Tag: sales

Opportunities

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Why would people rent a car and not drive it?

Even a service as straightforward as car rentals can have things to figure out. So chances are your product, your service, your software might not be used for the application it was originally designed for.

Two points to make here.

If that’s the case, and most likely it is, the best way to find out what is happening is asking your customers. No need to sit in a meeting room with product, marketing, sales, customer success to second guess the needs of your audience. Ask them. Actually, get them involved and listen to them even if everything is going as planned. That’s almost always a signal that you are missing something.

Then, how do you react to finding out? You might be instictively led to force the original use on the customers. Teach them, penalize them, leverage price and place to guide the wrong users away. Or you could make an opportunity out of it, understand that your plans are irrelevant, leverage product and promotion to adapt to what you have found.

Talk with your customers

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Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes (or in anybody else’s, for that matter) is not a great advice.

It might be a good introduction to the context and the surroundings of the customers, but eventually you will most likely end up taking with you a lot of your thoughts, ideas, assumptions, models, preferences, plans. What you will see is what you want to see, not necessarily what the customers see.

A better alternative is to talk with your customers (or anybody else you want to understand). Talk as in sit down with them, with no distractions, listen deeply, ask open questions, listen more, pay special attention to their language, their thought process, their ideas, and what they don’t say. There you can find information worth processing and turning into actions.

Take marketing seriously

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Your company is not going to win on features and product.

It is almost boring to say this out loud, and yet many still think that the fact their product is better than their competitors’ is going to give them sustainable competitive advantage.

Your product needs to be good, as infallible as it can get, and that is pretty much the basic expectation of any person who is buying anything. Even more so in B2B. And yet, that is not what is going to make your company successful in the long term.

Few numbers.

Slack went public last week, and they disclosed (among other things) that they invest 56% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Salesforce and Tableau spend respectively 46% and 51% of their revenue in marketing and sales. Out of 205 Saas companies surveyed here in 2017, the median marketing and sales spend as % of revenue was 37 (and by the way, the once who spend more than the median had a marked tendency to grow at a much faster pace).

I like the way David Cancel, CEO and co-founder of Drift (and former Chief Product Officer at Hubspot) explains the importance of marketing and brand in the Saas industry.

In this interview, he describes the current as the P&G wave of Saas. When Saas got started (the Edison wave), few companies were trying to figure out what Saas was and essentially come up with the basics. Then, the industry started to affirm (the Ford wave): a number of companies consolidating practices and growing their businesses. Now, in the P&G wave of Saas, a fast-increasing number of Saas companies (Cisco estimated there were 156,796 third-party apps serving businesses in 2016, a 30x increase in a matter of two years!) need to give buyers a reason to choose them against the competition. And the reason is never the product.

There’s no intention here to claim that merely spending money in marketing and sales is sufficient for success. It is not, as it is not having a good product. The companies that I have mentioned here (Slack, Salesforce, Drift) have excellent marketing people, that know well how to craft a strategy way before moving into tactics.

Nonetheless there’s a clear necessity for Saas companies to take marketing and sales more seriously. Marketing, in particular, is not the interns you are hiring for the summer to take care of your social media pages, nor is it the student you underpay to drive traffic and leads to your website. Make sure you have a solid marketing team that understands positioning, customer research, value proposition and all the elements of a marketing strategy.

Today, there’s no more excuses to overview this fundamental part of building a success story.

Will you take us to Mount Splashmore?

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How much do you have to insist before your customers say “yes”?

My bank sends me a text every day to tell me there’s a message for me in eServices, regarding changes to Terms and Conditions. I should go there, read it and approve it.

I still haven’t done that.

Facebook sends me daily updates of what my friends are sharing on the platform. I should re-install the mobile app and do not miss any of it.

I still haven’t done that.

LinkedIn has a new offer every other day to make me go back to Premium. I should take it, as it is unprecedented, and enjoy all the benefits (?) of their premium offer.

I still haven’t done that.

While navigating the net and Facebook (desktop), I get targeted with ads of cars that are nowhere close to the league of cars I am interested in. I should really check it out, and perhaps consider a lifestyle change.

I still haven’t done that.

Dumb repetition can get annoying pretty quickly. It breaks trust and it lowers the expectation of you actually having something interesting to say. And perhaps, like Bart and Lisa, eventually you get a “yes!”. Does that sound like a victory?

If you have to repeat yourself too much before inspiring action, you have either the wrong message or the wrong audience. Making it louder won’t help your case.

On-demand advertising

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I am shopping for a new car, and only today I spent a couple of hours looking for a good option for my family and myself.

With all the content and ads we are exposed to nowadays, I find it puzzling that there is no single space on the internet where I can go, say what I am looking for and get a number of customised (i.e., based on the needs and wants I would state) offers from different dealers.

We have been sold the idea of behavioural advertising (i.e., ads based on where I have been and what I have done on the internet) and of contextual advertising (i.e., ads based on where I am on the internet). Businesses got lazy, and forgot about the arts of asking and (really) listening.

Of course, when you ask and listen, there are two things happening that possibly get businesses (and marketing departments) into troubles.

First of all, you have to deliver. On-demand advertising would mean that when the customer expresses their needs and wants, you need to have a single matching offer to meet those (rather than having a range of offers that may bend customer’s needs and wants).

Second, you have to be the best. While many different businesses can ran ads on the same topic and find solace in some more or less meaningless metrics (reach, impressions, engagement, click-throughs, conversions, and so on), on-demand advertising would have one winner only. The one who gets the deal.