Archives for category: Marketing
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The B2B Customer Call

April 13, 2016 //
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A B2B customer is far, far more important than a B2C customer. Let me tell you why.

I work from the home office quite a lot of the time. When I’m on a customer call, or a customer’s customer call, and there’s anyone in the house, I always warn them that I’m not to be disturbed unless the house is burning down.

A B2C customer is one customer, one consumer out of many. There are degrees here, of course, since some B2C customers are large or repeat customers, and spend much more money than one-off or small basket-size customers.

A B2B customer, however, doesn’t represent their own interests, they represent the interests of lots of other employees, who are in effect lots of other customers. They’re corporate and they have very, very deep pockets. And for that reason, they’re very important. If they take away their business from you, you lose an awful lot. If one consumer does, it’s no biggie.

A B2B customer call is like the red ‘On Air’ sign outside a broadcasting studio. You’re broadcasting to a large number of individuals and are not to be disturbed. One bad experience is immediately magnified throughout the entire audience – or company.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

What Brits Mean When They Say…

April 6, 2016 //
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I’ve always prided myself on being honest and saying what’s on my mind. Not necessarily framed in a hurtful or undiplomatic manner, but one that leaves no room for misunderstanding. After all, people, especially customers, need to know what you’re thinking. They also need to be advised what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

It turns out, of course, that the Brits have long been guilty of not exactly saying what they mean, as the table here will testify. I’m indebted to James Trezona of Rooster Punk for drawing my attention to this table, though the version I’ve shown is borrowed from here. In this sense it would seem that the Brits are similar to other peoples, like the Japanese for example, in eschewing direct feedback.

Anglo-EU Translation Guide

Anglo-EU Translation Guide

 

I do think, though, that this British habit of hiding behind the nuances of the mother tongue is gradually dying out. You could put this down to a bunch of mega trends I guess: globalisation, American cultural influences, the erosion of the British class system, our increasing inclination not to waste precious free time, to name but a few.

If it’s not dying out, then it’s certainly lessening from a bracing wind to a gentle breeze.

Or maybe something else is at work here? Maybe we’re not very good at delivering bad news. Maybe we’re too willing to soften the blow for our audience and ourselves. Either way, I think we’re getting better at that too.

There is, however, still sufficient truth in the table, and sufficient difference between what Brits say and what they mean – and differences between two situations is of course the root of humour – for it to be seriously funny.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales

The Collective Intake of Breath

March 28, 2016 //
6

We’ve all witnessed those moments when someone does something truly remarkable.

What emerges in the immediate aftermath of one of those moments is what I call the Collective Intake of Breath.

They’re easier to spot in the world of entertainment I think. In soccer, there is a moment like the Cruyff turn, showcased in the 1974 World Cup. For a brief instant, the entire audience is captivated and taken aback by the sheer artistry. It simultaneously draws breath as if it were one giant multi-headed beast.

Two of these personal moments come to me first, though they occur – thankfully – regularly enough in a lifetime to keep us interested. One was seeing Michael Jackson in concert, in front of an estimated audience of 130,000, do his moonwalk thing – but sideways. I kid you not. It was mesmerising, and for a split second, you could hear nothing.

Another was a decade before when I was at the world table tennis championships, watching a match between an attacking Japanese player and a defensive Chinese player. The defensive player was pinned to the back of the court when another Japanese salvo flashed to his extreme left. In an instant, needing the extra distance to reach across his body to play the right-handed backhand, he turned his back on the table and ball, and flicked his outstretched wrist in a slicing motion. The ball flew off his racket, a centimetre over the net and he was back in the rally. It was probably the finest shot I’d ever seen, and I would have seen a million shots at that point. Same collective intake of breath.

So when we’re producing work, perhaps we should aim for something so remarkable that we cause in our audience a collective intake of breath? Not by offending or shocking them, but by amazing and astonishing them.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

One Chance

March 25, 2016 //
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These days, as a provider of products and services in either a B2B or B2C scenario, you get very few chances before you blow it. If you’re in a commodity business, you get one chance. Mess up and you’re gone, even if you’ve had a good track record before your faux pas.

One strike and you’re out.

