Illuminating the Future:

ROI: The Rest of the Story

Numbers don't sell themselves. While some people think ROI projections and calculations can dazzle a prospective client, it's really the story around the ROI that incites action.

Decision-making is a pretty irrational process when you get right down to it. Thanks to the work of today's leading behavioral and decision theorists, there's plenty of evidence on that score. ROI figures, however, give us the justification to do what we really want to do -- and make the investments we want to make.

These points came to mind when I was recently re-reading Making Technology Investments Profitable: ROI Road Map to Better Business Cases by Jack Keen and Bonnie Digrius. While it's a pretty left-brain, how-to kind of book, the authors recognize the hidden power of intangibles and compelling story telling. If you want to sell a big project, then you have to tap into the hidden -- and often, not so hidden -- desires of the decision-makers.

Show them how you can make them heroes. Peel back the layers to learn their highest aspirations -- or their deepest concerns. Tell stories of how existing clients overcame great odds, turned around their organizations or rose from obscurity to some great triumph. You can tell stories in the past tense to describe your client successes -- or you can tell them in the future tense to help your prospects envision where you are going to take them. (Just don't tell them that your box or your software is world-class, highly scalable or user-friendly. What kind of story is that?)

"Clever storytelling is one of the quickest and most effective ways to gain executive understanding, buy-in and funding," contends Keen, who is founder and president of The Deciding Factor. "It also helps attract support and cooperation from reluctant users during project implementation and operation. Vivid stories translate dry, abstract numbers into compelling pictures of how deep yearnings of decision influencers can come true."

Keen offers a few interesting guidelines for ROI Story Tellers:

Demystifying the Complex Sale

Can’t we all just get along? Sales and Marketing, I mean.

The problem is they just don’t understand each other -– and it’s a problem that few companies have truly solved. Sales is a black box to marketers and marketing is a black box to sales people.

So how do we get a better understanding of what is going on within these boxes? More importantly, how do we extract ourselves from these boxes and work together to get results?

It’s not about thinking outside the box. (Run, don’t walk, for the exits if you hear that hackneyed phrase employed.) It’s about blowing the boxes apart to unify sales and marketing. In fact, once we are outside the rigid boundaries of these boxes, we can even include the customer in our newly created circle of value creation.

If that sounds like a worthy objective, I suggest you start with two new books: Brian Carroll’s Lead Generation for the Complex Sale and Jeff Thull’s Exceptional Selling. Together, these books provide a well rounded perspective on the challenges that companies now face as they strive to succeed in today’s demanding and difficult selling environments.

Taking a Byline to the Bottom Line

Congratulations, you just got a story written about your company in a prestigious publication. Just don't assume anyone that matters is actually going to read it. 

Not in the actual magazine, anyway. While many important people may see it, I never make this assumption. Decision-makers are busy people. They skim through publications -- if they have time for them at all. In many cases, publications pile up and eventually get tossed.

But that doesn't mean that your PR efforts have failed. To the contrary. You now have third party credibility. You can capitalize on your clip. This is where the real value comes into play. "Yet for many organizations, that’s where it ends," writes Tech Image PR wizard Ken Krause in the latest issue of PR Intelligence Report. "The article is lauded the day it appears, passed around to those who need to know, and then summarily forgotten..."

Krause urges us to make the most of these articles -- strengthening our market credibility and enabling the sales force. How so? Here are five great suggestions he offers:

• Tell Everyone You Know. If the article is available online, send it out with a link to the publication to prospects and customers, letting them know about this valuable information. Better yet, distribute it to the sales force with an intro and let them use it to create a point of contact with prospects and customers.
• Place It on Your Web Site. The day the article appears you’ll want to place a link to it on your Web site – preferably on the front page... You want visitors to realize right away that when your experts speak, the industry listens.
• Consider Getting Reprints. A nice piece of glossy paper with the magazine’s masthead appearing over your expert’s words is a nice leave-behind on sales calls, and a great handout at trade shows and other events.
• Include It in Your Newsletter (and Talk About It in Your Blog). You can reprint the text with a mention that the article originally appeared in XYZ publication. It’s one more way to get the information directly into the hands of the people who need to know about your organization’s expertise the most, namely your customers, partners, and prospects.
• Frame It and Place It in the Lobby. Obtain a crisp, clean copy of the publication and have someone with an artistic bent remove the article carefully from the rest of the magazine. Then get it matted and framed and hang it in a spot in the lobby or entryway where every visitor may see it.

Smart companies recognize they can increase the payoff on their thought leadership marketing activities by actively leveraging the content they create. That certainly includes content that provides an independent source of credibility.

So don't let a valuable clip go down the memory hole. "The important thing is to make sure you get all the mileage you can from it," says Krause. "Handled properly, a byline article will be the gift that keeps on giving."