Archives for category: Customers

Pulling Up The Plants

July 10, 2015 //

There used to be a saying from parent to child that got adopted by business:

‘Don’t pull up the plant every 5 minutes to see if the roots have grown.’

The implication was that you needed to give things time to bed down, to settle. Give them a chance, then monitor, measure and adjust if necessary.

That’s really not valid any more. In the digital era you can tell in 5 minutes if something’s working, or not working, especially if you’re in the volume business. You can check the roots as often as you like. You can tweak something, see if it works, and tweak it again, ad infinitum.

You’re in constant tweak mode, like when you’re driving, making many micro-corrections on the straight, large adjustments to overtake or big turns at a bend or junction.

Pull up those plants immediately. Test early and test often.

Tags Feedback, Measurement

Categories Customers, Marketing, Technology

Selling Isn’t Yelling

July 8, 2015 //

Selling isn’t yelling. Marketing isn’t yelling either.

That’s the wrong direction.

Selling is NOT:

– talking

– telling

– reciting

– shouting

– bullying

– lecturing

– pontificating

Selling IS:

– asking

– listening

– qualifying

– disqualifying

– challenging

– guiding

– advising

That’s the right direction. It comes from the customer to you, not the other way around. Pull versus push.

So how do you initiate the conversation? Tell them something that compels them to engage with you, to put their hand up, to come to you.

Tags Listening, Shouting, Talking

Categories Communication, Customers, Sales

The Wrong End of The Support Bell Curve

July 6, 2015 //

When you look at support generally, it seems to me that the bell curve is in operation quite a lot. A few support questions account for the almost all of the bell curve in terms of the frequency with which they occur, and then a multitude of obscure and uncommon queries occupy the outer reaches.

Companies in the support business (all companies, really) try and whip through the major bell curve with content and answers to FAQs designed to pre-empt the vast numbers of people contacting them. What happens then is that their metrics and their productivity get sucked away by the time and effort spent on the unusual, hard-to-categorise, hard-to-legislate-for stuff. Or they ignore them and focus on the 90%.

I have my broadband and my mobile contracts with the same provider. I also have an interesting issue, namely that my outbound email works fine from the country where I live, whereas when I’m overseas, the outgoing SMTP server fails to send my mail. It works fine inbound, and fine for webmail in either direction, obviously.

I have spent the last couple months trying to find a solution, which is either to change the outgoing SMTP server on my laptop, or else connect via my mobile phone and change the outgoing server on that. Except it’s not that easy, and as you can imagine I’ve been pushed from pillar to post by people who are tasked with getting support queries off their stack and onto someone else’s rather than solve the customers’ problems and see their metrics killed.

The last communication by email was from the broadband side of the house advising me to send a mail to care@ the mobile provider, which I did. One week later I got an auto-respond email back – one week later! – saying that the care@ email address has not been supported since 2004 – 2004! I then contacted the mobile provider via live chat – for there is no way of emailing a support query, which you knew if you were keeping up – who told me that I needed to call the tech support call centre which charges by the minute.

This has left me ticked off and my provider no further forward because it has invested significant aggregated time failing to fix my issue – which is important to me because I travel often.

If you’ve got an unusual support query, you’ll find yourself at the ugly end of the support bell curve, the end where nobody wins, unless you’re prepared to pay additional cash.

Tags Support

Categories Communication, Customers, Strategy

The Rear View Mirror in Demand Generation Plans

July 3, 2015 //

We’re always encouraged to look forward, to plan for the future. I remember trying to get an interview for a job a long time ago. ‘Do you want a copy of my CV? I asked. ‘No,’ said the guy, I’m more interested in what you’re planning to do, not what you’ve done.’

I admit it’s unusual for a recruiter to say that, and I should temper his comment by saying that it turns out he was head of a multi-level marketing company, but my point is that people take the approach that since you can’t change the past should focus on doing something about the future. Past performance is not a guide to future performance, the financial ads are fond of telling us.

The past can inform, however. That’s why we learn the importance of the rear view mirror when we start driving. Nowhere is this more important than in monthly or quarterly demand generation plans, or in fact any kind of plan. It’s all too tempting to sweep the last indifferent plan under the rug and start again with a fresh- forward-looking plan. If you do that every period, you’re not accountable, because you’re not learning or improving with experience. You have no reference point and you’re simply presenting yourself as a moving target for people whose aim will eventually catch up with you.

So before you build your next demand generation plan, measure and analyse what worked the last time, and what the conversion rates were at each stage, so that you can plan the next period with some knowledge. You should then be able to improve your targeting and forecasting with each subsequent period, having done the closed loop thing on the previous period.

Practice makes permanent if you never look back, but it makes perfect if you look back and learn.

Tags Demand Generation

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning

How Long is Your Runway?

July 1, 2015 //

When you’re executing a project, it helps to think about runway. For example, when you’re looking to generate leads for sales people to follow up on, there is a lead time between starting the project and leads coming in from the project you’ve executed. You need to plan for this runway, or else you’ll be trying to do vertical take off, and unfortunately business operates like an aeroplane rather than a helicopter or a jump jet.

The smaller your project, the smaller the runway you need. The larger the project, the larger the runway. You can get a light aircraft off the ground in 200 metres. You need at least ten times that for a jumbo jet. Same thing with business projects.

Make sure you’ve allowed enough runway, or you won’t get off the ground.

Equally important, the larger the project, the more runway you need to bring it home, complete it and assess its performance.

Make sure you’ve allowed enough runway, or you won’t land to fly another day.

