ff – Bredemarket

Rejection, Distance, and Focus

Sales involves people who say no…usually many more than the people who say yes.

To keep moving forward in business (and elsewhere) and to survive the rejections, you have to distance yourself from the naysayers and focus on those who say yes.

In the distance.

An Abundance of Data is the New Oxygen…Maybe

I previously wrote about how clean data is the new oxygen (stealing a phrase from someone else), but sometimes more data is better. Sometimes.

Let me use the fingerprint example. If you have a single fingerprint from one person, you have data that you can use to match against a person’s tenprint record.

But if you have two fingerprints, then you have twice as much data for the match. And Mister Math tells us that ten fingerprints yields much more data.

Now there are cases where you don’t have all ten search prints. Perhaps you’re taking latent prints from a crime scene and the suspect didn’t carefully leave all ten prints. Or you’re using contactless fingerprint capture and for some reason didn’t get the full tenprint record. But if you can get all ten fingerprints for search, then your match accuracy increases.

But is an abundance of data better?

Only if it’s clean.

If finger numbers are misclassified, or if fingerprints from multiple people are mixed in the same individual record, or if the minutiae are not marked correctly, then the dirty data messes up your process.

Which is why the quality of data in a fingerprint database is important.

And if you need to talk about your fingerprint product’s quality assurance measures, Bredemarket can help. Book a free meeting with me to discuss your needs.

Funeral For A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding

An outstanding song.

View this post on Instagram

Hold Your Feathers

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States, and my former friends will ignore the Bredemarket blog as usual.

But so will my real friends. Food and football are much more compelling.

So the Bredemarket blog will take advantage of this tomorrow.

Hold your feathers.

Some Deals Will Never Close

After years of silence

and indifference

I gave up

and stopped chasing

Google Gemini.

On Evaporating Prospects

(Imagen 4)

Have you friends frequently and warmly connected with you…until they didn’t? Becoming former friends, ignoring and abandoning you, becoming silent and indifferent?

Sales prospecting can be similar. Someone eagerly wants your product or service immediately. But they delay in getting back to you, plead that other critically important issues have arisen, then go silent entirely, their former desire evaporated.

I’m sure some hard-boiled salespeople believe EVERY prospect can convert, but it ain’t so. And my earlier advice applies to business prospects as well as to personal relationships:

“If my former friends’ focus is elsewhere, my focus won’t impede on theirs.”

The Former Friend Who Fundamentally Focused Bredemarket’s Instagram Account

Have you ever had a friendship end and felt a shift in your online life? A former friend’s actions completely focused the direction of the Bredemarket Instagram account. This experience reshaped the content I shared, and refocused the audience who received it.

Nap Time.

Those who were reading the Bredemarket Instagram account over a month ago may have caught my disappointment at something I discovered among my followers.

Or more accurately, someONE whom I DIDN’T discover among my followers.

“Someone I respect unsubscribed from the Bredemarket Instagram page. Not sure why or how I turned them away.”

So I “took a nap,” pausing most Bredemarket Instagram activities for a week.

But over time I remembered what Alfred, Lord Tennyson never said: ‘Tis better to have subscribed and unsubscribed than never to have subscribed at all. (I’ll get to the latter group later.)

Reshaping the content

Admittedly some aspects of my Instagram account could alienate some people. As I took my Instagram “nap,” I pondered whether to put the wildebeests out to pasture, and whether to consign the 1980s music to a garbage can filled with cassettes and 8-tracks. After all, the so-called “experts” say that TRENDING AUDIO increases engagement.

Maybe for the “experts”…but not necessarily for Bredemarket.

After all, any perceptive person who is interested in me and my 30 years of identity/biometric experience will realize that I would enjoy songs that are 30 years old…or older.

So I doubled down.

OK, maybe I announced my “waking up” with a Flo Rida / David Guetta song.

But pretty soon I was back to Thomas Dolby, the theme of the Law & Order TV show, and Tina Turner.

