Landscape Digital Show

Episode 70 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why social selling success is like running a marathon.

Marathon training is a slow process of teaching the mind and the body to take the right actions. Anyone that has enjoyed selling success understands it too requires unique skills that are learned over time.

Last month I began training for my first marathon in over 30 years. Everything was going well until I got caught in a downpour that chilled me to the bone.

That concerned me because I was pushing the limits by upping my mileage too soon to get faster results. Then it happened.

Instantly, I recognized that piercing pain in my calf and stopped, hoping it was just a warning. It wasn t. I was out for more than a week.

Desperate, I researched injuries and discovered 83% of all runners are injured at any given time, but fixing the running mechanics can actually prevent most of those injuries.

Isn t the same true for some social media practitioners? They automate and push the limits without giving much thought to their mechanics, the process of serving customers

You re going to discover it is.

If you build the proper foundation, it will reliably lead to results that far exceed the competition.

Social Selling is Discovery and Understanding

If you are still blasting email messages to your communities like it s 1999, then you are overselling.

You are like a runner on the path to pain because you are forgetting that social is an essential part of the selling equation today, and ignoring it will quickly get you blocked or ignored.

Social media success starts with making discoveries that can potentially lead to profitable relationships. Maybe your connections will become clients or customers, and maybe not, but you won t know without engagement and interaction.

Understanding people can be a slow process, but it s a vitally important aspect of social selling.

Think of it as training that builds the foundation for later using marketing automation and other cool technology that can help scale your human interactions.

There are now 2 billion Facebook users and 65% of them are active. That s a lot of prospects you can reach with Facebook advertising (good luck reaching them any other way).

But then what? Hoping that people will buy once you have their attention is not an option.

In my opinion, social selling success is using technology right to take relationships to the next level, and then the next, and so on. It s and ongoing process of engaging and understanding that should never stop.

If it does, you re done.

Now you have two choices. You can either quit or fix it. Many people quit, but surprisingly most of the others keep going without fixing what s broken.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Your Overnight Success Start Today

A recent report from LinkedIn shows that 78% of social sellers outsell their peers that are not using social media. That s exciting, but it requires making good choices for using the social channels well.

You will find many coaches, consultants, and advisors that promise to fast track your path to results, but the truth is you can get good advice by simply engaging with your network.

Fast growth does happen, but not as often as many believe. Those that have reached the top, such as Gary Vaynerchuk or Chris Brogan, point out that it took them 20 years to become an overnight sensation.

That's good advice for beginners or anyone that wants to get to the next level.

There are more than a few YouTube celebrities that have recently had massive falls from stardom. Better to go the marathon route and build a foundation for your future success. That s what Vaynerchuk and Brogan have done, and their careers continue to flourish.

They say knowledge is power, but it s really potential power that only works when you are ready for it, otherwise, it can be destructive.

Think of an automobile. You need a solid chassis to transfer the power of the engine into acceleration without breaking down.

The chassis for runners is a balanced and flexible body that is not prone to injury. For your business, it s everything that got you here, including the network of people that support what you do.

Your success starts with respecting and building on that. All of us have pain points in our business that need to be fixed to take full advantage of our strengths.

These are obstacles that can be flipped upside down to reveal the opportunities that are needed to create more forward progress. You have to try new methods and shift your thinking, such as erasing the word 'blast' from your email marketing vocabulary.

Interact and engage with people. You don't think of engagement as selling, but if engagement is necessary to succeed with social selling, then it is, isn t it?

Business owners, marketers, and sales teams are discovering, that social selling is a wonderful thing, but it requires practice, patience, organization and occasional adjustments to make it work.

That s how selling has always been, a marathon, not a sprint.

Show Notes

• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

The call to action for this episode is to rethink your social selling as a marathon and not a sprint.

You'll get there faster by steadily using your smarts to build a foundation that respects your customers.

The post This is Why Social Selling is Like Running a Marathon appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 69 of Landscape Digital Show reveals one powerful idea for making social media marketing work for any business.

In a recent video interview, internationally recognized Internet personality Gary Vaynerchuk shared a brilliant idea for making social media work.

If you get overwhelmed with the grind of creating content to fuel your social media marketing efforts, then this is your lucky day. This approach will work for anybody because most of us share the same challenge.

Here s the idea: Stop creating and start documenting.

We spend too much time thinking about creating perfect content when the content that matters most is what we are doing every day. Document that and you ll never run out of content.

GaryVee points out that documenting is actually creating your own reality show, and the best part is you do not have to think too much about it.

Just show up and be yourself.

What you do every day and how you do it matters to the people you interact with, including the customers that your business serves.

That reality is the opportunity. If it's boring, you'll quickly figure out a way to make it better. People seldom get better by thinking and planning, but by testing those ideas again, and again, and again.

As Gary puts it, "Do this and check back with me in five years."

Is there work involved? Absolutely, but knowing that work will lead to tangible results is exciting. So, let s break down this equation into its most essential components, with the most important being you.

Your Brand Voice is Social

As you know, most of the social media published is not remarkable because it has been scrubbed and sanitized of what makes social media work, and that's what s real.

Reality disarms people and makes them take notice. This reality is the voice of your personal brand.

That voice stands out in a sea of sameness, but it's not going to fully express itself without daily practice.

What are people buying when they buy you? That s a good question to answer because it will help you position your personal and business brands.

Whatever it is, you'll discover more about it by putting your most authentic self out there on channels like Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook, because these are the visual channels.

