TORONTO – The country's independent Internet service providers have been warned to change the way they market and sell themselves or risk being wiped out by more agile competitors.
“Sales superiority is the only sustainable competitive advantage that your organization can truly rely on to win business,” Paul Madott, president of the Everest Performance Group, a Toronto-based sales and leadership training consulting firm told the annual Canadian ISP Summit in Toronto on Tuesday.
Why? Because having the best product and the best price doesn’t guarantee a sale, said Madott, a former national sales instructor at Xerox.
He urged ISP executives to think beyond merely competing on price and products to embrace what he called "3-D selling" – fashioning a sales strategy by thinking of the customer's needs (in the case of residential buyers), or the customers of the customer. “The idea is the vendor or the service provider that can best impact the client’s value proposition with their own client is typically in the best possible shape to win their business, and usually price is not the number one factor,” he said.
For example, when U.S. broadcaster Turner Broadcasting System wanted to get Delta Airlines to advertise it didn't merely tout the wide number of TV shows it carries and its rate card. Instead, it looked at what Delta passengers consider valuable, and targeted its frequent flyer program. Then, because Turner owns the huge MGM movie library, it made a pitch: Delta passengers could use their frequent flyer points to rent MGM movies – which could include a Delta promo.
The result: Delta increased its advertising with Turner.
Similarly, when Xerox wanted to get car dealerships to buy colour copier printers instead of monochrome machines, it thought of what potential car buyers might want, and the capabilities Xerox printers offer. Its pitch: take digital photos of people in a car before taking a test drive, and when they come back give them a photo print along with any brochures they want.
The result: Car sales went up, and so did sales of colour printers.
What would this approach mean to an independent ISP? Instead of telling residential customers how fast their streaming speeds are, providers could point out that the fast streaming means fewer interruptions when watching movies, Madott said. Or, it could emphasize to a business customer that wireless signal strength could boost their sales by improving their sales staffs' virtual presentations.
“If you’re not thinking along this line and you’re just talking about product and price, it really is a race to zero.” – Paul Madott, Everest Performance
“If you’re not thinking along this line and you’re just talking about product and price, it really is a race to zero,” Madott said.
The conference also heard entrepreneur Howard Gwin, former executive vice president of worldwide operations at PeopleSoft – and now an independent director of a number of Canadian startups – give a similar message as he talked about lessons learned over the life of his (still ongoing) career.
Early on had to sell IBM copiers, whose output he described as "ugly" compared to industry champ Xerox. But he knew the IBM copier did one thing better: it was faster. So that's what he emphasized in sales pitches. "What we as organizations do – every technology company I've been with – we spend much of our time on the 80% that drives 20% of the value," he said, "versus the 20% that drives 80% of the value."
Similarly, when selling IBM electric typewriters, he stressed the machines' self-correcting capability. The lesson: Focus on what your product has that the competition doesn't.
"Think like the buyer," he advised. "The buyer is not looking to see a bunch of stuff. The buyer is looking for their life to be easier, and if you don’t hit them with that in the first 20 seconds they don’t buy."
Finally, he also warned ISPs that to compete with large providers they've got to offer training to employees. "The great companies of this world massively invest in a structured process to train their people. If you're not doing it, you will lose. People want to feel purpose. That's all they want. You will hold people with purpose far more than with comp (compensation) than anything else. Purpose means ‘we're doing something cool here’,”
We’ll have more coverage from the ISP Summit later in the week.
