I am very excited to announce that Walker Sands started “One Step Forward”, our official philanthropy initiative. The goal of this program is to help the people and causes that matter to us. Caring about the community is important to so many of us, so having an opportunity where we can all give back together was something we wanted to begin.

Our first official event was yesterday. We helped the Little Giraffe Foundation put together spring gift bags for NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Units) for six hospitals in Chicago. The bags consisted of toys, children’s books, and a card for the families of babies in the NICU.

  Some of the Walker Sands team stuffs gift bags
  for Little Giraffe Foundation.

Another event with LGF that I wanted to share is the annual Memorial Day Cubs Rooftop event. We will be heading to Beyond the Ivy on Memorial Day to take in a Cubs game with all proceeds going to the foundation. Tickets are $125 with all proceeds going to the foundation. We will have more details regarding that event coming soon, should you be interested in joining us. Last year was a blast, so we are looking forward to another successful event!

Other events we are hoping to get involved with this summer include a happy hour for a non-profit of choice, helping out at a local shelter, and working with Habitat for Humanity to help build a house for a family in need.

Have an idea for an event or a non-profit you’d like Walker Sands to get involved with? Send an email to onestepforward@walkersands.com and we will start planning!

Inevitably, when our PR firm starts working with a new client, our initial PR brainstorming sessions yield dozens of story ideas that can be pitched to the media.

Some are great. Some are good. Some, upon further consideration, are just average or outright stink.

It’s brainstorming after all, right? You come up with a long list of story concepts and then you narrow it down to the best ones. Those winners are the ones that ultimately go into the PR workplan.

What’s the process for determining whether a given PR pitch is good or bad? How do you structure the brainstorming session such that you get mostly good PR story ideas? What constitutes a good PR pitch?

These are complex questions, but over the years I’ve honed the answer down to a simple three-circle Venn diagram that looks like this:

PR pitch ideas that have good potential can be found at the intersection of the three circles. Let’s take a look at each question and discuss why these are the most important questions to ask.

Question #1: Is it interesting?

For us, the top goal of a PR campaign is to get media placements in droves, such that we drive positive business results for our clients.

In short, our success is defined by whether our clients are featured prominently in print publications, radio stories, television segments, and online venues.

In working toward this objective, we are in the employ of the editors, producers and journalists who ultimately decide what will be delivered to their audience. Clients, I know you think we work for you, but, in the final analysis, we really work for editors, producers and journalists because if we can’t do right by them, we can’t do right by you.

If we reach out to a journalist with a story idea that is not interesting to their readers, do you think they will give us the time of day?

The answer of course is “Hell, no.” So, if a story idea isn’t interesting, then pitching it is a waste of everybody’s time. To cull the dull, we ask probing questions, such as:

• Why on earth would the readers of BusinessWeek ever be interested in that?
• Have you ever seen a story along those lines appear in The Wall Street Journal? If not, why do you think they suddenly would be interested in something that mundane?
• Have you seen that story covered before? What makes you think the media is still interested in it?

Question #2: Are we relevant to it?

Assuming we’ve got a story idea that passes muster with our Question #1, the next question to ask is whether our client is relevant to the story.

Yes, people are going to love to read about this topic, Mr. and Ms. Client, but how can we convince the journalist that they should mention you in the story instead of some other credible source?

For this one, the vetting questions run along these lines:

• Do you have any data that would help the journalist?
• Are you guys the leaders in this trend?
• What do you know about this topic that most people don’t realize or know?
• Do you have a case study we could offer up on this topic?

Question #3: Does it serve our interests?

The final leg on our three-legged chair has to do with why our client hired us in the first place.

We’re not just trying to get news mentions for the sake of news mentions, are we? Instead, the organization has some strategic goals that it is trying to accomplish. Documented in the business plan, these goals inform the marketing plan, and the top-level marketing goals in turn drive the PR plan.

At the start of the engagement, as we envision the PR placements we are going to get, we have to run all of them through the “So what?” lens.

Sure, there’s some value in just raising general awareness, but good PR strives for so much more than that, don’t you agree?

At the end of the day, we want clients to be saying “We are successful in large part because we hired Walker Sands as our PR firm,” and we only get that result when we ensure that our story pitch ideas have strategic value to our clients.

Using the Three Questions to Drive Better PR Results

As simple as they may seem, these three questions can improve your PR results if you use them wisely.

If you’re already in the middle of executing a PR plan, run your existing story pitches through this filter and give yourself a grade. Alternatively, if you’re just starting down the path of putting together a PR program, before you get started on story idea brainstorming, educate the stakeholders on this simple paradigm and why it matters.

