The 3 dimensions of Lead generation

The 3 dimensions of Lead generation

Mar 28, 2016 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Virtually any B2B business owner I talk to, one of their key challenges is lead generation.

When you dig a bit, often it is the case that lead generation  becomes a problem where there is a shortage of sales, then they react in a short term manner.

Lead generation is a long term proposition, B2B and B2C, the techniques may differ a bit,  but when working day to day the only effective tool to get another sale is price, so you lose.

So it seems to me there are three dimensions to effective lead generation:

  1. The means by which you generate the lead
  2. The conversation rates at various points  through the sales process
  3. The time taken in the sales process

Lets look at them in a little detail.

Means. This is the essence of marketing, the game is to identify who might be a buyer, why, when, and the means by which you can facilitate and support the transaction then build on it for a longer term. Digital has exploded the techniques available to us but the rules have not changed: Understand how you add value to who, and walk them through the relationship building and sales processes to a transaction. Brand building by another name.

Conversion rates.  How do you calculate your sales conversation rates? Digital is now awash with numbers, marketing has changed from the fluffy to the numerical and we are belted over the ears to get with the program.

Marketing Experiments is a shop flogging the notion that marketing experience, creativity and intuition can be turned into a mathematical formulas, and in doing so they have done a fair job of nailing the variables in a digital sale to the extent that they can be nailed:

Probability of conversion = Clarity of Value proposition + (incentive to action – friction associated with the action) – Anxiety.

Whilst a bit convoluted, it does make some sense, and you  can weight the factors according to your market, but the essential message is that marketing can be measured. To an extent  it can be, but losing sight of the emotion involved would be a mistake, and emotion will always be virtually impossible to measure with any certainty. As Gary Vaynerchuk asked, “what is the ROI of your mother?”

Time.  Every business and market is different, as is every potential customer situation so there are no rules in this except one: Only a small number of your prospects will be ready to buy right now.

However, if you extend the time frame to a month, or a year, and there will be many more ready. The challenge therefore is to be talking to them in terms that they are comfortable with at that particular point in their  journey to a transaction.  Given the reality of this journey, the worst thing to do is make the effort ‘stop-start’. It has to be a continuous marketing effort to ensure that there is a flow of leads into and through the sales process. Take the foot off the pedal and you will have a hole in the sales. Keep talking, build a relationship, guide them through the process. Demonstrate credibility and expertise, so that when they re in the buying mode, you get the call.

Too often we concentrate on finding the few who are ready to buy now, rather than playing the long game. Patience rewards the skilled fisherman, same with sales.

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Design for context.

Design for context.

Mar 21, 2016 | Customers, Management

Good design is considering up front what could possibly go wrong, and designing it out.

A while ago I did some work with a business that had suffered for years with excessive  invoice errors. To their credit, they had done a lot to eliminate the variations in their processes, and systemise them, which had made a difference, but not enough.

It was pointed out (by a forkie) that their very attractive shipper design, done by a design agency at considerable expense to be consistent with their brand, was really difficult for the forkies to read in the warehouse, three rows up.

They got rid of  the pretty graphics, replacing them with a clear, big product descriptor  and bingo, errors almost eliminated.

Lesson is  that design has many functions, and good design takes into consideration the circumstances that the product finds itself in, out there in the real world, not always the same world as that shown on the screen of a design software package.

On a more personal note, over the 40 years wandering around business, I have found that there is as strong well of common sense and actionable improvements available to us in places that those in the air-conditioning and suits often do not consider.

Go talk to those people.

The secret sauce of marketing.

The secret sauce of marketing.

Mar 16, 2016 | Branding, Communication, Customers

 

The currency of marketing success starts these days with a simple word:

Attention.

How to get it, keep it and leverage it.

In the crowded world we are in, it is the secret sauce of marketing.

Every day we are assaulted by messages, millions of them, yet we actually ‘see’ just a tiny fraction.

In a world where our brains give us comprehensive and automatic filters, where even those that get through have a split second to make an impression and gain some of our attention, it pays to understand the means by which this process happens.

Automatic sensory cues.

When was the last time you completely ignored a gorgeous bird (if you are a bloke) wearing a short skirt and blazing red shirt?

Never happens right? That is because our brain is on automatic, it sifts the information coming at it in an unconscious manner. However, when something triggers one of the basic responses in our ‘reptile’ brain, the deepest most ancient part of the grey matter that controls just a few things, we notice. This automatic response was vital to the survival of a weak mammal being hunted by sabre tooth tigers, and thankfully survives to ensure we see the red shirt.

Reputation.

We often almost automatically trust things and people based on reputation. Tom Clancy brings out a new novel, and fans of the genre will buy it based on the experience and reputation of his previous books. In the past we also tended to trust authority, police and doctors for example, but the transparency of the last 25 years has almost seen that gone, we now make judgements on a wider base. Taking that one step further, we now put some weight on crowd sourced reviews as Amazon does with their rating and referral systems.

Recognition.

