4 The Micro-Marketer Persona

Numerous studies cited previously in this book show that buyers may complete over half of their purchase evaluation process before contacting a potential seller. (See Figure 4.1.) Since buyers now prefer to conduct initial research and needs evaluation on their own before contacting potential solution providers, should sellers attempt to engage with buyers early in their buying process? And if so, can sellers do so without annoying or alienating them?

Our research and experience with clients shows that even though Buyer 2.0 now waits longer to invite sellers to participate, there are still effective ways that sellers can engage with early-stage buyers—either before or just as buyers are beginning to think about a possible purchase. Better yet, sellers can engage early in ways that Buyer 2.0 finds both valuable and appreciated. In fact, our clients report that when their sellers engage first with a buyer, they win business over five times more often than other sellers who wait for buyers to engage them.

There is a right way to gain access to and influence early-stage buyers, but it means significant changes in how most sellers conduct business development. To find new opportunities with Buyer 2.0, sellers must embrace and master a new persona—the Micro-Marketer.

The Micro-Marketer persona enables a seller to connect with and converse with early-stage buyers, demonstrate the credibility and value of a personal brand, and influence buyers’ understanding about potential solutions to problems or about potential opportunities for improved results.

Why Be a Micro-Marketer?

Historically, it has been the marketing department's job to influence market perceptions, demonstrate thought leadership, stimulate buyer interest, and generate leads. The sales department was responsible for turning those leads into closed business. This traditional division of labor, and the mutual understanding of the interdepartmental hand-off, was clear.

However, when we poll our clients, they tell us that they cannot depend solely on their marketing departments to provide all the leads they need to achieve their assigned goals. The reason is because most marketing departments, which tend to look at markets strategically, do not know the specifics of individual buyers, accounts, and territories as well as sellers who are serving those assignments.

A 2012 research study by CSO Insights¹ corroborates our findings. That study showed that marketing departments provide a little more than one-third of qualified sales leads pursued by sellers. This means that most new prospects had to be discovered through sellers’ own efforts, which is probably why the same study showed that about 60 percent of marketing organizations rated themselves as “needing improvement” in providing the right quality and quantity of leads to their sales teams.

For a seller, the Micro-Marketer persona means becoming a “marketing department of one” for engaging with early-stage buyers and stimulating the interest of prospects in a targeted territory or in an account, or who are individual buyers. It means developing a mind-set where sellers take personal responsibility for generating their own potential business.

The kind of business development activities that effective sellers perform is changing. Sellers need to engage in an effective mix of targeted marketing activities, which may include telephone canvassing, e-mail distributions, online and in-person seminars, direct mail, trade shows, industry associations, and related events to find prospects. In addition, sellers also need to find where their buyers are having online conversations, and participate in them.

In the world of the social web, the new buyers can participate easily in online conversations about their goals and aspirations with like-minded people. It is simple for them to find others with whom they share much in common by joining topic-specific interest groups such as those found on LinkedIn, or through other social media sites and industry forums. By joining these online resources, they can talk with peers who understand their challenges and who can exchange useful ideas.

Therefore, sellers must recognize that Buyer 2.0 is having conversations all the time about the kinds of capabilities that sellers can provide. Sellers must also understand they cannot simply insert themselves into the middle of those conversations using traditional broadcast marketing techniques. They must know how to engage effectively in online social discussions.

Micro-Marketers Demonstrate Situational Fluency—With Constraint

Let us be perfectly clear. The Micro-Marketer persona is not about a seller broadcasting generalized messages. It is about collaborating with deliberately selected buyers about specific issues that are of importance to them.

Sellers who master the persona of Micro-Marketer act differently than the usual salesperson. They do not try to sell overtly when first interacting with Buyer 2.0 in online conversations and during business development activities early in the buying process. Instead, they focus on contributing relevant insights to those conversations. They share pertinent ideas and observations from their own expertise and experience. By providing useful information and answering questions that may arise, Micro-Marketers have the opportunity to position themselves as useful thought leaders, or experts in their field of specialization.

Sellers must be very careful in how they communicate with Buyer 2.0 early in a potential buying cycle. If the buyers get any hint of a seller being pushy or aggressive, they will ignore or even block the seller from the conversation. If they think that a seller is pressing ahead with an idea or agenda that is not in their interests or is not relevant to their situation, they may shut out the seller from the conversation. In fact, if Buyer 2.0 perceives that the seller is just trying to sell something, instead of contributing expertise and informed perspectives to the conversation, the buyers will almost always stop participation in further discussion with that seller.

