Joined Up Marketing

July 17, 2015 //
2

Joined up marketing is what you really want to do in B2B, but it’s actually quite hard to do. It needs a lot of deep thought before you start executing.

The temptation – especially when you have monthly demand generation and pipeline targets to hit – is to take a scattergun approach and puts loads of stuff out there and see what sticks. You can get into a cycle, or perhaps it’s a rut, where you have to get content out there and rather than pause for a week or two and get your strategy tightened down you fire ahead and keep pumping out material.

Notice that I’m not talking about closed loop marketing, though that’s a pretty good approach too.

What I mean by joined up marketing is that your messages appear joined up to your customers. They understand how the messages fit together because you zero in on a certain aspect or message, and then zoom out to show how each aspect fits into the overall picture. You give your customers context, and they understand the buttons they need to push to get the impacts they need to solve the problems you have helped them identify.

To do this right, you have to get your big picture sorted, as well as the component parts that make up your big picture. It’s worth it in the long run though, because with a joined up approach each element reinforces your overall positioning, your stance on the world, the difference that the market acknowledges you make.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

Why Go To A Consultant

July 15, 2015 //
0

Question: Why go to a consultant rather than someone in your company to get something important done?

There are myriad reasons, but the 3 I like and the 3 where I feel people like me can add value are these:

1) Specialised experience. You pay for experience in the field where you need help, because a consultant’s experience allows them to know which corners you can cut to execute quickly and save time.

2) Hard-nosed practicality. Consultants know what works and what doesn’t work. The practical, workable solution gets the job done.

3) Laser-like responsiveness. A good consultant knows that you went with them because they are free from any internal company politics or distractions and because they can deliver.

These 3 reasons are the ones we stand behind at M4 Marketing, which is my consulting practice. Together, they add up to what I think is a compelling offering, namely accelerating a company’s time to market for any important project.

Answer: You should go to a consultant because you want to get something important done.

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

Empty Promises

July 13, 2015 //
0
Empty Promise - No Paper

Empty Promise – No Paper

Don’t make empty promises, promises you know you can’t keep.

Don’t offer things you don’t have. You’ll create a need for something that people now want but that you can’t deliver.

Don’t invite people to use your resource sparingly and then have none of that resource available.

If you run out of something, remove the notice or label it refers to, or amend your stock to say – yes, you’ve guessed it – ‘out of stock’.

These are all easy things you can do.

Remember, you’re looking to establish a relationship with your customer, one based on trust and the mutual expectation that each can deliver their side of the bargain. Don’t blow it by failing to do the easy stuff.

Otherwise, you run the risk of phantom marketing, creating demand which you can’t satisfy. You’ll annoy your audience, turn them off and break whatever bond you had built up. Then you’ll have to work doubly hard to get it back.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Pulling Up The Plants

July 10, 2015 //
0

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.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Technology

Selling Isn’t Yelling

July 8, 2015 //
0

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.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Sales

The Wrong End of The Support Bell Curve

July 6, 2015 //
0

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.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Strategy

The Rear View Mirror in Demand Generation Plans

July 3, 2015 //
0

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.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning

How Long is Your Runway?

July 1, 2015 //
0

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.

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

wikipedia – the gift that keeps on giving?

June 29, 2015 //
0

In the old days, if we wanted to find out something we’d ask someone, and if they didn’t know we’d have to look it up, which possibly involved a trip to the public library to do a spot of research.

Nowadays, if we need to know something, we ask Larry and Sergey, otherwise known as the founders of Google. Or we could consult wikipedia. I’ve used wikipedia thousands of times, and probably linked to it – with a credit – on this blog approaching 100 times.

For me it’s the gift that keeps on giving. It’s never asked me for money and seems to be well funded. I get the occasional feeling that I’m taking it for granted and not giving back, but the feeling soon passes.

It’s useful for background reading on pretty much any topic and while it may not be the most erudite source, it’s a freely and publicly available one, and that for me gives it a high value.

I don’t get caught up in the politics, because there are always two sides to any story, but in the interests of fairness, there’s a link to the donation page here, together with fairly strongly worded arguments against donating here and here.

What about you? Do you treat wikipedia as a ‘go to’ resource on the same level as Google?

 

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Categories Communication, General

Founders – Prepare to Lose the O

June 26, 2015 //
0

Founders – you need to prepare to lose the ‘o’.

If you’re the founder of a business, it’s more than likely that you’ll be the funder too.

In other words, to prove you’re serious about your business – and that others should be serious about it too – you’ll need to be funder as well as founder, to get it off the ground, winning and keeping customers.

Once you’ve been a funder, and you’ve proven your product/market fit, you can add the ‘o’ back in and get back to being a founder again.

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Categories General, Strategy
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