in a technological bog – sinking.
Wake up and smell the opportunity!
People guarding nickels have no idea of the power or the value of business social media, much less social media. They have no idea of the lost opportunity, or the lost revenue. They have no idea of the perception and participation of customers.
My bet is people who measure the ROI of social media HAVE NEVER TWEETED. Wanna take that bet?
I define these people as the ones who still have a small rubber circle in the middle of their keyboard – completely out of touch with what’s new, and trying to prevent the unstoppable force of progress, and customers.
Wanna know who else ‘measured’ financial return?
Blockbuster measured online movie services.
Blackberry measured smartphones.
Microsoft measured music players.
Billion-dollar MIS-MEASUREMENT: Bank of America DIDN’T measure or understand the power of Facebook. They were greedily measuring increased revenue from debit card customers. Their billion dollar loss paled in comparison to their complete loss of goodwill. I doubt they will recover in a decade.
All of those companies are/were foolish.
There’s one company you want to take their time, measure nickels, rely on lawyers, and stick their big toe in the water before getting involved – that one company is your biggest competitor.
Here’s an easy plan to get rolling in a week or two:
1. Gather the email addresses of EVERYONE in your world.
2. Create a first-class, well tagged with key words, business page on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
3. Start a YouTube channel by inviting your customers to film WHY they bought from you.
4. Map out a strategy, and goals for engagement, for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.
5. Assign someone to monitor, post, and RESPOND to all who engage.
6. Create six value-based messages, two each for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
7. Shoot 2-3 value-based (something your customers could use) videos and post them on YouTube.
8. Invite all of your customers to join you by sending examples of your value messages. I recommend one campaign per media for four weeks – but have links to all in each email.
9. Post something every day on Facebook. Tweet something every day. Link with 2-5 people every day. Post one video a week.
10. If you really want to create some buzz, convert your contacts to Ace of Sales (www.aceofsales.com) – and send emails that differentiate yourself from the competition.
10.5 Only listen to your lawyer if they tell you what you CAN do.
Start there.
Start now.
Start.
Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.
About the Author
Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].
https://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/JeffreyGitomer.jpg218156StrategyDrivenhttps://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDELogo5-300x70-300x70.pngStrategyDriven2012-04-09 06:50:272016-08-07 21:09:01Measuring the ROI of social media? There’s a laugh, and a joke.
Advocacy by John Daly provides actionable methods to effectively market ideas such that they are acted upon by the organization. Too often, worthwhile initiatives are pushed aside because they do not receive the critical level of support needed to move forward – merit and positive cost-benefit alone are not typically enough to ‘sell’ an idea. Rather, reputation, relationships, timing, and persuasive messaging is needed to garner the attention and buy-in necessary to gain action on one’s proposals.
In Advocacy, John reveals a step-by-step framework of activities to build the critical mass intangibles needed to drive organizational action. These immediately implementable actions are supported by highly illustrative examples and tools/templates – everything needed to create and execute a plan to get action on one’s next proposal.
Benefits of Using this Reference
StrategyDriven Contributors like Advocacy because of its immediately implementable methods for effectively dealing with the organizational politics common to all businesses. While meritorious competition between initiatives tends to best serve the organization, reality dictates that politics, power struggles, and positioning often hinder the progression of top ideas in favor of less deserving ones. Thus, Advocacy provides the crucial real-world tools every leader should practice when putting forward proposals; thereby ensuring more equitable treatment of the body of ideas being considered.
If we had one criticism of Advocacy it would be that John’s examples are a bit too numerous and a bit too long. While we believe the illustrations could be more concise, it is usually better to have too much than too little detail and the extra here is not a significant distraction.
Effectively dealing with office politics, power struggles, and positioning is a matter of life in today’s business world. Advocacy‘s positive promotional methods provide a comprehensive, actionable way of dealing with these influencers with the goal of benefiting the organization; making it a StrategyDriven recommended read.
The primary organizational responsibility of every executive and manager is the diligent management of resources. This oversight is clearly expressed through the effective management of an executive or manager’s assigned budget.
Hi there! This article is available to StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Remote Access and Dedicated Advisor clients and those who subscribe to one of the article's
related categories.
If you're already a Remote Access or Dedicated Advisor client or a related category subscriber, please log in to read this article.
Not a client? We'd love to have you on board. Check out our StrategyDriven Personal
Business Advisor service options.
