Pivoisms

Customer Value
Do your customer service goals include your client getting promoted partly because of the value you created together? If not, aim higher.  

Are your customers your marketing department de facto? Congratulations, you are doing it right. 

Sales Strategy Rule Number One:  There is No Such Thing as a Sales Strategy

People talk about sales strategy, but sales is the tactical execution of the strategic plan set by executive leadership. Strategy changes less frequently than tactics, which can change mid-battle. Strategy is visionary. Tactical is creative. Just because something is innovative does not make it strategic. Initiatives are Tactical. Missions are strategic. 

Who Has the Problem – Strategic 

What is the Problem – Strategic 

Why Are We the Best Solution – Strategic  

How do we tell Who our What and Why – Tactical

When do we tell Who our What and Why – Tactical

Where do we tell Who our What and Why – Tactical 

Leads are Listeners with Needs. You cannot grow revenue without growing lead volume—This is an unequivocal math parallelism. 

You cannot dictate your go-to-market plan, control your sales team's tactics, deprive them of leads, and question their performance. If your sales department doesn't own its tactical lead generation budget, they don't own anything.

If your CMO measures anything other than the quality of leads generated by the marketing department, fire your CMO. Impressions don't buy things; Leads buy things after the sales team closes them. I've never received a PO from Mr. or Mrs. Impression.

"Here's the phone, sonny," is not a lead generation plan.

Prospecting and Selling are not the same functions. Prospecting finds people who a) have the problem your solution solves, and b) are willing listeners. Selling is winning purchase orders from willing listeners.

 Pivo's Sales as Science™:

You cannot increase revenue by forecasting. Instead, you must design, engineer, document, manufacture, market, and sell your way to increased revenue.

Your idea to sell becomes the prospect's idea to buy after she sees your message in seven different media.

Asking a cold-blooded closer to find qualified leads is like asking a brain surgeon to prepare the operating room for surgery. 

The definition of a salesperson is someone who woke up disappointed with how much they made yesterday and is willing to do something about it today--if your commission plan and salespeople don't support this statement--you don't have a salesforce; you have an order entry force.

Your company lacks coherence if your website, collateral, hedgehog principle, brand positioning, and value statements aren't synchronized.

CRM properly deployed uses a 3 x 3 account contact matrix—your buyer and the people on either side of your buyer, their three subordinates, and their three bosses. So if three people in your company don't know all nine contacts, work towards that goal.

Salespeople fall into three categories - three, seventeen, and eighty percenters. Track the activity and performance metrics of the three percenters, set their system as your system, and replicate them. The rest of the pack will conform or exclude themselves.

Sales is a full-contact sport--Eyeballs, handshakes, back pats, and raised glasses. 

No one ever earned a purchase order while sitting in a sales meeting.

Operational excellence breeds sales excellence, not the inverse. 

Why bother if your salespeople don't take compulsory product knowledge competency exams requiring 90% minimum passing scores?

Sales must work in every department as the Interdepartmental Champion. Why?

It is the customer's job to behave unreasonably, engineering's job to meter and design it, manufacturing's job to produce it, marketing's job to tell everyone it exists, and the salesman's job to sell it at profitable margins.

Ninety-one percent of tradeshow attendees are vendor employees, speakers, or consultants, i.e., they aren't buyers. Considering B2B direct marketing's 5% direct response rate, savvy marketers spend more on direct marketing than tradeshows.

Need secures the appointment. Fear of unmet needs, promised. FUN.

Quality ensures the RFQ. Fear of unmet quality, assured. FUQ.

Salesmanship secures the Margin. Fear of breach extinguished. FBE.

Scarcity closes the sale. Fear of loss eliminated. FLE.

Buyer Needs Hierarchy:

Security. The solution delivers the buyer's job security.
Approval. The solution delivers the buyer's manager's approval.
Control. The solution delivers the buyer's project control.
Validation. The solution includes the buyer's desires.
Unmet Love. The solution delivers the buyer admiration from management, peers, and the vendor. 

Technology

If your answer to managing a new metric is to create a new Excel spreadsheet, you have a leaky cloud.

There will only be ten companies in 2050. Is yours preparing to be one of them?

In the post-Covid world, your processes are obsolete if you aren't digitizing your manual processes, and soon your company will be, too.

You don't understand the Internet if you are not attempting to create one-click ordering as your customer experience.

SaaS and IoT are blurring the lines between product and service, and one day, there will no longer be a need to distinguish a servicemarkSM  from a trademark™.

If you own a smartphone, you are either not that important or do not know how to live well. That is OK, me neither.

Your engagement is weak if your socials have fewer likes than your headcount. Make better content.
 

If your freedia app isn't busy, your engagement is weak. Make a better app.

Leadership and Culture

You cannot delegate culture creation to a subordinate.

People forget that we work for shareholders. Our first KPI is increasing shareholder value. Our supervisor is our coach on the Increase-Shareholder-Value-Team.  

Teach, mentor, lead, instruct, and champion every subordinate, every day, as though it were your last day.

You cannot be one kind of vendor and another kind of customer.

Go to work every day, trying to render yourself useless. 

If you haven't used your company's product or met with any customers in the past six months, no matter your role, shame on your manager and your CEO.

Electric Vehicle Adoption:

There can be no EV without O&G. (Oil and Gas)

Progress is seldom linearly progressive.  Hybrids reduce more GHG per dollar spent than EVs as of 2023.

Oil and Gas aren't going anywhere, but their use cases are evolving.
 

Owning an EV is the fad; Riding in EVs is the trend.

AI + ADAS + EV + Disappearing Middle Class = Ride-Hailing as the new standard transportation. Hailing an EV today (rideshare) is what streetcars and trains were one hundred years ago, except the train now arrives at your door in twelve minutes or less.

USDOT data proves 95.1% of American daily vehicles travel less than 31 miles round trip, and 99% of American round trips are less than 100 miles. This means most Americans could use an EV with a 100-mile range for all but three days per year. Still, many Americans favor owning (versus renting) something they need only three times per year.
 

EV adoption requires filling the use cases where EVs work, not whining about where they do not.

New technology requires new behavior. For example, equestrians who traded in their horses for Model T cars didn't put oats in the gas tank.

Equestrians, tack manufacturers, and livery owners shook their fists at automobiles like ardent ICE owners do EVs. 

EVs died the first time around (early 1900's) due to acquisition cost, not range, big oil, infrastructure, or battery technology. Once EVs reach price parity with ICE vehicles, new ICE models will disappear. 

Branding: 

Erratic taxonomy is the enemy of effective SEO.

Products perform a function in a place. Brands build homes in our hearts.

Demand creates volume, while scarcity sets the price.

The medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan), and the message is now TikTok. 

All CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) are engineered solutions.

SaaS and IoT are blurring the lines between product and service, and one day there will no longer be a need to distinguish a servicemark SM from a trademark™.

Perseverance and Pitch Prep:

I always get an order: Purchasing or Restraining.

If you cannot pitch it to your CEO, you cannot pitch it to a client.

Self Actualization:

The universe cannot distinguish between who you believe you are and who you are.

Faith is a belief applied repeatedly.

Change your outlook to alter your inlook. While changing your scenery doesn't dodge your issues, adjusting your steps, smells, sights, tastes, and sounds will transform your inlook.