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Are You Still Making These Three Marketing Mistakes?

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Has your marketing team ever made one of these three mistakes?

Marketing Mistake #1: Let’s Do Something Because Everybody’s Doing It

“Everybody needs some case studies, right? You have to have a blog, right? You can’t be a real technology company without a stack of whitepapers, right?”

Marketing Mistake #2: Let’s Do Something Because Nobody’s Doing It

“None of our competitors have an Etsy page, so to stand out, we’re going to do that.”

Marketing Mistake #3: Let’s Do Something Because Sales Needs It

“This one sales guy said he’s this close to closing a really big deal, and all he needs is for us to have a booth at this one conference in Barcelona where the buyer’s going to be next month.”

None of those seem like good reasons to spend product marketing resources. If your team has run a marketing activity based on those kinds of decisions, leave a comment below letting us know how it’s gone for you.

How Should We Decide What Marketing Should Invest In?

Here’s an approach that works for me and my clients:

Map out the customer’s buying process
Understand the needs and frustrations of the people involved
Identify the obstacles preventing prospects from purchasing from you
Create marketing materials to help your prospects get past those obstacles

This is a simplification, but it can help avoid some of the more common traps.

If you can’t figure out how a customer would be moved closer to making a good decision because of something you do, why would you do it?

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Shoulder to shoulder collateral: The secret to what your customers and your salespeople want

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Say you’ve spent some time creating your buying experience map.

And say you’ve figured out where your deals are getting stuck, and you’re ready to create that key piece of collateral or that key sales enablement tool that you hope is going to get your customers past that obstacle. You’re ready to create something that will accelerate your revenues and make life better for your customers.

Before you start creating that tool, do a quick check. Ask one question:

Could it be used shoulder to shoulder?

To explain what I mean by shoulder to shoulder collateral, let me use the example of the product brochure. Most of you probably don’t rely as heavily on the printed product brochure as you once did, and that’s probably for the best. But I use it as an example because everyone has either made one or been given one at some point.

Now imagine how that printed brochure would get used by your salespeople. Would it be something they leave behind as they’re on their way out of a sales call, hoping it doesn’t hit the bottom of the recycling bin before the door closes behind them?

Or is it something they can use to get invited to the same side of the table as the prospect, literally shoulder to shoulder, and work through how the product is going to solve the prospect’s problems?

A really good sales enablement tool, whether it’s a product brochure, or an ROI calculator, or a live demo on a tablet, or anything else that your customer needs to see, can get you invited to the customer’s side of the table. If this doesn’t happen literally, it will at least happen in the customer’s mind.

You want the customer to think “These people are on my side. They’re working with me to solve my problem.”

When you’re creating these tools, ask yourself “How would this be used to have a shared conversation about a problem the customer has?” It might wind up being a tool that gets shared digitally, and your salesperson’s shoulders might be situated nowhere near the prospect’s shoulders, but if you can imagine them using it this way, you’re more likely to be creating something that will build understanding and rapport.

When in doubt, think of the opposite situation. Think of the last piece of ordinary vendor collateral that was sent to you or you found on a website. You know, the one with a lot of product shots, maybe some acronyms, a couple of quotes from satisfied customers, a reference to a magical quadrant of some kind, and maybe even some pictures of shiny happy people pointing at a laptop and smiling.

What did you do with it? You probably either recycled it or deleted it from you device. But why? It did all the things it was supposed to do, right?

It talked about benefits, not features.
It included the voice of the customer.
It demonstrated differentiation in the marketplace, and so on…

So why was it a dud?

If you can’t see your problems being solved in what you’re reading (or more likely, scanning quickly) you lose interest. If you don’t get a sense that the vendor is on your side, you’ll ditch it and move on to the next thing. And this is as it should be, because you’re busy doing your job, and it’s not your job to buy things from vendors.

Your customers are a lot like you. So the next time you’re creating some collateral for them, imagine yourself or your salespeople pulling up to the same side of the table as the customer and using the collateral to share a conversation.

If you can’t imagine that happening, you probably have to start over.

And your salespeople will appreciate it too. They don’t want to clutter their prospects’ desks with glossy paper garbage stapled to their business card. They want something they can use to develop a relationship of trust.

Start aiming for collateral that passes the shoulder to shoulder test.

