Tag: sales

A whole lot more

FabrizioLeave a comment

I can find all the praises for your product or service easily.

I can talk to one of your reps in minutes.

If I prefer so, your chatbot will guide me to the content most relevant to my situation.

I can painlessly answer a survey to help you improve your website, and with one single click give you consent to using (and share) information about my interests.

Your marketing will seek me out to offer more, for free, as long as I stay engaged.

That rep is still trying to schedule a follow-up call to offer a discount if I sign now.

And then, once I am finally your customer, if I need some information, I have to dig them out of an overly complicated help center page, or pray for a telephone number to appear below one of the folds of your website and wait in queue.

And if I decide that, for any reason, I do not need your service anymore, you frustrate the hell out of me with rules, counteroffers, bundles, and eventually a cold goodbye.

There’s no balance in the way companies allocate budget throughout the customer journey. Or perhaps it’s just they think the journey ends when the customer has paid.

There’s a whole lot more to it.

Do, measure and adjust

FabrizioLeave a comment

There are many different ways to address any case. Unfortunately, you probably have resources (attention, money, energy, motivation) to try one or two of them at the same time.

The point is then to avoid lengthy discussions about which way is the better (not to mention pointless scenario-building that change the rules of the case), and put some effort instead in identifying what successfully addressing the case looks like.

And then just do, measure and adjust.

If it’s numbers you want …

Fabrizio1 Comment

When marketing is in total and complete service of sales, it is very easy to fall into traps.

You get what you reward, after all. And if it is numbers you are after, you will find somebody who can sell them to you, or somebody who can induce you to believe in a new made up trend, or again somebody going rogue who will ask you for a ransom to get back what is yours in the first place.

I have written about this before, but the intensity of this collective allucination is baffling. Marketing is about experience and relationships, and the only way you can build a great relationship is by continuosly looking at quantitative and qualitative data combined.

When is the last time you have talked to one of your customers?
When did you spend half a day skimming through reviews?
When have you done something that does not scale, just to impress one single member of your audience?
When did you use Voice of Customer to make an important decision about your next campaign?

We all get to measure [success] differently. You know how many people in here are all about math, conversion, and quantity? You know what that’s called? That’s called salespeople. Marketing and branding doesn’t get measured by the hour. For me, how I measure it is “how do I feel about where I am positioned?”, “how well is my company doing?”, “how well is my speaking requests coming in?”, “how many people are watching my stuff?”. But I don’t measure it on a tactical day-to-day, it’s an overall feeling of a vibe, intuition, and some baseline metrics. Many people are into landing page optimisation, and by the way that shit works, but that’s sales. People did not come here to see me speak because I cookie them, and target them with my message. It’s because I give them value, and they hope to get even more value from seeing me speaking live. This is branding.

Gary Vaynerchuk, see also this article

One message

FabrizioLeave a comment

Kantar Millward Brown has found that the more you try to say, the less likely your message is going to get across and stick.

A great reminder for all the times we are tempted to tell of all the great things our product does, of all the features our service has, of all the magic we can deliver.

When the temptation kicks in, just think how effective such a message would be if you were the customer. Would you understand it, appreciate it, remember it? Would it make you buy?

Keep it simple.

Value is how, what and why

Fabrizio3 Comments

There are three dimensions to value.

The first one is about the product, the “how” dimension. At this level, you are talking about how your product can help, how different features can be used, the technical specs and everything that does depend 100% on your team. There’s a whole lot of companies that stop here: “our product is amazing, buy it!”; “we have the fastest solution for X, subscribe!”; “our patented Y is disrupting IT, take a free tour!”. And so on.

The second one is about the customer, the “what” dimension. Here, you are talking about what your product delivers that is valuable for the customer. In general, and I am paraphrasing the approach of Inflexion Point here, there are five kind of value a company recognizes: more revenue, less costs, saving time, avoiding risk, and meeting targets (e.g. brand awareness, reputation, customer satisfaction, etc.). A bunch of companies end up here, and so you have “our product is the easiest way to get your back-office processes under control” (time saving); “we are the leader in delivering outstanding customer experiences” (meeting targets); “if you want to forget about fines, you have to try our newest solution for compliance” (avoiding risk).

The third one is about the world, the “why” dimension. Not the world as a whole, the world that delimits the prospect, some would call it “market” (I believe it is a bit reductive). Of course, every company is happy with more revenue, less costs, saved time, avoided risks, and met targets. And yet this is about understanding why these things are important to the customer you are targeting, and which one is more important than the others. Perhaps your target customer has just experienced an increase in direct competition from new entrants: “Our product is an easy to use tool that gets you up to speed, allowing you to compete on a level field with X and Y”. Perhaps they have been subjected to increasing regulatory scrutiny: “We have worked with companies like yours, and they have struggled to keep up with ever changing rules. Here is what we have to offer..”. Perhaps their customers have been empowered by technology: “With our product, you can forget about manual tasks and wasted time, so that your employees can dedicate all the needed attention to your customers and their demands.”

Very few companies manage to get to the third dimension. It takes work and appreciation of what your customers are struggling with and why. Sometimes, that means actually getting to a level of understanding that can open new venues for your prospects. Things they had not thought about before meeting you and your product, new solutions to an old problem never tackled because thought secondary.

How do you get to the “why” dimension? Clearly, start with your customers.