Category: Experimentation

Collaboration

Please Stop Collaborating with Me!

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for Nimble.)

Collaboration is all the rage in the business world these days — you can’t go more than a few minutes in any business conversation, journal, site, blog or anywhere else without the word coming up. And there’s no doubt that improved collaboration (often enabled by technology) has led to leaps and bounds in productivity.

But are you — like me — starting to feel like we’re overdoing it? I know there are times when I just want to say, “Leave me alone and let me get some work done!”

I’m just old enough to remember the days when everyone in the company had an office. I mean a room with a door that could fully close. While very few office doors were closed much of the time (there was a lot of debate about open-door policies and the like), you could close the door when you needed to concentrate. Or have an important phone call. Or — in the case of certain nameless colleagues — take a nap. In fact, in my very first job after college, I had just such an office.

Then the age of the cubicle arrived. In the 1980s, companies such as Intel were admired for their devotion to the cubicle culture — meaning the collaboration that came with the broad adoption of cubicles. At Intel everyone, even the CEO, had a cubicle.

There was conversation. We talked with each another far more than when I had an office. It became useful, productive, even fun. Prairie-dogging became a game.

Then we discovered the dark side. We couldn’t have the challenging conversations with customers, partners or even our bosses without everyone knowing about it. There were no more moments of concentration; there was collaboration, but there was also constant interruption. Recent studies have shown that constant interruption and multi-tasking are far less productive than concentration and single-tasking.

But are we ready to go back to closed-door offices? For most companies, no. Many companies are going even further and eliminating cubicles in favor of open-plan offices — just a collection of desks in a room (think the secretarial pool from any random 1950s movie).

Tele-Smart consultant Josiane Feigon recently published an article about an un-named client who gave inside salespeople closed-door offices. From her article, it’s easy to tell she did not agree with this move. She seems to feel that having salespeople in closed-door offices defeated the collaboration that she thinks is at the core of their job, and, as is common in other companies, they should have kept the salespeople in cubicles or an open-plan office.

I, however, agree with this client wholeheartedly. In fact, I think they might not have gone far enough. Here’s why:

Inside sales — at least the core piece of the job, which is making calls to prospects — is not collaborative at all. The employee’s (inside sales rep’s) focus is entirely outside the company, and that employee needs the ability to focus their attention outside (at the prospect) rather than dealing with the inside distractions of noise interruptions and over-hearing other outbound calls.

My friend and inside-sales expert Anneke Seley, CEO of RealityWorks Group, points out that there is a critical component of the inside sales rep’s job that is collaborative: training and preparation. These parts of the job benefit from working with managers and colleagues, collaborating on strategy and working to improve skills.

So these parts of the job should be done in an environment that promotes collaboration and interactions (intentional and accidental), and this can be done in a group setting such as a conference room or open area.

But the outbound calling should not be done in “public.” The highest productivity from that part of the job is achieved when the environment isolates the inside sales rep.

In our zeal to achieve ever-increasing collaboration, maybe we’ve forgotten why we want collaboration in the first place: to increase productivity and effectiveness.

Looking at collaboration through the lens of where the focus of the work is pointed (internal, external, solo, team, etc.) can suggest a new way to evaluate whether a collaborative work environment is going to help or harm our productivity. And then maybe we can find ways to collaborate when it helps and leave each other alone when it doesn’t.

And yes, I said “collaboration” (or “collaborative”) 16 times in this post. We might just be overdoing it.

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customers

Evolution: Demographics, Personas and the Relationship Graph

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for Nimble.)

Evolution: Demographics, Personas and the Relationship Graph

The “Social Graph” is all the rage in the social world. Ever since Facebook launched Graph Search in 2013 and the launch of OpenSocial in 2010, we’ve been talking about interesting and useful ways to use this new form of search and the data it can provide. We’re not there yet, but with the growing popularity of graph databases, the ideas behind the Social Graph are about to become very useful to sales and marketing teams.

