The lost art of listening

I wrote here before about how marketers should be conversing with prospects and customers. I'm still struck by how many marketing and sales professionals excel at talking and terrible at listening.

Reading from a sales script or 'shouting' about your ultra cool product/service/webinar/video via email, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Pinterest is is so much easier than listening to what the prospect/customer/community has to say.

I recently attended a meeting with a sales rep from one of the leading marketing automation tool vendors. Before the rep went into the demo, we mentioned that we are already pretty educated about the tool, we think it can do the job for us, and only have a couple of questions we would love to get answers to.

The rep acknowledged, but rather than answering our simple questions, gave us a 45 minute rundown of every possible feature in the product. "You can do this", and "you can see that". Needless to say the demo was generic and did not relate to any of our use cases. 45 minutes later we again raised our question, just to hear that the rep doesn't know the answer and will need to "get back to us".

In all my years in hi-tech, I have delivered hundreds of demos. One of the biggest questions you always face is when to end the demo. The answer is astonishingly simple - stop when you have reached your goal and the prospect is ready to move to the next phase, e.g. discuss a POC. The problem? You need to listen to what the prospect says. You have to watch his body signals. You have to ask questions.

We have an unprecedented number of communication means, yet it seems we're losing our ability to converse.

The Conversation Prism www.theconversationprism.com

Wait, can you answer these 3 questions about your new product?

Just before you start building your shiny new product (which will undoubtedly re-define the way we think of <insert-your-market-here>), make sure you have answers to the following questions:

1. Who will be buying and who will be using your product?
2. What need does your product address for those identified in the first question?
3. How is your product significantly better than other solutions that satisfy the need listed in the second question?

Pretty basic Marketing 101 stuff, right? As bizzare as it may seem, many of the entrepreneurs and heads of marketing I meet either fail to ask these questions or fail to internally agree on what the answers are.

Before devising financial models, estimating conversion rates, building go-to-market plans, creating cutting-edge websites and investing in marketing automation, make sure you have your bases covered - truly understand your target personas, figure out if they would care about your product and why they would prefer it over alternatives.

Note that the answers will most likely change along the way, so keep asking...

PS: While in the process of posting I received Seth Godin's latest post that talks about people's reluctance to ask hard questions... great minds ;)

Social media insights from the 60's

Social media is anything but new. Social engagement, social sharing and even social media marketing have been in existence long before Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook and Reid Hoffman launched LinkedIn.

Back in 1966(!), Ernest Dichter, the "father of motivational research", conducted a large study of word of mouth. One of the questions he looked at is what's driving people to communicate about brands. He identified four motivations:

1. A product delivers an outstanding experience that must be shared
2. An individual wants to gain attention or assert superiority
3. A person wants to express neighborliness, caring, and friendship
4. A message is so humorous or informative that it deserves sharing

Dichter's findings from almost 50 years ago still hold true. The underlying concept of social media hasn't changed. What the Internet and social media tools allowed us to do is take an age long practice and scale it almost infinitely.

The research brings up another important point that I discussed in this blog. The product is the most important ingredient in the marketing strategy.

Witty social media campaigns, snazzy web sites and even good content will not compensate for a bad product...

Close a $2M software sale by phone? Yes you can!

A few days ago I attended the Sales & Marketing 2.0 executive group meetup in Tel-Aviv.

The CMO of a fast growing startup - can't say the name, but it sounds like a that of a tropical fruit :) - shared with us how they go about marketing and selling their product, a SaaS that helps IT professionals perform certain risk-related tasks.

The company targets heads of IT at mid-size and large enterprises. They're in the ERP market. Their product is by no means cheap. You won't find them in any Gartner magic quadrant.

How many enterprise sales people does this company have?

None.

100% of their transactions are done through an inside sales team based in Israel. They sell to organizations across the globe. They close deals of five, six and even seven figures - by phone.

What's the secret sauce?

I believe it's a combination of several ingredients:

• A great product that is incredibly easy to try out (SaaS delivery model helps, but is not mandatory) 
• A crisp, compelling value proposition delivered to exactly the right audience
• A well oiled marketing and sales machine that leverages automation and personalization technologies
• A good business model that is simple and aligned with perceived value and usage pattern
• Delighted customers that spread the word and lower pre-purchase anxiety levels

Companies like New Relic, SolarWinds and Atlassian have figured it out. They're selling tons of software to organizations of all sizes with little or no enterprise sales.

Is it the end or enterprise sales? Probably not. Some product and some buyers will always require the more personal touch, yet these companies prove that you can sell software - even if it's expensive, and even if it's sold to a very traditional buyer - solely over the phone or through the web. The benefits? Lower cost of sale, faster scale up.

