Category: Engagement

Brand

Stop Enabling Your Customers! And Get Your Product “Hired” Now

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Have you ever heard product or service claims like these:

  • [Our service] enables executives to achieve their top priorities.
  • [Our product] enables you to make better use of your network to help the people you trust.
  • [Our product] enables you to create beautiful native mobile apps styled with CSS.

These are typical examples of statements that all too often appear as the headline of product data or sell sheets, web pages, and other promotional material.  Two of these examples come from small companies you probably don’t know, and one comes from a large company you probably do know.  And while this type of phrasing is all the rage in Silicon Valley, it pervades plenty of other industries as well.

But it says nothing.

Or at least nothing useful.  In these headlining statements, the companies producing the product have failed to communicate to the potential buyer why it is so important to the buyer to have the product or service being offered.

Of course, we want to enable our customers to do something that is of value, but all too often, when I see statements like the above, the value is either misplaced or misunderstood.  This is often indicative of a serious underlying issue with the positioning of the product or service.

Allow me to explain.

In his seminal work on innovation, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen points out that every product, in order to be successful, must have a job.  This means that in order for any person or organization to buy a product or service, they must have a job they want that product to do, and then they make a decision to “hire” the product or service to do that job.

Sometimes we know well the job we need done.  A simple, if dated, example of this is the personal computer.  When PCs were first brought to market in the 1970s, they were hobbyist toys.  Then along came Dan Bricklin with a program called VisiCalc, and suddenly companies could “hire” personal computers to do the arithmetic that had taken junior accountants much of their day to accomplish.  As the versatile computer became more of an office presence, it found more and more jobs to do but would never have been there in the first place had it not had a job in the first place.

Sometimes we don’t know the job we need done until it shows up in front of us.  A personal example goes back just two years to when I bought my first iPad.  As Silicon Valley marketing professional, I was a fairly mobile worker able to find ways to be reasonably productive from pretty much anywhere, whether traveling on business or working from home.  Once I learned how to connect my iPad to all the relevant services, however, I became a walking office.  Everywhere I went, all I had to do was open the iPad and suddenly there was no difference between being in an office and being anywhere else.  The iPad did the job of making me location-independent (or as one of my campaigns put it, “as productive from anywhere as I am at my desk”).  I wasn’t very aware I needed that job done, but once it was being done, there was no question that I had made a great “hire.”

So what’s the problem with statements like those above?  They don’t connect the value of the product or service to the value the potential buyer needs.  The marketers behind them found a really cool thing that their product enables, but they either failed to connect it to something their buyer needs or communicate that connection.  This is a serious positioning error that could cost you your ability to successfully enter a market or overtake competition.

Fortunately, the solution is simple, and it is nothing more than great positioning. Here’s how:

  1. Understand your intended customer’s needs:  What do they need done for them?  What needs does this create?  Which needs are being met and which are not?  Can you identify any needs they have — or soon will — of which they are not aware?
  2. Look carefully at your own capabilities:  not just your product or service but the whole range of capabilities your company, including its people and technologies, can bring to the market to serve those needs.
  3. Match your capabilities to the identified customer needs and figure out exactly how your capabilities meet those needs.
  4. Communicate as potential results your customers can achieve rather than things they could do, which will allow them to understand the compelling reasons to “hire” your product or service.

There is one more pitfall.  Many of the start-up companies with which I work fall into the trap of defining customer needs as what they want them to be (or, in the worst cases, wish they were).  It’s nice to think your customers should have a need to do whatever your product does for them, but (as we so often have to remind ourselves) we do not get to define what customers need and why.  Our task is to discover the actual needs and meet them.

When you define customer needs, make sure you do not believe your own mythology.  Make sure your findings are grounded in reality.

So stop enabling.  Start solving problems and creating results.  And your product will be the one that gets “hired” over and over.

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customers

Does great customer service matter?

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“Of course! If I didn’t give my customers great service, then my customers would leave for a competitor” (which we know is is not a good outcome)

True, but let me phrase the question differently: What does it take to keep your customers coming back?

Before you answer, did you ask? Yes, customers typically love great service, but here’s the most important thing to remember:

Customers became your customers for a reason (or several). If you do a great job at a bunch of things, but not that (or those) thing(s), you will lose your customer.

Yes, it’s that simple.

Let me give you an example: I used to have DSL Internet service in my home (which gives you an idea of how long ago this was), and was more than a bit suspicious of cable-Internet. When I signed up, the DSL was the fastest connection available. And, my DSL provider was fantastic (shockingly) at customer service. Every time I called, I got an actual person. I wasn’t transferred around, the person who answered my call did the research and talked to colleagues for me. He/she was nice, friendly and often offered credits for past poor service.

But….I needed a fast connection (when I signed up, they were the fastest available). And in the months preceding my change, my DSL provider’s speeds had slowed dramatically and a connection that hadn’t dropped in six years (you read that correctly!) was suddenly dropping several times every day.

The best efforts of several customer service reps, technicians, and even the people they sent to my home (for free!) could not resolve the issue.

They offered me credit; they offered me free add-on services; they made so many enticing offers that I was tempted to live with the unreliable, slow service. But in the end, I switched. I needed fast service.

My new provider has horrible customer service. An actual person never answers the phone, and when I get a person they are always rude and unhelpful, it usually takes five, six or seven people just to get a simple answer. But my connection is fast and almost never drops (three times in five years).

If you don’t believe me, take a look at two very well known examples of poor customer service. Whenever people bring up bad customer service stories, the examples they rely on are typically cable television companies and airlines. In my area, that means Comcast and United (I pick on them a lot). Think about it: Do you fly one airline all the time? If so, are you getting great customer service? If not, why do you keep going back? (If I had to guess, it’s schedule convenience, fares or frequent flier points — not customer service!)

This may not be how your business works, but if your business depends on repeat customers, you have no choice but to ask: “Why did my customers buy from me in the first place, and what will keep them coming back?”

Then invest your customer retention budget right there.

So, yes, if customer service matters to your customer, make it great. But always be sure you know — and are serving — your customer’s needs.

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customers

Keep Your Customers Coming Back: How to Increase Repeat Business and Reduce Churn

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Are you in a business that depends on returning customers?  Or a business that sells a subscription service?  If you are, then you already know intuitively that bringing your customers back — or ensuring they renew — is the lifeline of your business.

Knowing that, are you spending disproportionately on new customer acquisition and leaving renewals to a customer service team that lacks the incentive to maximize return/renewal revenue?

Many of my clients are in the technology industry, which is in the midst of making an industrywide shift from one-time product sales to subscription based services (the trend to so-called cloud computing is leading the way).  In the old model, it was fair to assume that once a customer purchased a product, they would most likely use it and then buy smaller add-ons, such as upgrades or service contracts.  In that model, most of the revenue came from the initial purchase, so most of the marketing and sales effort went into new customer acquisition.

But as the model has shifted, the investment has not kept pace.  My clients see symptoms such as customer service teams that are expected to renew their customers but have little or no incentive to do so or sales reps that have no incentives tied to long-term customer success.  The result?  Churn (customer turnover) rates as high as 33% are common.

So how do you keep one-third of your revenue from walking out the door every year?

The most common response I get when I ask this question is, “Good customer service.”  But what does that mean?  It’s usually measured by anything from product performance, to support center response/resolution rate, or to customer satisfaction survey scores.  This is all good, and these are desirable results.  But they are not (necessarily) what keeps your customers coming back.

To succeed in a repeat customer or subscription renewal business, you need to do two things very differently:

  1. 1. Redefine your business strategy and goals to align with this desired result.
  2. 2. Create metrics that both demonstrate success and allow consistent incentives to be

provided to those teams responsible for that success.

Aligning Your Business Strategy

You have, I presume, a very successful sales and marketing strategy and process for acquiring new customers.  Do you have a parallel sales and marketing process for bringing customers back?  This won’t be the same approach as customer acquisition, but it will take advantage of the existing relationship — and everything you know about your customer and how they value your products.

The information you have from your ongoing customer relationships will determine how to set strategy and process for renewal/return sales and marketing.  To define that strategy, you must answer questions such as

  • What customers are most important to you? Why?
  • How do you determine the value of a customer to you?  Are you considering all the aspects that matter?
  • How important are you to your customers?  Why?
  • What criteria do they use to evaluate your relationship and determine whether they return/renew?
  • How predictable are return customers or renewals?  What predicts them?

If you have sources of data — and you likely do — that hold information about customer behavior, usage patterns, specific activities, interactions with the various parts of your organization, etc., then you have an opportunity to mine that data, test (or defy) conventional wisdom, and learn very specifically what actions (or lack of action) can give you a reliable signal about your customers’ intentions.

Which leads to the second part of building an effective strategy: investing in the right people, systems and processes.

Once you know how to value your customers — what actually signals a return or renewing customer and what signals a departing customer — you can then institutionalize this in processes and systems, and communicate it to your people so concerted, prioritized action can be taken to maximize your ongoing revenue stream.

Creating Metrics and Driving Results

How you measure the success of your renewal/returning customer sales and marketing processes will depend on your specific business and what results you want to achieve. But with the data about how to value your customers and predict behavior, you can start by creating metrics that measure things such as

  • Increases in renewal/return rates year-over-year (or reduction in churn).
  • Increases in value of your customers to you.
  • Increases in value of you to your customers.
  • Success of programs that persuade customers to take the actions that predict renewal/return.
  • Success of programs that convert predicted nonrenewers to predicted renewers even before it comes time to renew.

A variety of other metrics can apply, depending on how your organization is structured and how your customers come back to you.

An important point to keep in mind is that a repeat business or subscription based business model is fundamentally different from a single product sale model.  The differences go much deeper than how you bill.  The investment levels are different, the management of the customer relationship is different, the way you offer and likely distribute your product is different…the list can go on and on.

Those of you in telco (telecommunications) and banking (and similar businesses) will know how to do this intuitively; these businesses depend on repeat customers.

For those of you who are in industries trying to make the shift to a recurring revenue model, don’t underestimate the fundamental changes in strategy and process that are needed. Looking at how you make sure your customers are coming back again and again is a very good start.

In my practice, we have found that understanding the true depth and value of the customer relationship can make the creation of a recurring revenue business much smoother and more successful.

Do you run a recurring revenue business?  Or are you trying to convert to one? Share your thoughts on the challenges and how you address them!

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conversation

Making Better Investments in Your Customer Relationships

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for PAKRAgames. It is part four of a series of four.)

Business relationships are not this intuitive (though I contend they should be), but let me ask you this (if you’re in a long-term relationship, think back to when you were single).

When you started dating, you had opportunities to begin and pursue relationships. How did you make the choice of which woman/man to pursue? Was it the best looking? The smartest? Maybe the most accessible or one you thought would say yes? And if you were lucky enough to have several people from which to choose, into which relationships did you invest your effort? Was it with the cutest partner? The one who seemed most likely to succeed? The one most likely to commit to you?

I’d be willing to bet you made these decisions based on some form of intuition. You probably agonized, analyzed and got lots of advice from your friends and family, but some sense of the “right” choice probably made itself apparent, and off you went.

We don’t do the same with business relationships. We look at forecasts, financials and, if we’re smart about it, marketing and culture compatibility. Specifically, when we look at our customers, we have pretty much one measure of desirability: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), which is essentially a net-present-value of expected future revenue from that customer.

But if you ask your sales people and customer service and support representatives, you might see a very different story. You’d hear endless anecdotes that go something like this: This customer may not produce much revenue for us, but they (pick one or more of these) helped us fix several critical bugs, showed us some new uses for our product, are really devoted to us, use only our products and never our competitors’, or have been our best reference customer and a big advocate in the market.

How much value do you place on any (or all!) of those things? My guess is that when it comes to making decisions on how much effort to put into the customer relationship or how hard to try to save them if they suggest they may not come back next year, you put not much value at all (or maybe a little, as an exception).

But you should. Companies that do have customers who keep coming back to them and not their less-successful competitors.

Here’s one example of why: Clayton Christensen’s (@ClayChristensen) “Innovator’s Dilemma” suggests (among other things) that as companies grow, they miss the customer doing something weird with their product. Smaller entrants see it, find the new market based on it and can disrupt the larger company’s market in doing so. But if you — I presume you are the larger, growing company — found the customer doing that weird thing and knew they were valuable, then worked to keep them, you would be able to see the new opportunity and capitalize on it.

There are similar examples for any number of the possible reasons noted above that customers can have value beyond CLV.

So what do you do about it? It’s a simple yet hard answer: Develop a model that can evaluate any given customer’s true value to you (building and helping you manage this model is one of my firm’s main services). That model must include revenue (CLV), but also must include the other dimensions that could make a customer useful and valuable to you. Not all possible dimensions will apply to all companies and, even among the subset that applies to you, not every customer will have much value in each one.

Once you have a model that can assign a quantitative value to each customer relationship, you not only know how valuable each customer is, but how to rank them and know who is genuinely more (or less) important to you. Then you can make well-conceived and well-informed investment decisions. You’ll also know why exactly you are making those decisions.

So when it comes time to allocate budget, time and people to ensure customers are happy, you’ll know who to make happiest. It’s not exactly intuition, and your friends may not have much to say about it, but it will ensure you are doing the best for your customers and for your company, and building relationships that last.

Conclusion:

Over the four parts of this series, I’ve suggested a new way to approach improving and deepening customer relationships, which can reduce churn and ensure customers who walk in the front door this year don’t walk out the back door next year.

I’ve covered:

– Rethinking our business model to ensure we’re making the most of recurring revenue

– Building an effective and measurable sales and marketing process for renewal revenue, and why that’s just as important as your acquisition process

– Learning to understand the value our customers place on our services

– Valuing customer relationships and making better investment decisions

I hope this has helped you think about your business model a little differently and more clearly, and that it has helped you focus your efforts on maximizing the power of your recurring revenue model.

We’d love to hear your story about how you are making the most of your recurring revenue model. Tell us in the comments. And thanks for reading!

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customers

The Missed Marketing Opportunity: Your Customers

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for PAKRAgames. It is part one of a series of four.)

Why would you let as much as one-third of your revenue walk out the door every year? And knowing it will, why include it in your forecast, and consider it a “success” as long as it’s no more than one-third?

This is exactly what many companies with subscription-based business models are doing.

The move to subscription-based business models has accelerated in the past decade, led by technology-services companies moving to cloud-based offerings. Most companies that have made this shift have benefited from having a recurring revenue stream and the ability (generally) for more automated sign-up and service options for prospects and customers.

But we missed something.

Recurring revenue means it’s critical to ensure that customers who walk in the front door this year don’t walk out the back door next year. Put another way, it means the value of renewing your customer’s subscription is just as high as starting the subscription in the first place.

A few of you who are doing this right may take exception to this, but in most of the organizations with which I’ve worked, the effort devoted to renewing customer subscriptions is not even close to the effort put into acquiring the customer in the first place. Ask yourself this: In your organization, how much of your budget and staff are devoted to ensuring customers renew? I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at the answer.

Conventional wisdom says it is far less costly to keep a customer than to find a new one. But translating that into action is far more challenging than it sounds (isn’t it always easier said than done?). Some companies do a good (sometimes great) job of bringing a customer up to speed with their products or services (called on-boarding), but then don’t do much of anything else until it’s time to renew. At that point, many companies will alert their customers of upcoming renewals and even assign so-called renewal reps to solicit the renewal.

Which means those companies missed numerous opportunities in between to understand how the customer uses their product and gets value from doing so.

Is it any wonder that as many as one-third of customers walk away every year?

How do we do better?

I propose three areas on which we need to focus to do a better job:

  1. Treating renewals with the same respect we do new customer acquisitions: This will ensure we gain the expected financial and market benefit from our customer relationship.
  2. Gaining a better understanding of how customers value our products and services: This will help us understand why customers renew or don’t — and what do to about it.
  3. Understanding how valuable our customers are to us: This helps us understand how to prioritize investment in our customers and in our renewal efforts.

Parts 2, 3 and 4 of this series will discuss these and how to make them work for you.

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Engagement

Reacting is not a process, but must be learned #s20c

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At the Sales 2.0 conference today, my friend Caitlin Roberson asked me about how looking at the sales process from the customer perspective makes buying easier

 

Another one of the core tenets of Sales 2.0 is that we as sellers should make the buying process as easy as possible for our customer.
But again, we work hard to remove friction from our selling process, we do what we think our customers want and we remove some of the friction. But still we are left with friction and complexity that drives away some of our prospects.
The key to decreasing friction by another order of magnitude is the same thing that marketers are just learning to do in social media marketing, and that companies are learning to do (often with our help) in deepening the value and return on customer relationships. You must:
Look at your process from the buyer’s point of view
In marketing, we call this “listening” and the obstacle that we faced is that listening isn’t (or wasn’t) an activity we could measure on our status reports and so we didn’t do much of it. We’ve learned how to do this and why it’s valuable.
In sales,  it’s called reactivity. Sales reps need to learn how to be reactive to buyer needs and readiness to move along in the buying process. But reacting is hard to put into a process and measure, but we must learn how to do this.
Leading-edge sales organizations are now starting to incorporate reacting into their process, learning to monitor social and other points at which buyers take action and making sure that sales reps deliver appropriate responses at those times. Early data is showing significant increases in likelihood of close when just a few reaction points are included in a sales process.
How are you reacting to your buyer’s expressed needs and readiness to I’ve along the buying process? Tell us in the comments!
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Why “Sell how your customer wants to buy” doesn’t really work that way

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It’s a Sales 2.0 mantra:

Sell the way your customers want to buy

and it’s one of the oft-repeated phrases at this week’s Sales 2.0 Conference.

It’s also a perfect idea. If you want to be successful in selling figure out the process your customers use to buy the kind of thing you want to sell them, match everything you do to that process, and your whole process will be as frictionless as an air-hockey puck sliding across the table right into the goal.

Making that happen in the messy, friction-filled world of everyday business is far more challenging. What this perfect mantra ends up meaning in most organizations that attempt to put it into practice is that we work to find what we want to think is a typical way our target customers would buy, and we design a process around that.

Then, in so many of our individual sales processes, reps are running to managers for exception approvals, and the process is only  followed at best approximately and at worst in concept only. This happens because the typical buying process to which we design is really an average of our target buyers which is the reality for no individual company, so every buyer requires some kind of exception or adjustment.

So what do we do about this?

Sometimes lost in the ever-growing focus on repeatable and scalable process based on technology is the fact that sales is a relationship business. To be clear, I don’t mean the old stereotype of the slick sales rep who can schmooze anyone into a deal, but rather the truth that in order to achieve that kind of exceptional success we must truly understand both the customer’s processes and the people, including their political dynamics. Then we have the ability to revolve friction as it arises and move deals to close more quickly.

But again, that’s a perfectly ideal thought and not a reality of how to do business. So what do we do in the real world?

Keep the process-focused methods we have. They are necessary and valuable. And you can’t make strong relationships happen without them. But let’s also design processes around how relationships between our companies – and maybe more importantly the people in them – develop.

Do we know just how that happens? Yes we do! There are a special few people I’ve met in my business career who seem to have no clue how to develop relationships with others, but the vast majority of us do, and we generally do it quite well. We do it in so many areas of our lives everyday (I love comparing long-term customer relationships to a marriage!), and most of those relationships are in business. Use that knowledge (intuition, people skills or whatever you want to call it), get it out of your head (and your heart) and into your selling practices.

So sit down with your sales, sales ops and marketing teams and work out how your target customers want to build relationships. Then institutionalize it in your sales and marketing processes.

Then make it work in your support and service processes also so all of your new-found customers don’t leave you next year.

And call us if you need help making this happen.

Then add your thoughts in the comments: how do you build relationship building into you sales process?

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Community

Happy New Year! A Thought for 2012: Build Your Relationships

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Happy new year! I hope that your celebrations were fun and that your 2012 is not only happy, healthy and prosperous, but also is everything you hope it will be.

I’m back to blogging after a rather long hiatus (at least that’s one of my goals for 2012 – it’ll be obvious to you if I keep that promise). Like all of the things we all hope 2012 will bring, this won’t happen just for new year’s day or a few weeks after. To keep that promise, I will have to keep working at it for the whole year.

Which brings me to the topic of the day: Relationships. This year DS3 will increase our focus on helping our clients build, improve and maximize the value of relationships with their customers, partners, suppliers and other key constituencies.

Just like with personal relationships, I believe that real value for businesses is created through relationships. Relationships hold the key to revenue and business growth, but maybe more importantly, they hold the seeds of market disruption and dominance. The stronger and broader your customer relationships, the better you will be at becoming disruptive in your market, or defending against being disruptive.

Your customer, partner and supplier relationships are a source (sometimes the only source) of competitive advantage. Your competitors will have a hard time taking customers who value your business and the value you provide.

We will be helping companies understand the range of sources – many hidden – of value in these relationships and help identify the typically unseen opportunities that can help your business make disruptive progress in your market.

But just like personal relationships, we all know business relationships take time and effort to build and maintain. And they require that all parties find compatible interest and value. We look forward to helping you understand what creates that common value, and how you can better use your resources to maximize the relationships and opportunities that make the most sense for your business.

So check back here for tips and tricks to help improve your relationships, and a few rants on what some are doing wrong (and how to avoid it).

And if you want to create disruptive opportunities by maximizing the value of your business relationships, contact us.

Start the conversation: how have your customer relationships helped you create disruptive opportunities? Chime in!

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Differentiation

Rethinking Customer Loyalty

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I’m paraphrasing any number of management gurus here:

If you want to be good enough, focus on shoring up your weaknesses. If you want to be extraordinary, forget your weaknesses and focus on building up your strengths.

The idea was proposed in the context of how to become extraordinary at whatever it is you do, and in the context of how to evaluate your performance at work.

But why do we not apply the same principle to the corporation and what it does for its customers?

Most of us are – or at least we claim to be – obsessed with customer satisfaction and loyalty. We want our customers to love us and to keep coming back.

So we ask, generally in a survey. Every time a customer wants to leave us (you’re lucky if you’re in a renewal or subscription-based business – your customers have to tell you they want to leave) we ask “Why?” and we learn something about what we’ve done wrong (or what our competition has done right).

Some companies go so far as to try to keep a customer from leaving (think telephone carriers and credit card issuers). I’m sure you’ve had the experience of trying to cancel your service and being sent to the “retention department” who then tries, essentially, to bribe you to stay – and take an offer attractive enough to put up with whatever they did that caused you to want to leave in the first place.

What if, instead of working to fix all the reasons customers left us, we worked on doing even more of what made customers stay?

If you already do that, congratulations. You probably have raving fans for customer. If you don’t, then it’s time to get started.

Start by asking your most loyal (not your biggest, your most loyal) customers why they stick around and keep coming back. I’m pretty sure the reasons will look very little like the reasons other customers leave.

Then ask a group of your customers who are not all that loyal,  but seem to stick around (or come back now and then) anyway: Why are they not all that loyal (probably the same reasons others leave) and why do they come back (probably the same reasons your most loyal customers stay).

Now comes the hard work: Focus on getting better at your strengths. Strengths are the reasons your most loyal customers stay.

Figure out what you are doing right in every single aspect of how you relate to your most loyal customers and do more of it. Refine it, improve it and make it the best in the business, bar none.

And forget about your weaknesses. Weaknesses are the reasons those customers hate you and don’t want to do business with you any more.

Yes, you will find that more unhappy customers will come out of the woodwork. They’ll complain, wondering why you don’t seem to want their business any more.

In fact, you don’t. You cannot be all things to all people, so be what you are good at being and stop trying to be what you are not (feel free to insert your own rant about authenticity here). Letting a group of customers (read: paying customers) go can be scary, but the focus and the new customers you gain will be worth it.