I’ve bought 3 shirts from an online discount store in the last 3 months. It’s the usual end-of-line strategy and stuff. The prices are good, and the quality of the product is decent. But the damn things take ages to arrive. Ages as in a month or more. And it’s tough to get customer service to respond, unless they’ve good news and can give you a tracking number. I haven’t got my last item yet…when I do I’m not using them again.

Years and years ago, when I lived in Scotland’s capital, I used to go to a local fast food place for fish and chips or pizza. One time I got a chicken pizza. I was ill with food poisoning that night and the whole of the next day. Never went there again. Did I tell them about my experiences? I can’t actually remember, but I voted with my feet.

I’m not the type of person who goes back looking to get a refund or compensation – life’s too short. I simply shop elsewhere. And don’t forget that we typically tell 3 times as many people about a bad experience as we do after a good one.

This is why, as a business, you must have a relentless and constant focus on quality, end-to-end. The thread can be that fine.

Along with trench warfare mentality, it’s a good mindset to imagine that you only have one chance to impress with every customer, every time.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Mea Culpa – Not

March 23, 2016 //
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Do you know what I find pretty shocking these days? When a company doesn’t admit they were wrong, or they made a mistake, or their service failed to live up to expectations.

Now there’s a small chance a company didn’t know that its website was down for a good while, for example, but it’s a very small chance these days. When was the last time you saw a company admit they messed up, unless they were forced to because a PR issue they could have stemmed early has spiralled into a nightmare?

I recently got an email from a company whose stuff I subscribe to, because it’s very good content. The email came thru with the subject line exactly like this: [insert subversive subject line]. I kid you not. It’s wrong on so many levels, even when you try and explain it away as deliberate, but I never saw a subsequent apology.

Companies seem to want to sweep it under the corporate carpet, forget it ever happened, or else hope that no-one noticed. They hardly ever say ‘mea culpa’ unless they have to. Wouldn’t it be the most refreshing thing in the world if you went onto a website and there was a prominent statement to the effect of:

“Do you know something, our website was down for 2 hours last Thursday, and that might have been when you were browsing it. If that’s the case, we humbly apologise for your experience not being up the standards we set ourselves. We’ll try our best not to let it happen again.”

Do you think it will send their customers’ lawyers scurrying off to see if they can eek out a few bucks for a broken SLA? Do you think it’ll send their stock price plummeting and plunge the world’s markets into disarray? Probably not. A little bit of honesty, humility and integrity will in all likelihood have the opposite effect.

This is what it boils down to. It shouldn’t be a case of ‘Phew, got away with that one, let’s chalk it up to good fortune’ but rather ‘We should do better, we should come clean and we should redouble our efforts to live up to our brand promise.’

It’s OK to say ‘I’m sorry, my fault.’  In fact I encourage it, especially if you manage people.

The trouble is, it’s almost always expediency over effort.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

It Is What It Is

March 14, 2016 //
2

One of my previous bosses – and I’ve been fortunate enough to have several excellent ones – had a phrase he often relied upon.

“It is what it is.”

This for me is all about accepting what you have, dealing with what’s in front of you, and making the best of the ingredients. You made a plan, you executed it, results followed and you’ve measured where you stand. It’s no use lamenting the what ifs, because, as the older generation still say, “if ifs and ands were pots and pans.” The second half of that phrase contains what you might term a ‘politically incorrect epithet,’ but it conveys the point well enough.

There’s something so succinct about It is what it is, that for me it’s like a snap of the fingers where you break out of the negative or wistful feelings and get in the right mindset, get your game face on. Let’s deal with what we have and let’s make the best of what we have.

Because, after all, we have what we have. We’re active and in the present tense. We can improve our future situation with this hand we’ve been dealt. In life and business we can’t really ask for a re-deal.

 

 

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Categories General, Marketing, Planning

There Are No Competitors

March 11, 2016 //
2

“There are no competitors”. I used to be fond of saying this, especially in previous industries I’d worked in which were fairly commoditised and definitely got the thin end of the Porter 5 forces wedge. These industries were also fiercely competitive.

My point was really this: There are no competitors, only potential partners or customers.” There is always a possibility of working with someone rather than against them. It’s more productive, and better for the collective, greater good. Of course, one of my reasons for saying this was to re-position my company, and de-position the opposition, by making such a statement, implying that we were different, unique even.

To an extent this is similar to the process of challenging the status quo. When you can look at things from a fresh perspective, and frame the place where you compete in a different way, then you reframe your market, you create fresh categories for yourself and you forge a unique set of dynamics where you are the lynchpin or fulcrum around which everything revolves.