I worked with a client last year to develop a series of marketing campaigns based on events their customers experienced. They had learned that companies bought their type of marketing automation systems soon after certain events occurred. In their case, companies tended to buy soon after receiving B-round funding. The campaigns we developed were triggered by news that some company had received B-round funding.

This was far more effective for them than the traditional demographic- or persona-based marketing, and it tells us a lot about how to look at prospects beyond fitting them into a particular description.

It also leaves out a very important part of any sales or marketing effort: relationship building. While the company was able to offer the right solution at the right time, the hard work of building a trusted relationship never happened.

So how did we get to the point where relationship-building got left out? Let’s look at the evolution for the answer:

Demographics:

Rewind half a century(!) to Don Draper’s office, circa 1965. He’s just landed a luxury car account and is recommending a targeted direct mail (state of the art!) campaign. He needs to know where to send his brilliant mail pieces, and the best tool at his disposal is demographics. So he goes to the U.S. Census Bureau and pulls personal income data by ZIP code. He sends that mail piece to everyone in every ZIP code with an average personal income above a defined threshold.

Let’s say I am lucky enough to live in that ZIP code. Am I in the market for a new luxury car? Would I consider buying one if it met certain preferences? The answer is more likely “no” than “yes.” While the effectiveness of direct mail relied on a very low percentage of success, it also wasted the vast majority of the invested resources. No marketer or salesperson really knew if I was ready to buy a new car until I showed up at a dealer.

Personas:

Fast forward 30 years to the same agency with yet another new luxury car account. Now they have lots of data at their disposal. They can create a picture of the type of person who might buy the car. It might look like this: A well-educated home-owner who travels for pleasure two or more times per year and shops at other luxury stores. Combine that with income and credit data, and you have a much-improved chance of reaching the type of person who would buy this car.

Again, let’s say I’m that person, and I receive the advertising message by mail and maybe by email or online. But I just bought a competitor’s model last year, and it’s going to be a few years until I’m ready to buy another new car.

The point of this is we can know quite a lot about out prospective buyer but still miss the two most important things:

  1. Is the prospect ready to buy?
  2. Have we established a trusting relationship that will result in the prospect buying from us?

Solution: The Relationship Graph

The timing-based marketing programs I mentioned above are a good first step toward answering the first question. As you get to know your prospects, you can get to know their buying triggers. This allows you to focus your sales and marketing efforts on those prospects who are truly ready to buy (not necessarily the same ones who said they were on your registration form).

But what about building a relationship? Just pursuing everyone who matches your target persona will not work.

We are very good at some parts of relationship-building. We know how to find common connections on social networks such as LinkedIn and how to scour social media streams to find more information about a company or individual.

Let’s go back to the Social Graph. In my personal life, I can look at Facebook and ask  interesting and useful questions. Let’s say I were looking for someone to join me at the movies this weekend. I can go to Facebook and ask, “Which of my friends lives near me and likes newly released movies?” Questions like that can help me connect with people with whom I have established relationships (or even with those I don’t) who might be willing to engage in the way I seek engagement.

What if we did this for our customers? What if I, in my consulting practice, could ask questions such as, “At what companies do I have connections who enjoy reading white papers about customer relationship management?” Then, when I write a white paper, I’d reach out to those people. And maybe I’d ask for their feedback. And maybe, if they like it, I’d ask them to tell their friends.

What if I could go further and ask, “Which connections enjoy reading CRM white papers and have recently expressed concern about their churn rates?” That’s someone I can help, and I’d want to reach out to them.

Unfortunately, much of this capability is not yet built. But the technology exists. The data exists. And, probably most importantly, your relationships exist.

And you can put the information in your organization together in a way that mirrors the Social Graph and starts to answer this kind of question. I mean the kind of question that will help you better understand your prospect and help you to add value to their business.

This is, I believe, the next step in sales and marketing evolution.

Tell me what you think it would take to put those together and start asking questions that lead to you adding value for your prospects.

