www.InWomenWeTrust.com

We relaunched IN WOMEN WE TRUST this week, it’s part speaker’s bureau and part educational resource for women’s organizations and business trying to understand how sustainability works in retail.

In Women We Trust/Inspiring Circles of Influence will be talking to women and business providing context on this changing market to both buyers and sellers. If your sales staff needs to be brought up to speed quickly, give us a call 714-926-1223 and we’ll set up a workshop with one of our professionals.

It’s been a big project that has been in the works for over five years. Why now? What’s changed? Teeth. They come in the form of Good Guide that can peer pressure business into place and therefore IWWT is a supporter of Good Guide.

GoodGuide has taken the lead in benchmarking rating sites by amassing 120,000 products and ranking them according to their publicly available information. It’s not perfect, but NO ONE would be perfect at this stage.

Because Good Guide is a private company, it can ask all the eco and socially responsible questions it wants, and publish all the information it can. It is not beholding to the companies who make the products who would edit out the bad stuff. It’s as transparent as you can be in this day of transformational change.

Coming along to add to the transparency is Earthster.org which is an open-source software for Life Cycle Assessment reporting. At some point, Good Guide will begin pulling infomation directly from LCA reports either from Earthster or other LCA sources.

Good Guide  is a tech company first with a heart and soul for the planet second. Because of that it’s providing all the fun tools that can make this fly across social media starting with a transparency tool bar and an app for your mobile phone. Shoppers will have no excuse for locating the greenest of the green products.

If you have a consumer level product, go to Good Guide and see if it’s been rated yet, and check out the competition at the same time. And contact us for a workshop on how to be responsive in this new sales world where the shoppers can bite back using their new teeth.

To create a can of Coke, at one time the company used 70 liters of water for every one liter of Coke. It’s down from that 70 liter high, but still far more than Soda Stream which uses one liter of water for one liter of soda with no can to recycle or plastic bottle leaching BPA into your child — all at 1/4 the cost.

If you were a Mother pinching pennies with little time for waste or recycling, which would you pick? Maybe that’s why Soda Stream’s stock is on the rise…

Under full disclosure, I bought a Soda Stream for the above reasons and haven’t looked back, not because I’m a Mom, but because I wanted less waste, recycling and sugar in my body.  It’s one of those products that you wonder how you managed without one before.

If you have to choose between working at a company with good PR or one with a solid, green product, follow the product.

Wouldn’t you like to have a business with the level of sales that this group represents?  They are working to insure that the dream can still happen for start ups and legacy companies. They are the white hats to the black hats of business, working in tandem to solve their own legacy issues while creating a sustainable business model.

Their business plan-of-action leads off with this dire alarm:

“…the energy challenge is much worse than most people realize. The problem is already imposing a heavy burden on our nation—a burden that will become even more costly. The economic, national security, environmental and climate costs of our current energy system will condemn our children to a seriously constrained future unless America makes significant changes to current policies and trends.”

Download the business plan here:  American Energy Innovation

What is becoming abundantly clear is that the only role Congress will be playing in this economic transition, will be of blessing the solution that business comes up with. With this group leading instead of BP and their cronies, I have hope for a greener future with sustainable practices.

They represent a cross section of industries that deeply affect the business to business economy at large. Download the plan now, and learn what you need to do to join them at their table.

Is that because Google’s been in the info-biz and Apple is in the product biz? We expect and have given over our info to Google because we know that it is the trade off if we want information on the other side. Apple, however sold us an info distribution product. They have no right to collect information to use only to their advantage. They can and are, but that doesn’t make it right.

It made me think about how this applies to our open source world; when is data-gathering ok and when will it bite you in the market share?

With Search a good sales rep can learn everything about a prospect before meeting with them. You could probably even put together an entire proposal before you sit down, but is that smart?  Doing so is an invasion of their intellectual privacy.  No one likes to know that you know more about them than they know themselves.

Lesson learned: let your prospect put the polish on the proposal. Don’t be an Apple.