When we recognise something or someone, it grabs our attention. Walking through Sydney’s CBD a few weeks ago, paying no particular attention to anything, I unexpectedly recognised someone I had not seen for many years, walking the opposite way on the opposite side of Pitt Street. The sudden and unexpected recognition riveted my attention, I had to race across the road and accost him. (luckily my recognition was accurate or it would have been embarrassing). This also works inside businesses, the recognition of the familiar, weather it be people, processes or existing patterns of behaviour are powerful motivators of future behaviour.

Think like a customer.

It often surprises how little marketers actually look at their output from the perspective of those they are trying to influence. Stepping across and putting yourself into the shoes of the receiver in a way that enables you to see the material you are producing through their eyes, recognise and respond to the emotional hooks, feel urge to ‘connect’ that you are trying to build, recognise the  relevance and power of the offer or call to action. To some this capacity to jump into your customers persona comes as naturally as breathing, to others it remains a bridge too far no matter how hard they try, how much research they read. Finding someone in your team who has this capacity can mean a quantum step in the effectiveness of your efforts.   Thinking like a customer makes gathering attention much easier as you can see the cues your customer will respond to, and deliver them in a manner that creates and drives the attention.

This task, the drive to gather and leverage attention is one of the foundations of marketing success, understanding the triggers is essential.

5 ways to avoid brand prostitution in FMCG

5 ways to avoid brand prostitution in FMCG

Mar 8, 2016 | Branding, Category, Customers, Marketing

The primary tool used by retailers to attract customers is the discount prices that they offer on their suppliers products, largely funded by those suppliers.

As you read all the literature and case studies on brand building, and reflecting on my own experience, the last thing you want to do is indiscriminate price cutting to build volumes. Deep and regular discounting is a sure way to murder any long term position of the brand as anything other than cheap and nasty.

I have yet to see “Develop the brand to  be cheap and nasty” in a strategy document.

However, promoting your product, as distinct from stand alone price cutting is a potent way to get trial, and any brand building exercise  contains measures that  encourage and reward trial; setting out to turn trial into habit.

It is a delicate balance, generating trial and confirming to customers that  the product is delivering value for the non promotion price, when the discounted price rolls around every few weeks.

So how do you combat it, when  you  have so little control over the retail interface with consumers?

Not easy, particularly when to retain shelf space, discounting is mandatory, and often the  suppliers have ceded control of their promotion timing and type via  trading term agreements.

In effect the retailers do what they want, when they want, with your products to build their revenues and margins, and charge you for it.

In other words, they are able to prostitute your brand in their battle for market share and margin.

How do you break this cycle?

Not easy, and not without risks, as retailers can always delete your products and put  something else in the space, and increasingly this is a housebrand.

The answer is in several parts.

Make the CEO the senior  product manager. Too often, the boss is too busy to attend to the details of the sales and marketing programs, and conventional management wisdom  is that you leave the detail to those responsible for the outcomes.  However, abrogating responsibility is very different from leaving the details to the functional management. The boss must be engaged in the battles with retailers. Such engagement delivers certainty that you are serious to the retailers, and assures your people that the boss has their back if it goes pear-shaped.

Have a plan to manage the customer as well as the consumer.  It is essential that you have a plan actively supported by the CEO around the supply chain challenges of building of a brand. This means that the CEO needs to support the sales and marketing management in the implementation in the face of retailer pressure, removing the retailers opportunity to play the  ‘go to your boss’ card.  Obviously, any marketing plan needs to address the consumer  you are talking to, what they are looking for, and how you are delivering that value to them, or they will fail, but most in my experience miss the explicit references to those who control the choke points in the distribution chain.

Regain some control over trading terms. This is easy to say, but enormously hard to do, and is impossible in one negotiation round.  To the extent that sales success requires distribution in the two gorillas, you need to be very aggressive and smart about wresting back some of the control of the on shelf promotional and price decisions. Branding success requires that you deliver consumer trial in a competitive environment, followed up and consolidated by the reward of great value, which is way more than a cheap pick-up price. Just going along with a retailer delivering a low price to consumers only rewards brand prostitution by the retailer.

Manage your data. You need data on which to base all your decisions, as debating challenging questions with a retailer on the basis of what you think is not good enough.  Assembling data that demonstrates the ROI on promotional activity across a variety of time frames and consumer centric parameters is essential. This requires both scan data and external consumer and social data to be combined and analysed. Not an easy task, and certainly not without cost. However, if your volumes are dependent on promotional pricing without the ROI knowledge offered by data analysis, you have already lost.

Consumers need to be engaged. Outside the price, you need to be communicating with your consumers, supporting the value proposition in every way possible. This is now possible through a multitude of channels and tools not dreamed of just a few years ago, and these need to be used. However, if  you have the budgets, old fashioned advertising, so long as it is good advertising that communicate clearly the value of the brand, still works.

