4 Sales Strategy Lessons from Frank Underwood

Netflix subscribers rejoice – the much-anticipated second season of House of Cards premieres this week. Centered around an ambitious and cunning politician named Frank Underwood (portrayed by Kevin Spacey), the show has generated widespread acclaim from viewers and critics.

Underwood is known for his particularly ruthless political tactics, but he ultimately gets his way through sheer determination. While we don’t endorse any under-the-table dealings, sales professionals can still take a few lessons from Underwood when looking to advance their goals.

Keep these 4 thoughts in mind when structuring your sales strategy:

1.     Know (and grow) your network

In season one, Underwood served as the Democratic House Majority Whip under a new White House administration. He had already established a reputation for cunning political insight, collecting numerous allies and holding them in his back pocket. He knows they can be trusted, and he uses them to further his goals.

Selling is a team effort, and your network plays a significant role with successful prospecting. Become familiar with you individual network, then use TeamLink to find the best path to your prospect. You stand a greater chance of success with a trusted source introduction than by reaching out cold.

2.     Tell a compelling story

Most politicians are able to recite talking points and pull numbers from a recent poll. But truly gifted lawmakers can weave a story that captures the attention of their constituents. Underwood hails from South Carolina, not normally considered Democratic territory. But he leveraged his familial and military connections to win the rural seat, and then used his political talents to ascend higher.

Talking points might get you into the boardroom, but a compelling, relevant story about achieving results with similar companies can help win over prospects. Boost your chances even further by looping the customer into your story – it will show that you aim to represent them, not the other way around.

3.     Engage directly

Underwood may have his loyal assistant in Doug Stamper, but he’s not afraid to do the work himself. In fact, he sometimes relishes direct contact with friends and enemies – it gives him more opportunities to read and understand their behaviors. His lengthy stay with presidential advisor Raymond Tusk served to evaluate his capabilities for higher office. Underwood is in his element during these direct discussions.

Making the initial connection is merely the first step – now you need to provide consistent, direct connections. Give your prospect a reason to keep engaging – a personalized piece of content helps build trust between both parties. There is no delegating with selling tactics – you are your own brand advocate. Make sure your profile is up to date, and enhance it with unique and curated content – think of it as a personal microsite.

4.     Don’t speculate

Frank Underwood always has a plan. The entire story arc of the first season revolves around his elaborate plan to reach higher office. Underwood never makes a move without first assessing the risks and rewards – which then strengthens his tactics.

With the wealth of searchable data available from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, there’s no need to speculate on prospect behavior. Advanced segments help narrow your focus based on geographical or demographical metrics, allowing you to plan your methods before the initial contact.

Here are just a few of the data points you can leverage:

• Title
• Experience
• Seniority
• Company size
• Location

We’ll have to wait until Friday to see if Frank Underwood’s tactics bear fruit, but you can get started with a revitalized social selling plan now. Tweet us @linkedinselling to learn more.

Diversify or Focus? The Best Strategies Do Both

Focus and diversification are often presented as a choice: You can have one or the other. Which strategy is right for you? It’s an unfortunate question that puts most companies on a time-wasting merry-go-around. For every CEO who touts her strategy to create a laser-focused company, there’s a successor waiting in the wings to launch a new era of growth and expansion. And for every CEO attributing strength and stability to his company’s wide-ranging portfolio, there’s a successor waiting to usher in a period of profitability and retrenchment.

Take Coca-Cola. Facing stalled growth in the 1960s and ’70s, the company pursued diversification—even going so far as to purchase Columbia Pictures in 1982. Only a few years later, management decided to “focus” by exiting “non-core” businesses (Coke sold its last stake in Columbia Pictures in 1989), and this worked beautifully for its sparkling beverages business. Fast forward to today: The company is seeking diversification into new businesses such as energy and sports drinks because growth in its main business has again stagnated. And around and around we go.

The good news, though, is that focus and diversification can successfully coexist. In fact, with the right strategy, each can increase the benefits the other brings to a company. But for this to work, you have to redefine what you mean by focus and rethink your reasons for diversification.