Visuals are memorable content that can be created in minutes if you commit to doing it and not worrying about making it perfect. In fact, raw media tends to get the most favorable response because we recognize it to be real.

It's been said that life is what happens when ….

Complete that sentence as you wish, but use it as a reminder that your life is full of content branding opportunities. Don't let them pass. Document them.

You just may discover that it s a fun way to become a better you.

Now that you have the approach, let's go further and apply it to your business marketing.

Authenticity Speaks to Ideal Customers

Before people invest in your business, they invest in you. That's what your authentic brand voice can accomplish.

You are now halfway there. You've achieved the know and like of getting people to know, like and trust your business because that is all about personality.

The only thing missing to convert that attention into profitable outcomes is a repeatable business process that shows the world what you do and how you do it.

One of the secrets to marketing nowadays is you have to be able to show people why your business matters without overselling.

In the context of social media, this is accomplished by documenting what your business does that s real, honest and authentic. Don t underestimate how desperately your ideal buyers want this, which may include:

• Customer interactions. This speaks to who is your ideal customer.
• Work in progress. People like to see how things are made.
• Happenings behind the scenes. Unique methods are always attractive.
• Commentary on local or industry events. Your voice offers insights about what you care about.

When you use social media to document these events you are doing two things:

#1. Creating connections. The people, places, and things that you are connected to are used by the social networks to connect the dots. More connections mean more opportunities for appearing in the newsfeeds of people connected with other people, places and things, and so on all the way out to infinity.

That is a massive payoff just for showing up!

#2. Becoming more aware. Awareness of your daily business activities helps you progressively refine the process of serving customers to make it better.

Don't create; document.

It s a monster tip for using social media marketing to build a personal brand that attracts leads and opportunities that will make your business grow.

Show Notes

• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

Now that you have no more excuses, it s time to start using social media marketing to document what happens in your landscaping business.

That s the call to action for this episode.

I chose to focus on posting daily on Instagram and it s working. I m reconnecting with friends and colleagues that are not active on my other channels or are filtered out by the algorithms

Perfection is nice to have, but progress is what gets you there.

The post Social Media Marketing: One Idea to Make It Work for You appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 68 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why digital leadership is necessary to integrate sales and marketing channels, and how to get it done.

It seems business slows down this time of the year. This leads to a question: What should we be doing during these summer doldrums?

Keep moving.

Every business experiences slowdowns, but they can be minimized by taking the right measures to close the gaps.

Is the cause a lack of leads or a failure to close sales? Leads are the responsibility of marketing and closing sales is clearly the responsibility of the sales team.

The solution is getting sales and marketing working together.

When sales slow down, doubling up on selling efforts is the action that many businesses take. However, that can be a big mistake if you have not properly prepared your customers for them with tactics that demonstrate empathy and earn trust, such as content marketing.

Empathy is a vital business objective because that understanding is the raw material for achieving alignment with customers.

Let s explore how this can work to smooth out wrinkles like the summer doldrums that can impact business growth.

Empathy is a Valid Business Strategy

Some people associate empathy with intimate feelings and touchy-feeling tactics that have no place in a business setting.

Empathy is understanding. That s what buyers expect before they will commit to a relationship with a business. Thus, getting your sales and marketing down to the level of emotions and feelings will only make it better.

If your business slows down this time of year, as many do, use this time to interview your customers. Stop focusing on product sales and start asking your customers questions.

Pay attention to how they position your company and compare that to your marketing. Are they congruent?

Look for what is not being said too. Take the risk of going deeper and you may be surprised at what you get for creating case studies that can be used across all of your sales and marketing channels.

Practice the Digital-First Mindset

It s recommended that you build all of your sales and marketing on the foundation of digital. For one thing, our experiences nowadays are predominantly digital, and the majority of those digital experiences are mobile.

Therefore, your attention and resources should be weighted more heavily on creating the best mobile experience possible for your customers. If you doubt this strategy, consider that Google now gives priority to the mobile vs the desktop experience in search results.

Our increasingly complicated world is driven by search, and not just online. Acknowledge and use this to your advantage by working to achieve consistent use of keywords, natural language, messaging, and voice and style across all of your channels.

Get into the habit of having a digital-first mindset. For one thing, it s necessary to make your digital channels work. More importantly, when you take this approach to your internal systems it teaches everyone to communicate consistently with customers, regardless of the channel he or she may be using.

Customers Expect an Integrated Channel Experience

Marketing today is ideally a collaboration with buyers. It's one in which the business and its customers co-create solutions that are better than what was previously thought possible. This requires customer-focused sales and marketing that attracts attention, encourages engagement and interaction, and leads to experiences that build business growth.

The traditional role of marketing was to create awareness and interest, but today it is bigger than that.

Our digital marketing channels, including websites, blogs, social media, email, podcasts, and video can indeed take a lead all the way to a sale, but they can do it much better with the help of sales and service.

That experience must be planned, tracked and measured because the sales and marketing channels now overlap, and that is why each of them should be used to do what they do best while supporting the others.

Every channel should have a theme or purpose that closes a gap in the overall customer experience. For example, you have to decide if your email newsletter will drive sales with special offers or nurture and grow that audience with valuable content.

There is no right or wrong answer here, just right or wrong outcomes that are due to failing to deliver an experience that is congruent with the brand promise who the business wants to be for its customers.

United Airlines clearly didn t intend to create a media fiasco when it permitted security guards to drag that passenger off one of its planes. It simply lost touch with its customers. Now it is employing an empathy strategy to fix who it wants to be for them.

