What do you know about Pinterest? Enough to decide whether your business needs to get involved? Here’s a great source for detailed answers.

Today’s guest post features Karen Leland, the bestselling author of 8 business books including the recently released Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest For Business, http://bit.ly/Amazonbook. Karen is the president of Sterling Marketing Group, and writes the Modern Marketing Blog at www.karenleland.com. Thanks, Karen!

Before you jump headlong into Pinterest it’s worth taking a step back to decide if a good match exists between you and the site’s users. Depending on which marketing expert you ask, defining your target market is best achieved by looking at either demographics or PsychoDemographics—customer lifestyles, attitudes, and behaviors—or both.

Demographics include age, income, and gender. These represent three of the big dogs in data, and it’s worth considering your ideal customer to see if they currently fit within the most common Pinterest user profiles below.

Age. Think about what role age plays in defining your target market. Do you provide services or products (i.e., beer or baseball caps) that anyone from a 21-year-old to a 91-year-old might buy? If not, what particular age groups do you serve and what are their unique needs?

Income. What level of earning or disposable income do your ideal clients have? The pinner whose business operates at an average sale of $13.99 (vs. the pinner whose smallest sale is $3,999) is going to have to approach what and how they pin in a particular way to meet the monetary considerations of their customer base.

Gender. Does your product or service appeal exclusively to men or women, or is it more inclusive? Men and women respond differently not only to what is offered but to the way things are promoted and displayed.

What the Numbers Say. Now take a look at your answers and compare them with this demographic data according to Google Ad Planner: 72 percent of Pinterest users are female
 and the average age of Pinterest users is between 25 and 54
.  25 percent of Pinterest users have earned a bachelor’s or higher degree and the majority have a household income of between $25K and $75K.

Does your demographic profile fit in with the prototypical Pinterest customer? If so, you may have a match made in online heaven, and it’s a good bet you will want to add Pinterest to your marketing mix. If not, you can still maintain a Pinterest presence—just to stay in the game—but it might not warrant putting a lot of time into pinning.

A word of warning: social media statistics—like a love of Cracker Jacks and cotton candy—can change over time. Hence the numbers quoted here are as of publication and, given Pinterest’s relatively new status on the playground, are likely to change. Updated data can be found at several places on the web including: www.experianhit-wise.com and www.google.com/adplanner.

PsychoDemographics are the other lens through which to look at your target audience. This includes their lifestyle preferences, personal commitments, and values. The fine research minds at such companies as Experian Hitwise and Nielsen Prizm research how these distinctions translate into different customer segments.

Understanding the ways in which these factors impact your customers can greatly influence your Pinterest strategy. For example, let’s take a look at just one of the segments from Claritas Nielsen Prizm and how they might apply to the Pinterest audience.

The Affluentials. These folks represent close to 23 million Americans with a median income of $66,913. They are typically couples with white-collar jobs and college degrees. Their consumer tastes include home-related items, health foods, computer equipment, and consumer electronics. One of the top followed brands on the web is home design company west elm (http://pinterest.com/westelm/). With over 87,000 followers, they do a great job of creating boards aimed at this demographic. Likewise the magazine Real Simple (http://pinterest.com/realsimple/) has over 192,000 followers and 73 boards that focus on the affluentials’ interest in food and home life.

Aside from hiring a marketing consultant to create a full profile of your potential customer, here are some of the ways you can identify the PsychoDemographics of your audience:

• What books and magazines do they typically read?

• What television shows, or types of television shows, do they watch?

• Where do they tend to shop (big box retailers, luxury stores, discount marts)

• What kinds of consumer goods do they tend to buy?

• Where do they spend their disposable income?

• Where do they value spending time (family, work, exercise)?

The bottom line is that you need to look at your customers in total. In addition to traditional demographics, strive to understand your ideal audience’s state of mind through PsychoDemographics. Then you can consider the contextual relevance a site like Pinterest will have and strategize accordingly.

What do you think about Pinterest? Just one more fad, or a potential tool for your business development? Let us know by leaving a comment!

Many large companies have rigid policies prohibiting employees from any business-related social media activity. If that’s your practice, I recommend you reconsider.