When you can do this, your competitors melt away. There are no competitors; only you exist in this space, and your value enhances accordingly.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Challenging the Status Quo

March 9, 2016 //
0

We’re constantly hearing about entrepreneurs or leading companies that challenge the status quo and look for new ways to do things. This can often give them an important edge in the market, which inevitably takes the competition time to identify and address.

Challenging the status quo is easier said than done, however. It takes a certain mindset which needs to operate in two dimensions. The first dimension is that you have to be able to think outside the box, to use a battered cliche, to be able to eschew the standard assumptions and accepted situations. The second is that you need to be able to do it a lot, and ideally all the time.

I was reminded of this some months ago when helping to prepare some messaging around a certain market, which included defining that market and how that market was structured. A couple of the senior individuals were in the team and I was struck by how differently and more expansively they were able to view the market they operated in, and hence how they could position their company in a more different and more beneficial way.

They simply brushed away the assumptions about how the industry was structured, assumptions I had wrongly taken as the pillars for how things worked in the industry.

It’s obvious that the role of senior executives is to be looking over the parapet far more often than other staff who are more siloed, specialist, operational, or tactical. But, that said, it was refreshing to see people who took a professional approach to questioning everything and thinking deeply about what they could and couldn’t move.

As you can imagine, visionaries are far more able to see everything as movable. For them there is no status quo.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy, Technology

Customer Requirements

March 7, 2016 //
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It’s hard to underestimate the importance of understanding your customer’s requirements.

I only needed one lesson to remember this. In my final year of college I paid a few quid to go on a 2-day ‘introduction to business’ course. It was a very academic college, with almost no course devoted to business, so this was something entirely new for many of us. It was very interactive, by which I mean we were divided into groups and completed tasks like launching a new product, negotiating the construction of a building with a local council, or selling something to customers. I remember it from thirty years ago because we learned by doing. If I’d been lectured at, the course would have melted into the hundreds of other days of ‘training’ that I’ve received.

The course was designed to simulate working in real business, not learning the theoretical stuff you do as a undergraduate or graduate. As such, the exercises had to be completed within a certain time. As you’re probably sick of hearing from me, time is the one thing we never have enough of in business, so the exercises had a genuine applicability.

In one exercise our job was to ‘manufacture’ products and sell them to ‘customers’. The product was the paper that fits into 4-hole punch binders, European A4 size. Our team was running behind on time and after a poor sales experience with our first group of customers, we were in a mad dash to get in front of our next group of customers.

This time we were ready, we had our paper, freshly punched, and proudly demonstrated this to our latest group of customers. They became really agitated and threatened to leave the meeting. We didn’t know what the problem was, so we asked them. So they took out their binders. The binders were A5, 2-hole punch.

We hadn’t understood the rules of the game, and we hadn’t listened to our customers to understand their requirements, which were different to the other groups of customers in the game.

Didn’t make that mistake again…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

What’s Your Filter?

March 4, 2016 //
2

What’s your filter when you’re writing, for business or pleasure? As with many things, physical or digital, I find it often helps to put something through a filter to clean it and make it suitable for consumption.

I create a lot of content in the area of business software. Some of it is quite technical and some of the concepts are quite complex. I’m not technical and I sometimes find it hard to fathom technical stuff. I do complex well either, and I always strive for simple if I can. If you haven’t explained software in business terms for a business audience, you haven’t explained it properly.

So the filter I use is me. First of all I have to be sure that I can understand something. Someone has to be able to explain something new to me in a way that helps me understand it, without hiding behind jargons, TLAs or short cuts. If I don’t understand it, I ask a question to get an explanation I understand. If I understand it, then that’s half the battle.

Once I understand, I try to write it in a way that I would understand. I know that sounds silly when you read it that way. Sometimes, however, we can write about something without fully understanding what we’re writing. So I ask myself, ‘could I understand this if I was reading about it as a novice in this area?’

If it’s not understandable to me, I try and re-write it until it is. Of course, I’ll make mistakes and accurately convey a misunderstanding or else inaccurately describe something I understood correctly. But that’s why we do drafts, so we can get feedback and improve them.

My golden rule: if it’s understandable to me, it’s understandable to anyone.

 

 

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy
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