The digital channels are a constant reminder that a customer-focused strategy is the only way to operate a business today

As you move forward with your plan, keep in mind that integrating the respective channels is more than a project. It's an ongoing challenge that can actually be fun for sales and marketing geeks.

If you enjoy making customers happy, then I imagine that describes you too.

Join me and we ll make this happen together!

Show Notes

• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

The call to action for this episode is to apply digital leadership to mapping out the integration of your sales and marketing channels. Leading brands are increasingly shifting to a digital-first approach for building more relevant experiences that are bigger than the products they sell.

You should too.

The post Digital Leadership: Integrating Sales and Marketing Channels appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 67 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to teach CRM systems to organize and manage data to better manage customer relationships.

The most basic tool for accomplishing business objectives is a simple checklist. You have lists of customers, products, and activities that drive your business.

How well all of that works together will determine the success of your business. While some have tackled this challenge with spreadsheets, CRM systems that integrate with marketing automation are infinitely more reliable.

CRM or customer relationship management systems initially start out as a database of customers and information associated with them. Over time this database becomes something bigger. It grows into a digital asset whose value grows as the business grows and streamlines the management of customer relationships.

There are many excellent CRM systems, but let s be clear that the value of the CRM is ultimately measured by the quality of data that it gives the business. The responsibility for making that happen is 100% on the business.

You have to teach your CRM how to give your business the right data on its customers, leads, and prospects.

Let s examine how that works.

Step 1. Use Categories and Tags to Organize

Lists work best to get the job done when they are highly targeted, and that is made possible with strategic tagging.

Tags organize customer data so that it is discoverable, but more important so that the CRM can segment customers, prospects, and leads into lists that the business can use to accomplish its objectives.

Many companies segment their lists into customers and prospects and that s it. My practice is to go further so that my business can personalize its interactions with our customers.

For example, we obviously have a client list, but we also add other tags to distinguish repeat customers from the larger group of customers because they are clearly higher value customers that trust us completely.

Think of your tagging system as the search algorithm for your CRM. You know when you perform a Google search it delivers all the available search results. However, the Google navigation allows you to focus on specific result categories, that is, images, news, videos, maps and more.

Think of categories as buckets of similar content. For your CRM they are buckets of customer insights that are defined by related tags. The more tags you use the more accurately your lists can be defined, but to make those tags easy to locate and use you should create meaningful categories.

Here are the categories I use that you can borrow from:

Business Status (client, prospect, lead, vendor) Personal Status (repeat client, early adopter, friend, influencer) Behaviors – (actions people take) Subscriptions – (opt-ins) Products – (purchases) Interests – (insights) Events – (live events)

A contact (person) can only have one business status tag, but he or she can have multiple personal status tags that further describe who they really are, such as a client that is a repeat client and an early adopter. These are the clients that help us test and refine our ideas to make them suitable for the majority.

Subscriptions are information lists that the subscriber has requested to join. Behaviors are non-buying actions people have taken, and products and interests are self-explanatory. As you can imagine, most businesses will have multiple products, and the people buying them will potentially have hundreds of interests.

As a professional speaker, I present at and attend many events, so that is an important category for organizing my relationships. And I would think it would be for many business professionals too because in our digital world it s especially important to get the full value out of these more intimate, in-person interactions.

Step 2. Teach the System the Actions to Take

CRM systems should ultimately tell a story that helps the business to make better decisions.

Your decision-making process may follow a traditional sales funnel or the more contextual buyer's journey. What's key is to anticipate and encourage desired customer actions by responding appropriately to every action taken.

This can be accomplished by considering what if?

What if a prospect buys? What if customers need to be notified of an emergency? What if a buyer needs more information? What if our offer is rejected? What if a prospect's interest score jumps?

All of these actions by customers or prospects merit an appropriate response, and the best-prepared business will almost certainly be the one with a robust CRM that has been adapted to know how to respond to each and every situation.

Let's say a prospect's interest score does jump. In most CRM systems any type of engagement (typically clicking a link) will be interpreted as interest that raises his or her score. Depending on the type of business, this may trigger an offer or a manual response like a phone call.

Historically, CRM systems have been used to accumulate data. In 1998 when my landscape business committed to our first true CRM our productivity jumped because we had invaluable data at our fingertips. However, we had a new challenge and that was what to do next with that data.

Now that we have marketing automation and mobile devices that give us notifications, it's entirely possible to filter the numberless 'what if's" so that what follows is our top priority, and that it gets the attention it deserves.

It's necessary is to create actions that address the many 'what if' possibilities and then build lists around those actions.

Examples of actions that may be triggered are as follows:

Start tracking Promote a product or service Connect and engage Offer a discount or reward Educate and inform Express gratitude Request more information

You get the idea. These are common day-to-day activities for any business. The only difference now is that we have data to assist in making the right decisions and to automate action sequences whenever possible.

Good luck!

Show Notes

• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

The call to action is to get a CRM if you don t have one. If you do, start getting more from it if you do have one by teaching it how to give you the data you need to better manage your customer relationships and grow your business.

The post CRM Systems: Using Data to Manage Customer Relationships appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 66 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to achieve business growth with marketing systems that identify and remove buying obstacles.

You may be familiar with Ryan Holiday's book The Obstacles is The Way, which has gained cult status with NFL coaches and elite athletes, among others.

The thesis of the book is one with which many of us are familiar. When the way out is obstructed it s telling us something.

