Archives for category: Customers
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Trains

January 17, 2018 //
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I’m sitting on a train which is theoretically on its way from Galway to Dublin. I have a 2 o’clock meeting in Dublin, and then I’m back home on the train. I’m coming in just for this meeting, but my train is due in 2 and 1/2 hours before my meeting, so I’ve arranged to meet a couple ex-work pals for lunch. I’d decided on the train because my back is a bit sore and I could also get some work done.

The lunch appointment time is just passing now. We’ve been stationery for about 50 minutes. Ever since we rolled over something hard and metallic about 25 KMs outside Dublin, trundling to a stop about a kilometre further on. The on-board wifi is taking a terrible beating.

There are emergency response teams on the scene, presumably for both the incident and our train. I’m not sure if I’ll make my meeting, or whether we’ll eventually roll into Dublin and I’ll hop on the next train back to Galway, which will probably be delayed.

On Twitter Irish Rail has announced the suspension of all services in both directions due to a ‘tragic incident’. It is what it is. You can’t legislate for this kind of thing. You can’t manage away all of these possibilities and percentages. But when you have any single point of failure you run the risk of running into problems which inconvenience thousands of people.

I’ve written about the unreliability of public transportation for work-related meetings on numerous occasions. This is, of course, extremely traumatic for anyone directly affected by the incident. But for those of us indirectly affected, what it all boils down to is the usual: the loss of two important and related factors, namely time and productivity. This meeting I’m supposed to be attending is a dry-run for the real thing I’m running in 2 days time, for which I was also going to take the train. Decisions…

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Email

January 15, 2018 //
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Ah, email, the scourge of modern lives, both work-based and social-based. It’s no wonder that the young are not embracing it as a communications vehicle in anything like the numbers that the older generations have.

Emails can represent both a time-suck and an intrusion into our daily lives. If you’re like me and you subscribe to suppliers’ mailings, or have simply bought something from a company which has your email address, you’ll know what a chore it is to wade through email subject lines from organisations you don’t want to unsubscribe from, in case the occasional email provides something of use to you.

Email has its problems. A large percentage of knowledge and intellectual property is buried in email, often not archived or indexed properly, and it can be difficult to find and retrieve. That’s not particularly efficient. Email intrudes on a regular basis, with a ping here and a ping there, and business gurus are lining up to tell us to ignore 80% of our email and do our necessary email work in batches so that we stay productive.  Businesses are soon to be subject to the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which places more stringent requirements on those companies that collect and use data on us, like our email address. Here’s a nice summary by a marketing automation provider on GDPR implications for companies that email their customers.

Email marketing has been trending down for some time, as search engine optimisation / marketing and social media have been trending up. By 2020, according to Forrester and CMO, email will account for only 2,5% of our digital marketing spend.

It’s not all bad for email though. For example, a couple of years ago I called a couple dozen customers of a client of mine and asked them what their communications preferences were, both as prospective customers, and as active, ongoing customers. The overriding preference? ‘Email. Yes, I get loads of them, but if you send me one that I know I need to read, from looking at the subject line, I can leave it in my inbox and get to it when I’m ready.’

So it seems that, at least for non-millennials and business folk, the hugely prevalent mechanism that is email is still the best of a pretty bad lot when it comes to written communications.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Technology

Prep

January 5, 2018 //
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I have found, perhaps more by luck than judgement, hence my anecdotal phrasing of this sentence, that when you do the prep, things tend to go fine. When you don’t, they don’t.

When you wing a call or a meeting, choosing not to think about the questions you might get, or the outcomes you want from an encounter, it can often unravel and put you behind where you started. When you think about your call or meeting, plan for it, do the work required, try and anticipate the questions, have answers for them, and have an outcome in mind, it tends to go well.

Things are rarely as bad or difficult as you thought they’d be before you started the prep.

I think this has to do with the self-fulfilling prophecy, and peace of mind. The self-fulfilling prophecy, as I’ve talked about here, here and here, dictates that something will probably turn out the way you expected it to, and that by extension you should go into any situation with a positive outcome in mind. When you’ve done the prep, you’re comfortable with the impending call or meeting. You have peace of mind, which relaxes you and sets you up much better to shape the meeting to how you want it to go.