The Whale Hunters help  B2B companies accelerate their growth by selling bigger deals to bigger customers. Most of our clients have a complex sale, such as a software solution, a technology, a marketing plan, a training program, a manufactured part of a larger item,  for a few examples. When they are selling into a large company, they find many people  involved in the decision of what to buy and from whom or whether to buy or do it themselves in house.

One or two people will make the final decision but many more will influence that decision. Whoever ultimately decides will only choose a solution or a service provider that is not acceptable to most internal influencers. The price of change is too high; the price of internal conflict is too painful.

These influencers–subject matter experts–will make their recommendation based on their confidence in the capability and likeability of their counterparts at your company. They want to get to know these people. They want to check out the credentials of  your project managers or your trainers or your customer service staff or your IT department or your graphic designers or whomever. They want to know their peers in your company.

Now here’s where social media comes in: they will look for your employees on LinkedIn and will check to see which employees contribute to your company’s blog or Facebook page or LinkedIn discussions. They will want to see a profile, work history, where people went to school, what kind of credentials they have. Especially on LinkedIn, they will explore whether your employees have received recommendations from past or current customers, supervisors, or co-workers. They will be interested to learn whether your employees are thought leaders; for example, do they comment on relevant industry blog posts, do they ask and/or answer questions on LinkedIn, and do they participate in special interest groups online. They’ll look to see how your employees are connected, to them and to others. They may ask to connect with members of your team.

If your employees are invisible online, or if their only presence is a personal presence, you will be at a distinct disadvantage in comparison to other competitors whose employees are visible and active online.

Of course you need policies and procedures, mostly guided by common sense. To start in a small, safe way, find someone (likely in marketing) who knows LinkedIn. Encourage your employees to create a LinkedIn profile. Teach them what a good one looks like and help them get a professional headshot photo. Ask them to request recommendations. Show them how LinkedIn works, how to find groups, and how to participate appropriately. Make your expectations clear, and be explicit about how much time during business hours would be acceptable for professional social media activity. Even a limit of 10 minutes a day on LinkedIn will enable them to become well-connected–and they won’t need to check in daily.

The more your team “connects” with others, the more powerful your company will become in business development opportunities–more sales, bigger deals.

I highly recommend Jill Konrath and Ardeth Albee’s new eBook: Cracking the LinkedIn Sales Code.

When The Whale Hunters work with our clients, we always encourage the leadership team and subject matter experts to create and/or improve their LinkedIn profile and activities. Few are coming even close to capturing the value in the network.

That’s where this book comes in. Based on a survey of 3094 sellers, the authors identify  the ways Top Sellers use LinkedIn to generate business.  Finally some real, reliable data about this practice!

This short but idea-packed how-to book shows you what it takes to make LinkedIn a “strategic prospecting tool” for your business. Your company size, industry, location, product or services etc. have little to do with your success. Rather, you can learn to generate business with LinkedIn by following the eight action steps that these authors learned from their valuable research.

This is not hard or complicated. It only requires that you put some steps in place and get a little time regularly on your calendar.

The eBook is free–get yours today and make it available to your team!

Here’s a link to the audio recording.

And my thanks to Dan Waldschmidt for featuring me! I am excited to be a partner with Waldschmidt Partners International as well as heading up The Whale Hunters.

I’ve recently completed writing a one-page strategic plan for The Whale Hunters. The program, designed and written by strategist Laura Posey,takes only about an hour to finish and leaves you with a single page to track your company’s progress for an entire year. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen strategic planning processes that take months and cost thousands of dollars. Believe me, they are not better than this one.

When it’s all on one page, you can look at it every day. Laura recommends having weekly metrics. That way, if you miss your target one week, you have 51 more weeks to hit it. If you only check once a month, you close your windows of opportunity much faster.

Laura and I just presented a webinar about this program, which I invite you to watch. You’ll find it at The Simple Strategic Plan.

Laura Posey is Chief Instigator of Dancing Elephants Achievement Group 
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I had a very happy phone call today–the kind that pleases me more than all others.