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Engagement

Has Marketing Failed Sales?

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A few weeks ago, at the Sales 2.0 conference, I noticed a trend: Salespeople are generating their own leads. In fact, I heard pundit after pundit offer justifications for salespeople to be more proactive and take lead generation into their own hands, including statistics showing that as few as 30% of the leads sent to sales by marketing are worthy of pursuit.

Isn’t it marketing’s job to deliver qualified (or at least pursuit-worthy) leads to sales? So has marketing failed?

Well, no, not exactly. There are two significant (you might call them disruptive) trends happening at the same time in lead generation: the indivdualization of technology and social selling.

Marketing is less-well-equipped than sales to take advantage of these. Sales, especially the individual salesperson, is far better equipped to experiment with new methods, processes and technologies than any marketing department can be, if only because of the scale. And marketing has significant responsibilities beyond lead generation, including leading and developing the company’s relationship with its prospects, customers and all other stakeholders, and stewarding the company’s brand.

But in order to be successful, marketing will have to watch these trends — and how salespeople take advantage of them — and figure out how to make them part of everyday marketing in order to stay relevant.

Trend One: The Individualization of Technology

Technology has migrated from huge systems only practical for large institutions to apps any individual can use anywhere, anytime. In the same way, systems which large corporations use to manage their resources are now available for individuals, including cloud-based (SaaS) services, such as CRM and marketing automation.

Companies such as Nimble and Contactually provide cloud-based services that are designed for (and priced for) individual salespeople to do the essential parts of what a more cumbersome CRM system once did. They manage everything from contacts to social relationships to follow-ups to engagement opportunities.

What is important about this is these services can be used by an individual salesperson to find opportunities and generate leads entirely on his or her own, even while working within a larger corporate CRM system.

In fact, my friend Matt Heinz offered a wealth of tips and tricks (he calls them “sales hacks”) for individual salespeople to use a range of tools to create a robust lead flow — all independent of any marketing department (yes, this works very well for sole proprietors, too!)

Trend Two: Social Selling

Social selling means salespeople can use their social networks and the activity they generate to find prospects and identify buying signals. For example, if I were selling marketing automation software, and a 2nd-degree LinkedIn connection just took a new job as CMO (a possible buying signal) for a company in my market, I would want to contact that person. I might find that out through the activity generated in my own social network, then find out more about that person through their own social and other activity. I would then have a connection that can introduce me and would also know how to approach my newly discovered prospect.

Notice I am not looking in my CRM system for a lead that has not been touched in a while, nor am I looking for an introduction from my management. Salespeople (presumably) have their own networks they can use to find the connections they want and need.

Services such as TwitHawk and Newsle offer this kind of social signal search service, and Nimble and Contactually integrate it into the activity stream.

When you put all this together, you have a powerful new source of very well-qualified leads for the salesperson to pursue.

So Where is Marketing?

Marketing departments have done a very good job of adapting to the world of on-line and social media, and they have found ways to successfully get the word out. Marketing departments have also become very good at doing this on a large scale, just as they became very good at large-scale communication in traditional media.

But even the most targeted integrated email and social media campaigns reach thousands — sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands — of people in the hope that a small percentage will be sufficiently interested to become leads and prospects.

Salespeople are looking at this from the other direction. They are ignoring the scale of reaching mass markets and large target audiences, and instead, using the power of atomized technology and social media combined to find the proverbial needle-in-the-haystack — who they are pretty sure is an interested prospect.

Can Marketing Adapt?

Should marketing change its approach and focus on finding individuals? No. Well, maybe.

Marketing must look after its whole scope of responsibilities and ensure there are strong relationships with customers, prospects and other stakeholders. Marketing must also continue to use its ability to scale communications to ensure large audiences are reached.