As Holiday puts it, "Turn it around. Find some benefit. Use it as fuel. Turn every obstacle into an advantage."

Holiday suggests obstacles are what they are because of perception.

For example, some companies are too quick to fire customers that challenge them. That s unfortunate because those customers may actually lead them to new discoveries and innovations that could benefit all of their customers.

The difference is perception and that perception can be changed.

Remove Buying Obstacles

Early in my career, I worked as a sales professional in the petroleum industry. The products we sold were mostly commodities.

As a result of this pricing was often the primary conversation topic with customers and differences of even a penny/gallon could prevent a deal from happening. But I quickly learned that matching the competitive price was only part of the equation.

That was the requirement for just getting in the game. The deal makers were other decision criteria such as assured supply and on-time delivery. Working them out tipped the scales in our favor.

Experience taught me that selling was mostly about removing obstacles that prevented buyers from buying.

To accomplish this I had to thoroughly understand my company's capabilities and what would be acceptable for each and every customer.

For example, some wanted delivery by rail car to assure them the lowest price, but others could only accept trucks.

Delivery was huge in that industry, and sometimes you could get a premium price for it. Of course, if you gouged a customer a few pennies when they needed expedited truck shipments, which was more costly, that would be remembered and factored into the next negotiation.

Every business regularly encounters obstacles and systems are necessary to manage them. Fortunately, in this data-driven world of CRM systems and marketing automation, that is readily accomplished if you take the time to build and consistently use them.

Why? Because soon there will be artificial intelligence technology to teach your system how to automate the process of understanding and responding to buying obstacles. But don t worry about that now; just be sure to consistently feed customer data to your CRM.

Get Excited About Obstacles

In the previous episode, we discussed why The Coca-Cola Company eliminated its CMO – Chief Marketing Officer position and replaced it with several new officers that are charged with implementing a "growth-oriented and consumer-centered" strategy.

It's apparent that Coke plans to focus less on traditional product marketing and more on the industry obstacles that inhibit growth, such as consumer lifestyle choices.

There is abundant research that both diet and sugary sodas can contribute to health issues. That has been a challenge for decades, and it deserves to be addressed sooner than later because consumers are increasingly aware of it.

What are the big obstacles in the landscaping or lawn care industries? A couple that come to mind is completing projects on schedule and the communication of schedule changes.

Just fixing that could make your company stand out.

The truth is in most markets product and service quality exceeds buyer expectations. As a result, the differentiating factors are the elimination of common obstacles that prevent buyers from approaching not just your business, but any business.

This should make it easy to get excited about being the company that is known for eliminating or mitigating them. Here s a tip: The solution is often getting personal with people to show them you care and that you have a plan in place for backing up your promises.

That should be reflected in your marketing, such as website content, social media, and email newsletters, and it should especially become part of your sales and service training programs.

Business Growth is Data-Driven

Get comfortable with the term business growth because, for lack of a better term, it may prove to be the one that best represents the discipline formerly known as marketing.

Coke's CMO was replaced by a Chief Growth Officer, a Chief Innovation Officer, and a Chief Information Officer. That combination acknowledges the fact that marketing today is now about the growth of more than product revenue, that it will require innovation, and that the comprehensive customer experience will be one that is data-driven.

Uh oh, that may be an obstacle.

That s right, you can expect marketing to become increasingly technical and dependent on technology.

Instead of perceiving that to be an obstacle, why not get excited and get busy being the company that is known for using that technology to do more for its customers?

Good luck!

Show Notes

• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

Reconsider marketing and what it is becoming, and that is something bigger than just the promotion of products and services.

Business growth is more than just increasing sales revenue. It's discovering new ways for connecting, engaging, and interacting with customers.

That comprehensive experience will soon become the benchmark of business and marketing success.

The post Business Growth: The Obstacle is The Way appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 65 of Landscape Digital Show reveals why experiences are bigger than products when digital innovation drives marketing.

This short episode is a study of recent changes in the world of marketing that will give you ideas for ensuring the relevance of your business marketing for your audience.

The event that best profiles these insights is the recent elimination of the Chief Marketing Officer role at Coca-Cola (better known as the CMO). The significance of this event can be traced to the influences of digital innovation on marketing.

Former Coca-Cola CMO Marcos de Quinto led a product-based marketing strategy at the global marketing organization. That emphasis on product marketing ultimately proved to be the impetus for shaking up Coke s management structure.

The truth is many consumers today are less interested in product features, probably because they cannot distinguish them from the competition. Nowadays it's the contextual customer experience that is desired most, and this suggests the product is merely an introduction to something greater.

In fact, Coca-Cola s CEO James Quincy stated, "The Coca-Cola Company has to be bigger than brand Coca-Cola." He elaborates, "The brand Coca-Cola will always be the heart and soul of the Coca-Cola Company, but the company needs to be bigger than its core brand."

That's interesting, but how exactly does marketing interpret bigger so that it can give it life?

To accomplish this initiative, the CEO s direct reports will be a Chief Growth Officer, a Chief Innovation Officer, and a Chief Information Officer, with the Information Officer being charged with "increasing visibility and focus on efforts to digitize all aspects of the company's business."

The significance of the Growth and Innovation Officers is that in order to transcend its core brand, Coca-Cola intends to become a "growth oriented and consumer-centered organization." Let s take a closer look at that.

A Growth Oriented Business is Data-Driven

Coca-Cola's Chief Growth Officer will be growing all aspects of the brand, not just product sales, but how consumers engage and interact with its products.

