Solution based selling

Why Solution based selling matters?

Solution based selling is largely driven by suppliers attempt to escape dramatically increasing commoditizing pressure on individual products and services become less differentiated over time.

Relationship difference in the approach:

1. Nature of Relationship
   • Product Sell: Supplier reacts to purchase order
   • Solution Sell: Supplier viewed as trusted adviser
2. Selling Skills
   • Product Sell: Strong Knowledge of product portfolio
   • Solution Sell: Boardroom level engagement with customer
3. Customer Experience
   • Product Sell: Quality product/service at good price
   • Solution Sell: Provision of strategic insight regarding customer's business

Side effects of Solution Based Selling:

1. Rise of consensus bases sale -> Its just like a car sales dealer has to convince a family before a luxury car is bought as opposed to a consumer report rating based car buy as its just another commodity. Understanding the team dynamics and interfaces between the department becomes very important.
2. Increased risk aversion -> In the world of complex solutions, supplier success is often measured by the performance of the customers business, not the suppliers product. The risk factors are considered in the value proposition.
3. Greater demand for customization -> Solutions are always bespoke to customers business model. The truth is everyone wants customization, no one wants to pay for it. The solution to this problem is to make processes a part of your solution and build innovative solution which are flexible to accommodate various process flows. In car market people say, "The design is free because it costs the same to make a bad design when compared to a good design"
4. Too many cooks in the house: There is a rise of third party consultants who act on behalf of the clients for vendor and services selection.

Why Mobile Analytics is different and exciting?

• Mobile/Tablets are replacing the way we interact on internet. Tablets are taking the experience of browsing at home from desk to a couch or dining table.
  
• Screen sizes and ways to intereact with smart phones and tables are very much different than traditional desktop.
  
• Websites can be upgraded when needed but there is no guarantee that the user will upgrade the app even after you push an update to the store.
  
• Monetizing the ads in websites was easy as the publisher chose where to place the ads. In mobile apps the ad placement have little or no control on where to place ads. Gaming the users in such a way that they think that there is enough incentive to watch an ad is the best way to make sure the ad was delivered right.
  
• With mobile apps now the publishers get complete access to the location profile of the user and thus making ads more valuable if done correctly.
  
• Functionally the apps have much more control on the device when compared to a browser running on the machine. When was the last time Apple checked that you programmed a website correctly for Safari? but they like to check each app and update for an app in the app store.
  

Also there is no business without a customer. So to establish the opportunity I would like to point you to a wonderful experiment that ft.com is doing at Grand Central Station: FT.com Mobile Story

Also check out this conversation. Really good example of how mobile analytics is different:Expedia Story of Mobile App Analytic

comScore Monetization Analytix (MAx)

One of the popular news site in India is, The Times of India. Their site is:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/

They intent fully put cheesy content to the bottom so people scroll down and click on that content so they make extra cash on these page views (by selling display ads).

Example of the content (annoys the heck out of me when an old newspaper puts nonsense content like this. Where is the editorial integrity gone?)


Especially the life and style.

So another newspaper in India made a mockery out of their content using this Ad.
Link-Which newspaper do you read?

Kareena Kapoor is one of the top actresses, but the point here is no one knows answer to simple stuff. The beep is for calling out Times Of India’s name.

Most managing editors have guilt for such cheesy content but then to stay alive in digital business those page views are needed. This makes it very important to serve limited content and make more money out of the ads. This is where MAx offering from comScore can help.

Geek Hangout

I always hear about the various events that people participate in. I managed to get a good list of such events. I probably call it as the Geek Hangout.

Here is a list of some of these conferences where the fun happens:
Game Developers Conference
CeBIT
LAUNCH Festival
SXSW Interactive
London Web Summit
Signal
Ignition West
Structure Data
Microsoft Dev Connection
Combinator Demo Day
VentureBeat Mobile Summit
Where
Data 2.0 Summit
ad:tech
Ad Age Digital
DEMO
The Next Web
Future Insights Live
Wired Business Conference
BlackBerry World
D10
E3
Tech Policy Summit
Microsoft TechEd North America 2012
LeWeb London
Structure Data
Velocity
Microsoft TechEd Europe
Google I/O
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference

Techmeme does a complete list
Techmeme events list

Linkedin Adverstising

As I am writing this blogpost I am on a train journey back to Washington DC. The Acela express provides free internet connectivity but at the same time probably optimizes the use of internet by blocking the ads.