In a situation that’s much more complex than a call or meeting, like war, or business, our strike rate is nothing like as high. There are too many more variables, with too many more possible outcomes. All plans turn to dust in the heat of battle, inevitably. The prep, though, and the act of prepping, is still a very important and worthwhile exercise.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Mind the Gap

December 27, 2017 //
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When you’re in marketing and sales, you’ve got to mind the gap, otherwise you may never emerge from it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up launching a new business, a business launching a new product, or a company planning its sales targets for the next 4 quarters, there’s always a gap for marketing and a gap for sales.

By this I mean that there is a lag effect. The marketing lag is from the time you start thinking about marketing to people, actually marketing to them with your finished content, to someone putting their hand up and saying ‘Talk to me, I’m interested.’ The sales lag is from the time someone puts their hand up, through the period of qualifying whether they’re a good fit for your business, through to them signing the deal. Add the marketing lag and the sales lag, otherwise known as the sales cycle, and you’ve got a pretty big gap before you’re turning your stuff into cash.

So, if you’re a start-up and your product’s not ready yet, you need to start marketing right now: blogging, tweeting, emailing. Building up a head of steam so that you can have real conversations once your product is ready takes at least 6 months. That’s half a year, which sounds much worse than 6 months.

Same if you’re an existing business about to launch a new product. You have to mind the gap, similar rules apply. And if you’re building your 2019 financial year’s sales figures, you need the marketing to kick in in 2018. Companies selling complex products and services with a 3-month sales cycle will not see any marketing activities from one quarter converted to sales in the same quarter. It might not be the quarter after that either, when you factor in the sequential lag time of the marketing and sales gaps.

How many companies who do a business plan for year Y plan the marketing effort for year X? Not many. And certainly not the ones who finish their year Y plan at the very end of year X, or even the start of year Y. Those companies can write off any help at all from marketing, probably for the first half of the year.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Athlete or Bathlete

December 25, 2017 //
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Are you an athlete or bathlete? Are you the straining, strenuous type, or do you luxuriate in rest and relaxation? Whether you’re thinking about an answer in terms of exercise, or how you approach your work, it’s the same question.

Some of us are type A, some of us are type B. Some of us are athletes some of the time, and bathletes the rest of the time. Maybe we’re all somewhere on the spectrum between the two, between the cheetah and the sloth.

I thought I had coined a new word in bathlete, but it turns out it already exists, except not the way I mean it. I’m not talking about a collapsing of the term ‘bad athlete’, more someone who is professionally good at relaxing, a bath or bathing expert.

There’s nothing wrong with being supremely good at the soothing of body and mind. In fact, it’s the perfect antidote to the intensity and effort of work or exercise. Work hard, play hard, as they used to say before it became slightly unfashionable.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

The Three Phases of New Product Go To Market

December 22, 2017 //
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Taking a new product to market, whether it’s the sole product of a start-up, or it’s a new product or offshoot from an established business, is a fascinating area, and one which I’ve been involved in and advised on for a while.

There are typically three phases that a company goes through in its go-to-market journey towards a repeatable, scalable business: problem-solution fit; product-market fit; scale. All of them are customer-verifiable.

1) Problem-solution fit

In this phases of the new product go-to-market journey, you have a solution that a customer acknowledges – by parting with money – solves a problem for them. Hardly rocket science. It might just be one customer, and that one customer might be helping finance your development of a product that you hope you can sell to others. The trade-off is between customising the solution to the customer’s requirements and developing a solution that will still do the job for your target segment.

2) Product-market fit

In this phase, you have developed and sold your product to the point where there is a fit between your product and the market. Again, we’re not splitting the atom here. Your customers acknowledge that they need your product and they would be in trouble if for some reason your product was unavailable to them.No-one buys a nice to have, they buy what they must have, and you’ve demonstrated that a good number of customers need what you have.

3) Scale

The third phase of new product go-to-market is when you’re adding sales at an acceptable rate and at an acceptable cost of acquisition. There are various different ways of doing this, such as using channel partners, optimising internal resources, getting better at implementing and servicing the business, and so on. As the business is growing it is achieving greater economies of scale. It is multiplying revenues at a progressively smaller incremental cost. It is scaling the business.

Plenty of companies are perfectly happy providing solutions to problems for a very small number of customers, perhaps for ever. A smaller number graduates to a product which has product-market fit. A smaller number still manages to genuinely scale the business.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Practising What You Preach

December 20, 2017 //
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The ad agency that masterminds its own advertising campaign.

The consulting firm that follows its own methods to bring in work.

