Jun 12, 2015 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Strategy
apologies to Scott Brinker, www.chiefmartec.com
Faced with so much choice of technology and platform options to reach and engage consumers, many marketers are paralysed. On the other hand, many are tempted to be all things to all people, simply because the tools are there to reach them, and they hope that they strike a hot prospect somewhere.
“It’s a numbers game” dominates many conversations, and it seems limiting your options is silly.
However, the customer has extraordinarily well developed bullshit meters to filter out the digital noise, so unless you are very specific with the offer, it will not pass the filter, it will not be seen.
It seems to me there is way too little being done to consider the people we are trying to reach. It is ironic that the tools have given us access to their lives, but often we choose to ignore the individual and chase the usually poorly defined “triibe”. A great description coined by Seth Godin, now misused by many.
We need to stop obsessing about the tools and ask ourselves three basic questions:
What is it we are trying to do?,
Why should anyone care?
How do we use these tools now available to make a difference?.
It seems to me there are four strategies
- Establish your “Why“. Simon Sinek in his seminal TED talk compellingly makes the argument that this is the core of marketing, to quote, “people do not get what you do, they get why you do it”.
- Build relationships. This sounds a bit yukkie, but when done with a genuine desire to help, and add value to others, it delivers to both parties. The twin brothers of C21 marketing, “Social media marketing” and “content marketing” have between them led us astray. Everyone is working feverishly at the tools trying to be different, the face in the crowd that stands out, but mostly failing, there are just too many faces, and too few asking the follow up question of “what am I going to do with them when I have their attention”. For the faces, they are attracted from time to time and let down somehow, and have become even more reluctant to give anything easily.
- Bridge the gap between what you say, and the customer experience. Too many marketers are there for the money, not for the joy of delivering on the “why”, and do not really care about the challenge of getting their customers to say “that was amazing?” Marketing is emerging as the difference between success and failure in this commoditised and transparent world, so you better get some of the rare good stuff.
- Choose your tools based on the behavior of the individual consumer. There are so many tools, and combinations of tools available, that making the choices becomes a task of considerable proportion. Choosing the right combination can be the difference, so make sure you choose on the basis of the best way to match your messages to the behavior of the consumer, not by what is available. No good having a hammer when you need a screwdriver. When you are building a deck at the back of the house, the choice is obvious, but when building a bridge to the consumer, the discriminating factor is their behavior in any given set of circumstances, and this is really hard to predict, you really need to understand them in great detail. There is too much technology, it has become the end, rather than the means.
When you are stuck, give me a call.
May 21, 2015 | Customers, Sales
Making an offer they cannot refuse is the ultimate selling outcome, notwithstanding the limitations of the law, and common decency.
So how do you make a Godfather offer?
- Know your customer intimately
- Know their business intimately
- Know their pain-points like they were your own
- Create an offer that removes the pain-points for them
- Make the payoff compelling
- Make the payoff unique
- Present the offer like your life depended on it, with passion, conviction, and from the receivers perspective.
- Create tension in the decision by ensuring there is a decision time after which the offer is off the table.
This works pretty much all the time.
When you are able to the identify components of a problem a potential customer has, for which you have a solution that is both valuable to them, and unique, and you clearly understand all the challenges in their situation, why would they not buy from you?
May 18, 2015 | Change, Customers, Sales
mindset switch
Access to information, the tools to make up our own minds has not just changed our behaviour in the way the sales process works, it has changed our mindset.
In a fundamental way.
We believe information we source ourselves, and distrust anything we are told.
We filter the available information and make up our own minds about the bits we will accept, and blend into our version of the truth.
The power to say no” has never been stronger because there are a myriad of options available to us to get the information ourselves.
I work from a home office, and usually do not answer the home phone, as most of the time it is an unwanted cold sales call, and those who I need to be able to contact me almost always do it via the mobile or email.
However, last week I did answer the phone, and yes it was a sales call, but a pretty good one. A very nice Aussie lady, so her first language was English, rang and politely inquired if she could take a moment to speak about how her insurance company could save me a heap of money.
As it happens, I had been considering just that proposition, I am over 60, work from home, but still pay full whack contents insurance, so I had concluded that I should save some money by changing, or at least negotiating rather than just paying the auto premium.
So what happens when the nice lady rings, I surprise even myself given I had concluded that I should change and said “No thanks”.
It was not her, she did a good job, unlike most cold phone sales calls.
It was not that the timing was wrong, I had decided to do the research and take some action.
It was my mindset.
Being given information on a plate by someone who I saw as having a vested interest was automatically rejected.
Yes, I understood she could help, and that it was great timing, but the opportunity was still rejected almost without thought.
Imagine how hard it is to make a sale when all the stars are not aligned, when you cannot even get past the front door when they are!
Selling used to be a staged process with information delivered by someone who had the access you did not have, but needed to make a purchase decision.
No more.
The process has been completely disrupted and reversed, all the power is with the buyer, and if you try and sell them, even the if tools you use smell of you trying to sell them, you lose because the automatic response now is “No”
Think about it the next time you set about motivating the sales force at the Friday rev up, as you will probably just be wasting everyone’s time if you do not recognise and accommodate the mindset change that has occurred in the last decade.
May 15, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Marketing
innovation comes from dot joining
Before 3M came out with the now ubiquitous little yellow pad of semi stuck sheets, nobody realised they needed them.
There was no clamour for sticky note papers to use as messages, place-holders, and the thousand other uses we have found for them, no market research pointed at the opportunity.