A narrow company operating in related markets can be unfocused. For example, think of oil and gas companies, with their portfolios of exploration, production, refining, and retailing businesses. Few if any of these companies have capabilities that are both distinctive and relevant to every one of their businesses. Although their portfolios comprise businesses operating in highly related markets, each business requires very different capabilities to win in its own particular market. It’s nearly impossible for the leaders of these companies to focus their efforts at building a coherent platform of enterprise capabilities that confer real advantage to every one of their businesses. 

The opposite case can be made about broad companies: They can be focused even though their businesses compete in unrelated markets. For example, most businesses in Berkshire Hathaway’s empire benefit tremendously from its preeminent capital deployment capability, Danaher deliberately goes after businesses that can benefit the most from its famous “Danaher Business System,” and UTC has a portfolio of businesses with one important common denominator—they all benefit greatly from its ACE program (Achieving Competitive Excellence). All three companies could be called conglomerates. But they are also highly focused companies.

Using this definition of focus, there are only two reasons to diversify. The first is to use your company’s way of creating value and its distinctive capabilities to generate new avenues for profitable growth. This is what Berkshire, Danaher, and UTC are doing whenever they acquire a new business. They are not doing it for the reasons that too many other companies diversify: to enter “attractive” markets in order to improve their financial profile (higher growth rate, better margins, or lower volatility of earnings). This is financial engineering, not strategy, and it always leads to lack of focus.

The second reason is to strengthen your company’s current business, by enhancing either its capabilities or its value proposition. Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in early 2006 is a great example of the former, because it addressed a massive capabilities gap in Disney’s animation business. Disney is often referred to as an entertainment conglomerate, with its theme parks, toy stores, Broadway shows, television programs, and more. But in fact the company is focused: Its original business is animation, which creates and popularizes the characters that feed all its other businesses (with a few major exceptions, such as ESPN). But the emergence of digital technology threatened this essential business, as companies such as Pixar were able to drastically reduce the cost of animation and enhance what it could do. So, although Disney brought a lot to Pixar, Pixar helped Disney fortify a distinctive capability that brings coherence to its massive entertainment complex.

Lego gives us an example of how diversification can enhance the value proposition of your current business. The company has had two big diversification drives in its recent history. The first, which ended in the early 2000s, was motivated by financial engineering and nearly bankrupted the company. The second started around 2004, and has made Lego the largest toy company in the world. This time around, every new area that Lego entered—amusement parks, education, virtual model construction, and movies—has helped to increase the engagement of children and parents with Lego building blocks. The company had few capabilities to bring to these new businesses, but those businesses have done wonders for Lego’s toy business.

When you define focus in the right way and have the right reasons for diversifying, your moves to grow beyond your current business are much less likely to put you on the merry-go-round. Instead of diversifying away from your base, you’ll diversify for it. Instead of diversifying to improve your financial profile, you’ll diversify because you are so focused. And instead of diluting what makes your company great, you will enhance it.

Strategic Business Unit used as a Marketing Approach

For decades of upgrading and improving Marketing Management Research several theories and strategic approaches are being used by business scholars and practitioners to improve the performance of the business being represented.  

As the congestion of business organizations both SME’s and MNC’s around the world are obviously increasing today, revising and innovating marketing structure approaches is needed to meet the demand for each market unique behavior towards the company.  As I study the nature of SBU marketing approach, particular market behavior can be observed and be given concern fitted to the market environment and the direct consumer. 

Strategic Business Unit

In segmenting the business operation through the different units, a given unit may improve their strategic plan in a more flexible manner allowing market research results of the unit to be applied in the specific problems that will arise. Another aspect that is important in SBU operation is the transfer of knowledge and the formulation of knowledge by the immediate workers that are performing the task inside the business unit.  

As a given R&D department of a unit will only innovate and discover new strategy and knowledge that are applicable to the unit, future research and management problem solving will be easier as well.  Knowledge sharing across units will define a more specialized investigation represented by the unit. 