Dave Stein, founder and CEO of ES Research Group, and who wrote the Foreword to this book, observed that it is counterintuitive for most sellers to restrain themselves in early engagement with buyers. “They'd rather do mass market appeals, hoping something sticks that they can drive to a sale,” he says. He believes that the early part of the sale is “where a seller can be a worthy collaborator to a knowledgeable buyer, and showing knowledge and thought leadership is foundational to that collaboration.”²

Many sellers are reluctant to position themselves as experts, especially if they are new to their positions. They lack the confidence in their own knowledge to consider themselves an authority. However, many of these sellers are shortchanging themselves—they are more knowledgeable than they think. They simply don't yet realize how they can provide specific expertise in a useful way to Buyer 2.0.

As we explained in the previous chapter, the most important competency for the Micro-Marketer is situational fluency. In order to become confident about their own expertise, sellers must cultivate relevant knowledge about customers’ situations, industry trends, best practices, and business drivers. In addition, they must be able to articulate their understanding clearly and in a compelling way. Most of all, they must be able to provide a perspective that helps Buyer 2.0 to visualize their world in a new way.

Micro-Marketers Create Their Own Personal Brand

The best Micro-Marketers not only represent their organization's capabilities, but they are also able to provide their own unique, individual brand to customers. They work continuously to develop their expertise and to diligently convey their value to buyers as a personal brand.

A brand is what identifies one seller's unique abilities distinctly from other alternatives. People evaluate alternative brands in their buying choices all the time. They consider Coca-Cola versus Pepsi, Acura versus Lexus, McDonald's versus Burger King, or Apple versus Microsoft when evaluating the kinds of products or services that each brand represents. There is safety and reassurance in selecting a strong brand, because it represents a consistent ability to deliver on a set of buyer expectations and perceptions. Buyers know, or at least they think that they know, what they are getting when they buy a well-established brand.

Whether sellers are consciously aware of it or not, they are creating their personal brand through their actions. A seller's brand is his or her reputation—what the seller is personally known for. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room.”³ A seller's personal brand is completely separate from the organization they represent.

Sellers who assume the Micro-Marketer persona recognize the importance of their personal brand. They actively develop their personal brand to differentiate themselves, so that buyers perceive them as credible, trustworthy, expert, and a distinct value-add, especially when compared to other alternatives.

To define their personal brand, sellers should first consider some introspective questions, such as, “What is it about me that makes me unique? What have I accomplished that I can share with others? What do I want to be remembered by?” Sellers can evaluate what they think their brand is today, and then examine whether there is a gap between that and where they want to be.

Sellers can then compose a personal brand statement—a promise made to themselves and to their customers. It should be a simple statement that summarizes their core values and beliefs and makes that seller stand out. It should be authentic and true to who they think they are. This brand statement should be simple (easy to remember and communicate to others), relevant (they can connect it to what they do), and believable (because seller credibility depends on it).

With a clear personal brand statement, sellers can then build their reputation by becoming better known in the world they service—their industry, accounts, customers, and potential buyers. They can begin to increase visibility of their personal brand in that world.

Gary Vaynerchuk, author of the New York Times best seller Crush It!, said, “I think that it is important to build a personal brand.… Your reputation online and in the new business world is pretty much the game, and so you've got to be a good person because you can't hide anything and more importantly, you've got to be out there at some level.”⁴

It is in sellers’ best interests to consider how their personal brand is perceived online and to take steps to improve it on an ongoing basis. Micro-Marketers can monitor the development of their online personal brand, using tools like Klout and Peer Index, which track the extent and effectiveness of their developing presence on the social web. Other sites like BrandYourself.com and Reputation.com further help sellers improve their chances to be found online—and also to appear in a positive light.

Jill Rowley is an example of someone who has developed a personal brand. Rowley leveraged social media to become one of the top sales representatives for Eloqua, a leading marketing automation platform. As the self-proclaimed “Eloqueen,” Rowley used tools like blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to “socially surround” her prospects and add value long before any sales engagement took place. When Oracle acquired Eloqua in 2012, they hired Rowley to further the cause of what is now called Social Selling at Oracle, with the appropriate title of Social Selling Evangelist.