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There are no two companies that train alike. Some go all out. Some do little or none. From my personal observation over the past five years, training (especially sales training) is in decline. Training budgets follow the economy and corporate profits.
I wince at the word training, because I have always associated it with lions and elephants. The word education seems more appropriate.
Training teaches you, ‘how.’
Education teaches you, ‘why.’
The person who knows HOW will always have a job. The person who knows WHY will always be his boss. (Although many people claim to be the author of this quote, it was originally written by Ralph Waldo Emerson around 1870. Emerson used ‘man’ rather than the PC version ‘person.’)
REALITY: Most companies provide salespeople initial (minimal) training of essential product knowledge and basic sales skills. Big deal. Then the real world kicks in and the salesperson is expected to produce without the real skills he or she needs to ‘make plan’ or ‘achieve quota’ before they ‘get fired.’
Pile on the facts that customers have situations, barriers, problems, and objections not covered in training, while the boss is demanding ‘cold calls’ and all kinds of accountability. If you combine those elements with zero attitude training, low belief sysyem, and constant rejection, it’s no wonder early turnover in some companies (maybe yours) EXCEEDS 25%.
What to do?
Here is list of the major categories that need to be included in the training/education of your sales force in order to retain good people and achieve your sales objectives:
CAUTION: This list will require your company to make a serious investment in the education of people and salespeople – but take heart, whatever the money involved, it pales in comparison to the cost of employee turnover.
Personal development skills. Attitude comes before sales success. Positive attitude, followed by the five parts of belief, and classes on achievement and listening. Educate employees to make them better people BEFORE you throw them into the market.
Communication skills. How to speak and how to write are at the fulcrum of sales success. Poor communication skills OR poor writing skills will lead to failure faster than anything other than poor attitude.
Buying motives. Why people buy is almost never taught, yet it’s THE most powerful concept a salesperson can possess. Teach it at your best customer’s place of business.
Product knowledge. It’s not an option to make your salespeople experts before they hit the road or the phone. Teach it at your best customer’s place of business.
Personal presentation skills. Getting your compelling message transferred and “bought” is an essential aspect of salesmanship.
Laptop and tablet (iPad) presentation skills. If you have the tool, and you’re not the master of it, you will miss the marginal sale. If you don’t have the tool, you’ll miss a ton of sales.
Selling skills. Asking engaging questions and establishing relationships – the basic science of selling. BUT the elements above need to be understood BEFORE selling skills can be learned, let alone applied.
Smart phone skills. This is the communication device of the present and the near future. It must be mastered.
Voicemail skills. How are you at creating one, and leaving one? Two of the biggest enigmas of the modern sales era.
Value messaging skills. Weekly emails, blog posts, and tweets to existing customers and prospects to stay “top-of-mind.”
Pipeline building. How to build the number of qualified and expected sales. At the end of the month, a full pipelne ensures you’ll exceed plan.
Customer service skills. How to be memorable enough to create word-of-mouth advertising and unsolicited referrals.
Loyalty actions. Going the extra mile. Being WOW! By your actions, creating positive word of mouth advertising.
Customer uses of product and services skills. How the customer uses what you sell in order to produce and profit.
Customer perspective skills. How the customer views things and how the customer wants to be treated.
Business social media. No longer an option. No longer possible to ignore its power. Not just for the company, also for the individual.
Networking and relationship building. Getting face-to-face with customers and prospects on a regular basis. Network for sales AND relationship building.
Earning referrals and testimonials. THERE IS NO BETTER WAY TO MAKE A SALE THAN A REFERRAL AND A TESTIMONIAL.
Personal promotional skills. How to market yourself so that others will call you first. This is a combination of corporate support and personal (online) branding.
Past history of company and product (even if it’s a service). Knowing the history of your company and product or service will help put much of the prospet’s fear and unspoken risk to rest.
Continuing education. Once you start, you must make a commitment to continue as long as you exist.
StrategyDriven Contributors find online schools, like Indiana Wesleyan, make it easy for business professionals to schedule continuing education classes around their busy schedules.
This list is the MINIMUM requirement for salespeople to be prepared to succeed. But my best guess is that you are not educating or being educated in most of these critical elements. WHY?
There are no good reasons other than cost of training. And cost is a weak argument at best as the competition heats up their recruiting and training efforts.
