If your sales force is having trouble closing sales, provide them with a diagnostic.

Is your sales force begging you for additional marketing support because sales just aren’t where they should be?  Don’t worry, the problem may not lie within your marketing program.  It could be that your company's prospects just don’t think they have a problem that needs solving or they are not in enough pain to be motivated to buy your solution. That’s where a diagnostic tool comes in. A good diagnostic tool can come in the form of a questionnaire or a tool that measures the monetary size and scope of a problem. Diagnostics can help expose issues and problems that were not readily apparent to the buyer. Just remember, your diagnostic needs to uncover problems that you can solve. And be sure your follow-up proposal or pitch addresses solving the problem head-on. In addition, we often encourage our clients to charge for their diagnostic as it adds more weight and credibility. Otherwise they may brush the results off as a sales tactic vs. really uncovering major issues that need to be resolved.

FDA To Hold Daylong Meeting on Medical Device Innovation

Each day, medical devices are developed to help prevent, diagnose, treat, and monitor serious and life-threatening diseases. After taking years to develop, these devices then undergo a regulatory review process before entering the marketplace. It then takes even more time for them to be adopted into clinical practice and for patients to realize the benefits.

Can the government do more to encourage the development of the next generation of medical devices? That is the question that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and participants from other federal agencies will examine this week at a workshop titled "Identifying Unmet Public Health Needs and Facilitating Innovation in Medical Device Development." The workshop is scheduled for June 24, 2010, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Hilton Washington DC North/Gaithersburg in Gaithersburg, Md. This initiative also is designed to identify potential barriers in the development of devices that the federal government can directly or indirectly remove or minimize to meet a public health goal.

The meeting will be an opportunity for the FDA and its federal partners to listen to academics, industry, and users.

Source:
U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Where the iPad Story Went Wrong

Well, the iPad presentation came and went and from a story telling perspective, Steve Jobs did a great job with his delivery and with generating excitement up to the presentation. But the story didn’t achieve all it could or even elevate the product to the level of wonderment everyone expected. Why? It missed some presumed attributes.

Presumed attributes, are those product features that everyone assumes will be in the product. If they are not there, the reaction of prospective buyers is negative.

And although there were plenty of “delighters,” those features that people weren’t expecting such as the price, the virtual keyboard and quality of the e-book reader; they became overshadowed by the fact that the presumed attributes were missing.

The presumed attributes that were missing from the iPad story included:

• A Camera
• The ability to run multiple applications simultaneously
• And Flash for watching videos.

The lesson to be learned is that while new innovation is exciting, if product marketers don’t address what people presume, the disappointment will slow the adoption of the product. Hopefully the Apple developers and marketing team are reading blogs like this and put back in what we presumed would be there.

Calling All Story Tellers

I came across a wonderful organization on-line the other day called MassMouth – The Power of Story- The Living Art of Story Telling in Massachusetts. How can you not be intrigued?

On January 31st the organization is hosting its next “Story Slam” at
The Enormous Room & Central Kitchen 567 Massachusetts Avenue Central Square, Cambridge Hosted by Will Luera from Improv Boston.

I highly recommend this for marketing executives who want to learn the ingredients of good story!

What is a story slam ?
Based on a poetry slam format, a story slam is a contest of words by known and undiscovered talent. Each of the featured 5 minute stories is judged on how well it is told, how well it is constructed and how well it honors the time limit and relates to the theme. Prizes will be awarded at each slam. There is a $7.00 cover - $5 for students/seniors. You can get more information at www.massmouth.ning.com

Out With the Old - Bring in the New!

Our firm has recently changed offices. While getting ready for the move, I decided to start purging old files. What did I find? Hundreds and hundreds of newspaper clippings, DVDs and VHS tapes of broadcast coverage from past clients. I even found old Bacon’s Media books. I couldn’t bare to throw them. After all, whenever we get a new recruit, I have to be able to show them how tough media research used to be and how lucky they are to use today’s on-line tools. I also found slide viewers, boxes of white-out, two typewriters, and old business cards.

I don’t know why I kept these items, but I couldn’t help but laugh when I found them. It reminded me how much things have changed, and how much we continually have to adapt to an ever-changing business world. Remember when email was new? Websites? When CDs replaced Zip discs? When DVD’s replaced VHS tapes of coverage? Remember clipping services vs. online tracking? And heck, I can’t even remember life without Google.

I know as an industry of marketing and pr professionals, we’ve recently had to adapt to a whole new set of tools all over again. We’ve had to master social media, search engine optimization, on-line marketing, viral marketing, inbound marketing and a whole pile of new marketing tools, portals, terminology and more. But I say, “enjoy the new while it lasts!” Someday we’re going to stumble upon our old linked-in page, Youtube video, blog, or e-book and say, “Oh, yeah, I remember those days.” And guess what? There will be something brand new waiting to replace or enhance them.

Trimming Down

This week I’ve been stuffing myself into tight pants, claiming that they must have shrunk in the dryer. But the awful truth is I’m stuffed into my pants like sausage, because I ate too much over the holidays. I couldn’t help gorge myself with all the tasty morsels.

It made me wonder, how many of us keep stuffing more details into the stories about our companies or products simply because it tastes good and satisfies us? Do we really need all those details that we cleverly come up with to describe our offerings? Or is it really just our way in indulging in our own pride in what we do?

I know I did this with the story about my firm at a cocktail party this holiday season. A delightful man asked me what I do; I told him I’m the president of a PR firm. Fearing that just wasn’t enough I spurted out, “But it’s more than PR in a traditional sense, we also have a social media division, and of course before we launch any PR campaign we have to get our clients’ stories right, and to do that we have to work backward from the buyers, and that requires research and strategy…and blah, blah, blah, indulge, indulge, indulge.”

So what happened? The man’s eyes glazed over and he tried to spurt back what he interpreted I do and he got it all wrong. Why? Because I got it all wrong. Stories have to be simple to be memorable. I tell my clients this all the time. They have to be told in layers. I’m sure if I just let it stand I was president of a PR firm, he would have asked, “Really, what kind of PR?” and then I could tell him the next layer and so on, and so on.

I tell my clients to shorten their stories all the time, and what did I do - The exact opposite.

So - My First New Years Resolution: Trim Down the fat in my thighs, and the fat in my own corporate story. And for heaven sake, practice what I preach.