Jul 23, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
www.strategyaudit.com.au
The “sales funnel” is a pretty familiar diagram, it has been around for a long time, simply because it makes sense, at least it did to sales people. To their customer prospects, there is a level of antipathy to the notion of being just a part of some “funnel”
It is time for an alternative view, one taken from the perspective of the consumer who now has all the knowledge necessary to make their own informed decisions, and they are exercising that power aggressively.
The world has changed, so too should our representations of the manner in which our marketing activities are managed, and the nature of customers and potential customers reaction to our efforts to meet their needs.
Seems to me that we would be better off thinking about the process in two funnels, one that represents our e-marketing activities, the other the way in which those messages are received.
The first is the marketing funnel, which has replaced the sales funnel, an obsolete metaphor in a digital world.
Below is my way of illustrating the new Customer purchase process.
- Need awareness. This can be either explicit, one that emerges when the consumer recognises that a purchase is necessary, such as when your printer dies, you need a new one, today! The other type of need is implicit, which is generally uncovered by a sales process, rather than by the consumer in isolation.
- Information search. Google has revolutionised this part of the process, by taking the power of information from the seller where it has been for all of human history, and giving it to the buyer. It is this point at which the marketing process now kicks in.
- Value comparison. The value equation is different for every person, in every situation, but the components are unchanged. Features, availability, warranty, design, capacity, and many others all feature in varying degrees, the means by which we communicate the bundle that makes up the value, so is common to every situation, is price.
- Purchase decision. “Yes, I will buy” thinks the consumer
- Short list. Which options meet the need, operational requirement, and value outcome needed, from which a finance decision can be made
- Transaction. The transaction can take many forms, from a simple exchange of cash for product, to all sorts of arrangements and trade-offs made between sellers, buyers and various middlemen
Whilst the whole process is usually depicted as an ordered, sequential one, in which the various marketing automation software options can provide order and flow, in reality is is usually a chaotic, messy, and iterative process.
Jul 16, 2014 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Sales
Prospecting, lead qualification and nurturing, prospect management and the transaction itself have all changed forever.
The salesman with a bag has been relegated, at best, to the transaction end of the prospect to transaction continuum. In the process, we have lost some of the humanity, some of the eyeball closeness that good sales people brought to the table, the insights and instinct gathered from the context and body language that underpinned all the conversations they had.
All gone, but most would agree that body language holds a significant place in the sales process, so how have we replaced it?
Is there such a thing as “Digital body language”?
Can we score metaphors of the physical reaction from digital interactions?
Logically the answer has to be ‘Yes”, as we now have access to a huge body of data that reflects the sum of behaviour of all who come into contact with whatever platform or tool we have working for us. However, access to data is a very long way from leveraging the insights that are hidden within the data, a fairly advanced level of analytic capability along with a tool with some grunt is required, although simpler tools with manual intervention can be made to work.
Consider the process:
- Somebody reads a blog post and “likes” it, better yet, shares it,
- They subscribe to the blog to make receiving it automatic,
- They respond to an offer, webinar, e-book download, surveys, or combination of these, perhaps several times, and all the while your system is recording and responding to their actions, delivering the next step to them.
- The system is constantly being improved as more data points are collected, and A/B testing provides finer grained insights
The data collected can be sliced and diced, weighted and resliced in all sorts of ways that can provide an almost visceral insight into the behaviour of groups and subgroups to various content stimuli at differing levels of engagement. The relative effectiveness of differing pieces of content at each point in the sales continuum can be calculated with good levels of accuracy.
Surely this is the equivalent of the sum of the body language cues of those in the database, if not necessarily that of any individual within it, and so is a very effective guide when well used. Data will never replace the one on one human responses, but the value of the digital picture built up is a source of enormous value, immeasurably widening the net of prospects beyond what can be achieved with boots on the ground.
Jun 16, 2014 | Branding, Marketing, Sales
A journey evolves
One of the most memorable, and biggest mistakes I made as a young product manager was to redesign a pack.
The product was an old fashioned, relatively low value product on supermarket shelves, it had a small niche to itself, and the sales ticked over, pretty much unaffected by promotional activity of any sort.
The pack was truly horrible.
Over the years , as suppliers of the display box had come and gone, the original photo had morphed into a messy amalgam of unrecognisable shape and conflicting colour to the point that it was not easy to recognise what the product inside might be, and if you did, it seemed unlikely to me that any reasonable consumer would consider buying it.
So, I did the obvious thing, at least it seemed obvious.
I contracted a designer, who did a great job of redesigning the pack, new photos, layout, recipe ideas, the whole five yards, so it looked clean, fresh, appetising, and with a bit of a flourish in womens magazines (this was the early 80’s) we relaunched the product.
The unexpected, unthinkable, happened.
Sales stopped, literally, dead in the water, nothing, nada, zilch.
Panic stations were manned, as while the volumes and profile of the product were low, the gross margins were outrageously high, and I had just shot the goose.
Not having any budget for research, I did the next best thing, which turned out to be the best thing, another lesson I have kept and reused, and reused.
I lurked around in supermarket isles for a while trying to talk to consumers of the product, and begged the field staff to do the same, to try to understand the reason for the abject failure of the new design.
