Mar 14, 2012 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
Rarely does anything happen behind a desk, so why do you spend so much time there? Just like the old saying “the harder I work, the luckier I get” small business owners should say “the more customers I see, the greater chance of an order”
Most small business owners are usually specialists of some sort, they are not often sales people first, they are something else first, and it takes an effort to get out and sell.
Do the preparation, know the customer know how you can add value to his/her business, and get out there.
Mar 8, 2012 | Customers, Sales
As a marketer my basic mantra has been “see it through the customers eyes”, simple and effective.
Recently while mentoring a great young sales person for a client, I noticed that even though she asked the right questions at the right time, and used the information returned to progress the sales process very well, she had less success closing than I would have expected.
On reflection, she was failing because of the language she was using.
Her language reflected that of her employer, and in it were embedded the jargon and descriptive nuances that were used to communicate a complex product amongst themselves, and it was not necessarily the language her prospects used amongst themselves. Although the differences were small, they were important, not just for the clarity of understanding that was communicated, but importantly for the comfort of the prospect, who was reassured that there was no ambiguity at play.
It became clear that in addition to the marketing mantra, there needs to be a sales one as well, “speak using the customers voice”.
By so doing, you avoid the pitfalls of the same words having slightly different meanings and implications in different contexts, and by using the customers voice back to them, you enhance the opportunity to build the rapport so important to building a relationship.
Mar 1, 2012 | Customers, Marketing
The truth of wealth creation in the gold rushes, is that it was the blokes who sold the shovels, beds, grog, and horses who got rich, not the individual miners, with the odd exception for the really lucky ones.
It is still the same.
As markets commoditise, it gets progressively more difficult to make a bob out of selling the commodity, even the least cost supplier has trouble in the long run doing better than returning the cost of capital. However, those who sell insurance, currency hedging, heavy equipment, and the like, are all doing OK, so moving up the value chain, from the front lines to the rear supply echelons, to continue the analogy in the headline, makes more sense as time passes.
Feb 2, 2012 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
I purchased a set of Sidchrome tools as a 20 year old working on my first car, simply because a mate doing an apprenticeship told me they were the best tools, and 40 years later, I still think Sidchrome are worth the money, despite not putting a spanner on a cylinder head for 30 years.
The power of word of mouth referral for a brand.
The world has changed, and we all now go looking for product reviews on line, and as the volume of those searches has sky-rocketed, so has the incentive for marketers to game the system. Use a pseudonym, or pay for someone to tell the world how great your product is, nothing stopping you. The line between advertising and endorsement by a trusted figure blurred beyond recognition? Perhaps not, so long as negative reviews are able to get equal time.
Social media is a great leveler, both positive and negative reviews get oxygen, reviewers can build a bank of credibility by being even-handed. EBay’s rating system of the performance of buyers and sellers is a great example of the way it can works, as is Amazons book review system.
Planting reviews that are advertising cowering as reviews is dodgy, but ultimately OK, so long as the product delivers on the promise. False reviews are immoral, wrong, and dangerous, as the power of social networks will find you out, and shoot your lousy product dead. This infographic from Hubspot makes for interesting reading.
Feb 1, 2012 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media
I’m 60, an early adopter of marketing analytics in the 70’s. Demographics, U&A, and product positioning research all hooked into mass marketing media, the foundation of our mass market, consumer led social revolution.
Now all that is irrelevant, or almost.
Marketing now is about engaging with an individual, and groups of individuals with a common mind-set, weather they be social butterflies from the eastern suburbs of Sydney, or driving a truck in the Kimberley’s.
Their demographics do not matter any more, what matters is their mind set, and increasingly we can communicate to a mind set with the tools of the web 2.0.
This just makes marketing harder and more accountable, as creativity and innovative thinking now trumps budget dollars, and mass reach every time, and you can measure the return from every dollar spent.
It also makes it more rewarding for those who embrace the challenge.
Jan 11, 2012 | Change, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Kodak used to “own” photography, having a massive share of the film market, end to end.
No more, Kodak is virtually broke, subject to continuous take-over speculation.
The really interesting thing is that one of the assets that makes Kodak valuable to an aggressor is its bank of patents that relate to the technology that drives the product innovation in the digital space.
The failure for Kodak is therefore not in being unable to develop the science, for individuals in the labs to see a different path, and to imagine the next iteration but to do something about it in the marketplace, disrupt themselves before somebody else does it.
Coming in parallel, but I have not seen it really considered before is the fundamental change in the way people think about photography, a complete disruption in behavior that has gone unnoticed.
Photographs used to be used to preserve memories. No more, at least, not much.
They are now used as a foundation piece of the individual communication process.
What are we doing now, who we are seeing, where we are, an expression of ourselves are now the motivations to take a photo on whatever device happens to be in our hand at the time. Creating a record for our kids is a useful by-product of these activities, although I am not sure how the current 20 year old will react to their children in 20 years seeing photos of them pissed at a party 20 years before, so perhaps creating some records will be problematic in the long term.
The photographic market has been totally disrupted, not just by the development of digital technology, but in the way consumers behave. For a marketer, being able to build a corporate mind-set that enables the science, and at the same time embraces the ambiguity and uncertainty of consumer behavior changes is the challenge that keeps life interesting.