One of my clients called to report that on the previous night, the school board of his customer (a 50,000 student school district) had unanimously approved a five-year, $6.3 million contract for educational software that my client’s company sells.

This sale is the third or fourth biggest single sale the company has ever made and by far the biggest sale that the salesperson whom I coach (we’ll call him John)  has ever made. And he will tell you “it was a whale hunt!”

Schools have no money, right? Schools are hard to sell to, right? Schools are bureaucracies, right? Right on all counts; nevertheless, schools do buy all sorts of things, all of the time.

So here’s how  we made this deal happen.

• Planning. John learned everything we could about the district and all the people who would be involved in decision-making–principals, curriculum coordinators, IT people, central office people and others. They were not looking for software and had no immediate plan to buy an educational software package. However, a few individual schools had purchased pieces of it and were showing good results. John decided that we should write a formal business plan–a case for support–and his company commissioned me to write it. We had it beautifully prepared and formatted. That was in April 2012.
• Persistence. John personally delivered the business plan to each of the stakeholders, seeking their support. He began to locate a group of people who were very interested in the plan. They did not take a recommendation to the school board prior to the end of the last school year, preferring to wait until school reconvened in the fall. John continued to meet with people as he could during the summer.
• Patience. Fall came and went, and still no agenda item for the board to consider this software purchase. However, right after the new year, it suddenly came up on the board agenda for a presentation. John coached the school leaders who would be presenting the business plan to the board. And after a lengthy discussion it was approved unanimously.

How much planning do you do? How much persistence and patience can you demonstrate in a tough selling arena? There is definitely an art to knowing when to quit, but there is equally an art to knowing when to persist.  This deal took nine months from the initial presentation of a business plan–closer to twelve months totally. But it is a deal more than 10 x John’s average deal, it’s three times his 2013 quota (already sold in January!), and it’s a flagship deal for his company.

A complex deal is just that. It has lots of people involved, many points of view, and multiple connections. John could not have sold this deal one:one. He involved his team and the customer’s team in building a case for support that all at once became inevitable. And that is whale hunting!

Often you and the whole team are totally focused on the great advantages that you provide with your products and services. You consistently make a rational case for the sale of your products, unaware that 99% of buying decisions are made on irrational, emotional bases, led primarily by fear of making a bad decision.

Unless you develop powerful ways to address the fears, you will continually lose your bids and come in second on your proposals.  And second is the worst place to finish–you stayed in too long and you paid too much but you still lost.

This isn’t a new topic for me. See, for example,  It’s All About Fear and Holly Buchanan’s guest post Wonder Woman and the B2B Sale. Nevertheless, many sellers have trouble coming at the sale from the perspective of what makes the buyers afraid.

You think the buyers are looking for the best solution–the most creative option or the solution that will get them where they want to go faster, better, or cheaper than the others.  But in reality, they will go for a solution that will probably work and seems to be a safe choice.  ”Safe” as in, “I won’t get fired if it doesn’t work” or “I’m not going to be alone on this” or “I’m not putting my career on the line.”

To overcome this problem, you will need a collection of what we call “fear busters,” tangible tools to allay the buyers’ fears of change, work, internal conflict, and most important–making a mistake.

Assume that you scare them and introduce fear-busters throughout the sales process.  Once they are no longer afraid, the buyers can appreciate the added value that your solution represents.

And the 9th way to lose is:  Your team is complacent.

You’ve been so good for so long that your team expects that it will always be business as usual. You’re not scanning the market, not tracking old and new competitors, not learning every day about what’s going on in the lives of your customers.

Many growing companies are actually making a market, not taking a share of an existing market.  The more innovative and unusual your service or product, the more you are focused on a niche, the fewer your competitors, the more likely it is that you will experience a short-term success that you can’t sustain.

If you have been successful in bringing a new product or service (or product/service mix) to market, sooner or later other prospective competitors are going to challenge your dominance.  You will have painfully created a market–first persuading customers that your service is a great idea and then persuading them to buy from you.  When you hit a critical mass of customers, you will undoubtedly attract competitors.