This bigger vision will be data-driven, that is, it will incorporate AI (artificial intelligence), and that gives it a hope of winning over analysts and shareholders who will be expecting proof of ROI.

Consumer engagement and interaction are just a couple of metrics that must be measured to reliably predict revenue growth.

If that can be accomplished, marketing will by default become more consumer-centric.

Consumer-Centric Marketing Builds Community

Your marketing shows what your business cares about. A product focused company cares about sales and a customer focused company cares about the people that generate those sales.

A consumer-centric organization recognizes that customers are seldom product experts, but they are indeed experts in the user-experience of, let s say, their automobile, favorite pair of jeans, or landscaping.

Businesses that seek to understand customer experiences will be ideally positioned for making product innovations that lead to sales growth.

Contrast that with this statement Coca-Cola's former CMO made to his advertisers, "If you want people to love to drink Coca-Cola, please show in your commercials people who love drinking Coca-Cola."

In all fairness, that type of advertising is how many of us were taught to market before digital became the dominant form of marketing.

However, the problem with this product marketing approach is that it doesn't integrate well with digital because consumers, not the company, are the most credible source of marketing. And as we ve noted, they care less about the product than the experience of consuming it.

What do customers want from your business, better products or unique solutions to their problems?

Do you see the difference?

Nowadays most products perform exceptionally well in getting the job done, whatever that may be, but that s not enough to get talked about on social media.

This is why I like Coke's vision to be bigger than its core brand.

For most companies, the core brand is necessarily product or service-based because that's how we have traditionally measured success. Whereas, a consumer-centric approach to business seeks to create what most of us would call community, a sense of belonging or connection.

When you buy a product or service you literally join a community of like-minded people.

The challenge for businesses likes yours and mine are discovering ways to make that more tangible by creating opportunities for people to share ideas and insights that just may become bigger than the brand that initially brought them together.

Isn t this kind of digital innovation what social media does well?

Make that your call to action.

Show Notes

• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

How can you use social media (or any other platform like a live event) to create opportunities for your customers to come together and share ideas that you can then use to create a bigger brand experience for them?.

The post Digital Innovation: Experiences are Bigger than Products appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 64 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how CRM systems can become digital assets of customer insights that increase sales productivity.

Recent research conducted by industry CRM leaders Salesforce and Hubspot indicate companies using a CRM are more productive and sell 30-40% more than their competitors.

Our 2017 digital marketing survey revealed more than half of landscaping industry respondents do not use a CRM. Specific feedback suggests this is due to confusion about the role of CRM in general, set-up, training, and maintenance costs, and how to choose a CRM that is right for the business.

These are all important considerations that are best addressed by considering what the business wants to accomplish with its CRM and the resources that it is prepared to dedicate to those objectives.

The Role of CRM

The term CRM is short for customer relationship management. And when you consider its meaning it becomes obvious that it's not just the CRM, but the planning and implementation of actions that affect customer relations that are vital to CRM success.

CRM technology promises sophisticated customer insights, but that information is unattainable without taking the time to plan for its acquisition.

This is a challenge even with basic CRM's. There is a learning curve.

In addition to several industry-specific CRM systems, I have worked with several of the top-tier CRM's, including Goldmine, Salesforce, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, and Nimble. They all have their merits.

Finding the one that works best for your business will require an assessment of objectives and the resources necessary to accomplish them. Typical CRM objectives include:

• Capturing leads
• Giving every lead the attention it deserves
• Filtering out leads that are not a good fit
• Tracking leads to ensure they convert to sales
• Nurturing relationships with leads until they are ready to buy
• Tracking referrals within your network
• Maintaining a centralized log of all customer communications
• Building a database of customer insights
• Fulfilling all customer commitments
• Following up on key anniversary or milestone dates
• Responding to specific segments of your database when necessary
• Automating sales and marketing actions

CRM Set Up and Costs

A CRM should allow for easy importing and export of data. Depending on your skills, this may be a service that you will want to hire out because it should only take a few hours at the most for someone familiar with the system.

Training is necessary to get the respective team members using the CRM properly, including owners, managers, and sales and support teams. Note that more team members will increase the monthly cost of using the CRM system because additional seats must be purchased, but keep in mind some of those seats can be shared.

After the initial training, which can be significant, most CRM services will provide regular system updates for little or no cost. However, this will require the dedication of at least one person in your organization to keeping everyone current.

Choosing the Right CRM

You probably think of a CRM as a tool, and it is when you first acquire it. Yet, over time it becomes a digital asset that can be mined for business opportunities, including referrals and upsells.

Therefore, it's important to choose a provider that you are confident will be there for you for years to come. Also, the leading CRM systems integrate with other services, such as Gmail and Outlook, and social media.

Look for a CRM with a track record of partnering with other companies because that usually brings additional value to you at no additional cost.

More sophisticated CRM's such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, and Infusionsoft carry a higher price tag and require greater skill and time to employ the many features. Do your homework and test-drive these systems before making that commitment.

If you decide to move forward, be sure to negotiate your best deal. You ll discover the big players will work with you on pricing to get your business locked in.

Among the more affordable, yet powerful CRM's are Nimble, Zoho, Insightly, Sugar, and the free version of Hubspot. Pricing for these systems is typically around $30 or less per month per user, and most provide a free short-term trial.

The truth is there is not a perfect CRM because every company has different needs, budgets, and skillsets. If your experience is like mine you will discover there are systems that just seem to fit how your business operates.

For example, if you are a heavy email user, consider systems like Nimble with integrations that allow for automatically adding contacts directly from email.