The National Bureau of Standards would approve.

Refocusing the audience

After I reshaped my content, I took a long hard look at who was and wasn’t reading it.

And discovered that I was subscribed to hundreds of people on Instagram who, unlike my former friend, NEVER subscribed to me in the first place. And thus never saw a word I wrote. Or the accompanying audio: David Guetta, Thomas Dolby, or “Royalty Free Music Background.”

Did you notice my use of the word “was”?

Like my former friend, I did a lot of unsubscribing myself, reducing the list of people I read by hundreds.

Because, at least on Instagram, I focused my energy.

Focus Your Energy.

Easing the Pain of Case Study Creation and Approval

Case studies are powerful marketing collateral for companies.

Why?

Because if you select your subjects carefully, your prospects will say, “That subject is just like me. And the company’s solution solved the subject’s problem. Perhaps the solution will solve my problem also.”

Ideally a company would want to publish dozens of case studies, so their prospects could find one case study—or perhaps two or three—that describe the exact same problem the prospect is encountering.

It’s hard to create case studies

But case studies are by definition more difficult for a company to create.

For other types of content, the approval process resides completely within the company itself.
But case studies by definition require approval by two companies…even if the end customers in the case studies remain anonymous.

Perhaps that’s why there are so few published, recent case studies.

On Tuesday I had the occasion to visit four technology websites.

One had 5 case studies, all written in 2024.
One had 4 case studies, all written in 2023 and all anonymous.
One had 8 case studies, all written in 2021.
One had no case studies at all, even though the company had clients who could be referenced.

And the approvals don’t just involve the end customer.

A former friend interviewed many customers but was only able to complete one case study; the approvals from company legal, other company executives, and the end customers were overwhelming, delaying the other case studies.

So how do you expedite case study creation and approval?

Three tips for creating case studies

Here are three tips to expedite the creation of case studies.

Creation tip 1: Get the facts first

If the sales rep, program manager, or the subject itself can provide the basic facts beforehand, then the interview can simply consist of confirming facts and filling gaps.

Creation tip 2: Outline the case study and tell your story

Whether you use the STAR method (situation, task, action, result) or some other method (I prefer the simpler problem, solution, result), take the facts you gathered above. Then fit them into the outline and into the story you want to tell. Then see what pieces of the story are missing.

Creation tip 3: Obtain a meeting transcript

Since the subject has already consented to the case study, they should consent to the meeting being recorded.

The most efficient way to do this is with one of the popular AI note takers, which lets the case study writer review the actual words from the interview without going back and forth through a video recording.

And AI note takers are more efficient than the way I used to transcribe case study interviews.

Three tips for approving case studies

Here are three tips to expedite the approval of case studies.

Approval tip 1: Read the contract

The language of the contract with the subject may have clauses regarding publicity.

If the subject wrote the contract, then it may prohibit any promotional publicity whatsoever, or it may dictate that any publicity must be approved by a high-level governing board in a foreign country.

If the provisions are onerous or impossible, don’t use that subject and find another.

Approval tip 2: Get pre-approvals, or at least grease the wheels

Let your approvers know what’s coming, and when you think it will come.

Once I submitted a case study for pre-approval even before the results were available. This subject had a lengthy approval process, so I wanted the approvers to see the first part of the case study as soon as possible.

Approval tip 3: Use every ethical method to get those approvals

While the case study may be critically important to you, it may be merely important (or even inconsequential) to the lawyer with 50 other tasks.

From the lawyer’s perspective, it may be better if the company does NOT publish the case study. Fewer potential lawsuits that way.

Do everything you can to expedite the approval. If the CEO is demanding a published case study in three days, say so.

If not…well, that’s why you’re a salesperson. Oh, you’re NOT a salesperson? You are now.

One final tip

You don’t have to go it alone. If your staff is stretched, or if your staff has never written a case study before, Bredemarket can help. Visit my content for tech marketers page.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers