Archives for category: Marketing
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Great Products Don’t Need a Manual

September 3, 2014 //
4

We have a vacuum cleaner, as I’m sure you do. It’s quite a well-known brand with a purportedly heavy emphasis on product design. I hate it. I won’t list the myriad reasons why I hate it, because that would be beyond dull. I will mention one though, to illustrate the point of this post.

You have to take off the dust container to empty it, which as far as I’m concerned requires a degree in advanced engineering. There are two buttons to push with helpful arrows on them, which seem to want to work together but which fight with each other and act in opposite directions so that within a matter of moments you’re wanting to wrench it from the base and cast it over your garden wall.

Mrs D bought the vacuum cleaner, and loves it, naturally.

But my point is this: great, well designed products don’t need a manual. Manuals always make me hark back to the bad old days of IT, which are still here, where some smart alec would answer your ‘how do I’ question by telling you to ‘RTFM’, which stands for the profane version of ‘Read the Flipping Manual’.

I don’t want to read the manual. I shouldn’t need to read the manual. Apple have been producing great products since the i-Mac and before. I can remember getting two documents: one is a quick start guide where in 5 easy steps you can learn how to plug in your device and power it up, ready for use; the other is a manual that you only ever need to refer to if you have to troubleshoot or you want to learn some ninja inside moves.

Every product designer should be asking themselves this question: how can I make this product so easy to use the user can just switch it on and pick it up as they go? Try setting that challenge to the folk that produce TV remotes. You might as well lock them in and throw away the key.

Vacuum cleaners can be funny though. Here’s the funniest joke from 2014’s Edinburgh Fringe.

 

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

It’s Not You, It’s Me

August 27, 2014 //
0

A sales proposal is a bit of a misnomer really. It should be called a buy proposal. ‘Here’s how, what, when and why we propose you buy from us.’

I supposed it’s called a sales proposal because most sales proposals start selling from the first line. If you’re not filling in a tender document and are therefore constrained by the order and flow of the information you present, you have 100% control over this document. Sales proposals don’t start with you. They start with your customer.

Next time you write a sales proposal, try this approach:

– First, what is your customer looking to accomplish? What are their goals? They’re not looking to buy what you have, they’re looking for the benefits and achievements that result from buying what you have

– Second, if relevant, what is stopping them from getting to where they want to be? Especially for larger investments, there is usually something that’s stopping them from achieving their goals, otherwise they wouldn’t be spending money with you. There is also an opportunity cost of not fixing the problem if they decide to do nothing

– Third, how have you helped companies with this problem before? Relevant experience in your prospect’s field is very important. They don’t want you learning the job on their time and with their assets

– Fourth, how will what you have uniquely help them achieve their goals? What makes your offering better than the competition, including ‘internal’ or ‘do nothing’ options?

– Fifth, what results will they get from investing in you? You need to demonstrate the planned for value if at all possible

– Sixth, what will this cost them? Simple, clear, unambiguous is the way to go

– Seventh, your call to action. What do you want them to do next? Call you? Have a meeting? Seek further clarification? Place the order? Lead them down the next natural step towards buying from you

The Sales Proposal: here’s what we propose you do, not here’s what we propose we do.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

But Enough About Me

August 25, 2014 //
0

In addition to my sales and marketing consulting work, I do a little bit of mentoring. The companies I work with tend to be either start-up companies looking for the best way to go to market or established companies who want to break into new markets.

I often ask the companies to show me samples of their communications and marketing, or to explain how they approach a sales presentation with prospects and existing customers. Most of them – around 90% I would say – start with themselves. Who they are, what they do, their history, that kind of thing.

It happens a lot, but it’s fundamentally wrong. Everything should start with your customer and their market. Whether you’re hoping to build a relationship, or you’re looking to challenge the assumptions and knowledge of your customer, you always start with them. Their market, their issues, their drivers, their objectives, their barriers, their success factors. If you can’t demonstrate that knowledge, you can’t make a connection, you can’t tell if you can help them, you don’t know if there’s a fit, you don’t earn their respect.