In fact, without doing this first, the salesperson may never have the chance to find that one interested prospect

But marketers must also become proficient in a world that has become individualized. This individualization has happened not only in how sales leads are found, but also in how relationships and brand preferences are developed. Marketers must be able to take all the activities where they focus on the mass market and find ways to translate or evolve them into individual relationships.

It’s easy for individual salespeople to experiment with new methods and technologies, and they are finding some of them very useful. Marketers must find ways to experiment with new methods, processes and technologies to find the ones that work in this changing world.

The challenge marketers face is learning how to scale this individualization to reach the mass audience so the company can scale its individual relationships.

And marketing can deliver more relevant leads.

Join the conversation: post a comment telling us how you are addressing this issue.

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Decision Making

Elephants and Data: The Missing Link to Making Sales & Marketing 2.0 Work

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This week I had the privilege of attending the Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (thank you to the conference team for the invitation!).

While this edition focused on social selling and marketing (as expected), it also focused heavily on what leaders need to manage a social selling or marketing team.

But this is not a summary of the conference. If you would like to see the very useful and interesting learnings from these two days, my friend Matt Heinz has an excellent post you should read.

This is my view of the most important lesson learned this week, and what I think is the missing link to making all of these new ideas in sales and marketing work. First the data.

Data

For the past five years or more, I have been hearing conference presenters, pundits and all sorts of others talk about the new way to market and sell in a social world. While some of it is just hype (isn’t it always?), when you sort through all of the information out there, you reach a few simple conclusions:

  • Technology has and will continue to disrupt how products and services are marketed and sold
  • Social technology has shifted the balance of power to the buyer, so that sellers now have to work not to sell, but to help buyers buy
  • Most corporate organizations and the systems by which they measure their people have not adapted to this new reality at all, meaning we are all essentially doing what we used to do, just with new technology (yep, I wrote that five years ago!)

The focus of the conference for the past two days offers some hope for addressing this last point. Much of the focus was on managing in what they call a “sales and marketing 2.0” or “social” world.

Speakers showed us how they are helping their people do certain things differently – or do entirely different things. They showed how they are figuring out what those things should be. And – since we know what gets measured gets managed – they showed how they are measuring success in the social selling and social marketing process, and how they are rewarding people for that success.

These management practices are all based in what we have come to call big data. For example, you have to merge and interpret data from your company’s traditional systems (e.g. CRM), your other internal data (e.g. email communications, chat and other interactions), customer data, social network data and other public data to gain a deeper understanding of how a Facebook campaign or a sales rep’s blog helped generate revenue and specific deals. And yes, this can be measured. But no, it’s not easy.

We saw examples of how every aspect of management from governance to measurement to evaluation, to hiring to leadership and coaching (yes, coaching) can be improved when driven by the effective use of data.

Elephants

Here’s what I think was the elephant in the room: In order for individuals to succeed at anything at all in a corporate organization, they have to know what success looks like.

Your sales leadership can be the best at understanding and directing a social selling organization. but does your newly hired rep know what to do when she is on the phone (excuse me, web conference) with a hot prospect? Do they know how to use the social tools at their disposal to make that a more successful call?

Your marketing leadership can put in place all of the social tools and programs, and even hire people to manage the various social channels. But when your demand gen manager executes a new campaign, do they know how and when to incorporate those channels?

Do your people know it when they see it?

What leadership needs is a way to institutionalize the knowledge, learning and assumptions needed to become a social sales and marketing organization. We need not only a way to not just communicate to our people what this is all about, but also a way to make sure that when our people do their work, they know – intuitively – how to do it in this new way.

Do you give your people the knowledge and skills to be able to do their jobs in whatever new way your organization is adopting? Does it work?

Add your story to the comments below. And I’ll see you at the next Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference.

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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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conversation

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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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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creativity

Change of Control

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It’s often the simplest things that make all the difference.

This article by Gary Hamel describes the seemingly incredible effects of allowing local and front-line employees to make decisions on how best to serve the customers with whom they interacted every day, rather than listening to a standard coming from the central corporate office, which had the effect of not quite serving any customer particularly well.