As a whole, the knowledge strength of the whole conglomerate will base its pillars to the different units of the whole conglomerate.  As to the learning outcome of the whole human resource, specific and specialize knowledge resource will emerge as the SBU will continue to function as a unit.  

Product Outcome

Obviously, if the formulation process for each SBU is having a high quality knowledge application, then eventually product produced by each unit will have a higher quality as a result from higher knowledge application. SBU marketing approach will answer the emerging diverse consumer community both virtual and non-virtual.

Customer Analysis: How to Effectively Target the Market

Customer analysis is also known as a customer profile or target market analysis; and, it is an essential element of your company business plan.  This analysis will determine your marketing strategy by identifying your customer base and ascertaining their needs, something which helps you develop your product or service in a way that specifically meets or exceeds those needs.  You can use a customer analysis not only to better understand your current customer base, but also to draw in new customers.  You do this by studying why people buy certain products, the method by which they make their purchase, how often they buy those products, and under what conditions they make their purchasing decisions.

All of this information helps you increase your sales, develop your customer loyalty, and expand your business.  After you have read the article, you can check out this video to learn how to add the customer analysis to your business plan.

A customer analysis profile helps you not only to develop your product, but also tells you how to best position and sell yourself in the market. In order to properly position yourself, you have to know both your customer demographics, such as age, geographic location, gender, and income, and their purchasing patterns.  Your customer analysis will be informed by the stages in the buyer decision-making process.  Buyer decision-making can be seen as an underlying psychological process, meaning that the stages a customer goes through when making a decision to purchase are not necessarily consciously undertaken in the mind of the buyer.

The Buyer Decision Process

This process reflects the stages that a buyer goes through before making a purchase.  The general stages assume that the purchase is already of a general value to the buyer and that the buyer has time to make an informed decision before he or she actually makes the purchase.  Economic decisions are not always rationally motivated. For example, you may have two products on the market with exactly the same ingredients, but with drastically different prices, such as the brand name headache medicine, Excedrin and the no-name brand, Headache Relief typically offered at a discount store.  For some customers, the name brand is more important than the specific ingredients – so much so that they will pay more than double the price just to have it.  Why is this so?  What are the prime motivators for that customer?  In a competitive market, knowing the answers to these kinds of questions is what makes an in-depth customer analysis so valuable to a business.

The Stages in the Buyer Decision-Making Process

Recognition of the Problem

This is often considered the most important step in the buying process:  a potential buyer recognizes either a desire that needs fulfilling or a problem that needs solving. That need or problem can be internally motivated, such as a need to eat or to remedy a headache, or, it can be externally motivated through strategic advertising, that is, advertising which constellates a need that a customer was previously unaware of.

The Search for Information

After a buyer has recognized the problem, he or she will begin to search for a solution.  This is the stage at which the buyer starts to look for information to find out more about what products and services are currently in the market. Having your information strategically placed can make the difference in whether or not a potential buyer sees your product or service.

An Evaluation of Alternatives

This is the stage at which the buyer measures his or her needs and desires against what is available and how much it costs. At this stage, a buyer will determine a set of criteria by which to assess the alternatives. You need to know this criteria in order to position yourself against your competition.

Making the Choice

This is obviously the point at which the buyer makes the purchase. An individual buyer’s choice is often based on a balance between price and perceived quality. For an industrial purchase, other factors are considered, such as payment terms, delivery schedules, and reliability.

Post-Purchase Evaluation

This is the stage at which the customer assesses the product or service in terms of its value.  Did the product meet his or her needs?  Did it exceed expectations?  Was the benefit worth the cost? Would they buy the product again?  This information is crucial in establishing customer loyalty and getting word-of-mouth advertising.

Your Customer Analysis

Determining Your Customers Needs and Desires

In order to establish your customer base, you need to determine your customer’s needs and desires.  In other words, you have to know what the prime motivators for making the purchase are. What exactly are they looking for in the product or service?  Are they making a purchase that solves a problem or are they making a purchase that fulfills a desire. The answer to these questions will lend insight into the underlying psychological motivations for the intended purchase. This information helps you determine a plan of action to encourage the customer to come to you instead of your competitors.