We don't need no "Like"

Many companies are now immersed in a Facebook arms race. Frito-Lay recently set Guinness record for Facebook “Likes”, getting 1,571,161 “Likes” in 24 hours. That’s pretty impressive, yet setting aside the excitement of making it to the Guinness World Records, is it all that important?

“Like” is easy. Too easy. 

A swift click of a mouse and you’re moving on to the next person-falling-into-water-video or really-cute-friend-haircut-photo.

A “Like” in itself has little value. 

Today’s hyper-connected, always-on, information-overloaded world calls for a well thought out, integrated engagement strategy that builds on real discussions and top notch content.

Steve Rubel, EVP of Global Strategy and Insights for Edelman, recently gave an excellent talk about changing the nature of authority. Steve noted that more content will be created today than existed in entirety before 2003(!). Everyone is a writer, a video producer, a reviewer, a commenter. 

So who do you trust when you make your buying decision? Who's the expert?

Becoming a subject matter expert has become so much easier – content distribution costs have gone down to practically zero.

Becoming a subject matter expert has become so much harder – anyone can create and disseminate content. 

Experts have become the most precious marketing assets. I wholeheartedly agree with Steve’s first step to success: “elevate the experts”!

Authority in the Age of Overload

View more presentations from Edelman

Conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue

"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet." Truman Capote

As I wrote here before, I strongly believe marketing and selling is all about building relationships. It's about engaging in a conversation with prospects and customers. The conversation can take many forms - it can take place online or offline; it can be carried out through a phone call made by a sales person, a discussion in your Facebook page, or auto-generated emails sent from your marketing automation system.

Here's the caveat: talking is much easier than listening.

Pitching your new product to an analyst is far easier than asking for her candid feedback. Telling your customers how they should have used your radically simple online service beats listening to their complaints.

Some vendors prefer not to go through the 'trouble' of conversing with their customers - that's perfectly fine as long as you're not a share holder in one of them. What ticks me off are the 'pretenders' - those who pretend they're interested in what you have to say. Those who ask you to respond to an email or fill out a survey, and then retreat to the comfort of silence.

For example, I recently received an auto-generated email from Tungle.me, an online scheduling service, trying to "reactivate" me:

Hi Ran,

We noticed you haven’t been Tungling.  Can we help?

This Tuesday we’re hosting a short webinar for new Tunglers.  It’s an opportunity to ask questions, share feedback and see a live demo.

The webinar is free and you can register here.

If you have questions or feedback, but prefer not to join the webinar, you can also reach out to us by replying to this email, through the Support Community, or on Twitter and Facebook.

We hope to see you back soon!

Sincerely,

The Tungle.me Team

Since I do see the value in their service, but stopped using it for various usability issues, I took a few minutes of my time and described my issues.

Did I get any sort of response? No.

There's a better way. Here's the "activation" email I received from New Relic, another SaaS company:

I was looking through the list of people who signed up for New Relic this AM and saw your email address - but it looks like you didn't deploy the agent into your app anywhere - did you have problems?  Not what you expected?  

This is NOT an automated email by the way - I do this in the morning to make sure our customers are getting what they need!

Please let me know if there is any issue! 

Cheers,

Patrick 

I responded. Patrick, who must be a very busy individual, responded back. Easy, but that's what it is all about - talking, listening, talking... 

Conversation is a dialogue.

A shiny Salesforce marketing cloud

Both marketing and selling are centered around the age-old act of building relationships. If your prospects and customers are using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any of the myriad social networking services out there, you can take relationship building to a new level - you can share useful content, help customers do their job, drive your tribe to create content, run highly targeted promotions, and most importantly, you can listen.

Social networks are highly effective means of communications, but they must be integrated into your marketing and communication strategy. Facebook is a great new tool for us marketers, but to get optimal results we need to make it work in conjunction with everything else we have in our tool bag.

The recent acquisition of Radian6, a social media monitoring platform, by Salesforce, might be an important step towards convergence of social media marketing with "traditional" marketing and sales.

Call it whatever you want ("cloud marketing" would make you fully buzzword compliant...), but if as a result of this acquisition we marketers would be able to get a holistic view of our marketing campaigns by combining Salesforce data with social media intelligence, then marketing will become a little more 'science', and a little less 'art'.

We evaluated Radian6 about a year ago and were deeply impressed. We're a Salesforce customer. I can't wait to see how the two platforms will be integrated. For example, if we'd be able to enrich our contact database with information flowing from social media feeds, or if we'd be given the opportunity to correlate sentiment with revenue, then the folks at Salesforce have done good!