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It has been a busy few weeks for the marketing team at MindTree. On July 13th, we hosted our first industry analyst day in Boston.We were pleased with the turnout and the feedback was all very positive. For years, we have been spending time trying to figure out how to gain mindshare from analysts to differentiate MindTree: in person at a conference during a chance encounter; or trying to differentiate the Company through a 60 minute phone briefing 1-2 x year. If analyst relations are part of your responsibility, I don’t need to tell you – this is not an easy task.
Yet bringing these key influencers together for 7 hours to learn about MindTree, our growth strategy and offerings has already paid dividends through research opportunities and follow-up conversations scheduled.
We followed this successful event up with another on July 22nd, when we hosted 84 clients, prospects and partners at Yankee Stadium in a hospitality suite. Once again, the feedback was outstanding-my inbox was filled with “thank you” notes the following day.
It got me to thinking about how effective these types of marketing activities remain today. While most of us (including me) spend more time trying to understand the ROI of various social media activities; creating a new brand strategy for our companies; or understanding our Web site analytics that we forget how simple it is to plan “mindless marketing” such as the two initiatives I mention above.
Mindless marketing still also provides some of the best ROI. If one’s goal is to create a marketing program to build loyalty, cultivate relationships or generate new opportunities, is there anything more effective than getting your client outside of his or her office and spending 3-4 hours together?
My colleague, MindTree’s gardener Subroto Bagchi, once told me “good things happen when people meet.” If you agree with his statement, consider adding a few mindless marketing initiatives to your plan today.
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Geetha says:
Dear Mr. King,
Thank you for an interesting post.
I agree 100% with the Gardener’s profound statement especially because we are told that marketing is just not all about presentations? On the contrary, is it not all about establishing connections and to achieve that, isn’t face time absolutely vital?
Wonder whether the following article on the importance of face-to-face time in Sales applies to ‘Mindful Marketing’ as well?
Thanks and regards,
Geetha
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http://www.completeselling.com/members/completeselling/blog/VIEW/00000013/00000166/Sales-Training-Ideas—The-importance-of-building-relationships-no-matter-what-you-sell.html#00000166
Sales Training Ideas – Selling the old fashioned way.
Wednesday, November 19th 2008 @ 11:08 AM post viewed 221 times
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The other day a previous customer from my banking days called. I’ve been gone for a little over a year and he was calling to find out who his new sales rep. was. Yikes!
I gave him the information he was looking for and then we chatted a bit about business and personal stuff. Years ago he had worked with my dad and that subject came up. He said in effect, “Ya, I remember your dad, an old IBM type salesperson. Every four or five months he’d call, ask if he could stop by and then we’d review what our plans were and what new products he had. That was the old way of selling, the good way of selling, and that doesn’t happen anymore.”
Sometimes we get so caught up in new ways of selling, new techniques, new technology, etc., that many times we overlook the basics. The truth is: in many cases, the “old” way of selling works best. Going out and seeing people face-to-face and having a relaxed, fact-finding conversation where we simply touch base, find out what is going on and simply let our prospects and customers know that we are still around and that we care enough to pay a personal visit.
The bottom line: Go out and see your customers and prospects, if you haven’t already been doing it. Don’t let a phone call, e-mail, or some other touch point suffice for what should be an in-person visit. In this economy, most salespeople cut their face-to-face calls by roughly 37%; be one of the salespeople that increases, not decreases face-to-face calls. If you’re in the face-to-face sales arena, set up a schedule to call on customers and prospects at least once every 6 months. Get back to the “old tried and true” methods of selling that worked so well years ago and still will today.
John Chapin co-author of Sales Encyclopedia
Nand Kishore says:
Joseph
Enjoyed reading the note.
I would like to invite you to my blog with thoughts on marketing
http://nk33333.blogspot.com/
Thanks and have a great day
Nand Kishore
Geetha says:
You may find this interesting I think:
http://www.marksanborn.com/blog/marketing-for-leaders-quiet-is-the-antidote-to-noise/#comments
Thanks and regards,
Geetha
Ramprakash Chinnappan says:
Dear Joseph,
Meeting prospective in order to build business relationship has always been one of the best ways to really understand the different business nuances. It provides an opportunity to really build one to one relationship or even gauge the overall group perspective about the product or service like the one that you have mentioned above.
It also creates a platform to understand the latest market pulse, trends and even turn out to be a mind opener. Face to face meetings provides an eco system particularly the casual ones that can lead to discussion on different “nodal points”. These nodal points could be, the benefits of our company’s products or the competitors, the leadership of the organization, financial position, and latest development in the technology or market share. The outcome of such an interaction is just a formation of “nodal objects” formed by connecting these nodal points. These outcomes can just be anything an elephant or a horse and the ability to work with these nodal points instantly in creating the necessary objects or in plain terms gain mindshare is an important role that the marketing personnel does. And face to face meeting has always provided such opportunities more tangible in terms of all the key attributes of marketing.
Regards
Ramprakash
Akshay says:
Joseph – I am currently involved in an acedemic project to define a model which basically gives ROI on Social Media. And it is a indeed the kind of work which we get so involved in and we forget the simple meet and market rule. The last line from Mr. Bagchi strikes the cord.
On a separate note. Congratulations for the successfull analyst meet and hope to hear some new client additions for MindTree.
Joseph King says:
Akshay:
Thanks very much for writing. Yes, that line from Subroto has stuck with me for years. It must be its simplicity.
Joseph King says:
I agree with you Ramprakash. Do you think we’ve moved away from this rather simple, straightforward approach?
Joseph King says:
Dear Geetha:
Thanks for sharing.
Joe
Joseph King says:
Thanks for sharing and good luck with your blog.
Joseph King says:
I wish every sales person woke up and recited John’s bottom line every day. Email may have made us more efficient, in terms of total touches, but I’m not sure it has made us more productive.
Lubna says:
Good to hear the meetings were successful.
Ramprakash says:
Yes, we did move to more sophisticated way of marketing approach.
When global companies compete for market share on a daily basis, creating sales lead as quickly as possible plays a major role.
Just imagine, one has to adopt mindless marketing in “all” aspects of the marketing process, the amount of time spend reaching target audience from diverse geographies converting them into potential sales lead becomes an extremely time consuming task. Rather, If one adopts latest technology “wherever possible ” in the entire marketing process could be a game changer. This can be called as process improvement or adopting technology as strategy and this ultimately helps in reaching clients, generating sales lead, follow up, and hence closure.
The pitfalls of using these latest technologies can include the effectiveness (Lets say how many deal closure Vs deal lead generation by using ONLY technology) of the process itself as you have clearly mentioned earlier.
Then, Does it comes to the usage of more sophisticated technology that can mock a face to face meeting ? Does technologies that help perform virtual conversation almost as real ones play a vital role ? Sharing data instantly including bulk ones using cloud computing technology may play a major role ?
Or Does it comes to effectively collaborating both the simple methodology and technology.
Well, we all know there are limitations to these technologies and irrespective of any automation by using technology in the marketing process, we all know how important to meet our client face to face at least in any of the critical part of the process that would make a “HUGE impact” in representing the company’s offerings.
Ram