Are You True to Your Brand?
High tech companies still have a lot to learn from consumer companies when it comes to branding. A few weeks ago I was visiting Ibex who is a customer of ours. What struck me was how thoroughly their brand permeated the entire organization. The foundation of the company is producing high quality, natural wool-based outdoor clothing. As I spoke to various employees and toured their facilities, their brand was engrained through the culture. What made me feel this way? Every aspect of how they operated and worked, but to name a few: employees can bring their dogs to work, they are based in Vermont with a view of the mountains, they are moving more of their sourcing to the US to use local suppliers. They clearly know their target customer and their culture embodies their brand to support their success.
So isn’t this true for high tech companies? More often than not high tech companies try to claim “we are innovators”, “we are customer focused”, etc. While these are worthy goals, they re only worth claiming if your customers agree. I love the simplicity of killianbranding’s comparison of branding and an elevator pitch.
All companies have a brand – it is how your customers perceive you. Are you true to your brand? It should be visible throughout every dimension of your company. If you are innovative, that should not end in engineering, customer focus means every person thinks of the customer first. Are these behaviors rewarded, re-enforced?
Branding and First Impressions
I recently was interviewing a marketing candidate and while I went to check on their arrival I saw (who I thought was the candidate) having a smoke in the parking lot before the initial interview. I must admit that my first impression of them dropped as my misconceptions of someone who smoked did not fit with the type of person I wanted to hire.
So how do first impressions impact your brand? Very significantly! Customers first impressions can come from many sources: web site, sales person’s visit, telesales firm cold calling, a LinkedIn profile, an employee tweet, etc. As a marketing executive while you can control all these you can certainly define the tone and set the direction.
The first steps are to be honest with yourself on what your company brand represents:
- Are you edgy, cool, or conservative?
- Innovative, creative, or operationally efficient?
- Premium priced or low cost?
Once you have captured the brand character then review all the communications channels and assess their value in re-enforcing the brand.
- Does your web site reflect your corporate personality?
- Do you blog on breakthrough ideas or are you contrarian, perhaps simply educational?
- What tools does your sales team use? Do the graphics reflect the brand? Does the tone support your goals?
Branding gets built up over many years, but can get diluted without the right supporting focus and leadership. What are the best examples of consistent branding you know of?
Great Messaging – Hard and Simple
Recently I was reviewing some messaging with a group of executives, and of course everyone has an opinion. When you develop messaging, it can be difficult to be objective when reviewing it. A recent Rocket Launcher post by provides excellent reasons and actions for lousy messaging. The best messaging may be difficult to create but in my experience, once you “get it” it becomes obvious, at which point you often wonder what took so long.
So why is messaging hard? Here are the reasons and what you can do about it
1) Everyone has their own context. Put another way everyone has a different perspective from which they frame the messaging.
What to do: Make sure you frame the context: who is the message targeted at? For example is it an IT person, business person, executive or individual contributor? What is the delivery vehicle? Are people seeing walking past a trade show booth? On an web site banner? As part of a face-to-face meeting? In today’s world a message map is pretty basic, however, incorporating different delivery vehicles is usually “left to the student.”
2) Every market has its own language. The mix of industry jargon can help or hurt your position. Too much jargon and it comes across as gobbledygook, however, if you do not have enough you will be perceived as not having enough “domain knowledge”. Also technology companies are famous for coming up with their own terms while trying to “create a market”
What to do: Test run your marketing mumbojumbo. This can be done in a few minutes with Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Also you can review your competitions’ web site. Finally, test with real customers and your sales force. The best sales people on your team will tell you are is hard hitting versus ivory tower.
3) People do not have time to learn. Trying to tell your whole story, while tempting is a mistake. It is simply too hard to tell the complete story, keeping people interested with the right context, and language, in a brief time slice.
What to do: Look at your broader campaigns as a series of micro-campaigns. Each one specifically targeted at a role, and based on a specific context. Use drip marketing to move the prospects along the learning curve. They must get hooked initially, but then they will educate themselves. At some point there is an inflection point when they start pulling information, and it is the signal they will end up in the pipeline. Be patient.
