Judy Mod

Social Gastronomy, LLC

Judy Mod, Principal of Social Gastronomy, specializes in Social Buyer Target Marketing, Network Selling, Social Networking Strategy and Community Adoption, and Enterprise Social Business Programs. Judy has over 25 years in driving top line revenue through global sales, business development, marketing, strategic consulting and alliances/channels/partnerships roles. Judy is also President of the Social Executive Council, an organization for executive officer (CXO) or senior executives who are social leaders.

Welcome to the Buyer-Centric Movement

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Posted on 2012-02-07

In response to my last two posts, an “Open Letter to Buyers” and an “Open Letter to Buyer-Centric Organizations”, I have tried to articulate the evolution in the conversations I’ve had about why social is disruptive to business as we know it, why a buyer-centric approach is so critical to the long-term viability of your business, and why your team needs to pay attention now.

In its simplicity, buyer-centric means “it’s not about you, it’s about them.” Buyers are tuning out self-serving messaging. They crave context and the ability to compare. But perhaps, it would make more sense if we look at our evolution which has now brought us to buyer-centric.

In our infancy, as a sales-centric organization, we were very reactive to the market. Our initial belief was that the market was craving a strategic forum for social. If a buyer approached us within a specific need that we could fill, we wanted to centralize it for them. We quickly realized...

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Open Letter to Buyer-Centric Organizations

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Posted on 2011-12-15

The last two posts, an “Open Letter to CMOs” and an “Open Letter to Buyers” have triggered a large number of pretty intense conversations about the frustrations that you’re feeling today around the disruptive impact social media is having on your markets. It’s disruptive, not because of the technology, but because of the impact it’s having on your relationships with your buyers, their perceptions of your organization and their desire to want to begin or continue to do business with you. The fear and the uncertainty that you’ve shared with me is not knowing what impact this disruption will ultimately have on your company’s reputation, revenue, market share, the quantity and quality of the relationships with your buyers, if you were to just continue down the same path you’re on today.

At the same time, even at the point...

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Open Letter to Buyers

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Posted on 2011-11-05

We owe you a mea culpa…. We’ve been seller driven, not buyer driven. We’ve focused on selling you what we think you need (what we sell) versus helping you make better decisions. We haven’t helped you make the business case for why this is a significant problem. We’ve automated our marketing systems to better reach you, but never asked if or what you’re interested in. We’ve treated you as a company, not as a group of individuals with different needs, perspectives, and roles. We don’t know what a “day in your life” looks like to give us context as to why you don’t have the time to sit through our “canned” presentation, educate us on your business, and sift through all of our market claims.

I know, you’ve been trying to tell us for a while. You sent out a letter telling all of your vendors that their sales people aren’t allowed onsite anymore. You deleted all of your voice mail messages without listening to them, only giving your mobile# to the folks you want to talk to...

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Real Social Engagement Using the "Language of Pain" -- Inside Scoop with Judy Mod of Social Gastronomy

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Posted on 2011-10-07
CustomerThink Founder Bob Thompson interviews Judy Mod, Principal of Social Gastronomy and President of Social Executive Council.
Key discussion topics:
- the Social Web as a disruptive opportunity that is changing the order of industry leaders
- how micro targeted marketing on social networks can create real engagement before buyers formally contact vendors.
- closing the chasm between the prospect's "language of pain" and seller's jargon
- why traditional marketing and sales reps are not the right people to develop relationships with early prospects on social networks
- justifying Social Business applications with hard and soft ROI, and why it's critical to "start with the customer"
...
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Social Target Marketing for Complex Sales – Evangelism, Advocacy, Justification

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Posted on 2011-09-28

As part of our process, we have built a three-part conceptual framework for social target marketing and the business impact that we believe is critical for managing the complexity of the buying process in today’s market. The first, “Open Letter to CMO’s” focuses on the impact that social is already having on the purchase behaviors in your industry and established the foundation for the criticality of the business case. The second, “Social Target Marketing for Complex Sales” focuses on the right approach for your organization to take and that the timing is more critical than ever.

The third is understanding how to apply that process to internally developing the consensus around the business case for social target marketing. Our recommended approach is to focus on building the business case as part of the evangelism and then allow the internal team to build the business justification based upon the available resources, budgets, market priorities, and timing factors. We...

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Open Letter to CMO's - Social Target Marketing for Complex Sales

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Posted on 2011-09-26

Not sure if you saw the “Open Letter to CMO’s” in the Social Executive Council. The feedback we’ve received is that the post is helping to build your own business case to address the impact that social is having on the purchase behaviors in your industry, in particular those with a very complex buying/selling process.

With that in hand, many of you have now asked me to share our approach, to arm you, as the internal advocate, for the conversations you need to have within your organizations as to why social target marketing is more critical than ever.

At a high level, social target marketing is about how we can build better relationships with likely buyers to create new opportunities for our business that we’re missing out on today.

Like the “blooming onion”, we start by peeling back the layers and breaking down the walls in the market to identify and reach the heart of those complex buyers we don’t know who have come together around a common pain/need...

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Open Letter to CMO’s

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Posted on 2011-09-22

It has been awhile since I wrote my last open letter to the SEC, but my goal with these is to summarize important trends that I see consistently across the executive members within the group in a way that helps highlight major strategic challenges.

In speaking with many of the CMOs, I am seeing that many have started social marketing programs, but many are struggling to integrate these programs into the rest of their marketing efforts and to justify the investments. You’ve shared with me examples of what’s not working and why you are frustrated, but everyone seems to be challenged as to why we are struggling in building traditional justification and accountability models in social marketing. I probably have had conversations with variations on this theme at least 50 times in the last month. It is also interesting to note that the more complex the sale, the harder it is to calculate the business impact. In the last couple of weeks, I think we have come to some startling...

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