Tags Lead time, Runway

Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Don’t Pack Too Much In

June 24, 2015 //

Most meetings over-run. Why is that? Two reasons spring to mind. Firstly, they’re not properly managed. Secondly, we always try and pack way too much into them.

It’s not just meetings, it’s the same with presentations, anything involving an agenda, business or travel itinerary. We get too ambitious, want to cover too much and we don’t allow enough time for each item. As I’m fond of saying, we’re trying to stuff 10 pounds of dung into a 5 pound bag, with ugly and unsatisfying results.

Sometimes we deal with an item more quickly than we thought we would, but more often than not we take longer than we planned. It’s human nature, we’re social beings. With a modest amount of experience you can see straight away if an agenda is going to over-run, it’s not rocket science. I like to allow more time than I think I need for a meeting, because then I aim to finish early and give people some of their day back, rather than the other way with most meetings. It’s the temporal equivalent of under-promising and over-delivering. Then you start to garner a reputation as someone who can properly manage meetings. “I’ll go to his meeting, I’ll get something out of it and I won’t be chasing my tail for the rest of the day.”

It’s all about finding the right productivity balance between an agenda that’s too long, and one that’s too short, which then becomes prey to Parkinson’s Law. In my view though, it’s better to have a meeting with a light agenda where you get some useful discussion and some firm decisions, over a heavy agenda where you end up having to park everything and the time invested is wasted.

Tags Agenda, Itinerary, Meetings, time

Categories Communication, Customers, General

Content Equals Writing

June 10, 2015 //

The word content is everywhere. It’s the buzz word for marketing, especially digital marketing, sales and the online world. You’re nowhere and no-one without content.

Content hasn’t really changed its meaning from the original. It’s still the stuff inside that’s important.

My 2 brothers and I are in 3 completely different industries. I’m in sales and marketing consulting, brother 1 is in natural history broadcasting and publishing, brother 2 is in English language teaching literature.We all create content for a living, which is perhaps what you might expect of 3 siblings with conjoined DNA.

We’re all involved in content, but we wouldn’t call it that. We would call ourselves writers (among other things, polite and otherwise).

Don’t get hung up on the word content. It’s not a new piece of jargon to be afraid of. It’s still about writing engaging stories that your audience can identify with and derive something from.

Tags Content, Writer, Writing

Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales

When The Numbers Do Lie

June 8, 2015 //

The number system is a handy thing. You know the sequence of it and this helps you navigate life and work in an incalculable – pun intended – number of ways.

It’s only when the numbering system becomes unpredictable and lets you down that you feel helpless and want to exclaim ‘WTF!’ very loudly.

Take the numbering system in the estate I live in. Calling it maverick would be like calling a serial killer troubled. You struggle to fathom why they did it that way. I swear people never give a thought for how someone – possibly at some point a customer or buyer – can find it so hard to find a place for the first time. I don’t know a resident of the estate who understands how the numbering works. Our postman does, but that’s his job after all. You get visitors coming in asking ‘excuse me, I’m looking for number 37?’ and you have to say ‘I’m sorry, I do live here, but I don’t know. The numbering system is a mystery. You might try down there, but no promises.’

The other day I was travelling to the new London office of a client for a meeting. I had in my head a picture of where the office was, but when you emerge from the underground you rarely know which side of the road you are. There tend not to be helpful exit signs like ‘High Holborn – south side’. As a consequence, you don’t know which direction to go. Try asking someone which way is east, west, north or south – so easy in the US and engrained in city-building and thus people’s heads – and you’ll get a confused look as if you asked them what the chances were of seeing a Hutu tribesman on the south Pole.

I was advised to go in one direction, which I did for a few minutes. Following numbers is harder than you might think, as few offices or shops display their number, possibly because they don’t want you to find them the first time. After a while I realised that the numbers on both sides of the street were heading in the wrong direction. So I did a one-eighty and headed the other direction, but suffered the same fate. Worried that the bank of offices I needed were in fact held somewhere in a parallel universe, I enquired again and was sent back the original way. Sure enough, the numbering went against me again, but then after 5 minutes started to move in my favour.

Why on earth would you make it difficult for people to find you the first time, people who want to give you their time and money? Madness I tell you, madness.

Tags Guidance, Number, Sign

Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

The Successful Marketing Manager’s Magic Word

June 5, 2015 //

I recently wrote a post on the successful sales manager’s magic word. That word was buffer.

It might also be prudent to offer a suggestion on what the successful marketing manager’s magic word is.

That word is buffer, as well. In fact, building buffer is a pretty good mantra for everything we do, from all types of work to how we manage our leisure time, our coffee appointments, our train departures and our meetings.

Just as the successful sales manager builds buffer around a team target that’s lower than the sum of the individual rep targets, so too should the successful marketing manager build buffers around the different marketing initiatives, especially around demand generation which in B2B circles is so essential to the successful sales manager, relying as they do on a steady stream of leads from marketing.

If you have a team of individual outbound ‘demand gen’ reps working the phones, make sure that the total of their individual targets is more than the team or company total. Similarly, if you have a range of outbound activities planned for the quarter, make sure that the sum of the targets for each of those activities – in terms of leads, opportunities and resulting revenues – exceeds the team or company total. You need to insure yourself against activities not happening or underperforming, or a rep underperforming, getting sick or leaving to give you a back-fill headache.

Remember to go back and measure the actual performance against target too, for the previous period. Then over time you can improve and be able to refine the amount of buffer you need to build into each area.

Even the best laid plans and estimates go awry. Give yourself some buffer, to make sure you can over-deliver on your promises.

Tags Buffer, Demand Generation, Slack

Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

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