Creating a list of what you’ve accomplished in a year becomes a talking point when meeting with new customers. Show them how you’re walking an ever-more-sustainable path.

(this just in)  Microsoft is going with 100% PCR (post-consumer recycled paper) via Grey’s Harbor Paper. That’s bragging rights for both companies and a benchmark for competitors to follow.

from Triple Pundit — Microsoft announced yesterday that it will purchase only 100% post-consumer recycled (PCR) paper for its offices in the greater Seattle metropolitan area, including its vast Redmond headquarters. The company’s previous printing stock was 30%. Microsoft’s vendor of choice? Greys Harbor Paper, a company that operates out of nearby Hoquiam and has made printing, food industrial, and packaging paper for almost 20 years. Greys Harbor has won much recognition for its low-impact approach,environmentally-friendly operations, and for using renewable energy to fuel much of its factory capacity.

Neuromarketing ran a post a while back on how something as simple as a smile can increase sales. Which gender smiles more, males or females?  You don’t need to do any reaserach other than a lifetime of experience to know that answer.

Today they posted on How to Soften Up Your Prospects. The general wisdom is that if you place customers in a hard chair, they’ll negotiate less and you’ll get a better and higher level sale.

Research has found the opposite to be true. The more compfortatble the client, the more likely the sale will go in your direction. The coorelation goes as far to say that if the tactile cues before a sale are soft vs. edgy… the sale will go more smoothly in your direction. Which gender has softer items on and around them — males or females? Which gender tends to be more welcoming and warm?

The article takeaways:

• Seat them in a soft chair.
• If you hand them anything, avoid hard objects.
• ….described in Heat Up Sales – With Coffee! (not coincidentally, based on research by John Bargh), offer them a warm beverage.

The takeaway for Sales Directors — embrace soft skills, social settings and your feminine side.

DUHHHHH. When did consumers want to buy brands that aren’t good for them or others? How many moms do you know that want to buy toxic formulated products that will damage their pets and their crawling babies?

Now that the tide is tipping towards real, boardroom-born sustainability vs. the eco-lite  that comes our of a marketing department, companies need to tune up their sales voices as well.

The above quote came out of the recent MIT Sloan Winter Research Report is just plain insulting on so many levels:

1. (again) Duhhh, tell us something we don’t know.
2. If you knew this, then what took you so long?
3. If the consumers want this and sparked the idea, then HAIL THE CONSUMER or GROUP that helped push you to a higher benchmark.

If you give credit where credit is due, that group is going to feel really good about their efforts and push your product around and continue to support your company. They felt heard and respected. At that point you’ve created a partnership that you can build on.

Typically what happens, however, is that a mom’s or advocacy group works for decades to get the “problem” recognized and acted upon. At the point where the company can’t take the public pressure, they change their ways. BUT THEN, rather than thanking those who were part of the bigger picture, they ignor them and claim that it was “the company” who came up with the idea, not those who are are trying to sell to. That’s just so pre-Internet thinking.

Think about how well that goes over in your internal business operations. Someone comes up with an idea and offers it around and after ignoring the contributor, the boss picks up the idea, claims it as his own and takes all the credit for thinking of it. How supportive would you feel for the boss after that? How many more ideas will you contribute?

In this new market where the buyer/seller equation is very public, it’s time to own up and respect the consumer. They are doing their part to help move sustainable thinking along and deserve to be recognized for their half of the work.

Check the picture below up close by linking here and then read the book - The Gort Cloud. I’ll meet you on the other side of the “oh-I-get-it-now” moment. It’s time to turn green into the new work “force.”

They also report that some consumer are taking it into their own hands and boycotting BP then WRITING ABOUT IT. Talk about an uphill battle for your sales teams; how do you overcome peer to peer comments and search?  This is where an ounce of prevention is worth a decade of bad press being read again, and again, and again…

Do you still think that creating and selling a sustainable product line costs too much?