Someone connected the unconnected dots.
The story goes that there was a failed glue experiment in the 3M lab archives. One of the product lines of 3M is glue, sticky stuff used as a joining agent with uses from the home to building sites and industrial applications. Researcher Spencer Silver was seeking a super strong adhesive, the line of experiments was deemed a failure, it was not glue, it did not stick, although it seemed to be re-useable, the stickiness was not strong. It was however, long lived. One of 3M’s employees who was also the member of a local church congregation choir, frustrated that his placeholders kept dropping out of his hymn book made the connection, and a product was born.
Point is the research had been done, there was a solution in the archives in search of a problem.
The challenging task for innovators and marketers is to put ourselves in the position where we can connect the solution with the problem.
That does not happen in the office, it happens where there are conversations happening, often random conversations, between people with vaguely connected networks and ideas.
The science of networking indicates we get more from those we know vaguely than from our very close peers.
Why?
Because those close to us are typically the same as us, similar views, experiences and attitudes, exposed to the same sorts of stimuli, that is why they are close to us.
The revelations, the connection of the unconnected dots usually comes from left field those who we know, but not well, who circulate in different groups to us, have different knowledge, networks and interests to us.
Go talk to them, network, engage, step out of your comfort zone, and with time, curiosity, and yes, lady luck does play a role, you might find your Post-it-note. You will almost certainly not find it if the only place you look is inside your own patch.
May 1, 2015 | Customers, Sales, Small business
Design your sales process
Everybody in business is in one way or another, in sales.
After all, you do not make a living by giving stuff away, you actually have to sell it.
It is also true that not everybody will want your stuff, in fact, usually very few will want it, so the challenge is to find them, engage them, demonstrate the value, and then create a transaction.
All this takes time and effort, it will not happen by some sort of osmotic process, giving a bloke a sales folder, a car, and map no longer works, the sales process needs to be specifically designed to create the circumstances in which a transaction can take place.
35 years of designing them in one way or another has led to a few conclusions on the best way to go about it,
- Ensure you understand the buyer, and their buying processes. One size does not fit all, each will be different, and by whatever means you need to define their processes, pain points, and priorities so you can build messages that resonate.
- Design a detailed process. Given each prospect will be different, the process needs to be both robust and sufficiently agile to accommodate the nuances of each customer. Generally it will have a number of stages that fits the product you are selling. Office supplies will differ substantially from power stations, but the principal remain the same. Set the stages, and the triggers that move a prospect from one stage to the next.
- Develop a playbook for each stage. This will involve both the response to the persona of the prospect and delivering the type of content that they will respond to at their point in the sales cycle, the delivering the content in the most appropriate manner.
- Routinize the sales process. Like any process, a sales process is best if it works routinely, in a predictable and consistent way. Improvements then come from the anomalies and outlier things that pop up, and become very obvious simply because they are outside the norm. it may be a inquiry from a market you had never considered, or an idea on how to improve your product for a particular purpose, whatever, the sales process needs to make the odd thought obvious so it does not get missed in the welter of activity that occurs.
- Manage the metrics. Like any process, a sales funnel can be continuously improved, you can also ensure sales priorities are optimised, and KPI’s set and managed.
- Engage your sales force in the process design and ongoing improvements, and feedback loops. Over time as the process evolves and new sales people come along, to keep a sales process delivering it needs to be able to evolve at least as fast as the customers you are seeking to serve. Sales people come in many colours, like the rest of us, and managing any diverse group of people requires that they buy into the objectives of the strategies in front of them sufficiently strongly to resist the temptation to chase the new shiny thing.
None of this is easy, despite all the verbiage out there that seems to indicate it is. Designing an effective sales process takes time, effort, investment, and iteration. The good pat is that effective process design quickly pays for itself.
Apr 14, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Small business
It is all about what goes in
Unlike a funnel for petrol into your tank, sugar into your cake, or production ingredient into your ribbon mixer, in a sales funnel there is no bloody gravity!
You have to create the gravity!
You have to create the customer energy, commitment, interest, whatever it takes to move from one point to another more committed point, and eventually to a transaction.
Not easy.
Most marketers inherently hope if not believe their prospective customer is just hanging out for their product, that even if they do not yet know it, their product will be the saviour. That is not because they are misguided or simple, that is how they are trained, and those that stick with it are usually the more optimistic, and sometimes thick-skinned amongst us.
The reality is that most customers are distracted by life. Their kid is sick, their car just terminally broke down, their daughter is going out with the “wrong” bloke, or they are planning a holiday. They really do not give a flying fig about your brand new, shiny, world beating gizmo anyway, and it is just easier to be nice and not tell you to piss off, and be busy when you ring, than to be a bad guy. You just misunderstand and wonder why the order has not come in yet
This rant was motivated by another of those annoying self proclaimed experts that extol the unmatched virtues of their particular cure-all, in this case a digital funnel template. Must have scraped my email from the website, twitter, or some turd sold it to him. Now my inbox is being flooded with spam, with the writer becoming increasingly concerned at my health because I have not yet bought.
“Just do X, so easy anyone can do it, and for an investment of just $279 for my exclusive, all singing all dancing funnel and 15 minutes a day the cash will roll in”.
Bullshit.
Selling is hard work, best done by professionals who understand their market, products and customers well, and have the emotional intelligence to work with the prospect to deliver value via a transaction. It never happens just because somebody bought a template.
Sales Funnels can only be as good as the input allows, and the process facilitates. When you need someone who can do this stuff properly, call me.