You must also determine if your customers are willing to wait for delivery of your product or if they need it on demand. This helps you determine not only your production strategy, but also your market placement strategy.  Other factors to consider are whether your customer has a preference for quality versus quantity; what their general price-point is; and whether or not they demand a warranty.

Attracting Your Customer

What is the best way to attract new customers and keep them coming back to you?  To answer this question, you first need to know who wants to buy the product or service. In marketing terms, this person is called the initiator of the purchase. The initiator is not always the decision-maker in the process, for example a teenager may want an IPod, but may not be able to make the purchase for himself. You have to attract both the attention of the teen who desires the product and the attention of the person who ultimately makes the decision to buy it. How can you attract both at the same time? Your customer analysis will help you determine the marketing strategy to do it.

Another consideration for attracting customers is answering the question, “What is your message and how does it solve your potential customer’s problem, need, or desire?”  To answer this, you need to have training in effective customer service.  You have to be able to really listen to your customers.  How does your product satisfy their core values?  To determine this, you must know what will make your customer’s life easier. If there is a way to make an emotional connection to your customer, then make it. Think about how Apple customers feel about their product. Their brand loyalty goes far beyond a rational satisfying of a desire.

You should also determine how your customers measure satisfaction and success. If you have a product that fits the bill, then the product will sell itself.

How to Gain the Trust and Loyalty of Your Customers

In order to gain the trust of your customers, you have to back up what you say about your product. This means giving them real data about your product or service, something which makes them stop and take notice.  If you have a special ingredient, then offer the research on why it is better than what is already on the market.  If you have test data that proves your product does what it says, then show that in your marketing material.  And if your product can stand behind what it says it can do, then offer a money-back guarantee.  You also have to give people an incentive to try your product over what they may already buy. Be prepared to offer initial deep discounts with the inner assurance that your product will stand on its own and keep your customers coming back.

Customer Demographics

Are you positioning yourself in the right retail or market outlets?  Your customer demographic describes the specific segment of the market to which your product or service appeals. This information is based on factors such as age, social class, geography, and gender.  This helps determine both your market advertising and placement.  For example, you probably do not want to place an advertisement for denture cream or bladder control products on MTV.  The same would be true for advertising a high grade power saw during daytime television.

The Current Market

How are customers responding to current marketing programs?  To answer this question you have to know where your potential customer buys the product or service you offer. For example, if your product is a high-end product, you don’t want to position it in a deep discount store.

What are your current or potential customers’ purchasing patterns?  You can focus your research on the types of items that were purchased, the amount of the average transaction, where the item was purchased, or items that are purchased in conjunction with other items.  This kind of customer analysis helps you determine how often and under what conditions a customer makes a purchase. It also helps you define price points and the amount of a product a customer will buy. If you understand the current state of the market, then you can speak with confidence about your product or service and inspire people to find out more about what you have to offer.

The Fundamentals of How Colors Influence Buying Decisions

Colors play an important conscious and unconscious role in purchasing decisions.

If you bought a car, the color of it undoubtedly played into your conscious decision-making. The same goes for house buying and interior decorating. The colors inside your house need to complement each other well and create a certain environment and sense of “warmth”.

But perhaps the most common purchases you make are influenced by color. Some studies have shown that snap judgment purchases are influenced by color. One study showed that 62-90% of snap judgments made about products are based on color alone. This effect is limited; obviously you don’t buy a particular brand of toothpaste solely because of its color. But it is not inaccurate to say that these purchases and their equivalent are influenced by colors.

These same color influences also have an impact on the web, even when you’re not shopping. With almost every website you visit (there are some rare exceptions) you see an array of colors. How these colors affect us and our purchasing decisions is the subject of this post and a recent Neil Patel webinar.

How Colors Affect Us

As a human, you can see about 10 million different colors. That’s more than just the blue, red, orange, purple or yellow.

The main thing you need to know is that colors create emotional reactions. Some colors can be pleasant, while others are not so pleasant. There has been research on how specific colors influence emotions. Ideally, you would be using colors that are pleasing to the eye in order to increase conversions. In general, women prefer soft colors, while men prefer bright colors. Color preferences can also vary among age groups.

