Community Marketing Blog

Winning Strategic Accounts: Permission + Self-selection= Referrals

Smaller  firms need major accounts because large companies are more likely to award multiple contracts year after year. However, getting past the barriers in Fortune 1000-sized companies can be daunting and time-consuming. How about doing something counter-intuitive?

Cold-calling senior executives is discouraged in many key account acquisition strategies.  Yet how do you crack into a Fortune 1000-sized firm who would be a perfect client for you if you have no "natural" network access?

Winning Major Accounts: Myth 3: Right Person

If you want to secure preferred vendor status with a major account, there will be multiple stakeholders in each division or operating group.  Not only are there "silos" or independant revenue groups with their own budgets, but the stakeholders have different responsibilities with respect to a decision to hire your firm.

Each stakeholder group may see a different part of the elephant (as in the fable of the blind people and the elephant) and each stakeholder represents a go/no-go point in the company's buying process.  Therefore, your firm will make a "sale" to each stakeholder group.

Oprah and the Voice of a New Generation

"You work and work and fight and struggle and all the time, you're dreaming of this moment when it's all going to happen, when people will listen to your opinions and team up to make your ideas happen.  I'm in that moment right now and it's unbelievable.  Everything I've worked so hard for is coming together right now," says Derrick Ashong, activist, social entrepreneur, and front man to the band Soulfège - who has recently caught the eye of Oprah Winfrey.

A couple of years ago, things looked a bit more challenging for Ashong.   He’d organized a record deal and international tour for Soulfege.   All eight bandmates had let go of their apartments and day jobs.  And a week before they were supposed to go on tour, the venture fell through.   “So it looked like my whole band, including me, had to start from scratch and it was all my fault because I’d pulled the plug at the last minute after realizing the record company wasn’t living up to their end of the bargain.  I felt so bad,” says Derrick.
 
Exacerbating his frustration was the fact that Derrick was a 33-year-old Harvard graduate, who had immigrated to this country from Ghana at four years old with his parents and younger sister.  He had defied the traditional expectations of what he calls an “F.O.B.” (Fresh Off the Boat), by daring to enter into the arts, rather than going into a more stable profession. The stakes were high for him to prove the validity of his unconventional choice.  Furthermore, he placed upon himself the added pressure to succeed at a very high level, in order to help the rest of his family back in Ghana – and indeed, to help transform the nation of Ghana itself.
 
Fortunately, Mr. Ashong has no dearth of faith, pluck, intelligence or drive.  As an undergraduate, on the first professional audition of his life, he won a stand-out role in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad.  He shares a speaking agent with Nobel-Prize-winning luminaries, such as Mikhail Gorbachev and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  Derrick is in demand around the world to speak, ex tempore, about how to empower disenfranchised communities and young people.  He helped found the Harvard Black Men’s Forum and Harvard Black Alumni Society.  He worked for a time for Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, helping him run his media venture.  He’s played guitar with Gilberto Gil.  And a cutting-edge documentary about a global shift in consciousness, aptly called The Shift (not to be confused with self-help guru Wayne Dyer’s The Shift), features Derrick prominently amidst the likes of Tutu, Richard Branson, Bono, Deepak Chopra, Mohammed Yunus, Fatima Gailani, Marianne Williamson and Al Gore.  And, even though he did not naturalize as an American citizen until he was 25 years old, he knows every intricacy of United States politics, rendering “news junkee” a polite euphemism.
 
The latter skill unexpectedly gave him his big break when, during the last presidential primaries, an older white gentleman with a video camera approached Derrick outside an Obama-Clinton debate in Hollywood.  Looking much younger than his age already, Derrick could have passed for a high school or college student, wearing a baseball cap, hoody sweatshirt and Ghanaian caori shell necklace, carrying a backpack and a “Si, Se Puede!” Obama poster.  The citizen journalist asked Derrick why he supported Obama’s health care plan and when Derrick began to respond, the interviewer snapped, “Do you have any specifics?  Do you have any technical versus emotional specifics?!  What are their policies?  Do you know?”  Respectfully and cheerfully, the seeming kid launched into an expert health care policy analysis, eventually wearing down his crochety interrogator’s defenses and preconceptions, until at the end, the two men were slapping each other five.
 
Uploaded onto YouTube, the video received well over a million hits, becoming one of the most viewed online videos of 2008.  Suddenly, CNN, BET and other major media outlets were contacting Derrick, asking him to blog and report for them.  Even The Economist, not particularly known for its progressive sympathies, wrote about him.   Next thing he knew, he was receiving enticing phone calls from Hollywood mega-agencies.  Vanity Fair’s Editor of Creative Development, David Friend, wrote a piece about the new YouTube phenom and Soulfège.
 