And of course you’re going to want to measure the returns on your investment. Luckily in sales, ROI is the easiest part. Here’s an ROI reality: subtract last month’s sales from this month’s sales, and this month last year from this month’s sales and compare the results. You might also want to measure employee retention.
In sales all you have to do is measure reality. How’s yours?
Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.
About the Author
Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].
https://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/JeffreyGitomer.jpg218156StrategyDrivenhttps://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDELogo5-300x70-300x70.pngStrategyDriven2012-04-02 06:14:402016-08-07 21:15:32Training is out. Education is in. Are you in or out?
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Budget Management Best Practice 2 – Monitor the Market and Be Prepared for Change
/in Budget Management, Premium/by StrategyDrivenMeasuring the ROI of social media? There’s a laugh, and a joke.
/in Marketing & Sales/by Jeffrey GitomerI got an (unsolicited) email offering a webinar to teach me about how to measure, and the importance of measuring, the ROI of social media.
TOTAL JOKE. And a bad one at that.
Social media, business social media, is running wild – with or without you. Your customers and prospective customers are posting on Facebook whether you have the balls to have presence there or not.
And I am not just talking to companies – I am talking to YOU – the individual.
CONSIDER THIS: Of all the grassroots revolutions that have occurred on social media, none of them were started by companies or a governments. They were all started by people – people who were excited, people who were afraid, people who were pissed, and people who wanted change and spoke up. They spoke over CEOs, media, newspapers, government, lobbyists, and politicians.
HERE’S WHAT THEY SHOULD MEASURE: LRI otherwise known as Lost Revenue (and goodwill and customer loyalty) of Idiots.
While Macy’s and most other department stores are/were measuring ROI, Zappos is cleaning their clock, delivering value, connectingwith and responding to customers one on one, and building a billion dollar empire in less time than it took Macy’s to expand to a second store 100 years ago.
Webinars on the subject of ROI of social media are likely run by the same people who thought Amazon.com wouldn’t make it. If Bezos measured the ROI at Amazon in the first five years, he would have quit. He accomplished domination while Barnes & Noble was measuring ROI, and Borders was going broke.
Amazon now has total market dominance based on leadership, vision, and technological excellence. Same with Apple. Microsoft used to laugh at them, now their employees all have iPads and iPods at home.
Measure? No, INVEST RESOURCES IN SOCIAL MEDIA WITHOUT MEASURING. NOW!
It’s way too soon to measure.
MAJOR POINT OF UNDERSTANDING: If they had measured the ROI of TV, or the computer, or the automobile, or the telephone, or the Internet after 5 years, NOBODY would have gotten involved, and we’d be in a technological bog – sinking.
Wake up and smell the opportunity!
People guarding nickels have no idea of the power or the value of business social media, much less social media. They have no idea of the lost opportunity, or the lost revenue. They have no idea of the perception and participation of customers.
My bet is people who measure the ROI of social media HAVE NEVER TWEETED. Wanna take that bet?
I define these people as the ones who still have a small rubber circle in the middle of their keyboard – completely out of touch with what’s new, and trying to prevent the unstoppable force of progress, and customers.
Wanna know who else ‘measured’ financial return?
Billion-dollar MIS-MEASUREMENT: Bank of America DIDN’T measure or understand the power of Facebook. They were greedily measuring increased revenue from debit card customers. Their billion dollar loss paled in comparison to their complete loss of goodwill. I doubt they will recover in a decade.
All of those companies are/were foolish.
There’s one company you want to take their time, measure nickels, rely on lawyers, and stick their big toe in the water before getting involved – that one company is your biggest competitor.
Here’s an easy plan to get rolling in a week or two:
1. Gather the email addresses of EVERYONE in your world.
2. Create a first-class, well tagged with key words, business page on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
3. Start a YouTube channel by inviting your customers to film WHY they bought from you.
4. Map out a strategy, and goals for engagement, for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.
5. Assign someone to monitor, post, and RESPOND to all who engage.
6. Create six value-based messages, two each for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
7. Shoot 2-3 value-based (something your customers could use) videos and post them on YouTube.
8. Invite all of your customers to join you by sending examples of your value messages. I recommend one campaign per media for four weeks – but have links to all in each email.
9. Post something every day on Facebook. Tweet something every day. Link with 2-5 people every day. Post one video a week.