“The modern sales professional is actually not a seller, but is someone who helps people buy,” Rowley says. “This is someone who helps the buyer understand his problem, helps the buyer understand there's a solution to the problem, and helps the buyer understand why her company is uniquely qualified to solve the buyer's problem. Today's buyers are better informed by information available via the web and social connections.”⁵

By establishing a persistent online presence and using this to demonstrate expertise and thought leadership, Micro-Marketers can convey their personal brand to Buyer 2.0, and also help shape the buyer's initial vision of potential solutions to problems before any further sales engagement. By becoming a valued contributor to the conversation with Buyer 2.0, sellers can once again connect with prospective customers early in their buying process—and in so doing, they can influence the requirements and specifications required in eventual purchases.

Planning and Executing a Micro-Marketer Strategy

Once sellers have developed relevant situational fluency and defined their personal brand, they can then plan and execute a Micro-Marketer strategy. The five components of a Micro-Marketer strategy, illustrated in Figure 4.2, are:

1. Target. Identify the key audiences to focus Micro-Marketer activity upon.
2. Listen and monitor. Identify and track the most relevant resources for buyer conversations.
3. Network and participate. Connect with buyers and contribute to conversations.
4. Create and respond to demand. Cultivate any stimulated or expressed interest of buyers.
5. Manage and nurture. Maintain connection and provide value to latent buyers.

Target

In order to stimulate the interest of Buyer 2.0, sellers must first decide what kinds of buyers they need to interest. This may sound obvious, but few sellers take the time to think about the ideal kinds of problems that their capabilities can solve, and who owns those problems—that is, the specific jobs, in specific industries and departmental functions, that are held accountable for the business and performance issues that a seller's capabilities could address or improve. These key buyer roles are the ideal targets for Micro-Marketer activities. They represent the most likely prospects with the highest potential for buying.

Once the ideal target criteria have been established, sellers can then narrow the scope of where they can find those potential buyers. What online social groups would they participate in? What industry or trade association resources would they find valuable? What specific companies and individuals represent the best fit with the target criteria? Do those companies maintain their own blogs and online forums? Sellers can use the target criteria to determine where they can find Buyer 2.0 conversations—and where they need to listen and monitor.

Listen and Monitor

Sellers can subscribe to RSS feeds on relevant customer and industry websites to receive regular updates and bulletins. They can establish keyword searches using tools like Google Alerts, Twitter Search, and Social Mention.

They may also set up trigger event monitors in tools such as InsideView, Nimble, and SalesLoft to keep a finger on the pulse of the latest trends and news that would be of interest to their buyers. For example, sellers could set the search term declining sales revenue in InsideView for designated accounts or industries, if that is relevant to their capabilities, and then periodically scan all related notifications sent to their e-mail inbox to see if any articles indicate a potential opportunity.

We recommend that sellers who are new to online communities approach them quietly at first. Observe the kind of questions that are being asked, the discussions that generate the most controversy, the resources that are most frequently shared and quoted, and the manner in which people who overstep the social norms of the community are treated. This kind of quiet observation is often referred to as “lurking,” a term that sounds more sinister than it really is. Lurkers watch others in an online community without actively participating, and doing this initially helps sellers to learn the community's accepted code of conduct.

We've heard sad tales about sellers who violated acceptable online community behavior, where they lost valuable social capital with potential buyers and current customers. No one wants to do business with someone who does not comply with behavioral norms, and it's easy to get that reputation if you aren't aware of the expected social conventions used in online social groups. When in doubt, find and ask one of the founders or current administrators of the group, forum, blog, or website. Usually, they are happy to provide any formal guidelines or recommended dos and don'ts for engaging with other participants or group members.

By listening and monitoring, sellers can be alerted to situations that may be ideal for subsequent engagement in direct demand-creation activities, using relevant messaging that references the alert source. For example, after reading an alert about an event in a target financial services company, a seller may send a message to an identified potential buyer, beginning with: “John, I recently read an article on XYZ online news detailing your recent acquisition and merger, and the impact that was likely to have on revenue attainment. We have helped other financial services organizations surpass revenue targets during major acquisitions.…” This personalized message is more relevant to the buyer, and is more likely to be received and acted upon.

Network and Participate

Another important component of a Micro-Marketer strategy is to network and participate. Since Buyer 2.0 is using the social web to conduct their own research and interact with peers to discuss problems and solutions, sellers need to find those conversations, contribute to them, and be of genuine help and value, if they can. Once again, specific targeting criteria can help to identify the most relevant online resources and groups to join. These may include Facebook pages, Google+ communities, LinkedIn groups, and trade association and industry forums. An increasing number of companies themselves also host public blogs and forums, and sellers should routinely review any provided by targeted prospects.