It has a very powerful story which illustrates three important points:

One: It’s an excellent lesson in experimentation, focusing on what the customer really needs and wants and, what I think was Professor Hamel’s point, how to run a better business by changing the way you treat your people.

Two:It reinforces the fact that your brand is not what you define it to be, but rather it exists in the mind of those who know you and are your customers. In this case, looking at the definition of “reliability” from the perspective of the customer completely changed the practices that helped support the reputation.

Here’s what intrigued me:

Three: It’s the second underlying theme in the story that makes it so compelling: The changes, the innovation, the tremendous increase in customer service and profitability all happened because someone (according to this, a few people at a time) made the decision to give up centralized control and trust employees to use their judgement and do what is best for the business on their own volition – and most importantly to use their own intelligence and motivation to improve the business at every opportunity.

This was a shift for this particular company, and might well be for yours, in the relationship between the company (and its management) and its employees.

What would happen if we made the same shift in our relationship with the people in our market (customers and everyone else)?

What might happen if we stopped telling our market what to think about our companies and how they should relate to us?

As marketers, we are trained to do market research, find market positions with large opportunity, and spend time, money and resources making sure everyone think of us what we want them to.

One side effect of this is that we may not serve any of our customers particularly well (to reference a common example, I’d prefer a car that is safe, forward-thinking and “hot” but brand-reputation at least, I get to pick one).

This story is one from which we can learn.

Please read it.

Then think about what you are doing that is stopping your people from having the freedom to build a new customer relationship.And what you need to do to make that job easier for them. (can you provide templates to print opening hours instead of dictating them?)

Then go one step further: how can you enable your customers to build the relationship they want with you and get the service from you that suits them best?

I am fairly certain that even simple steps will dramatically improve your customer relationships and put you miles ahead of your competition in your relationship with the rest of the market.

Take a step now.

Discuss it here. I’d love to hear what you’ve tried and how it worked.

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Engagement

Improvement and Change

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I learned something from my last few posts: The people who read this blog like to respond by e-mail. OK, maybe I’m generalizing based on just a few events (e-mails in response to posts), but I do get e-mail, and I don’t get many comments.

I didn’t intend to experiment to find out how my “market” likes to engage. But what I did was, on a small scale, the kind of experiment in which marketers engage every day: Put something out into a market or segment and see how people respond. Do the same thing (at the same time) to comparable but different versions of the same “thing” (offer, message, whatever) in different but comparable markets or segments and you’ll end up with a good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

Marketers do this all the time. And, I hope, as a result they improve how they talk to their market.

Marketers (and, I’ve noticed, many companies) are not as good at the kind of experimentation that creates change. It’s really not that different. Experiment with things you have not yet tried. Try a new medium for communication – outbound, inbound or (preferably) two-way. Try a few all at once. See if any work. Maybe try a structure to a program, or create something in your market that’s never been created before. It might not work, but it might, and even if it doesn’t, you’ve learned something about having the conversation with your market that your current structure would never have allowed you to learn.

Using simple methods, like piloting, controlled experiments, and allowing the emergence of what works and what doesn’t, this type of experimentation can be successful in almost every organization. And when you learn what works, and then work to improve it, you create the kind of marketing innovation that puts you ahead of your competition.

Why does this matter? I will refrain from beating the now-tired drum of “the market is changing” (which really means your buyer is changing) – we all know it’s true, and will continue to be. If you’re trying the same things over and over again (even if you are improving them every time), you will become irrelevant.

Why does it matter now? In the past year, I’ve seen several companies start to see their marketing effectiveness eroding, only because they won’t (or don’t know how to) try something new. And I don’t know if I believe the doom-and-gloom economic forecasts, but I do believe that the market will become more challenging in 2008 than it was in 2007.

So the question is: are you going to keep doing what made you successful last year, and let someone else find a new way to beat you? or are you going to experiment with new ideas and find the new way to beat them?

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