10. If you really want to create some buzz, convert your contacts to Ace of Sales (www.aceofsales.com) – and send emails that differentiate yourself from the competition.
10.5 Only listen to your lawyer if they tell you what you CAN do.
Start there.
Start now.
Start.
Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.
About the Author
Recommended Resource – Advocacy
/in Decision-Making, Practices for Professionals, Recommended Resources/by StrategyDrivenby John Daly
About the Reference
Advocacy
by John Daly provides actionable methods to effectively market ideas such that they are acted upon by the organization. Too often, worthwhile initiatives are pushed aside because they do not receive the critical level of support needed to move forward – merit and positive cost-benefit alone are not typically enough to ‘sell’ an idea. Rather, reputation, relationships, timing, and persuasive messaging is needed to garner the attention and buy-in necessary to gain action on one’s proposals.
In Advocacy, John reveals a step-by-step framework of activities to build the critical mass intangibles needed to drive organizational action. These immediately implementable actions are supported by highly illustrative examples and tools/templates – everything needed to create and execute a plan to get action on one’s next proposal.
Benefits of Using this Reference
StrategyDriven Contributors like Advocacy because of its immediately implementable methods for effectively dealing with the organizational politics common to all businesses. While meritorious competition between initiatives tends to best serve the organization, reality dictates that politics, power struggles, and positioning often hinder the progression of top ideas in favor of less deserving ones. Thus, Advocacy provides the crucial real-world tools every leader should practice when putting forward proposals; thereby ensuring more equitable treatment of the body of ideas being considered.
If we had one criticism of Advocacy it would be that John’s examples are a bit too numerous and a bit too long. While we believe the illustrations could be more concise, it is usually better to have too much than too little detail and the extra here is not a significant distraction.
Effectively dealing with office politics, power struggles, and positioning is a matter of life in today’s business world. Advocacy‘s positive promotional methods provide a comprehensive, actionable way of dealing with these influencers with the goal of benefiting the organization; making it a StrategyDriven recommended read.
Budget Management Best Practice 1 – Line Item Awareness
/in Budget Management, Premium/by StrategyDrivenTraining is out. Education is in. Are you in or out?
/in Practices for Professionals/by Jeffrey GitomerThere are no two companies that train alike. Some go all out. Some do little or none. From my personal observation over the past five years, training (especially sales training) is in decline. Training budgets follow the economy and corporate profits.
I wince at the word training, because I have always associated it with lions and elephants. The word education seems more appropriate.
Training teaches you, ‘how.’
Education teaches you, ‘why.’
The person who knows HOW will always have a job. The person who knows WHY will always be his boss. (Although many people claim to be the author of this quote, it was originally written by Ralph Waldo Emerson around 1870. Emerson used ‘man’ rather than the PC version ‘person.’)
REALITY: Most companies provide salespeople initial (minimal) training of essential product knowledge and basic sales skills. Big deal. Then the real world kicks in and the salesperson is expected to produce without the real skills he or she needs to ‘make plan’ or ‘achieve quota’ before they ‘get fired.’
Pile on the facts that customers have situations, barriers, problems, and objections not covered in training, while the boss is demanding ‘cold calls’ and all kinds of accountability. If you combine those elements with zero attitude training, low belief sysyem, and constant rejection, it’s no wonder early turnover in some companies (maybe yours) EXCEEDS 25%.
What to do?
Here is list of the major categories that need to be included in the training/education of your sales force in order to retain good people and achieve your sales objectives:
CAUTION: This list will require your company to make a serious investment in the education of people and salespeople – but take heart, whatever the money involved, it pales in comparison to the cost of employee turnover.
StrategyDriven Contributors find online schools, like Indiana Wesleyan, make it easy for business professionals to schedule continuing education classes around their busy schedules.
This list is the MINIMUM requirement for salespeople to be prepared to succeed. But my best guess is that you are not educating or being educated in most of these critical elements. WHY?
There are no good reasons other than cost of training. And cost is a weak argument at best as the competition heats up their recruiting and training efforts.
And of course you’re going to want to measure the returns on your investment. Luckily in sales, ROI is the easiest part. Here’s an ROI reality: subtract last month’s sales from this month’s sales, and this month last year from this month’s sales and compare the results. You might also want to measure employee retention.
In sales all you have to do is measure reality. How’s yours?
Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.
About the Author