Once you demonstrate that you understand your customers’ pains and requirements, then you can establish how you’ve helped other companies with similar problems and how you’re uniquely placed to help them.

The direction of the dynamic with successful companies is from the customer to them, not from them to the customer. That way you’re not selling to them, you’re guiding them to buy.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

What’s the Call to Action?

August 13, 2014 //
0

In my previous post, I shared the first of the two things you must do in any business communication. The second is so simple, yet is so rarely done.

What’s the call to action? In plain English: what do you want your customer to do? Your customer is busy, you earned their interest by explaining quickly why they should be interested in what you have to say and how they will benefit.

At this point they’re looking for your guidance. How do you want them to proceed from here? Make it clear what you want from them. Here are some examples:

– click here to request your [whatever you’re giving them]

– please expect a call from me early next week

– call this number to book your place

– reply with #AmazonBasket to add it to your basket & buy later

You’ve got your reader this far. Don’t blow it at the end by leaving them hanging. Tell them what you want them to do and make it easy for them to do it. Simple.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Who Cares?

August 11, 2014 //
0

Whenever you communicate with someone in business, whatever your business, there are two main things that your communication needs to do, otherwise you’re wasting your time – and theirs.

The first of these is the first chronologically as well. Why should the person you’re communicating with be interested in what you have to say? Their time is at least as precious as yours, so you need to be able to quickly provide them with an answer to the following questions that are really variations on a theme:

– what’s in it for me?

– who cares?

– why should I read any further?

The only way to answer is for you to clearly state the benefit to them of what you have to say. Ideally in the heading of your communication, and certainly in the first paragraph.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Ask the Customer

July 30, 2014 //
0

We do so much work trying to persuade our customers to buy from us that we often forget that they hold the answers to our success. If we provide a good product or service and we have our customers’ interests at heart, they’ll want us to do well and they’ll want to build relationships with us. In short, they’re rooting for us.

– Want to know what success looks like for your customer? Ask the customer what they’re trying to achieve, what’s stoping them from getting there, and what they require to remove the barriers.

– Want to know why you won the deal, so you can improve your offering? Ask the customer.

– Want to know why you lost the deal, so you can improve your offering? Ask the customer, but make it easy to get honest feedback by sending someone not involved in the deal, because it might be personal.

– Want to know how you can sell better? Ask the customer how they want to buy.

– Want to know what products and services to develop next? Ask the customer. They may not know what the next big thing is going to be, but they know what’s big for them right now.

– Want to know how much to charge? Ask the customer what they’re prepared to pay.

If in doubt, customer will out, to paraphrase Mr Shakespeare…

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

The Fair Exchange

July 28, 2014 //
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The role of marketing is to influence the exchange of outcomes between two parties. This exchange normally involves one party parting with money, but not always. The role of personal selling, as one of the 4 main elements of the promotional mix, is to close the outcome in favour of the selling organisation – closing the deal.

The natural inclination of the sales organisation is to get the best possible deal, to extract as much out of the sale as possible. The phrase ‘don’t leave any money on the table’ is the mantra of the sales-maximising organisation. Taken too far, this short term mentality, that of treating the customer as someone you can shaft because they’re never likely to buy from you again, has been around as long the sales profession itself. It is flawed, and if you believe in karma, you’ll know that in some form it will come back to bite you.

A successful deal is all about a fair exchange. The deal has to feel right for both parties. If it doesn’t, one party will renege on the deal and it won’t stay on the books. Alternatively, if they can’t pull out because of contractual reasons, they will sour the relationship, if it isn’t sour already. They won’t be a repeat customer and they’ll also tell 3 times as many people about their experiences as they would if the deal was a fair one.

A fair exchange is a long term deal, a partnership, where both companies address their business problems and profit.