Doing this will also help you define what type of customer is good for your business and what type isn’t. It will give you a different (you might find, better) way to segment your market, and you’ll find that the core of your new segment is much more profitable than the old, less appropriate, segments.

And you’ll find that you end up not only with customers who are more loyal, but they’ll all tell their friends (and colleagues) and you’ll probably end up with even more customers who become just as loyal.

And your (new) customers will become your raving fans.

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Is the “Age of Conversation” Coming of Age?

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It’s a bit like that ‘fool me once…’ adage: When the second observation showed up this week, I started wondering if this is a trend. Then I realized it’s inevitable.

There are few people left (at least among those with internet access) that would dispute that, in the past decade or so, technology has changed the way we interact with and relate to each other. Whether you call this the ‘Age of Conversation’ or refer more generally to the social media/social networking trends, it’s been clear for some time that the skills of technology have been applied to the art of human relationships, and how those relationships manifest has changed.

Another point that few would argue is that the social media/social networking phenomenon has changed the way corporate – actually, all – marketers see the world and related to and communicate with their target audiences. Even the simple use of the phrase ‘communicate with’ in the previous sentence is symptomatic of the change – 15 years ago I would have said ‘communicate to.’

I found it interesting when two unrelated experiences began to triangulate (yes, I’ll still need a third to fully triangulate – care to offer one in the comments?) on these ideas.

  1. Over an otherwise social dinner, a friend who is a successful CMO told me he’s thinking of leaving his position to start an agency. When I pressed him for the reason he wanted to do this after many years working in corporate organizations, he said ‘Marketers have forgotten how to market.’ He explained (and I mostly agree) that most marketers have become so caught up in the social media trend and have focused on a long list of not-well-developed-conventional-wisdom approached and tactics, that some of the fundamentals – like knowing how to segment a market, understand basic customer needs, and focusing on messages (read: content) that is of critical interest to your customers and prospects – have been lost in the shuffle, or worse, forgotten.
  2. I watched a Tom Peters video that talked about the importance of being able to write well and coherently (you can judge for yourself if I’ve mastered that skill). Yes, the very same Tom Peters who is always ranting about big strategic ideas and the importance of challenging the status quo, is now talking about a very basic skill in which most of us became at least moderately proficient in high school. His explanation for this is that in the age of quick e-mails, facebook statuses (statii?) and Twitter, where writing is reduced to the fewest characters possible and sentence structure gives way to compact meaning, being able to communicate well and coherently is still a highly valued skill. In fact, good communication – including written – skills are critical for business success (his new book, in fact, focuses on the importance of the so-called ‘little things’). I would add that for marketers, being able to express yourself well rather than briefly (in most cases), makes it more likely that your audience will understand your message.

A return to fundamentals is the core idea that ties these two observations together. Good marketing is, well, good marketing, no matter the tools, channels, media or relationships. The core elements of understanding how to relate to your audience and how to get a message across in a way that is compelling and results in action (presumably buying, but not always), along with the rest of the basic marketing tenets, are still the things we must do right every day to make sure that, whether in old or new or social media, we can be effective communicators. The same is true of the basic skill of written communications (admit it, you love reading blogs – obvious, because you’re reading this – but you know that so many are poorly written, and sometimes hard to decipher).

I would never make the argument that the so-called ‘revolution’ in the nature of the relationships among people and between companies and their audiences is coming to an end. In fact, I’d argue that it’s only just begun (but I won’t argue that right now – maybe later). Relationships must and will change, and they will change dramatically.

We are no longer at the point where we are experimenting with what the new tools can do. We have reached the point where we’ve played with the new tools and now we have to go start finding out not only what they can do, but where they are useful and how to make them a part of our own lives, our own professions and our own relationship. Then we have to use them to redefine and rebuild those lives, professions and relationships in ways we may not fully understand.

As we do, we should not forget that we still have lives, professions and relationships, and the need to do the simple things right – to live lives, to practice professions and to relate to others – and to do them well has not changed, and I don’t think it ever will.

Add your story about how you see good fundamentals returning to blend with a radically changed world in the comments

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