Archives for category: Customers
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Why Can’t I Demo Your Stuff?

February 15, 2017 //
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In this Internet-enabled age buyers often know as much as we do about what we’re selling. They’ve usually done their homework, researched the alternatives, and – most importantly – asked their peer group what their experiences of the alternatives are.

Gone are the days when we knew more than them and we could act like masons, jealously guarding our information and secrets. Customers now are used to self-serve and the most savvy companies are making it possible for buyers to buy their stuff with no or a light touch. After all, why step in front of a moving train? Why increase the cost of acquisition when they’re in buy mode?

Imagine how frustrating it must be, then, for B2B buyers of complex software systems who can’t demo your software on their own, without your intervention? What signal does it send to the buyer if it’s hard or impossible to try your software for themselves:

  • I’ll think your system is too expensive
  • I’ll not see the value unless you explain it to me
  • It’s too hard to use, too hard to navigate
  • It doesn’t look good
  • It’s clunky
  • It falls over

The list goes on…

The challenge for the purveyor of complex, comprehensive B2B software is to simplify it without compromising on power. The challenge for the purveyor of poor B2B software is to fix it before you’re no longer the best of a bad lot.

The provider’s response might be that they can’t sell to a buyer unless they understand the seller’s requirements and how the system can help them address those requirements better than anything else. This shouldn’t stop the provider using content, guiding the buyer to that conclusion and packaging a bunch demos of their software to back up each argument.

Low touch is the pathway to no touch.

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Technology

1000 LinkedIn Connections

February 13, 2017 //
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I reached a thousand connections on LinkedIn the other day. Given that I almost never connect with someone I don’t know or have not worked with, I consider this a function of my advanced years that I’ve been able to accumulate what is in theory a valuable network.

Of course, there are various tiers to this network. Some of the people in it I actually can’t remember, so I either worked with them very briefly a long time ago or I connected with them when I was under pressure to break my 2 cardinal rules. Others I know better, and others again are part of a small coterie I know very well and would reach out to for help or to give help.

Interestingly, I only realised I was on 998 connections after I had sent out 3 connection requests. I wondered who would be connection number 1,000. Number 999 would be in the top 3 of all my connections influence-wise, and would be a well known name in the Ireland business community. Number 1,000 was someone relatively senior in the UK with whom I have only recently starting working. Number 1,001 is a friend of a friend who has not accepted my request yet.

Getting to a 4-figure network, which I consider to be a genuinely powerful network rather than one of those that is ten times the size and built for the sake of quantity not quality, reminded me how little I currently leverage the network that I have worked so hard to build up over the last 10 or 12 years. I must do better with this important, sleeping giant of an asset…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Technology

The Smart Smartphone

February 10, 2017 //
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The other day I went into my home office before starting work and noticed that one of my apps required an update before it would work. I think I was checking in for a flight. Anyway, I’m a bit lazy with updating apps, so I decided to update all 20-something apps that needed updating at the same time.

I plugged the phone into my computer and starting work, thinking nothing of it. Ten minutes later I get a message from my phone company that I have used up 80% of my monthly data allowance, and I might want to keep an eye on it…I did, I never exceed my data allowance.

Then I realised that – d’oh – I wasn’t connected to my home network wirelessly. The night before I was low on battery and, not wanting the battery to give up the ghost before the alarm went off, I switched off the wireless and the bluetooth.

Call me old fashioned but I would have thought that a genuinely smart smartphone would go through the following process in about 4 milliseconds:

  • Do you know what, this guy’s downloading a ton of stuff, he’s not connected to the wireless and his wifi is not switched on
  • Location accuracy isn’t great without wireless but I can tell from his GPS location that he’s at home, which is odd
  • I’m going to send him a quick message to let him know that he might want to activate his wifi and connect to his wireless to save on data charges…

Those kinds of situations where the phone never forgets but the human does…it’s not that much to ask, is it?

 

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Categories Communication, Customers

Revenue Avenue

February 8, 2017 //
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There’s a guiding principle for all businesses, regardless of their size, industry or stage of life. It applies across the business or for a specific project or initiative within the business.

What’s the revenue avenue?

By which I mean, what is the quickest path towards revenue? What do we need to do to get the sales? After all, nothing really happens in a business until somebody sells something.

Sometimes we can get too caught up in the planning, or do too much analysis, or maybe overcomplicate our strategy, making it too hard for ourselves. When this happens, we need to keep it as simple as we can and ask ourselves what we need to do to get it going, to get the revenues going.

It’s far easier to make decisions for the future of the business from a position of income. Always look to take the revenue avenue.

 

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Read vs Retain

January 30, 2017 //
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I don’t know about you, but as I get older I find it harder to retain information.

I read loads, at work and for leisure. I remember the information for the short term, but it doesn’t stick over time and I have to go back to the information I need again. And again.

When I was younger, at school, I used to have regular tests, like loads of other kids. A lot of the tests were vocabulary tests, for different languages. I would cram, learn the words by rote, regurgitate them in the test, score well, and then forget many of them over time. Later, when I started taking the kind of exams where you couldn’t learn something by rote – you had to learn how to do it, like a solve a maths problem a certain way or learn how to do an income statement – I struggled.

When we need to retain information or knowledge, it has to happen regularly over time, as we absorb the new information or methods and learn the patterns that help us embed them with repetition and practice.