If it’s done right, the customer will make it their own. They will save it to their favourites, or they will print it and scribble some notes on it, or forward it to a colleague with their thoughts attached. It becomes their tool for getting what they want, not just another piece of nameless “content” that you leave in your wake, destined for the recycle bin.

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Excerpt from a design by Jenny Cham based on a presentation by Kerry Bodine

What sales can learn from B2B Customer Experience Management (part 3)

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

This is the third and final installment of my conversation with Kerry Bodine about B2B customer experience management. Catch up with part 1 and part 2.

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience consultant and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions have appeared on sites like The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age.

Aldwin Neekon: It sounds like all of what we’ve covered so far would apply equally in a B2B or B2C context. What’s different when you’re dealing with an enterprise or B2B situation, when you’re selling to companies instead of individual consumers?

Kerry Bodine: What you need to do to change your B2B organization is Read More →

What sales can learn from B2B Customer Experience Management (part 2)

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

This is part 2 of my conversation with Kerry Bodine about B2B customer experience management. Part 1 is here.

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience consultant and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions have appeared on sites like The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age.

Aldwin Neekon: So how do you recommend companies who are getting started in customer experience management sift through all of the information they get through all these different sources? You’re not going to get a unified voice from thousands of customers. Some customers will love something that other customers hate. How do you avoid misinterpreting the data?

Kerry Bodine: You can always interpret data a million different ways. Data does not necessarily equal truth. Data equals Read More →

What sales can learn from B2B Customer Experience Management (part 1)

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

I spoke recently with Kerry Bodine, customer experience consultant and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Her ideas, analysis, and opinions have appeared on sites like The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, and Advertising Age. She holds a master’s degree in human-computer interaction and has designed interfaces for websites, mobile apps, wearable devices, and robots.

I had noticed that some of the techniques I use to map out my buying processes to help my clients improve their sales were similar to those used in the customer experience field. I had some questions about customer experience generally, and how it applies to B2B businesses specifically. So I turned to Kerry, a globally renowned expert in this field. Here’s what we discovered. Read More →

Why you can’t copy Apple’s “postcard” marketing

Posted by Aldwin Neekon

Chances are your marketing people have stolen some of Apple’s visual language.

In fact, Apple’s full-width, high res, shallow depth of field, light sans serif font on a light background look has been copied so widely, your marketing people might have copied someone else’s copy of Apple’s visual language.

Here’s why that might not work for you.

You’re not Apple. By which I mean, you can’t show your customers a postcard of a place they haven’t already been.

When Apple gives 50% of their homepage to a gorgeous closeup of an Apple Watch or a shot of a Macbook doing a handstand with the words “Learn more” underneath it, they’re doing something you can’t do. They’re showing you a postcard of an experience you’ve already had.

Say you’ve been to Niagara Falls (the Canadian side, you know, the majestic, beautiful side) and you’ve brought back an old timey postcard. The only thing on that postcard is an image of the horseshoe falls, with the words “Niagara Falls” superimposed. Looking at that postcard years later, it all comes back to you. The smell of the mist, the freshness in the air, the feel of the curlycue iron fence under your hand, the heart-fluttering whoosh of the glassy river rushing over the edge.

You’ve had the experience. The postcard evokes the experience with one image and two words.

Apple does the same thing. By the time you get to their site, you’ve heard about their latest product release on every news show. On every blog. On every twitter feed. And that’s if you’re not interested. If you are interested, you’ve consumed even more information about it.

When you go to Apple’s website, they can get you to recall all of the experience you’ve already had with their product with one image and two little words. They’ve already taken you there. Now they’re showing you the postcard.

You can’t do that on your site.

You can copy their look, you can put a beautiful picture representing your product, or your team, or your mission behind a flat white sans serif headline, but it will not have the impact you want.

To some, it may say “these guys are a modern company with a modern look”. To some it may say “these guys are unimaginative copy-cats”. But unless you’ve already somehow managed to give them the experience that your “postcard” refers to, you’ll fall short.

There’s a way around this. Two actually. The first is to capture the world’s attention like Apple does. But that’s a bit like making a million dollars by starting with a billion dollars.

The second way is to focus on your targets. What Apple does with the whole world, do for the 300 CEOs of the companies you’re targeting. Give them the experience. Then show them the postcard. Then prompt them to learn more.

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