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!

The "S" in SaaS stands for "Service"

I'm a firm believer in cloud computing.

Yes, cloud is right at the peak of inflated expectations, but if you've been around long enough, you've seen this happen with Client/Server, Y2K and Web 2.0, to name just a few examples. The fundamental concepts of cloud are sound, the technology will catch up with the vision, and cloud will become an integral part of mainstream IT.

But cloud computing not only changes the way we consume computing resources, it also presents a sea change to many marketers.

Most cloud vendors make it real easy to onboard - just sign in and you're good to go. No need to ask your IT to set up a new server, no need to install any software, no need to (and usually no way) to embark on complex customization projects. Whether you market IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or any other Gartner-oriented-cloud-acronym, remember that the last "S" stands for "Service". It is incredibly easy to start consuming a service, but it is equally easy to stop, or switch to another provider.

When I joined Zend a couple of years ago we used a paid web analytics service from FireClick. It was complicated, slow and buggy. We decided to check out Google Analytics, and realized it could easily do what we wanted, and for an attractive cost of zero. A few web page updates later and we were up and running with Google Analytics.

If your business is a cloud-based service, you just can't afford to slip. Your service needs to be unreasonably good. If you head marketing for a cloud-based service, remember it's not just about leads and conversions. It's about delivering great value to your users day in day out.

Talk first, sell later

Say I give you $100 which you need to share with another person, whom you have never met before. You determine the split. The other person can accept or reject the offer. If the split is rejected, nobody receives any money.

How do you split the $100? And if you're on the receiving end - what's the lowest offer you would accept?

It's called the ultimatum game. Any classic economist would assert that a rational human being would accept any offer that is greater than zero. After all, one dollar is better than nothing...

However, people are irrational (well, you might be rational, but all others are not).

Academic experiments show that 33%(!) of the splits offered in the ultimatum game are rejected.

Why? Because people perceive the split to be unfair.

Now what happens if we tweak the scenario, and let people chat before evaluating the split offer?

Researcher Al Roth conducted this experiment. Only 5% of the splits were rejected. The conversation improved "conversion" from 66% to 95%!

The point is that marketing is all about building relationship. As marketers or sales people, going directly "for the kill" would yield far worse results than gradually building relationships.

A question that comes to mind though: what if the discussions were carried out online? In Facebook? Over Twitter? Would conversion be higher or lower?

How does online relationship compare to offline relationship?

The cost of free content

Say you could post a free white paper on your website and get 10,000 anonymous downloads. Or, you could require registration and get 200 downloads. What's a better option?

There's an interesting debate between HubSpot's Mike Volpe and David Meerman Scott about putting forms in front of content. Mike thinks you should. David thinks you shouldn't.

I think they're both wrong. And they're both right.

Time and privacy are the currency in today's connected world. Ask people to give you their email, and some will go away. Ask people to make a few extra clicks, and you will lose downloads. Does this mean you shouldn't ask people to register? Of course not.

Marketing 2.0 is all about building relationships with your target audience. What you get greatly depends on what you give. 

 

At Zend, we have tons of content available for free. You can watch lots of really useful videos, download white papers, read insightful blog posts - no registration is required. But, "pay" us a little - give us your email address - and we will send you marketing-free product alerts or a mostly-technical newsletter. Ready to "pay" the big bucks, i.e. tell us more about yourself? We're happy to let you watch one of our many webinars, or download a free trial of our commercial products.

If you're in Mike Volpe's position (or mine), you're measured on the number of qualified leads you can generate. If you're set out to build trust and interest among your target audience with the hope of turning many of them into qualified leads, remember that relationships are built over time and take a great deal of interaction. Create a "relationship building" plan - make sure you have the right content for each stage, design the right form for the right moment, and go "sell" your content.

Facebook marketing is too important to be left to marketers

Facebook has become an obsession.

The infographic from SocialHype and OnlineSchools.org says it all. 1 in every 13 people on earth uses Facebook. Your local plumber, credit card company, detergent maker, politician and grandmother most likely have presence on Facebook.

Facebook is the new web. It's where things are happening. It's where herds of prospective buyers come for their daily doze of "like".

It's also become a preferred destination for us marketers. We want to be where our customers are. But once you land in Mark's land, what do you do?

At Zend, Facebook has become an incredibly efficient marketing vehicle. We have always looked at Facebook as an integral part of our marketing mix. Some people like talking to us by phone, some by email, and some are happy to communicate with us through Facebook. It's up to us to take a holistic view and integrate all those wonderful tools for optimal results.

Since we launched our Facebook page, the number of users and interactions have been steadily growing. Facebook has become a top 10 referring site to some of our downloads, so it helps feed our funnel. We're seeing more and more online purchases driven by our Facebook page.

Why did Facebook work well for us? Because we kept marketing out of it... sort of.

Facebook opened up the door to a new world of connecting, searching and sharing online, but at the end of the day, it's all about how you as a marketer can add real value to prospects and customers. Sure we do online contests on Facebook, we promote special offers and new product releases, but what made the difference is our focus on truly helping people solve their problems. In our case, we're helping web developers address their technical questions and issues, so they can be successful at what they do for a living.

The person in charge of our Facebook program is one of the best technical guys in our company. He totally gets the questions, the responses, the nuances, and he speaks the same language our customers do. He often posts tips & tricks, how-to online videos and interesting technical posts. He helps them solve their problems. Could a marketer do this? Probably not.

In summary:

• Use Facebook to help customers solve their problems
• Integrate Facebook into your marketing mix and programs
• Measure results and optimize - users, interactions, search, conversions

"Just enough" sales process

The sales process defines the company's revenue production line. A formalized sales process, if diligently enforced, helps you ensure consistency across your sales teams, and consistency is key to measuring the health of the pipeline, forecasting, and scaling up.

At Identify Software, we had a 26(!) step sales process that covered pre and post sales activities. Sales reps were expected to religiously follow the process. They were trained on messaging and were not to divert from it. They had to document every step in the CRM system. Management spent substantial time on analyzing sales cycle metrics on a weekly basis.

Sales Process at Identify Software

At BMC, we had a 4 step sales process - interest, concurrence, evaluation, decision. Simple.

How detailed should the sales process be?

The answer depends on many factors, such as the type of the product or service being sold, desired skill set of the sales reps, management culture, geos covered and more. At Identify, the exceptionally detailed process enabled management to have stringent control over what sales reps were doing, and get immersed in analytical data.

This came at a price.

Blindly following a recipe leaves no room for creativity. No room for organic optimization. It also affects the type of people you can hire for the job. You can't ask Jamie Oliver to follow a recipe you have written.

So what is one to do? I believe in "just enough" process. Define a process that provides guidance, enables tracking and scaling, yet leaves room for creativity and local adjustments. Keep what works and eliminate what doesn't. After all, the goal is revenue and delighted customers. The process itself is not.