Does Automation Kill Creativity?
Or even worse….kill common sense. A while ago I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, in which he outlines how people with tremendous experience in a particular field develop an almost instinctual capability to assess a situation in a fraction of a second. His examples included art “experts” who got duped into buying a fake …., and a tennis pro who can detect a fault before the serve is completed. How does this fit with sales and marketing?
Around that time, a business development person came to me with a lead they were working. They had completed the initial qualification and spoken to the prospect. The customer was implementing a new global Oracle system, but their title and the “pain” they identified resulted in a lower lead score. “What to do?” – asked the rep. To me the answer was obvious: the customer is spending millions of dollars on an ERP system, and I could think of 10 other customers who had selected our solution as part of a global Oracle project. My conclusion: go find someone in the customers’ organization who does have pain, obviously we were talking to the wrong person.
While marketing automation, drip marketing, lead scoring, social marketing all provide value – they still need brainpower. Most professionals get paid because we leverage experience and make judgment calls. Should I invest more time here or not? Do I need additional support? etc. Too much focus on the tools can kill your best people and your creativity.
Nothing replaces smart people. In short the real question is do you spend more time on the process or the results?
Here are some other questions to ponder:
1) What are the top 3 things that you have learned from your CRM or marketing automation tools?
2) What revenue or customers have you achieved that you would have missed without these tools?
3) Do your sales and marketing teams still prospect or do they wait for the tool?
4) What new sales/marketing campaigns have resulted from using the tools?
5) What have you stopped investing in based on the results from the tools?
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.
Defining and Winning a New Market
It is always impressive when an innovative company can carve out a new market segment and dominate it with double or even triple digit growth. Many more companies fail trying to evangelize “new emerging markets” that never have enough compelling value.
When it comes to marketing, my absolute favorite technology company is Salesforce.com. We use it, and the other day I went to log in and came across the following banner.
Forgive me for not knowing before, but although I had not heard of “the social enterprise”, I got it right away. Not only that a couple of days later I saw Gartner’s magic quadrant for Social CRM. Here is a market that in theory didn’t exist a couple of years ago and it is now projected to be a $1B market. Now that is great marketing.
So what separates the market makers from the market fakers? Here are my top factors
- It has to make sense, keep it simple
- Most likely it evolved from an earlier market, for the biggest winners there a game changer that cripples the older market.
- It should be differentiated but meaningful
- There has to be competition; no competition, no market
More often than not the big winner is not an incumbent. For example look at the CRM market. Siebel essentially defined the market by taking what companies like Goldmine did and “going enterprise.” Salesforce.com came along and went “On Demand”. Much less common is the incumbent reinventing themselves. However, Salesforce.com is now promoting Social Enterprise along with numerous smaller entrepreneurial firms. Apple is another obvious incredible incumbent. Microsoft and Yahoo are examples of companies that cannot seem to innovate “the next big thing.” What will happen to other one time market makers: Nokia, Motorola, RIM, etc.?
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.
Should You Strive To Be Like Apple?
A few weeks ago I was in a board meeting reviewing a strategic initiative. I am always struck by simple questions that drive constructive discussion. In this case the board member asked, “Using Michael Treacy’s Model, do you think Kewill is product oriented, customer oriented, or efficiency oriented?” The answers were relatively consistent, but there were differences based on each person’s perspective. The views also included, where we have been, where we are today, and where we are going.
Yesterday, I came across the WSJ story talking about “How to Be Like Apple”, which discussed how to create an environment that fosters creativity and innovation. Of course emotionally everyone “wants to be like apple” – the question is what does it take? More broadly going back to Michael Treacy’s work is one area of focus better for high technology?
In my opinion it comes down your people and the passion. Emotionally, my experience in high tech is successful companies are either product or customer focused. This often gets defined by the founders or subsequent senior team. Did they come out of engineering or sales & marketing? Either side can create energetic, entrepreneurial environments. “Efficient” high technology companies tend to be pretty boring, although I will admit medium and long term may be quite successful financially.
Where is your company? Are you where you need to be?
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.
SixthSense – Impact on Marketing
Who said social marketing was the be all and end all?