Something else needs to happen, though. We need to listen or read actively. We need to be engaged. It’s like saying hello to someone new for the first time and engaging the brain actively to remember their name. If we don’t pay the right kind of attention, the name is gone in an instant. If we listen actively, it stays for years, decades even.

There are lots of books and courses out there that help you remember names and other more involved concepts by figuring out connections and stories that make them memorable. But to me they’re more developed ways of engaging the brain for retention.

So it’s not really my getting older that’s the problem. It’s more that I live in an era of information overload and I’m scanning everything, rather than reading it properly.

The difference between read and retain is the difference between passive and active.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Client or Customer

January 25, 2017 //
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Client or customer? Which term do you use? I must confess I’m not keen on the word client, at least in business.

I remember having this conversation about a decade ago with a software VP. ‘Which term do you prefer,’ I asked. ‘Oh, I don’t like the word client. Hookers have clients…’ was her reply.

Well, yes, I suppose they do. Yet, so do social services organisations, charities, artists, business agencies and probably a good few professional services companies too.

In business, everything revolves around the customer. But it’s still a partnership between you and your customers, a fair exchange of outcomes between you and them. Usually, they pay money and you deliver products and / or services, but not always. It’s a business relationship built on a series of mutually beneficial transactions over time.

Calling them clients in business – internally within your business or externally with your various stakeholders – puts them on a pedestal and makes for an uneven relationship that’s open to abuse, or at best unnecessary leverage.

Client equals master-slave, whereas customer equals business relationship.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales

Primary, Secondary

January 9, 2017 //
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Almost everything we do is secondary. Not secondary in importance, you understand. Secondary as in it’s been done before, said before, heard before, tried before.

We spend 99% of our entire school and college lives learning stuff that has already been figured out. We’re getting it second hand and not doing the primary work, the genuinely ground-breaking stuff. Remember that odd time when you stuck your neck out in school or college and wrote what you felt was something new, a product of your independent thought? I bet it was marked wrong, right? You’re treading where thousands of people have gone before, so your new thing is not thought to be right – thought being the operative word.

So much of what we do is secondary. Our working lives are about replicating processes, re-working, recycling, renewing what’s been done before. So little of it is actually new, never done before.

There is a very small number of people doing the primary stuff. Making the law, setting the precedent, inventing a financial mechanism, product, sport, piece of technology, process, creating something new and valuable. The rest of us are studying it, reading it, criticising it, adopting it, using it, benefitting from it, and sometimes improving it.

In the world of doing primary stuff there is failure, mistakes, false dawns, incorrect conclusions, disappointment and a huge amount of wasted time. But also, by an order of magnitude greater, there is fame, fortune, progress, history, satisfaction, gratitude and humility.

What primary stuff are you doing, or trying to do?

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

Really Viral

January 6, 2017 //
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There’s nothing like the physical world to give us a powerful corollary of how it works in the cyber world.

I’m always reminded of this in late December when families and friends get together at the end of a few months of solid graft and a winter vomiting bug or two runs riot, moving through areas like wildfire.

That’s really viral, genuinely viral. You can see why the term virus was coined in the cyber world. A physical virus is an amazing thing, replicating itself, producing different strains and moving quickly through people in different cycles and timeframes.

Millions can be affected within the space of a couple of weeks, brought on by the combination of people being at a low ebb and slightly more vulnerable to infection after a sustained period of work, proximity to others, and mobility within family groups and circles of friends.

I’m always fascinated by how terms like desktop, folder, cloud, virus and so on are borrowed from the physical world for their digital equivalent. They always seem so apt.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Tell A Story

January 2, 2017 //
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Do you want to sell something to someone?

Do you want to market a product or service?

Do you need to convey a complex idea or concept?

Are you trying to get your audience to remember something?

Do you want your audience to be able to absorb, internalise and re-use the information you’re giving them?

Do you want someone to learn something?

Then tell a story!

Stories connect. They resonate with people. They’re memorable. They attach all the links in the right order into a coherent chain.

The story is the basic building block of the sales person and the marketer. Even if you don’t need a full story to get over your message, then a metaphor makes it memorable. So does an image, or a picture.

In this hectically fast world we occupy, with woefully short attention and retention spans, people are still engaged for hours and hours reading a good book, far longer than watching a movie or TV program.

So tell a story. It works.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Speaking with non-Native English Speakers

December 30, 2016 //
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I was reading an article the other day which suggested that native English speakers need to learn how speak English with non-native English speakers.

It seems pretty obvious to this writer that we need to adapt the way we speak – to some degree – to every single person we speak to, even if they’re also native English speakers. That’s what communication is all about; adapting our vocabulary, phrasing and colloquialisms to the person and situation at hand. This is what all communicators do naturally, talking more slowly to non-native speakers, avoiding idiom, softening accents, and so on.

Those that don’t do this are small-minded, either because they don’t understand the basics of communication or they don;t care to make life easier for the person they’re in dialogue with.

Non-native English speakers may find written English easier to understand, because it’s more formal, they can take their time with it and revisit the sentence if they want, or look a word up for a translation. Spoke English offers none of these luxuries, unless you help out. Written and spoken English are also two different, and diverging, languages, each subject to different forces like speed of change and formalising regulations.

So, speaking with or writing for  non-native English speakers is like speaking with or writing for any speaker. It;s basic sales and marketing. You adapt your content to your audience.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
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