Once you have selected a CRM your task is to give it a chance. This is vitally important because some companies get frustrated and quit. I'll admit to having done this once after paying for the entire year in advance.

For a CRM to deliver on its promise you have to develop the discipline of using it to make regular updates, while also learning new skills.

Some companies resist this because it's one more thing to do at the end of the day, but you will discover it to be an invaluable practice.

A habit that works for me is keeping a notebook in Evernote where I make notes of my CRM workflow after learning new techniques. Over time you will build a set of company-specific tutorials that will save you time and that can be passed along to others.

Remember that a CRM is a means to better relationships with your customers. You may not necessarily enjoy learning technology or data entry, but if you commit to it you will be rewarded with insights that help to close more deals.

And who doesn t enjoy closing more deals?

Show Notes

• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

The call to action for this episode is to double down on your commitment to your CRM. Rethink what you want to accomplish with it or start researching other CRM systems if you believe you haven given it a fair shake and it's time for a change.

Before you do that contact customer service and explain your situation. I was ready to quit my current CRM until I got the help I needed.

The post CRM Systems: Digital Assets that Increase Sales Productivity appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 63 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how data science can help discover and interpret customer insights for running a smarter business.

This episode examines the role data plays in the success of your business, and how to acquire, analyze, and use it to gain valuable customer insights

I ll introduce terminology associated with data science that that may be new to you. This will help you to intelligently research and study this important topic further. And I ll give you an example that will show how to identify and analyze data points to run a smarter business.

It turns out that I've just returned from a conference where I had the opportunity to get a first-hand take on this subject from Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM

This event was a celebration of IBM's top performers and significant others from around the world. If you were wondering, one of those top performers was indeed my wife Leslie.

While I imagine Ms. Rometty s presentation on data and analytics was primarily intended for IBM employees, I was especially interested in what she had to say because it provides insights on how you and I can expect to be using data in our businesses.

Let s take her high-level review and bring it down to earth.

Data Science is Storytelling

When you think of data, do you imagine cubicles of geeks poring over numbers and equations? The truth is data science is hot now and its practitioners are in-demand storytellers.

One thing to keep in mind is that numbers are never the point, but a means to an end.

As a business owner, you want to use data as a lens to filter and focus and make better decisions, presumably to better serve customers and generate profits.

Ginni Rometty says the purpose of acquiring data is building a resource of insights. And the most valuable insights are the stories data tell through the interpretation of the daily activities of regular people, your customers.

That's what data scientists want to know, what people are seeing hearing, thinking and doing. That contextual data tells a story about what people want, and that is valuable information for any business.

To get ready for the data science revolution you can start by mapping out what customers are doing as they experience your business.

Empathy mapping is an invaluable tool for understanding what customers are seeing, thinking, hearing, feeling, and doing at every key interaction with the business, such as discovering it online, visiting it, and ideally make a purchase.

Check out this article I wrote for Speaker Magazine for more on how to use empathy mapping. It gives you a visual of an empathy map and helps to identify those interactions and use them for refining your process for serving customers.

Artificial Intelligence is Software at Work

Artificial intelligence may sound like it belongs in the playground of organizations with teams of scientists and engineers, like IBM, for example. In reality, you experience artificial intelligence every day.

You've used natural intelligence your entire career, that is, asking good questions, listening, and evaluating the results to make better decisions. Artificial intelligence, often referred to as AI, is simply using automation to emulate natural intelligence and gain more accurate insights more quickly.

The most common approach to artificial intelligence is machine learning that identifies human actions and responds to them. As the name implies, machine learning uses machines, better known as computers, to automatically respond to repetitive questions, and to get better doing it over time.

And some of the best-known examples of machine learning are artificial intelligence chatbots, with Alexa and Siri being two of the most recognizable examples.

AI is readily available to businesses large and small. In fact, some elementary schools are teaching children how to create their own bots. What s a bot? Just a software program, but it takes a human being with natural intelligence to create one.

You can actually create your own AI bot to respond to your Facebook page visitors with Messenger. Here s a free mini-course you can sign up for that will help you create a Facebook messenger bot.

The approach to using data science is not complicated:

1. Set goals 2. Collect and analyze data 3. Use data to make better decisions

IBM s CEO used the term 'man and machine,' which is a phrase that for decades has come to stand for industrial progress. That s the idea behind AI, machine learning, and bots. The intent is not to replace man, but to augment man for making him or her better, smarter, and faster.

Most important is you need to supervise your business data and train it to accomplish specific business goals.

Train Data to Be Smarter

Every industry has typical activities or functions that if improved will significantly affect the bottom line. In labor-intensive service industries like landscaping, this is production labor because that s usually the most significant variable cost.

A logical goal is to reduce labor costs while maintaining or possibly increasing the current level of production. To accomplish that, the business has to track labor to better understand and manage it, and to determine the data points that will provide insights that tell a story.

Here's an example that may give you some ideas. IBM used its Watson artificial intelligence technology to help Dave Haase compete more effectively in the Race Across America, which is a cycling event spanning over 3,000 miles from Oceanside, California to Annapolis, Maryland.

Competitors must navigate terrain, weather, and manage their schedule of sleep and nutrition, typically staying on the bike for an average of 30 hours and alternating with 2 hours off for rest for a period of 8 days. You can imagine there are a lot of variables to process.

Thanks to wearable technology devices that measured cycling cadence, skin temperature, heart rate, weather, etc., Watson was able to give Dave a big edge over competitors that relied mostly on intuition. While the Race Across America is athletic competition at its highest level, you can draw inferences about the importance of collecting and analyzing data to make better decisions in your business.