Targeted prospect individuals may have their own blogs, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles and groups, and Facebook pages. By using LinkedIn, for example, sellers can review useful information about the identified contact's background, education, specialties, and employment history, as well as social web groups where the contact may participate. They can also see if they share common connections, which they might use to get further advice or insight, or to gain a warm introduction. Twitter Search can also help sellers gain further insight about the contact and the industry.

To build their personal brands, the best Micro-Marketers work diligently to develop their own online presence. In addition to monitoring and participating in social web activities, some also start their own blogs and post to them regularly, or they use approved blogging resources provided by their organizations.

Using a “microblog” service like Twitter to distribute links to relevant news stories, or to links to the seller's blog posts about the implications of such developments and what they could mean to buyers, can be of profound interest to a seller's intended audience. Some sellers use automated content-gathering technology, like Curata, Scoop.it, and Paper.li, to assemble useful websites for targeted buyers, which coincidentally help them to remain abreast of current business trends. (See Figure 4.3 for an example of a curated website—in this case, SPI's Sales Performance Review page at www.salesperformancereview.com, which uses Curata to collect information about sales performance improvement for our clients.)

By setting up information distribution processes with a service such as Buffer or Twitterfeed, and by consolidating online updates using a tool such as HootSuite or Sprout Social, Micro-Marketers can post simultaneously to Twitter and other online social networking sites with minimal effort, providing convenient links to useful news items of interest to buyers.

Create and Respond to Demand

As sellers network and participate in social web conversations, they will discover buyer situations that represent ideal opportunities for solving problems and creating new value. This is when sellers should follow up directly and attempt to create buyer interest in how they might help their specific situation. This must be done tactfully and in the context of the conversation, in order to be effective.

For example, in response to a recent exchange of ideas on an industry forum, a seller might send a message starting with: “John, I'm glad you found my response to your question in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group on LinkedIn to be helpful. I have been thinking about your challenge, and I wanted personally follow up with you.…” The seller can then outline some potential ideas, and recommended next steps.

Nurture and Manage

Even if executing the Micro-Marketer persona does not result in immediate sales opportunities, it serves another important purpose: it enables faster and more proficient development of situational fluency in a seller. As they hear relevant news and trends, sellers become more knowledgeable about their buyers’ industry, businesses, and best practices. As they build their expertise, sellers will develop greater confidence and more insight and passion about how they can be of help to their customers. The Micro-Marketer persona enables sellers to build the situational expertise they need to differentiate themselves from other sellers. They do this by managing and nurturing their understanding of buyers, and in so doing, developing better relationships with them. The result is a greater propensity for developing new opportunities as they emerge early in the buying process.

Marketing Automation as a Micro-Marketing Tool A marketing automation system (MAS) can be an effective nurturing tool for Micro-Marketers, enabling them to foster the development of potential buyer relationships. A MAS allows for the creation of nurturing campaigns that will automatically send relevant content to potential buyers based on trigger events, such as downloading a white paper or signing up for a webinar. These applications score the levels and types of interaction of early-stage buyers with the seller's organization, and encourage higher levels of engagement by providing useful content based on explicitly expressed or implied buyer interests.

Historically, leads were given to sellers to qualify—not a bad idea, if the person who expressed interest was ready to buy. However, this is not always the case. MAS applications such as Marketo, Eloqua, and Pardot can help nurture “not yet sales-ready” leads to the point where it makes sense to transfer them to sellers. Figure 4.4 shows a sample nurturing campaign dashboard screen from a MAS system from Pardot, a Salesforce.com company.

Enabling the Micro-Marketer Persona

Even though the Micro-Marketer persona is very useful for engaging early with Buyer 2.0, we find that many sellers are nevertheless uncomfortable with this persona and developing their own personal brand. Some sellers believe that branding and buyer interest stimulation should be consigned to their organization's marketing department. They fear that by taking on the Micro-Marketer persona, they may be overstepping into job responsibilities that are claimed exclusively by marketing.

Sellers may also lack the technical know-how for logging into and participating in the social web, where Buyer 2.0 is having conversations. They may assume that this is a technical subject that is best left to social media experts in the marketing team.

More commonly, sellers who avoid becoming Micro-Marketers simply don't know what to say that would be of interest to their buyers. Either they have not yet developed sufficient situational fluency or they lack the confidence in their own knowledge and experience to believe that buyers would find their opinions of value.