Using these questions can make the PR planning process orders of magnitude more efficient, and, more importantly, can be the difference between executing a PR plan that fails versus executing a PR plan that makes you a hero because you were instrumental in paving the path to your organization’s success.

Sure, some of you are saying: isn’t this all pretty obvious? You would think so. It’s common sense, yes, but I often find that a quick refresh on common sense goes a long way towards getting good business results.

Do your customers and prospects prefer your offerings to that of the competition?

Needless to say, if you can prove that they do, it can be a boon to your marketing efforts.

The most famous “proof” of competitive superiority is the Pepsi Challenge, which Pepsi launched in 1975 to prove that they were better than Coca-Cola. Consumers at shopping malls across America tasted Pepsi and Coca-Cola in unmarked cups. After indicating their preference, they learned whether they had selected Coca-Cola or Pepsi. According to Pepsi, which ran the tests, consumers consistently preferred Pepsi to Coca-Cola.

There are some who have suggested that it wasn’t a fair test, but the Pepsi Challenge still has some interesting lessons for us marketers. Running a test or collecting statistics that credibly lead our sales prospects to believe that we are better than our competitors is an exercise that can pay big dividends.

Here’s another example. The Stradivarius violin, which is sacred in musical circles, recently had its comeuppance in a blind test against competitors. Stradivari are so acclaimed for their sound that they now sell for millions of dollars apiece. Yet, in a recent double-blind study conducted by a French acoustics physicist Claudia Fritz, professional violinists were not able to discern an old Stradivarius from a new violin made in 1980. Moreover, most of the violinists preferred the new violin to the Stradivarius. Of course, this test also had some doubters but the results have been heard far and wide regardless.

What an amazing marketing coup for the maker of that new violin: “Rigorous tests have proven that our violin sounds better than a Stradivarius!”

It would be so nice if our Chicago PR firm could run double-blind tests that could prove we get better PR results than the big firms that charge three times as much and deliver a fraction of the results we deliver.

The same goes for our marketing strategy consultants and our digital services team. Put us in the ring with any competitor, and we will knock them out cold. Give them the same marketing challenge as us and see who does better. I have no doubt that we will outperform them — every single time.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of us cannot do our own equivalent of the Pepsi Challenge.

Instead, you and I must rely on more traditional marketing methods to spread the word regarding the value we offer.

You must promote your strengths and count on those customers who take a leap of faith to try you out, rather than going with the incumbent.

Over time, you will find customers who have worked with both you and your competitors who are willing to speak up and say that you are the better firm. There will be a tipping point when — finally — the world recognizes you as one of the best.

It takes time and effort to get there, but have faith.

Remember, the cream always rises to the top…and sludge always sinks to the bottom.

We all know that being a commodity is the kiss of death in business.

The second you start to sense that sales prospects are viewing you as a commodity, you’re on the cusp of business failure, unless you immediately embark on the proactive actions that I’m going to prescribe to you below.

The Problem

Before we get to the cure, let’s understand the malady a little better. Commodities are purchased on price and price alone. In commodity markets, much to the dismay of sellers, lowest price always wins. Profit margins erode quickly as competitors race to the bottom.

Buyers love to make you think you are a commodity. If a buyer can get you thinking that you are a commodity, then they’ve got you into a mode that they adore — a mode where you are going to drop price to get their business.

Even if they know you are not a commodity, they may hand you over to Procurement, which is essentially a death sentence for sales people. It’s a cruel mind game played by some buyers: “I know you are not a commodity, but I’m going to treat you like one so that you behave like one. I was going to buy from you anyway, but this way you’ll give me a much better price.”

On a quick tangential but related note, I have a friend who owns a business and he has a VP of Procurement named Steve. On a daily basis, however, they call Steve the “VP of Nobody Makes Money But Us” because that’s essentially what Procurement does. Given a spec, they try to buy for the lowest possible price. They could care less if you make any money, with the exception being that they might throw you a small, barely edible, profit margin bone if they need you to stay in business long enough to fulfill the next order.

In this tough economy, mind you, Procurement departments are busier than ever. Sales are down for many companies and there’s pressure on profits on all fronts, so buyers — your customers — are doing something that is completely logical on its face: in order to improve their margins, they are shuffling purchases over to Procurement and telling them to get it for a lower price.