Emotion and Engineering
When I combine the terms “Emotion” and “Engineering” with marketing people it usually starts conversations and frustration about how to get more out of engineering. Rarely do marketers look for engineering to provide the key ideas and value add for marketing. I mean that is our job! We are supposed to tell engineering what to do…
With the passing of Steve Jobs, there has been a lot of discussion on the importance of design. As I look back in my career I can think of two companies where the engineering team had outstanding design and in each case I can point to multimillion dollar deals we won, where the design played a key factor. The design was part of our competitive advantage.
Creating emotion in the sales cycle is THE most important thing sales and marketing can do. Despite all the discussion around lead scoring, sales funnels, creating ROI, value-based selling; emotion still plays a huge role in customers buying. Are you using product design to win new deals?
A few thoughts on leveraging great design:
- Does your product user interface create excitement in your sales process?
- Does the ergonomics of your user experience drive frenzied loyalty in your customer base?
- Do you sales tools (PowerPoints, Collateral, etc.) reflect your brand? (I am not talking about colors)
Have you defined the emotion of your brand? Are you cool? Cutting edge? Industrial? Buttoned-Up? People buy from people, and it is expected that the basics will be covered in terms of value, ROI, etc. It is the emotion that you create that can separate you. Some of the most successful companies actually built momentum around arrogance (Oracle, Ariba, Siebel, etc.). Strange as this sounds – the emotion created was “we are going to be the winner, want to come with us?” Not surprisingly no one likes to be left behind.
One Hundred Qualified Leads Please
Marketing and sales alignment…sales is our customer…closed loop….lead scoring…..visibility…campaign ROI….
Last night I got 3 orders for leads: Would you like budgets of $10K or $100K? Do you want them in the eastern region or western? Mid-market or Fortune 500?
Everyone agrees that “sales is our customer” but do we do a good enough job with our own “market strategy” for our “customer”? Do we know the set of “products” we should have available for sales? They should include
- Market strategy
- Target prospect profile
- Go to market plan
- Value proposition and messaging map
- Sales kit (collateral, presentation, pricing, etc.)
- Leads
So what does sales “owe” marketing? Instead of a vendor-customer relationship, best practice is a balanced relationship, since sales has responsibility back to marketing. These commitments consist of:
- Focus their prospecting and sales efforts on target market and prospects
- Intense and timely follow up to leads
- Objective feedback on quality of all marketing deliverables
- Collaboration on sharing win/loss information
- Provide early insight into significant opportunities that may impact product requirements
- Not bring small deals “that only need..” to close
Sales and marketing collaboration is a two way street.
Segmentation Versus Fragmentation
I was recently at the Gartner Supply Chain conference and was discussing market strategy with some analysts and colleagues. The topic of markets and market segmentation came up, and I realized that many marketers (and others) get confused or are too rigid in how they segment markets.
Market segmentation should be fundamental skill of every marketer, although there are many lenses at which one needs to view their customers. The first question to ask is “are you segmenting one market or are there multiple markets?” Even this has degrees of gray. I characterize a market as a group of people/companies that have the following traits in common:
1) Pains points to be solved. These need to be relevant and specific. They not “aspirations” such as “save costs or “improve customer service”
2) Processes that run their business: this could be the way the market, distribute, buy goods, etc. Obviously they also need to be relevant to your offering.
3) Roles that use your solution and gain benefit. Examples would include common titles, departments, etc.
4) Competitive landscape. If in each “segment” you have different competitors changes are you are in different markets.
5) Do the customers talk and collaborate with each other? Read common trade journals, go to common events, are there industry associations, etc.
Once the market is defined, there is a multitude of ways to segment it. Some are traditional such as company size, geography, vertical, some are more subtle:
1) Innovative versus laggards
2) IT focused versus business focused, who has power when buying technology
3) Home grown versus off the shelf
Segmentation is as much art as science, since one company’s market could be a segment to someone else. The most important element of segmentation is to relate the above factors to your solution and the problems it solves.
Over-egg the Pudding
Two weeks ago on I was a call with my colleagues from the United Kingdom and I heard the expression, they have “over egged the pudding.” One of the enjoyments of international business is the exposure and learning to different cultures and colloquialisms. After the call I looked up the definition and found
If you over-egg the pudding, you spoil something
by trying to improve it excessively.