In order to overcome these obstacles, organizations should consider the following:

• Sales and marketing management must publicly embrace the Micro-Marketer persona for sellers by establishing company policies that provide sellers with the authority to develop their own “brands of one.” Managers should allay concerns about the appropriate use of social media by establishing clear guidelines for social media ownership and content.
• Because situational fluency and the confidence to apply it with buyers is the foundation of being a Micro-Marketer, training and educational content on buyers’ industries, business issues, and best practices should be made available to sellers—in addition to training on product and service capabilities.
• Next, identifying relevant social media tools and technologies and mapping them to execution of specific Micro-Marketer sales activities can give sellers a logical framework for knowing when to execute these methods and what tools to use to do so.
• Provision of relevant social web tools to sellers, along with any required training on their proper use, will enable sellers to accept and execute the Micro-Marketer persona with more proficiency.
• Finally, charging the marketing team with the development of suitable thought leadership content for use by sellers can help to “prime the pump” of material for use in Micro-Marketing activities, and sustain it as an ongoing practice.

In some regulated industries, such as health care or financial services, the boundaries of what a seller can or cannot say to a buyer are strictly defined. But even under these kinds of restrictions, organizations can help their sellers to be effective Micro-Marketers and develop their own personal brand with their customers. Technologies such as rFactr's SocialPort application can be used to distribute approved content for use in conversations with Buyer 2.0 and still meet regulatory requirements (see Figures 4.5 and 4.6). This puts more responsibility on product and strategic marketing teams to create that content, of course, but it ensures legal compliance while still helping sellers to engage with Buyer 2.0 early in the buying cycles.

While essential in regulated industries, this kind of social media messaging management application can be a boon to any company in any industry. If embraced by content creators in the marketing team, such applications can help improve sellers’ confidence levels in their communications with Buyer 2.0. They can also increase the speed at which sellers develop situational fluency—and thus help sellers to establish effective personal brands as Micro-Marketers to Buyer 2.0.

The Micro-Marketer is the first of three personae in The Collaborative Sale. It overlaps with and supports the next seller persona required to succeed with Buyer 2.0: the Visualizer.

The Story (Continued)

The Delta Sky Club lounge felt stale to Jon. He wanted to pace the floor and walk off some of his energy that had accumulated during the past hour.

Nancy said, “Tell me what you're doing to market yourself as a thought leader in this space, Jon.”

Time stood still.

Eventually Jon said, “Nancy, I've been 100 percent focused on getting appointments and riding on airplanes. I don't have time to speak at conferences.”

“What are you doing on LinkedIn?”

“I have a profile and I use it for research. Why?”

“You don't have to speak at conferences to market yourself as a thought leader. You can do it right there on LinkedIn. I'll send you a link to a great webinar on how to get started.”

A week later, after watching the Micro-Marketer webinar, Jon decided that every Sunday night, when his wife turned to Masterpiece Theater, he would turn to LinkedIn for an hour or two of personal brand building. He had no particular love for the period drama series that was currently running, but his wife enjoyed his company even if he wasn't following the plot with her.

Reading the insurance broker's LinkedIn updates, he shouldn't have been surprised to see that the broker shared a familiar white paper in his stream. Nancy had sent him the link to the same report when they met in the airport the previous week.

Jon's first thought was: Damn—I should have been the one who introduced him to that white paper.

He shook off the self-recriminations and went back to research ideas for how to build his pipeline and personal brand. He noticed that most of his insurance prospects belonged to a group that was facilitated by a PhD statistician with a keen interest in weather patterns, so he spent an hour scrolling through the threads and downloading a couple of white papers along the way. He scheduled time with himself to read the materials and decide which prospects would appreciate the information.

The threads also yielded five prospects Jon had never spoken to. He thought, I'll see how to get in their line of vision tomorrow.

Next, he looked at the groups that his two strongest competitors belonged to and monitored how they were conducting themselves. One used a lot of sports metaphors to kick off discussions, and Jon grudgingly admired how smoothly the competitor interjected that he used his software to help him pick his fantasy league players, even though that wasn't the software's intended use. That's working for him, Jon thought, but I'm not going down that road.

Another competitor frequently shared decks from conferences he attended. Very few of them were from the competitor's personal presentations; he shared decks from other panelists as well. Jon had recently watched a webinar that stressed the importance of curating content, and not merely pushing materials from ExyRisk. Jon noticed that his competitor didn't just share the decks generally; instead, to save potential readers the aggravation of scrolling through the entire deck, he advised group members which specific slides related to an active discussion.

I can do that, Jon thought, as he rummaged through his backpack for a thumb drive of decks from the conference he'd attended a week ago. Not only can I do this on LinkedIn, but I can also e-mail one of these to a couple of prospects who didn't go to the conference.