No-one said life was fair, but if you want to win in the long run, you can make it fair.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

There is a Difference Between I Like and It’s Good

July 18, 2014 //
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One of the guiding rules I have heard among oenophiles is this: if you like the wine, it’s a good wine. This brings up a really interesting point on people’s preferences, the differences between subjectivity and objectivity, and how that affects the purchase process and in turn the marketing we design to influence purchase.

Many people either can’t or won’t make the distinction between liking something and judging its quality. ‘If I like it, then it must be good’ is perhaps one view. Think about a piece of musical genre, or a sporting style, a movie, a wine, or any B2B or B2C product or service you come into contact with. It’s unusual to hear someone say ‘it’s good, but I don’t like it’, or ‘it’s not a great product, but I like it.’

Most reviews of restaurants, movies, books or other products tend to be either a number of stars, which is a quality attribution, and a thumb or thumbs up, which for me means whether or not they like it, but which could also be construed as a quality recommendation. Quality should be an objective thing, whereas liking something, or not, should be purely subjective. I would like to see more reviews that make a distinction between the two. I’m interested in your opinion, and that means you telling me why it’s good and why you like it. I value your view and that’s why the why is important to me.

So when it comes to marketing and sales, we need to figure out what is important to our customer:

– do they distinguish between I like and It’s Good?

– what would help us find this out?

– do both I like and It’s Good have to be in place for us to be able to positively influence their purchasing behaviour?

– do we want to sell to the I Likes or the It’s Goods?

I think the answer to all these questions is it depends, and is something you should figure out for your own situation.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Being Off The Grid

July 2, 2014 //
0

When it comes to experiencing things, there are two kinds of people. The first type is those who, if they can’t actively follow something live, they follow it online while they’re doing something else. For example, getting updates on the Wimbledon semi-finals while you’re at work. The second type is those who, if they can’t experience all of it live, they want to shut the world away and experience it later, recorded, and have their own ‘private live’ – albeit somewhat delayed. The example of this is someone who doesn’t want to be disturbed with any updates on an event, and who rushes home unmolested by real-time devices or intrusions to watch or listen to the recording.

I belong to the former group. I can’t see the point of experiencing an event in a sterile environment that’s live only to you. It’s asocial rather than anti-social. Being off the grid – and staying off the grid, which some people prefer to do – is pretty hard to do, especially in this connected world we inhabit. If we haven’t bothered to configure our settings, our laptops and mobile devices get pinged all the time by social media updates. Our instinct is to check the ping, even if we’re on silent – I’d better check, it might be important – and before we know it, our concentration drops for a moment, we read the update unwittingly, and the surprise is gone.

From a sales and marketing point of view, we have customers and prospects who embrace always-on technology, and some that don’t. We also have customers and prospects who are the first kind of people and some that are the second kind. As sales and marketing professionals, we need to try to allow customers to interact with us by whichever means they prefer, which might be exclusively one, or both.

Ask yourself this question: if I work in a predominantly digital environment how should I serve my customers and prospects who prefer to be off the grid, who respond to traditional rather than digital forms of communication, who don’t want to be contactable sometimes? Do I actually want to serve them at all?

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Always Check Your Comms

June 18, 2014 //
4
Always Check Your Comms

Always Check Your Comms

It always pays to check your customer communications before they go out. It’s a good idea to have someone else – ideally someone away from the business – to check the communications, because you’re often too close to it to see a problem.

This is a recent sample of emails in my inbox. One of them is a problem for me. Can you tell which one? [Pauses, for dramatic effect…] It’s the bottom email. I can say with some certainty that there is no chance that this email will make my Dad smile, since he died some years ago and his ashes are probably fertilising a bowling green somewhere in the middle of England.

Had I received this email in the immediate aftermath of his demise, when I was a teary, shambling wreck of a man, I would probably have torched the offices of the people who sent it, and certainly unsubscribed for ever.

Where you can, always try and put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re sending something to, the person you’d like to buy from you. You’re hoping to build a rapport with them, not dash it to pieces in one fell swoop.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
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