It is also used nowadays with the meaning of making something
look bigger or more important than it really is
Is your marketing team a culprit of “over egging the pudding?” In today’s world high tech buyers are typically pretty savvy. Gone are the days of buying on hype and getting on the next rocket ship.
Here are some signs that show your messaging is aligned with customer value and their perception of your company:
1) Your sales team uses the tools your produce for them throughout the sales cycle. They ask for more content, not simply more leads
2) Do your programs pull above industry average
3) You inbound programs are your best vehicles for leads and deals
4) Your website is a focus point for industry education and you can show growth through increasing traffic and lead capture
Of course the other end of the spectrum of “over egging the pudding” is also poor marketing.
Marketing Spin or Market Value?
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting at a seminar next to an independent consultant. He was telling me about some new initiatives from Cisco around monitoring and controlling computer devices. The first example involved automatically turning all the phones & computers off in a call center when they are not in use in order to save energy. The idea being if it was a two shift operation, the devices could be automatically turned off for the idle third shift. The second scenario was putting RFID tags on newborn babies. If the baby left their room without authorization, the hospital elevators and doors would lock automatically, and the hospital would ensure the infant was not abducted.
After explaining these with much enthusiasm he said, “I do not know if there is any real value in these, but Cisco is a marketing machine, so we believe we can make some good money.”
Without debating the value of the initiatives, it made me wonder: How much success is inherent value versus pure spin marketing? Obviously on the strategic side of marketing the whole objective is to find new markets and deliver value, but fundamentally there has to be some core value. No question spin marketing can accelerate the success or even ensure it gets a strong enough foothold, but if there is not enough core value, the marketing efforts will be expensive and time consuming.
Do You Need a Psychiatrist?
Over the New Year’s holiday I was at a friend’s for dinner and we played a game called “psychiatrist”. It can be quite fun, if a little bit risqué. The game requires at least 7 or 8 people, with one playing the psychiatrist. The person being the shrink cannot have played the game before and here’s why. All the others have the same problem, and it is up to the psychiatrist to find out what that problem is by asking probing and personal questions. The condition that every player has is that they are answering the questions based on they believe person to their right would answer. The final twist is that when someone gets an answer wrong, the person to their right must declare “psychiatrist”, at which point they switch seats. You get the point.
The above game got me thinking about lead qualification and the sales process. Is your sales team wondering around asking diagnostics questions trying to find the pain and compelling event? In today’s world creating a strong differentiated value proposition is just the start. Even developing compelling and consistent messaging is typically best practice. However, these are not enough. What I believe complex sales require is a diagnostics map. A diagnostic map basically provides guidance on where to probe based on the prospects context. The context includes the customers business, vertical, organization, etc. as well as where you are in the sales process.
Do you have any good examples of a diagnostic map?
Messaging Fairy Tale
Recently I was walking through Heathrow airport and was struck by HSBC’s “Different Points of View” campaign. The main point of the campaign is that a simple word or image can mean very different things to people based on culture, context, etc. One example is shown above with a picture of a bridal couple on top of a wedding cake. There are three different versions with the messages: Fear, Fate, Fairy Tale.
It re-enforced how critical messaging and context is to high tech marketing. In this world it is almost always a complex sale, with multiple communications channels (e-mail, phone calls, meetings, formal PowerPoint presentations, etc.), each hitting different roles within the prospect. Although it is obvious the VP of transportation will have different perspective than the director of IT; getting the right message, delivered in the right way can be challenging. How the messages are “packaged” impacts their effectiveness as shown in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink.
The following is a starting point to deliver strong messaging:
1) Define the titles and roles you need to reach
2) Based on role what are the most relevant value points
3) What are the best channels to reach these people? In this case channels might be as simple as an e-mail blast or as sophisticated as a complex discovery process.
A core messaging map is a useful internal tool that can be used by marketing communications, sales, business development, product marketing to ensure content and tools for the campaign are aligned. In today’s social marketing world with information overload, the right messaging and context are fundamental.