It was rapidly clear that while consumers had no love for the old pack, they also thought it was rubbish, but they recognised it, bought it by habit, and when the design was so radically changed, they simply did not recognise the new pack as the same product, assumed their regular purchase, that had done the job for them well despite the packaging, was out of stock and moved on.
We changed the pack back, with a couple of subtle improvements and sales recovered immediately.
The point here is that I am sometimes faced with a client wanting to completely redesign their websites, they get sick of the old one, it is dated, unresponsive, not mobile friendly, and so on, and it seems like a good idea, and it almost always is.
However, I relate my pack story, and seek to persuade that many incremental steps that create an evolution of design that takes people with you is better than a big jump that risks losing some of the rusted on followers, those to whom you probably owe the bulk of your profits.
Now, you do not have to lurk in supermarket isles to assess the impact, you can conduct a series of A/B tests, to maximise the impact of the changes as the evolution journey winds along, a journey that should not end, just seek to deliver a superior experience.
BTW, the old product is still on the shelf, and having just googled it, the design seems fairly close to my memory of the brand, spanking new design of 30 years ago that so nearly truncated my marketing career.
Jun 9, 2014 | Branding, Marketing, Sales
Strategyaudit.com.au
We all know the world of sales has changed.
Consumers now have virtually all the information they need to make a purchase choice without any assistance from a “sales assistant”.
Before a significant purchase, consumers now review all sorts of web based resources that can deliver exactly the information important to them in making the choice.
It is exactly the same in B2B, sales people really only come in most of the time when the purchaser is almost ready to place an order and has all the information they need, except one bit:
The performance of the vendor and their product, by reputation, by past actions, and by undertakings about future performance
In the old days, choices were made on relative value, The purchaser had limited information, and really only chose between a few options.
Now they have enormous choice, and access to all the information that could possibly be relevant should they choose to look for it, so they are in a position to make a choice on the absolute value of the alternatives to them.
Changes the dynamics of brand building just a bit, and the old dilemma of functional priority is well and truly determined in favor of marketing, who now runs the sales show.
No longer is it about weight of distribution, advertising, number of sales people on the road, and relative value, it is about the absolute value delivered.
Now to be successful you need to be thinking about the balance between your sales and marketing investments, and making the most of marketing automation. Software and the cloud have changed the game, weather you are just using excel, the free Mailchimp and others, or going the whole mile with Marketo, Hubspot, or other enterprise solution marketing automation packages.
PS. September 2014. One of the really well known marketing writers David Meerman Scott, has written a new book called “The new rules of selling” and released a Slideshare of the same name on this topic. The book is worth reading, the slideshare is long, and summarises the ideas with great generosity.
May 14, 2014 | Branding, Management, Sales
expertflyfishingand camping.com
Creating a lead is a whole world of work and pain for many business people, followed by another, converting the lead into a transaction.
Too often I see the process followed as an aggressive “close at all costs” mentality. That approach rarely ever worked well for anything beyond one off transactions, and is even less effective now that digital communication has revolutionised the way we create, conduct and nurture relationships.
People like to buy from those they like and trust, basic human nature.
It follows therefore, that to make sales, you need to demonstrate that you are both likable and trustworthy, as well as being in a position to address the customers need and deliver value at least as well as alternatives.
Following is a three stage process:
- Humanise you marketing, you are selling to people, not “organisations”, people!
- Track relationships. Have a metric, and visual device that articulates the existing relationships with people, such as the one following.
3. Explicitly set out to build relationships, recognising that sales will follow, rather than the other way around. Having a visual representation of the state of a relationship, and an objective of moving up the pyramid, by understanding and acting on the drivers of a relationship will deliver mutual benefit, and a return on effort.
Each relationship, whatever its status, is an individual thing. It will have a range of parameters that will direct its development. How we met, what we look like, how we conduct ourselves, the mutual stories we have, how authentic we are, how consistent as are in the engagement and interaction, and the degree to which we are proactive, and generous in that engagement, and so on.
Managing the inputs to those parameters is a foundation of marketing success that was not possible just 20 years ago because we did not have the tools, but now we have, so there is no excuse.
Apr 29, 2014 | Communication, Customers, Sales, Small business
Successful selling
Regularly I find myself on the receiving end of a pitch of some sort, as do all in business. We all buy and sell on a daily basis, and whilst there are easily recognisable and specialised functions that buy and sell on behalf of our organisations, we nevertheless are “pitchers”, and “pitchees” every day.
It seems that one of the impacts of digital communication has been to help us forget, or perhaps brush over some of the foundation sales skills honed over the millennia of human activity, so here they are again:
- Listen rather than speak. Asking questions, listening to the responses, and then asking the follow up questions has always been, and will always be the best sales strategy.
- Benefits not features. When you are speaking, talk about the benefits of your offering to the “pitchee” rather than reciting the features. Customers are really only interested in what value a product is to them, not what the range of features may be, so focus on value to them by demonstrating how your product makes their life easier, more efficient, and more productive.
- Deliver useful insights, knowledge, and intelligence. Being of value to a customer is more than just flogging product, it is also about articulating the context in which the product will be used to add value. Clearly however, there is a line here with confidentiality, any potential customer who hears what their competitors may be doing from you will never trust you again to keep their confidence, but the best sales people are always able to deliver solutions to problems they have collaborated to articulate.
Easy to say, often hard to do.