Eventually, Oprah’s “BFF,” Gayle King, interviewed Derrick several times on her radio show, calling him "the voice of a generation".  And, ultimately, about a month ago, Oprah Radio the Grande Dame of all media herself interviewed Ashong for her Soul Series.  She introduced him to the world this way:
 

I really don’t believe...in coincidences.  But I believe that everything is interconnected and everything happens for a reason.  So...I know it’s a sign...I first heard the name Derrick Ashong when the head of my development suggested, ‘You know there’s this guy we ran into.  His name’s Derrick Ashong.  You should meet him.'  Then at a west coast meeting for my new television network OWN, the name Derrick Ashong was broached again by a few West Coast executives at this meeting.  And then, one day, out of the blue, Gayle King had interviewed Derrick Ashong on her radio show and Gayle insisted that Derrick Ashong...So when you hear a name like, any kind of name shows up in your life more than one time and you keep hearing that, that means something’s going on with that person.  So, lo and behold, I present you today, musician and activist and social entrepreneur, Derrick Ashong.  Finally, we get to meet.

 
And, without missing a beat, Derrick responded warmly, "Finally."

Look out for a big announcement from Derrick and his band Soulfège on Wednesday, December 16 at 8pm PST (11pm EST), while they host a live interactive concert online: www.TheRoomLive.com for an hour of performance & conversation and a chance to be among the first to hear the BIG NEWS.

This blog post is also connected to my blog at The Huffington Post.

First Impressions Make or Break

"It helps a ton when you learn people's names and don't butcher them when trying to pronounce them."  ~Jerry Yang.  Ok, I just can not help myself. I read the quote above, and it brought to mind an incident that occurred when I was a front office trainer at a ski resort some 15 or more years ago. I should not make fun of people, especially since I am not good at remembering names either. But, you will see, those in the service industry can learn from this story!

6 Steps to Manufacture Your Invention

We are almost there!  Now that we have learned about Concept, Development and Design, I am going to go into the Production and Manufacturing stages of your product.  Manufacturing is defined as the application of tools and a processing medium that will transform raw materials into finished goods for sale. These steps will vary depending on the type of product you have.  Here we’ll focus on the spatula, as all types of processes could be applicable depending on whether your final material selection is metal or plastic, a decision made in the design stage that will dictate selection of a manufacturing process.  For the sake of this blog let’s assume production of 100,000 annually, utilizing plastic injection molding (insert molding Figure 1.) to manufacture our 2-piece spatula.  The spatula will have to withstand high temperatures, thus the material selected from the design stage must be heat resistant up to about 500° Farenheit.

First we will go into tooling, then sample production and lastly full production. I am going to outline the steps for several different types of processes, but keep in mind that you might be producing different quantities then I have specified, and may employ different processes.

Selling to Big Companies: 30-Second Commercial

As the great architect, Mies Van der Rohe said, “Less is More”.  Especially when talking about yourself.

Senior executives of big companies have often been in sales and can fill in the blanks pretty quickly. In an initial conversation, they usually have these questions on their minds:

Globalization: Friend or Foe?

Globalization, friend or foe,is all around us whether or not we notice it. So much of what we do on a daily basis has some sort of global component to it: the car we drive, the food we eat, the clothes we wear. And depending upon the context of all of this globalization can be a good thing. The best example of this is Social Media. How else can millions of people connect with millions of other people that they normally would never know existed? Families are reunited, friendships and business partnerships are made, and important causes given attention.

It is All in the Details

Can you imagine a company like Ben and Jerry's ice cream deciding to sell a new flavor without taste testing the concoction first? It would never happen! Before they even begin to create a flavor, the company often canvasses ice cream lovers for suggestions. A lot of research and development goes into a new flavor before it goest to market. The company mixes and tastes, mixes and tastes, mixes and tastes, until they are completely satisfied with the test batches. Then, all the marketing details. They need to come up with a name and packaging for the new flavor that will excite discerning palettes and make customers want to scream for the new ice cream.

6 Keys to a Successful Blog Post

What #blogoff2 is Teaching Bloggers

There are dozens of posts for Blog Off 2. Some have zero comments while others are well into double digits. Why is that?

Let's take a look at 6 things the most popular posts are doing so you can put them to use for yourself. Each of these posts has:

1. An Attention Grabbing Headline
2. Emotional Appeal
3. Useful Content
4. A Current Topic
5. Graphics
6. Conversation

How well are you doing at putting these into your blog posts and articles? If you're interested in improving your social media ROI, do keep reading...

Whatever Happened to Ryze?

When I started my business, online networking meant joining one or more Yahoo groups. Then one day, a fellow member of one of those groups told me about a cool new site called Ryze. I checked it out and could see immediately why she'd recommended it. Unlike the email groups, you could actually see pictures of the other members, and with a little HTML knowledge, you could customize your profile just about any way you wanted. You could connect with your existing contacts, join groups to network with people with similar interests, and search for other people to add to your network. If you weren't careful, you could easily spend many valuable hours exploring the site. In many ways, it was a lot like Facebook, but with purely a business focus. I made some great contacts on Ryze, some of whom I'm still in touch with today.