The childcare experts who raise their own children.

Sometimes it’s really hard practising what you preach. You stick too rigidly to the framework of best practices you advocate yourself. It takes you longer than it does for your customers because it has to be perfect. You have to get it right. You have to eat your own dog food and be the best at what you do because it’s what you’re also selling.

Of course, there are difficulties doing your own stuff. You’re too close to it for one thing. Also, the shift in perspective is always a revealing one. ‘This is the way I’m teaching this stuff, yet when I do it myself it’s hard.’ Or, ‘this is how I tell people to prospect for new business, why am I not following this practice myself?’

Then there is the criticism of those who say that ‘do as I say, not as a I do’ is a copout for those with lesser abilities than the people they’re coaching. I’m not sure this is valid. Even those who are the best at what they do look for coaches to give them that extra edge, regardless of whether the coach has been in the mentee’s shoes before.

Practising what you preach is useful for refining what you preach. Doesn’t make it any easier though.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

Celebrating the Mortgage Payoff – Part 2

December 18, 2017 //
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I owe you an apology. I feel it’s only right. I got lots of likes and offline ‘congrats’ messages as a result of people reading the first post with this headline, and probably not much further.

In the first line of the original post, I mentioned I was able to pay off a mortgage recently. Not the mortgage, simply the smallest, by far, of the mortgages the missus and I have.

The post wasn’t about inviting congratulations on this modest achievement, it was about how the mortgage company didn’t even acknowledge this milestone with me, when they could have celebrated it and used it as a marketing tactic to unlock some of my newly freed-up disposable income.

The fault lies in the eye-catching – and perhaps misleading – subject line. Better would be been ‘Not Celebrating the Mortgage Payoff’ or ‘The Missed Pay-off Marketing Opportunity.’

Sorry. I’m still saddled with debt, and the bank manager has a vice-like grip on the reins…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

Being an Ex-Pat on the BBC Website

December 11, 2017 //
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I’m not sure I qualify as an Ex-Pat, an Englishman  living in Ireland. It’s not quite Singapore or Sao Paolo is it? Still, if and when Brexit happens perhaps I’ll have more of a case.

As long as there’s been an Internet I’ve used the BBC website as my de factor home page. I use it to get a snapshot of the news, the sports goings on, and some of the magazine articles. Even though I live in another country the exemplary BBC site is my anchor.

One thing gripes, though, and has always griped. About every year or two they issue a survey on the site for their foreign readers, which usually culminates in the offer to be a member of the BBC Global Minds community. Every time I complete the survey I always mention my major gripe. Due to the licensing laws, most of the sporting videos are content ‘not available in your location’, or similarly worded nonsense.

What’s that all about? I can switch on BBC on my Freesat box and watch the sporting highlights. Same jurisdiction, same video footage. So why is not available on the web? And what is the BBC doing for its British nationals abroad?

Even though the site is still peerless, there is a small disappointment in the product not delivering every time the video content is denied to me. Less than optimal.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

The Amazon Effect

December 8, 2017 //
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The fantastic end-to-end experience we get when we shop at Amazon has serious repercussions for our experiences when we shop on other ecommerce sites. This is especially true for us in Ireland when we want to shop on Irish websites.

I was reminded of this recently when I was trying to buy two items on the Currys PC World website. I selected the two items and went to my basket to check out. The first item, incredibly, was not available for posting to me – WTF! – so it offered me click and collect. I selected my closest store and it said it was out of stock. Yes, I was at the checkout stage. The closest store was in Dublin, over 100 miles away. S0 that’s €30 on fuel and a full day to pick up an item that cost €30…

I moved down to the second item. This was not available for click and collect – why not? – but was available for online delivery. With me so far? I filled in my billing details and clicked ‘continue’. No good, WTF! 2. I had to go back up and delete the first item that was only available in practically the next time zone. When I deleted the top item the page refreshed and left the bottom item in the checkout but wiped all of my hitherto completed payment details – WTF! 3.

None of these WTF! moments would have occurred on the Amazon site. I left the Currys PC World site feeling that its experience is so excremental compared to Amazon. We become so conditioned to how good the Amazon buying experience is, and the experience itself, by which I mean the shopping process they take us though – that it negatively predisposes us against other vendors.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I do the vast bulk of my online shopping on Amazon and why they’re hoovering up business.

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Categories Customers, Sales, Technology
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