What are the important data points in your process? It may help to go back to the suggestions of the empathy map, and what people (your labor force, sales teams, customers, and so on) are seeing, thinking, feeling, and doing. Those human activities are sources of data that can affect change.

Your business needs to start building its future on a foundation of human data that in most circumstances does not yet exist. With or without AI, you can gradually acquire that data and periodically analyze it to make progressively better decisions over time.

We'll talk more about this in future episodes. For now, have the intention of becoming a data-driven because that alone will give your business an edge.

Show Notes

• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

Human beings are not perfect and neither is data, but having the intention for acquiring, analyzing and using it to make better decisions will position your business for the future, one where data science is sure to be one of the most important disciplines.

Your call to action is to get ready for that inevitable reality.

The post Data Science: Discover Customer Insights for Running a Smarter Business appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 62 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to use email as a customer communication channel for building genuine trust with customers.

The best marketing for any business is not what its media says, but the actions the business takes, especially when circumstances are less than optimal.

Those familiar words introduced our customer care episode two weeks ago where we revealed the leadership and marketing lessons from the recent airline fiasco in which a passenger was forcibly removed from an airplane.

If you happen to be a United Airlines customer you recently received an email that addressed the situation, and in my opinion, it nicely accomplished its objective.

After a series of media mistakes, I believe the United CEO s customer communication email will very likely prove to be a key step toward fixing his reputation and the airline's.

It can also serve as a case-study for using email to build genuine trust with your business customers.

Email Is An Intimate Communication Channel

Choosing email to address customers directly was a key decision United made for healing relationships with its customers because unlike the major media channels, it s personal.

Major media is more of a performance than a communication because it's open to everyone, including people that don't need to be part of the conversation.

Email is intimate because people give you permission to access their inbox. That permission is granted because they trust you, and if you do not live up to the implied promise of respecting the channel, then that permission will be revoked.

The subject line of the United CEO s email, Actions Speak Louder Than Words, was carefully chosen to give the copy an overall theme to distinguish it from general marketing. That s personal. In addition to that, the short paragraphs read like a personal letter.

Some of the first words of this customer communication state, You will be treated with the highest level of service and the deepest sense of dignity and respect.

The words deepest sense of dignity and respect set the tone of the message. But make not mistake, so does the email channel itself.

There is a lesson here for anyone that uses social media marketing for customer communications. If the message is for everyone it is for no one.

When customer communications are blasted out to multiple social media channels it weakens the message because it's not targeted. This is why the most successful marketers consider email to be their most valuable digital asset.

Customer Communications are Teaching Moments

The second paragraph of the email states, Earlier this month, we broke (your) trust when a passenger was forcibly removed from one of our planes. Our procedures got in the way of our employees doing what they know is right."

An amicable settlement was made with the passenger that was forcibly removed before this email was released. That is precisely what I suggested in our customer care episode: Fix it and share the teaching moment with your customers because chances are they going to eventually learn about it anyway.

The CEO s words signal that he is taking full responsibility, while also removing the burden of the people on the front lines that have to go out there every day to serve the customers. That s smart on many levels.

In taking responsibility, he outlines specifically what the airline is doing to fix the situation so that it hopefully never happens again. The remedies include:

• Up to $10,000 for voluntary rebooking
• No-questions-asked $1,500 reimbursement policy for permanently lost bags
• Rolling out a new app for employees so they can give away miles, travel credits, and other benefits on the spot when things don't go right.

For those interested, the special customer hub gives additional details on the actions that are being taken. Don't underestimate that approach for complementing email.

Customers always have questions and the message tends to stick when the company uses its website to give everything more context, and therefore, more relevance.

Go Further and Make a New Promise

When you break a promise trust is broken, maybe forever. This is why apologies are only a stepping-stone to what should follow, and that s a new promise.

Here s United s new promise.

Our goal should be nothing less than to make you truly proud to say, I fly United.

Should be those are powerful words that acknowledge there is more work to do.

It goes on to say this.

"Ultimately, the measure of our success is your satisfaction, and the past several weeks have moved us to go further than ever before in elevating your experience with us.

The customer experience is the ultimate measure of how well a business is serving its customers. Don't wait for a crisis to elevate the customer experience.

Reasonable people understand that no company is perfect, but they want to be assured there is a promise to make the customer experience everything it can be.

When things go wrong you have to take strong actions to get them right. While not everyone is going to agree with your decisions, they will respect the fact that you took action.

In addressing a live audience once, Steve Jobs acknowledged that Apple indeed makes mistakes like everyone else, but he noted that's better than not making decisions that lead to actions.

Action is what the customer communication promised, and some of the results are already in place. Now it s time for customers to respond with their actions.

It turns out that next week I m flying United Airlines from Chicago to Hawaii. I ll be interested in reconciling the United Airlines customer experience I know with the customer-focused airline you expect and deserve.

I ll be sure to share what I discover with you when I return.

Show Notes

• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

The call to action for this episode is to be diligent about building your lists of customers, influencers, and partners by using email to nurture those relationships, including sharing teaching moments from both favorable and less than favorable circumstances.

Actions do speak louder than words, and that's why your customers will appreciate hearing from you on a regular basis. This humanizes your business and keeps that personal email channel warm and ready for any type of customer communication.

The post Customer Communication: Using Email to Build Genuine Trust appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.

