Get viewed by more than a million people in less than a week. That’s the generally accepted minimum for “going viral.” Let’s just go with that as a definition for now.
Going viral is the benchmark. It’s the essential badge of honor that differentiates between a legitimately talented marketer and a wanna’ be. If one of your blog posts or videos or pithily-captioned images or whatever hasn’t gone viral, don’t even try to pretend you really know what you’re doing.
The above paragraph is total bull&@%#.
As a B2B sales pro, I could care less about attracting the attention of a million people. I’m not selling to a million miscellaneous people. I’m selling to a meticulously selected few decision-swaying executives. Yes, I want my virus to be extremely virulent, but I only need it to infect that chosen few.
Am I suggesting you should repeatedly expend the considerable time and effort required to produce a set of digital pieces that effectively communicates your highly customized value proposition to only 3 or 4 key people for every significant opportunity you are pursuing? Yes!
Allow me to repeat. Yes. I am urging you to repeatedly expend the considerable time and effort required to produce a set of digital pieces that effectively communicates your highly customized value proposition to only 3 or 4 key people for every significant opportunity you are pursuing.
Think about the situation where 4 people in your customer will be deeply involved in making a decision about your proposal. One of those folks is your champion. You’ve never met two of them. Because of an odd set of circumstances a few years ago, the fourth thinks you’re a knucklehead.
It could take weeks – even months – to get appointments with them all. You might never get in front of #4.
What if?
What if you made a short video concisely articulating the guts of your value proposition including the financial impact, and laying out an implementation plan? Your champion, obviously, would look at it carefully. Your champion would also (at your request) forward it to the other three with a strong endorsement for moving forward.
Now it’s you and/or your team (via your e-Rep, a digital extension of yourselves) explaining the value and sorting through the complexity. You no longer need to depend on your champion to get it all communicated. And it all gets communicated right now instead of next week or next month.
As I might have mentioned, you need to repeatedly expend the considerable time and effort required to produce a set of digital pieces that effectively communicates your highly customized value proposition to only 3 or 4 key people for every significant opportunity you are pursuing.
