Vivo

The power of key messaging

2011-07-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

In 2000, I joined a small laboratory software company based in Kansas City (revenues of 400 MM). At the time, the company made an ambitious push outside of its specialty area and into the entire hospital enterprise as a whole. They went from selling 3-4 applications to selling over 50!

This company devastated its competition in a few short years without really having a market tested product. By the time I left 6 years later, it had grown to one and a half billion dollars in revenue.

They invented an entirely new category: they coined the term "integrated" which immediately made all "interfaced" systems look archaic and old.
They trained every single employee to tell the EXACT SAME brand story, namely, the story of "integration".

For three years the competition did not know how to respond. They didn't know that their own message "interfaced" was toxic and that a competitor's key messaging had poisoned their value proposition.

But with everything, companies must reassess the market and evolve its messaging. Sticking with it too long can have really bad results. As in this companies' case, a competitor showed up out of nowhere with an entirely new message and "ran the table" on the market, racking up unprecedented growth and revenues. I'll talk about what they did shortly.

Embrace trial and error with digital tactics

2011-07-22T08:01:00.000-07:00

Digital tactics bring the capability to measure effectiveness. So in essence, what you have is a closed loop constant improvement process.

With digital, you can "fix the bike while you are riding it". You can modify campaigns and continuously improve them based on measurement.

Companies that embrace this learning process will really maximize the value from their digital tactics and incentivize a larger embrace of the medium.

Cultural differences can neutralize your marketing!

2011-07-21T15:13:00.000-07:00

If you've read my other posts, you know how much I appreciate great marketing. For 13 years as a salesperson, I saw great marketing from small brands beat the pants off of weak marketing from big brands. No lie. I will have to dedicate a post or two about some simply amazing real life examples that I experienced.

But one factor that gets overlooked way, way too often is the impact culture can have on the success of your marketing. From a marketing communications perspective, culture matters to me in three ways:

Your corporate culture which comes from its DNA-usually from the founders. This can be company oriented or customer oriented, engineering or product driven, or marketing driven, or sales driven. I've worked for all of them.
The culture you are marketing to-the US, far east, Germany, south america, etc.
The culture where the company is geographically headquartered

I am 40 years old, and the more I come to truly recognize these cultural differences, the more I am amazed how much they influence-and can interfere with-the success of marketing.

For your marketing communications to be successful in every region of the world, you have to align #s 1 and 3 with #2.

Social media: the brand amplifier

2011-07-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

Let's face it. B2B marketers don't know what to make of social media. They don't know how it can impact their brand, or fit into their marketing mix. The reason for much of this confusion is because social media is often viewed as a standalone tactic (Faceook, LinkedIn, etc.) and not as part of a larger strategy (customer intimacy, insight mining, etc.). Social media can have tremendous consequences for your brand.

How?

Think of social media as a 2 million watt amplifier of a person's voice. An amplifier so powerful, a person's voice can be heard all over the world.

If you have unhappy customers, social media will amplify their unhappiness, and vice versa.

Brands that build deep customer relationships benefit from social media. Those that don't get punished.

Every brand has a goal to narrow the divide between company and customer. Too many don't have a strategy to accomplish it.

Get a strategy.

Implement it.

But first start with a fresh look at your brand. How it is perceived. How you want it to be perceived. And all the touch points in between. When everyone has access to a 2 million watt amplifier, it simply becomes too costly to have a weak brand.

Crossing the chasm in technology marketing

2011-07-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

I had an eyebrow raising phone call with the director of R&D at a multi billion dollar global conglomerate. This person had all kinds of engineering degrees from places like MIT and CalTech.
What he said confirmed my belief that we have reached an inflection point at engineering-driven companies.

He railed on his salesforce only being able to sell on cost. The products he conceived and developed were technically superior and commanded a premium, but his salesforce was getting nowhere near a premium selling price. As a result, his R&D budget was shrinking because margins were evaporating due to the lower selling prices.
His story is playing out everywhere. The pendulum is swinging from an engineering approach to marketing to a market driven approach to marketing. Why? Because an engineering approach to marketing simply doesn’t work anymore.

Now, marketing departments are taking a much more active role in product conception and how they relate their brand value into real world, human benefits. Social media is exploding, bringing brand leadership marketing opportunities never before seen. And the emphasis on product is being replaced by an emphasis on how that product solves customer problems.

Take a look around. There are seismic shifts taking place in B2B marketing. Where does your company stand?

Building market share with brand strategy

2011-07-19T07:14:00.000-07:00

For the last 15 years, I have been amassing first hand and anecdotal B2B product sales data. It’s indisputable. Incumbents win 2-3x more often than non-incumbents. In certain industries, I’ve seen it as high as 90-95%. And sometimes even higher—I’ve seen billion dollar companies fail to get a competitive win over the course of an entire sales year!

Competitors have simply been unable to provide a compelling case to beat an incumbent. Your brand strategy has to be more than just good—or competitive. It has to be exceptional to dislodge an entrenched competitor.

If your objective is to take market share away from your competitor, and add it to your own, your brand strategy needs to reflect it—unequivocally. Loud and clear. Ask yourself:

“Is my brand strategy strong enough and different enough to take business away from a competitor?

If you think that it isn’t strong enough, or your sales are overwhelmingly derived from your installed base, then its time to take a new, more aggressive, more unique approach to articulating your brand value. Since market share leaders have so many competitive advantages (profit, mindshare, R&D, etc.) it makes sense that your marketing brand strategy reflects trying to be #1.

Take the gloves off your product brand

2011-06-08T10:08:00.001-07:00

B2B product marketers have a very hard time quantifying the value of their brand in terms other than product level terms (feature, function, etc.). It often is like a mental block. What results is a marketed brand value that is significantly handicapped, undifferentiated, and lacking meaning for the target audience.