Where will they come from?  Some will be new companies mimicking your business model.  Others will be diversified companies observing an opportunity that they’d missed.  Still others will be companies that have been very good at producing something that’s no longer valued in the market, and they are looking for a new thing that they can be good at.

There are ways to combat this tendency.  Here are a few:

• Conduct a Brand Promise Audit.  [This one-hour recorded how-to webinar is available to registered members of the Pier9 Premium resource site].  Review the marketing messages of your company and those of your competitors.  Revise your promises as required.
• Talk with your customers–those that you sold and those that you lost.  Be certain you understand what it is that people value about you and what it is that turns them away.
• Engage your team in bringing ideas and information forward.  The more individual employees who are engaging in social media platforms and knowledge bases, the more current your knowledge will be about trends that may not have even reached the “trend” stage yet.  Encourage your team to look for potential threats as well as opportunities.

Whenever you hold the position of “the best” for a period of time, you become vulnerable to many kinds of attacks.  You can’t afford for your team to become complacent about your #1 position.

This one is sooooo hard for me to understand. But yes, we have clients who think that promoting the background and talents of their team, or documenting a few of their wins, or identifying key brands in their customer portfolio is inappropriate bragging.

This flaw can raise its ugly head near the very end of the sales process, when the buyers are making their final selection. You may have put a terrific proposal in front of them, quite likely better than the proposal from your closest competitor.  But the competitor included bio details about company leadership and key team members, success stories from several prestigious customers, a few succinct testimonials, and unique experiences or background that set them apart.

You’ve heard me say that you shouldn’t lead with the “all about us” stories.  But before you close the sale, the buyers should know what sets you apart as a delivery team.  Even having these things on your website and LinkedIn profiles is helpful because the buyers are going to check it out again when they make their final call.

A couple of examples.  One client reports on their website that “the founding partners, combine more than eighty years of color separation and printing experience.”  Well, let’s have their names and their particular background experiences–there are three partners and each brings unique talent and background to a project.  Further, this company has produced catalogs for some of the most exciting brands in North America, but they don’t mention it.  True, some customers will not permit you to brag about them.  But others will approve certain kinds of publicity.  If you have great clients and don’t mention them, others will assume that you do not have name brand experience.

We talked with leaders of a company that provides security services for industry, hospitals, airports, etc.  Their website mentions that the founding partners have US military experience, but does not include that at least two of them were in Special Forces units. To me that background would set them apart as an elite security team whose leaders have mastered the highest levels of security practice–not just theory.

The key here is to be specific. Citing some details of your past accomplishments and those of specific team members, calling attention to key customers that you have served well, and including some honest testimonials is not bragging.  Rather, it is helping your prospective new customer to feel safe in hiring you.  There’s no need to spin the details or embellish them, just put them forward.  Don’t force the buyers to put your story together for you–spell it out.

Some companies that are the best in their field are completely focused on sales and delivery plus R&D to develop new products and services. You may have the resources and the market share to sustain that approach, but you may be missing out on market feedback, which over time diminishes the strength of your message to the market. Your new products and services are invented inside, not in concert with your customers.

I have also worked with a number of teams who believe that no one in their field delivers the level of product and service that they do.  However, they have no evidence to support this claim.  When teams like this lose business,  they blame it on “politics” or “incumbents” or “price cutting,” but the truth is they don’t have any idea why they are losing.  They do not interact with their market enough to have a pulse on what’s changing.

Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, wrote a terrific book (published in 1999) called Only the Paranoid Survive.  It’s about the need for relentless pursuit of market information and preparation for unforeseen market disasters.  And Jim Collins and Morten Hansen’s newest book Great By Choice (published October 2011) looks at ten successful companies and their leaders who managed to greatly outpace their competition in chaotic and unpredictable markets.  “Paranoia” was a key ingredient in their success–hard-nosed, direct confrontation of all of the possible ways that things could go wrong.  The bottom line is that things will go wrong; things going wrong is a normal state.

So, do you have a deliberate paranoia mindset?  Do you encourage all of the bad news and weird news to come to your attention promptly?  Do you refuse to blame a messenger?  The more you are outwardly focused, the better you will understand how to be the best and convey to your prospective customers that you are the best company to meet their needs.