117 – Flashmobs, Parades and Ignited Movements: How to Uncork Your Market Leadership with Ken Rutsky

Ken Rutsky is a B2B marketing consultant with over 30 years of industry experience. A renowned specialist in achieving and growing market leadership, he has advised a range of B2B companies, including Cisco, FireEye, Lee Hecht Harrison, and such venture capital funded high-growth startups as Jumio and Skyhigh Networks. He is the author of Launching to Leading: How B2B Market Leaders Create Flashmobs, Marshal Parades, and Ignite Movements.

Top Takeaways: Flashmobs, Parades and Ignited Movements: How to Uncork Your Market Leadership with Ken Rutsky

Phases of Business

Create Flashmobs
- the Early Stage in a business venture with passionate customers who are excited to be part of an emerging opportunity, often your network; former peers in business – this is the foundation of your business and a springboard to the beginnings of success
- Be someone people want to follow
Marshall Parades – If you want to be a leader find a parade and get IN FRONT of it
- What is your customer’s Parade?
- What are our customer’s trends causing excitement, risks or problems?
- Get in your customer’s shoes
- Don’t fight over dead snakes; every problem starts looking like a snake
- Mindset shift from you to your customer get IN FRONT of the parade
- Don’t be a follower or a bystander at the parade –
Ignite Movements
- The stage when the company gets to the point of changing the world
- Be part of the few that makes a difference with your product or service
- Figure out strategically what your buyers are trying to accomplish

Five Steps to Uncorking your Market Leadership

STEP One: Shifting your mindset from what our product does to our customer’s perspective – teach them something before you start to sell them something; The reason you are in business is to help and serve customers
Step Two: Understand where you are and what you’re trying to accomplish in your business – adjust your tactics and expectations to the phases of business growth become the go-to person in your Sphere of Influence
Step Three: Tell Your Viewpoint Story – Modeled after the “Heroes Journey” -position your product or service as to how it can help transform their world – Make your customer a HERO
- Motivate Change – take them to a better place – explain the value of change to them
- Shine a light on the customer’s challenges by doing things they way they are doing them now – Status Quo is always the biggest energy in creating change
Step Four: Value – we ask our customers to trade both time and money for our product or service so be crystal clear on what your bring and why you can do it better than the competition or the status quo
- Always remember Value is in the Eye of the Consumer
Step Five: Become Showers not Tellers – Look at how much value you bring and increase it by 10X
- Build the “know, like and trust” factor by “showing”
- Move from Diagnostic Selling to Authority-driven Selling