Whereas you used to be able to wine and dine the head of a business division to get business, you now find yourself talking to some low-level flunkie in Procurement. Even worse, you’re not talking to Procurement, you are interfacing with them. Maybe you’re asked to sign up for their new reverse-auction bidding system and submit your prices, or maybe you’re asked to send in an RFP, without ever being given the chance to meet with any human beings.

This is the predicament. If you are not in it now, it may just be a matter of time. So what should you do to avoid the RFP and reverse-auction death traps?

The Solution

There are three things you can do to avoid playing the reverse-auction game:

#1 Define your differentiation and its value to your customers.

What is that you have that the guy who might underbid you doesn’t have? List out all your points of differentiation and assess their value to your customers (ideally based on customer and prospect input). In order for you to avoid being viewed as a commodity, your incremental value, relative to the competition, has to exceed the money your customer would save if they went with a low bidder. In other words, you can’t just say your offering is not a commodity. You have to prove that the non-price attributes of your product are worth paying a premium for. As simple as it sounds, many companies struggle with this exercise. Get help if you need it.

#2 Inoculate yourself against the procurement curse.

If you are lucky enough not to yet be viewed as a commodity, you need to invest in protecting that edge. If you believe you are not a commodity based on your differentiation, then it’s really a marketing exercise to convey that to prospects. If you know it, it doesn’t matter. The world has to know it. Whatever it is that makes you not a commodity has to be driven home in the minds of the prospect as something that they cannot live without. The usual marketing tools apply: case studies, testimonials, sell sheets, PR placements and product reviews in the media, and relationship selling with face-to-face discussions. The messaging has to make the case that there is more to your offering than price. Moreover, get the message out that if a prospect just purchases based on price alone, they will likely suffer some significant pain of some kind.

#3 Call their bluff.

If it’s late in the game and you’ve been complacent, you may already be viewed as a commodity by buyers. In this case, you need to try to convince Procurement that, with respect to buying your product, they need to be more thoughtful than they are being. In a subtle way, you need to make them realize that they will fail if they proceed with their current plan of buying based only on price. They will get fired, the business will fail or have a crisis of some kind, or profits will be down, for example. Raise enough credible pain scenarios to make them double-think the reverse auction approach to buying.

To have this discussion, you can go to Procurement directly to try to get an audience or you can work with the business line contacts to get them to influence Procurement. There are pros and cons to either approach. The best case is to have Procurement and your line-of-business contacts all in the same room. If there’s an RFP or bid process, you don’t want to just respond to the bid; you’d want to contact Procurement and the ultimate consumers of the process, and say “We’d like to schedule a meeting to ask a few questions about the bid process and the requirements.” If you can get that meeting, that’s your chance to make as strong a case as you can that they’ve written the specs wrong — i.e. they’ve forgotten the features you have that competitors don’t — and making it painfully clear to them that if they just go with the lowest bid, there will be hell to pay in the future.

Key Lessons

There’s a reason our Chicago marketing consultants spend a lot of time helping clients to define their value proposition and their competitive differentiation. In markets that are nowhere near being commoditized, it provides an edge over the competition. But in markets that have the potential to be commoditized (and you may be closer than you think to that unenviable fate), defining differentiation that is highly valuable to customers is not just essential to win business — it’s critical to ensure long-term survival.

In the last two years Walker Sands has more than doubled, causing us to completely rethink employee professional development.

Account Executive Julie Walsh launched the program in October with a personality assessment. Since then the company has met every month to tackle a new challenge. So far our sessions have covered:

- Understanding One Another: MBTI – Communication is critical, so we started with a Myers Briggs assessment to determine the different personality types at the agency. Today the matrix of everyone’s communication style hangs on many people’s bulletin boards. Take the test yourself at http://bit.ly/RYWA9.

- Setting S.M.A.R.T. Goals – Important for both our clients and our personal lives, Julie took us through a session to define Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely goals.

- The Attributes & Enemies of Good Writing – Ken Gaebler, CEO, led an interactive session that covered a number of key writing strategies as well as basic topics like the pyramid approach.

During meetings, participants also discuss the Walker Sands’ Challenge. This program challenges Walker Sands’ employees to come up with a solution to a problem they see within our firm. It could be as simple as a new conference room decoration or as complex as restructuring our SEO services.

So far, response has been phenomenal, with great idea sharing occurring during each session. Upcoming sessions include Managing High Touch Clients, How to Present like Steve Jobs, and The New Business Process. If you are interested in learning more, Julie is sporadically blogging about the topics on this blog so come back to check out her posts.

Got another idea for sessions that a firm like ours should cover? Leave them in the comments.