Yeas ago as a young product manager, I was a (minor) part of the team that built Meadow Lea margarine into the dominating market leader in margarine. Meadow Lea peaked above 20% market share, well over 3 times its nearest competitor, in a crowded market, at premium prices. It was just margarine, a great product, but hardly worth that sort of dominance until you remember that we were busy congratulating mothers for using it for the benefit of their families health and  happiness. I have not seen any numbers in a long time, but I have also not seen advertising for a long time, so I bet Meadow Lea is back with the pack, only selling on promotion, at discounted prices, and the parent company, which took a short term view of marketing, went from being a successful large company to an unsuccessful way smaller one until it was flogged off to a Singaporean group.

Sad that.

We built a brand powerhouse, only to have it squandered.

As a final groan, just pre Christmas I went into Woolworths to buy the family Christmas ham. The only choice was one of a number of Woolworths house brands.  I went elsewhere, and found a really good ham from a specialist retailer, probably cost an extra $5, but was worth every cent.

I wonder if this experience is a portent of things to come, or just me being cranky.

Three by four marketing equation for success.

Three by four marketing equation for success.

Mar 2, 2016 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

How do you win business in a competitive world?

I know for sure it is not  getting any easier, but the advice on how to do, and stories of how to be rich in 15 minutes a day seem to abound.

Perhaps I don’t take advice well?

It is pretty clear to me, after 40 years of working with this stuff that the more we complicate things, the more difficult seeing the wood for the trees becomes, so here is a really simple tool that you can use today.

To get business, any business, although the context and circumstances vary enormously, the potential customer needs to:

  • Know you
  • Like you
  • Trust that you can solve their problem/add value to their lives.

Pretty simple really.

The other side of the equation of course is the challenge of creating the circumstances where a potential customer has the opportunity to get to know, like and trust you.

Marketers can spend huge amounts of money, much of it wasted, on chasing this outcome, often failing simply because they complicate the hell out of it and confuse themselves.

I like to think of it in human terms. The building of a marketing relationship is no different to any other type of human relationship, it evolves in stages that are pretty simple:

  • You need to be where they are. This is so blindingly obvious it is often missed.
  • You need to get their attention.
  • You need to make a connection
  • You need them to take action.

marketing matrix for successBreak all the complicated cliché ridden & expensive recommendations  you get from those with a pig in the race into this simple matrix and reap the benefits.

Beware though, as Steve Jobs said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” so this stuff is deceptively hard, but now you have a tool to make it easier.

The dirty little secret of digital marketing.

The dirty little secret of digital marketing.

Feb 8, 2016 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business

Achieving simplicity is really hard, we all know that in our guts.

There is however a huge difference between simple and superficial, and again, we all know that but tend to be persuaded to take the easy way out.

The development of a specific ‘Persona’ to which you target your marketing efforts is one of those seemingly simple  things we can now do with digital help, but in fact it is really hard.

Therefore, many make a token effort, and go away satisfied, but have in fact settled for a superficial result.

And then they wonder why the subsequent marketing efforts fail to deliver on the hype.

It is impossible to target a generic message to a 35-year-old middle-class working mother of two, and have it received in the manner you would wish. It’s much easier to target a message to Jennifer, who has two children under four, works broken hours as a lawyer, and is always looking for quick but healthy dinners and ways to spend more time with her husband and  kids, and less time on housework.

As a young marketing bloke we always developed a ‘target audience’ for everything we did.

In those  days they were generally demographic categories, which were pretty broad. If we were lucky and had big budgets, we had a Usage & Attitude study that gave us some insights into consumers behaviour, but were pretty superficial. The research relied on peoples memory, and willingness to actually recognise and admit to the behaviours that drove marketing decisions.

It was relatively rough and ready stuff.

Then  we used mass media to try and reach those demographic groups, hoping to find a few by chance who wanted to hear and act on what we were saying, or even were just prepared to listen.

Progressively we have been able to develop detailed pictures of customers and potential customers, those of our competitors, and those who might be interested in what we have to offer. We now can build a detailed understanding of their preferences and behaviour from a range of data sources,  can direct messages very specifically at very small groups of  individuals, and with many forms of media, specific individuals.

This power is unprecedented , and mostly it is ignored by small and medium sized businesses.

It enables the development of a four sided picture of those we want to reach.

Who they are

Where you can find them

Develop your target persona

Develop your target persona

What are their behaviours that are relevant to your value proposition

Why they should  buy from you

The flip side of the persona, the challenge  most marketers fail to understand sufficiency is that individuals now can avoid you should they choose. That array of digital targeting tools can be turned against the marketer, their messages in one way or another moved to the ‘Junk file’ never to be seen or acknowledged.

Why they should  buy from you, what makes your persona something relevant to a potential buyer?

Because you can solve a problem,  they like/trust you, and/or they engage and relate to you.

Successful selling is not about the transaction, it is the value you can deliver that is more  than the cost of the transaction, and it is about the empathy you can deliver.

In order to create a story potential customers can relate to, you need to develop some sort of story for the character.  Who they are, how they got here, what they have experienced, the obstacles overcome, their character flaws, all the things that make them human. You weave your own characters into the sales itch, and lead people to the conclusion you want them to reach, because you relate to them, they relate to you, your story is theirs.

This means you may need a few variations that accommodate differing ideal customer personas, but not too many or it becomes false and fabricated.

Let me know if I can help.

 

 

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