Tag: customer experience

Empty house

Fabrizio1 Comment

When you are on the market to buy a house, and you start going around to see some of them, you will probably feel better about those who have furniture in it. Even when you actually plan to get rid of everything and bring your own furniture in.

An empty house is often difficult to imagine with actual life in it. It takes people a huge extra effort to visualise closets, carpets, curtains, chairs, tables, lamps, and so on.

A lot of B2B marketing nowadays feels like an empty house. Huge potential, but what am I going to put in this room? Will a bed fit in here? Will there be enough space for kids to play around, if we bring a sofa and a side table in?

Start with being specific, and it will be easier for customers to apply what they are seeing to their own unique cases. It is a shorter route.

* I owe the empty house metaphor to a customer I was chatting with a few days back. It is unbelievable what insights customers can provide.

Specific

Fabrizio1 Comment

Would you rather buy services from:

  1. A company that promises to improve your workforce efficiency;
  2. A company that promises to reduce the lead time of your projects by 10%;
  3. A company that promises to digitalize your paperwork and automate some of the most tedious of your processes, therefore reducing lead time of your projects by 10%;
  4. A company that promises to give your project managers the tools to digitalize the documents coming from customers and partners, to ensure they move through project lifecycle with digital assignments and approvals, and produce an exact report of what was done, when, by whom useful both for the customers and for your internal finance department. All of this, estimated to reduce lead time of your projects by 10%.

It is a matter of specificity, of course.

There is no difference between product 1, 2, 3, and 4. What changes is the level to which the company providing the service demonstrates to know what you are dealing with day after day.

Moving from option 1 to option 4 requires more data, more research, more effort. And to motivate the investment, just survey some of the websites of your competitors and alternatives: how many belong in every category? A fairly common situation is: 80% use option 1; 15% use option 2; 4% use option 3; 1% use option 4.

So, does being specific pay?

Elsewhere

FabrizioLeave a comment

Things that will make people stop listening and move their attention elsewhere.

Raising your voice.

Interrupting.

Antagonizing.

Being self-important.

Imposing your own topic.

Using more than three items in a list.

Not making pauses.

Technical jargon.

Not letting the other speak.

Getting distracted.

No form of personalization.

It does not matter if your idea is the best in the world, if you do any of the above you stand no chance to make an impact. Thinking about how many organisations out there have at least five of these dealbreakers in their communication on a regular basis.

Mess

FabrizioLeave a comment

What HBO is doing with their streaming offering is the perfect example of how bad marketing can ruin a great product.

Having three brands (HBO Max, HBO Go and HBO Now) to essentially serve the same audience has created a lot of distraction and confusion, and it has not helped one bit in delivering the image of quality HBO is recognized for worldwide.

They will fix it sooner or later, and they will most likely get past it, because they are HBO. Your organisation, though, is not. Take marketing seriously.

Patches

FabrizioLeave a comment

Many organisations mistake customer centricity for customer support or customer success.

Yet, having the customer at the core of what you do is not about being there when they need help and collecting high scores on a satisfaction survey. It is actually more about aiming at getting rid of those things, because when the customer is embedded in the business, you know already if they need help and when, whether they are happy or not, what they want to see in the product next and how their businesses are developing.

You actually know, in many cases, before they do.

So, instead of putting patches on the relationship with those who determine your (organisation’s) success, start investing time and resources in crafting the relationship. Listen. The rest will follow.