Episode 61 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to create winning landscape industry awards entries and sell more work with storytelling.

In one of the first episodes of Landscape Digital Show, we discussed why storytelling is essential to winning landscape industry awards.

Since we are once again in the thick of the landscape industry awards season, I d like to go into more detail about why your project story is vital to winning, and how to tell to tell that story with familiar storytelling practices used every day in Hollywood.

What I m going to show you is that amazing project photos are essential to winning landscape industry awards, but without a good story to back them up your entry will play like a silent film.

How Judges Choose the Winners

Years ago I was asked to be a judge for the landscape association that is now NALP The National Association of Landscape Professionals. There were 4 landscape company members charged with judging several hundred projects over two days.

Here's how it works.

Each project has a general description that is read aloud for the group. That description has to tell a story that aligns with the judges' expectations as they review the dozen or so images.

Pretend you are a judge. As each image pops up on the screen its one or two sentence description is read. A couple of things are happening. One is that you are reconciling the photo with the description. Two, you are looking for confirmation from your fellow judges, like a nod or smile.

Those photos have to deliver on the promise of the overall project description and the specific image description. They do that be letting the story unfold.

Think of the project images as scenes in a movie. There needs to be a logical progression from beginning to end, with drama, suspense, and surprise as we progress from scene to scene.

If you can accomplish that, you have an excellent chance of winning an award.

Contrast that with image descriptions that are vague or do not align well with the visual in front of us. We hear one thing and see another. That confusion is a misfire that will likely drop that submission down a notch. If there is no recovery, such as stunning photos that create a big finish, it will be lucky to receive any award at all.

That s it. Game over.

Now let s get into the specifics.

Every Project Must Have a Theme

Great novelists and screenwriters know you have to get and stay on-theme if you expect to capture and hold the attention of the audience.

Your audience of judges needs to know why each submitted project was undertaken. That s its purpose or theme.

And you need to spice it up with whatever backstory you have, such as the residential landscape renovation that was completed just in time for a milestone family event, thanks to your company's innovative mobilization and execution strategy.

You get the idea.

Your story narrative and images must work together to become a short film that sparks the imagination of at least one of the judges. Just one. And this is key. You see, while there is usually agreement on the merits of each project, disagreement on any little thing leads to further debate.

In other words, there are negotiations among the judges and compromises have to be made. So, to sell an award to the group, at least one of the judges has to champion your project entry. Then he or she will use your story to help the others understand why it deserves an award.

And that story starts with the project being true to its theme or intended purpose.

A compelling story puts meaning to the project images. In short, when everything else is perceived to be equal, the story is the tiebreaker.

Now that I have your attention, let s talk about how to tell that story.

How to Tell a Story Like Hollywood

Storytelling at the highest level is a complex mix of beats, sequences, scenes, and acts. You may not know what those elements are, but you intuitively know that something is amiss if they are not right.

Most important is to understand the main storytelling elements, which are the acts of the story. You know them simply as the beginning, middle, and ending. What s important is what happens within each respective act.

1. Beginning Hook – It contains the inciting incident that propels the story forward 2. Middle build Here there is crisis and progressive complication that holds the audience's interest 3. Ending payoff This is resolution of the crisis and the story climax

What's interesting about this simple but reliable formula is that you probably use one like it to sell landscaping projects. Your sales story is one of transformation from a beginning landscape reality into something remarkable, which is the ending payoff.

That s what will win the judges over. You start with the beginning hook that sets the stage, giving them a reason to buy into your story, while creating suspense about how the projected outcome was ultimately achieved.

The beginning hook prepares the audience for what is about to come, and within that first act is an important moment known as the inciting incident. This is when the story really begins.

In the film Rocky, the inciting incident is when Apollo Creed picks Rocky's picture out of the book of contenders and proclaims, "I'm going to give this chump a shot at the title."

Now you know there is going to be a fight to the finish. Everything in the middle builds up to the finish, with plenty of challenges that create anticipation about that climactic moment. Rocky experienced his share of challenges and your landscape awards story must do the same.

The crisis in the middle raises the stakes for the protagonist, and the higher the stakes for failing the bigger the payoff for winning.

The protagonist of your story is the customer. And the stakes are the award level your project can achieve by coming through for them. So, go ahead, give your story impact by making it a fight to the finish. Let it get a little bloody. Did everything come together perfectly? Doubtful. Quantify your challenges with data to amplify them for the judges.

Let s go back to the inciting incident again. What exactly is that for a landscape industry awards project? It's the reason why the customer chose you over your competitors.

It s your better idea or way of doing things that hooked them in. And the challenges and struggles you encountered along the way make the outcome that much sweeter for everyone, including the awards judges.

That s your storytelling formula. It s a hook, build-up, and a payoff.

Back in Episode 4 of Landscape Digital Show, I discussed the details of a particular project that resulted in my young landscaping company at the time winning its first of what would be many landscape industry awards. Give it a listen because it's a real-life example of how this worked for us.

Show Notes

• Need help putting together your awards submission? Let's discuss it.
• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.
• And if you are on Facebook, please like the Landscape Digital Institute page. I ll greatly appreciate that!

Call to Action

The call to action for this episode is to start thinking like a storyteller because that is how you are going to sell more work and win more landscape industry awards.

If you would like help with your landscaping awards submissions, that is a service that I offer.

You can get in touch with me using the contact form or you ll find my contact information on my personal LinkedIn profile.

The post Landscape Industry Awards: How to Create Winning Entries appeared first on Landscape Digital Institute.