One example of this was the double click/Dart iframe actually shows the call made to doubleclick but has no display ad being served.

What is interesting is the data about me that LinkedIn passes to Double click and which I think is pretty specific segment information as it is accurate and provided by me :)

lang=>Language
u=>Encoded user id?
func=>my job function first word in the title
func=>my job function
coid=>Company ID
csize=>Company Size
zip=>My Zip code
cntry=>Country
edu=>My grad school
edu=>My undergrad school
gy=>Graduating Year
gdr=>Gender
age=>Age
seg=278http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
seg=>Target Segment
grp=>Target Group

Just thought this is exciting. For a free service I do not mind LinkedIn using my data. Also for what it matters I will probably never click on a display ad and thus the ad spend is a waste for the advertiser as my propensity to act on the message provided by the ad is ZERO :)

Also if you would like to opt out here is a video:

Set comScore debugger

I got a comment from a user few days back. I want to mention that this works only for comScore's scorecardresearch.com tracked traffic.

To setup the Digital Aanaltix/comScore beacon Debugger
1) Open any browser and then go to any website.
2) Browse to any page on the internet and set a bookmark.



3) Edit the bookmark and change the URL. The following shows the steps in Mozilla.
Step 1: Find your bookmarks and right click to see the properties option.


Step 2: When you click on properties the following window opens and the location/URL needs to be updated.


Step 3: Copy the following javaScript

javascript:void(window.open("","daxDebug","width=600,height=600,location=0,menubar=0,status=1,toolbar=0,resizable=1,scrollbars=1").document.write("script%20language=\"JavaScript\"%20id=dbg%20src=\"http://webmetrictools.com/dax/debugger.js\">"));

Step 4: Replace the URL with the javaScript. The final screen looks like:


Okay now that I have it, how do i use it?
1) Go to the website where you want to see the comScore beacon values
2) Click on the bookmark list while on the website and then click the bookmark for debugger.


3) Here is what you should see.

Are you a Black Belt in Web Analytics?

I came across this quiz on one of the LinkedIn groups I subscribe to. I think that the title of "Black Belt" doesn't mean much as different things work for different people. What is interesting though is that all of us as practitioners should be asking these questions.

So check out the quiz
Web Analytics Black Belt quiz

Questions:
1) Do you know why your website exists?
2) Do you know how you make money on your site?
3) Do you know whats people's experience of your site?
4) Do you know how many manage to accomplish the task?
5) Do you know what people like or dislike with your site?
6) Do you know the monthly return rate?
7) Do you know the volume of your returning visits?
8) Do you know how important your various traffic sources are?
9) Do you know your top 10 entry pages?
10) Do you know their conversion and bounce rate over time?
11) Do you know what type of content is consumed most?
12) Do you know the value of the visitors that consumed various content?
13) Do you know how many of your visits use internal search?
14) Do you know what type of searches your visitors do?
15) Do you know your head vs long tail?
16) Do you know the value of your long tail?
17) Do you know your best converting keywords?
18) Have you grouped the keywords in various buckets based on volume or value?
19) Do you know your top referring URLs?
20) Do you know how these URLs perform on conversion, bounce and revenue?
21) Do you know where people lick on your most people click on your most important pages?
22) If you have a desired path funnel do you know where people drop out?
23) Do you track your social media efforts?
24) Do you know how much ROI your social media engagements bring?
25) Do you know your most profitable online ad campaigns?
26) Do you know your most profitable offline ad campaign?
27) Do you use a bid management tool to maximize your online campaign ROI?
28) Do you know how your adwords cannibalize on your organic traffic?
29) Do you track your email marketing campaigns correctly?
30) Do you evaluate and optimize the content of your emails?
31) Do you have a KPI dashboard and how frequently do you monitor it?
32) Do various part of the organization use various dashboards?
33) Do you know the type of segments that are important for your business?
34) Do you break down your numbers per segment?
35) Do you know what actions directly affects your conversion?
36) Can you tell how the factors that affect conversion correlate with each other?
37) Have you done A/B test on your top entry pages?
38) Do you have a systematic methodology for A/B testing?
39) Do you have a long term strategy for your testing?
40) Do you document your findings?
41) Do you spread the knowledge of your findings?
42) Do you know what your competitors do?

I think if you know answers to most of these questions you have indepth knowledge of your web analytics program.