A study by Rajesh Bagchi from Virginia Tech shows how red and blue background colors on websites and stores influence a consumers willingness to buy. He summarizes his findings in this video:

How Colors Influence Website Conversions

We know that colors influence on purchasing decisions isn’t limited to brick and mortar stores. Many websites have had conversion success changing elements on their website. Much of what you’ll find is anecdotal (“we changed our sign up button color to green and doubled our conversions”) because there is such little empirical evidence to positively correlate any website color change to increased conversions. In general, contrast is key when deciding button color.

Personal Communication is not Marketing

Marketers have forever been lost in the false belief that personal communication preferences and marketing communication preferenes are one and the same. The fact is, we've found time and time again that personal communication habits are a misleading proxy for marketers looking for the best way to communicate with consumers.

This is because consumers don’t truly consider brands to be their friends. Yes, they might love your products and services. They may even love the fact that social media allows them to interact with real, live human beings who work for your company. This does not mean, however, that they will automatically invite you into the same direct communication channels as they do their friends.

Take SMS (text messaging) for instance. It indexes as the most frequently used personal communication channel for people age 15 to 34 and second for those over the age of 35. Consumers love SMS for personal communications because it facilitates short, quick messaging in an environment relatively free of the distractions that clog other channels (advertising, spam, and messages from “friends” in extended social networks). Consumers may text with hundreds of friends, but they are highly selective of the brands they will engage via SMS. This is also true of other emerging channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, where the primary purpose of the channel is personal.

In our 2012 Channel Preference Survey, we asked consumers which channel was preferable for marketing communications from brands whom they have given permission to send ongoing information. What leaps off the page is how different the preferred channels for communication with friends are from their preferred channels for permission-based marketing messages. Email and direct mail index much higher for direct marketing communications while text, telephone, and social networks drop dramatically.

The lesson here for marketers is that just because consumers embrace a channel for personal communications doesn’t mean that they want to receive marketing messages from your brand via that channel. In fact, marketers who attempt to force direct communications through such channels may find themselves blocked by mobile carriers (in the case of SMS) and the subject of far more “unlikes” and “unfollows” than “likes” and “follows" on Facebook and Twitter, respectively. Absent an invitation from consumers to engage through social channels, marketers should focus their efforts on optimising communication through channels where consumers do want to hear from them.

THE VALUE OF PERSONAL COMMUNICATION

In our modern world of Web interfaces, online purchases made easy with a few clicks, pre-populated order forms, and social media share buttons, it’s easy to interface with dozens or even hundreds of companies and never have an encounter with a human.

Maybe that’s why when somebody does reach out to us personally, we notice. A human interaction can be delightful.

I had a speaking engagement in Quebec City yesterday for employees and key clients of The Co-operators Group. Since it is a lovely six-hour drive from our home near Boston, my wife and I decided to go together and enjoy a few days in beautiful Old Quebec.

Prior to our journey, we researched restaurants on TripAdvisor and other services and made several dinner bookings using online booking engines Open Table at one place and bookenda at another.

As I usually do, I added a short message in my booking form at each place, something like: “We are looking forward to dining with you!”

Whenever I make an online restaurant booking through a service like Open Table or a hotel reservation through an site, I add a personal message. I’m imagining the person at the other end who is processing a bunch of reservations and want mine to stand out just a little.

In perhaps 100 restaurant online bookings I’ve made, I’ve never had anybody respond to my notes. Until now!

Humanize in order to delight your customers

Marcela at Restaurant Saint-Amour replied to my reservation via bookenda with this: “So do we! Until then, have a lovely week monsieur Scott! Marcela”

This was so unique and unexpected that I immediately shared it with my wife. And during my presentation yesterday, I shared it with the audience. 

We agreed that Marcela’s personal reply made us even more excited to dine at Restaurant Saint-Amour. Marcela humanized the restaurant in a way that a hundred other restaurants failed to do when given the opportunity.