How often have you heard the key values of “efficiency” or “innovation” or “customer centric” or features like “easy to use”? Pretty often, right? The disconnect is that product marketers struggle taking the next step, asking “how does our product efficiency or innovation positively impact our customer’s business or personal lives?”

Does “lower maintenance” mean “greater readiness”? Clearly there has to be a more meaningful benefit to “lower maintenance” than just “lower maintenance”.

Does “reliability” mean more than just being reliable? Maybe it means that your plant will operate without interruption because your gas detection equipment is always working. At $50,000 an hour for a plant being offline for a safety breach, I’d say that reliability is pretty damn important if marketed in that context.

So why isn’t it marketed this way?

Break the logjam and develop meaningful benefits:

Empathize with your target audience and constantly perform a role reversal. Know what they eat, how they talk, how they are paid, what keeps them up at night, what can get them fired, etc. Salespeople are the best at knowing this information.
Identify and articulate the problems that your product solves. Tell them you know their world, not just yours.
Market your product as a solution. Not just a part number.
If you don't believe me, there are MAJOR sales training programs that do just this (Miller Heimann, SPIN Selling, Integrity Selling). If it works for Sales, why isn't is used in Marketing?

Start thinking this way and you’ll be surprised how you can transform the way you market your products-for the better.

The biggest mistake when marketing technology

2011-05-04T09:38:00.000-07:00

I recently had a hushed hallway discussion with a very passionate product marketer at a massive global conglomerate. He admitted something that we’ve known all along.

He said “What do we do to give this launch a little bit more staying power? Our last launch had strong sales for about 6 months and then sales literally fell off a cliff when Brand X came out with their new technology.”

What was the mistake and how do you avoid this career limiting experience?

The mistake was that he branded his product 100% on the technology, and 0% on what the technology DOES for the end user. Does it make their job easier? Does it remove limitations? Does it make people more efficient? More profitable? Higher performers?

There are many things you can do:

Market the technology as a solution to problems and a facilitator for high performance.
Market the technology (solution) to people and their needs, both rational and emotional.
Do not market the technology (solution) as if your target market was engineers (unless, of course, this is true). When engineering-driven companies try to market, their marketing oftentimes sounds like a technology spec sheet or feature dump.
Make the solution stand for something enduring, not fleeting, like neat features which get leapfrogged in 6 months or so.

Easier product marketing? Focus on your corporate brand!

2011-05-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

What do you do when every competitor is saying the same things and spouting the same features and functions in the same undifferentiated way that fails to meet the very real needs of your target audience?

Do you focus on your technology advantage which will in most regards be leapfrogged very shortly by a competitor?

Do you become the 'lowest price' player and win that way?

Do you hire more sales people?

Market research shows that in most complex markets, people are confused and buy based on two factors:

1. Brand

2. Price

Why?

1. They don't want to make a mistake. Strong brands generally stand for positive qualities which mitigate the risk that you've made a bad choice and will regret it (or lose your job). Among CIOs (Chief Information Officers) the mantra is "No one was ever fired for buying EMC storage" or "No one was ever fired for buying IBM servers" or "People don't get fired for buying GE".

2. People buy on price because that is the only differentiator (other than brand).

So what do you do? Two things...

Firstly, in complex markets, incumbents win more than 50% of the time. In healthcare, it is more like 70%. This will be part of another blog post, but for now, in order to keep an existing customer, you have to make products that are high quality, easy to use, perform as advertised, and meet market needs. Otherwise, your customers will be dissatisfied and replace you with a competitor. And once you are on the outside looking in, it is really hard to displace an incumbent.

Secondly, make a concerted, long range effort to build your brand. What does it stand for in the hearts of customers? Does it represent a reduced risk for buyers? Does it communicate how it will make user's lives easier? Does it message consistently with other products that may be part of the brand family? And really focus on the corporate brand most of all. Make it synonymous, also called "unguided recall" in market research parlance, with high performance and low risk of making stakeholders unhappy.

"Interesting. Focus more on the corporate brand to help me sell my product brands?" Yes, absolutely! I am watching markets go this way. I'll talk about this further and why you are really at a disadvantage if you have a weak corporate brand.

Marketing is from Mars. Sales is from Venus.

2011-04-25T14:41:00.000-07:00

Why do these two never seem to get along? Why is there so much pent up hostility among them?

When a sports team wins, you don’t see finger pointing.

When sales aren’t that great, the finger pointing gets going.

I’ve seen this a million times. In general, the reason is because the two don’t understand each other.

Marketing: Marketing has to market a ton of products and a seriously too small budget to effectively support all of the needs of their sales force. Marketing also has to deal with the vortex called company bureaucracy which always seems to slow everything down. If you want to see frustration, watch a new sales guy who goes into marketing. Its painful.

Sales: The people on the front lines are paid a small salary that is not enough to cover their personal expenses and thereby must depend on commissions to support them and their family. They also are in a situation most people don’t have to deal with: REJECTION. This is enough to cause destabilizing depression. Sales is desperate to succeed. They are looking for Marketing to show them the way. When they begin to fail, they hold marketing accountable.

So what is the answer? That is for another blog post, but like any therapist, I recommend compromise and shared sacrifice. I”ll show you how.

Marketing used to be easy!

2011-04-25T14:23:00.000-07:00

Marketing used to be easy compared to today for four reasons:

There were nowhere near as many competitors as there are now
There were nowhere near as many products in each marketplace
Companies have to go way beyond simply highlighting a cool feature or USP in order to win
There were fewer marketing channels

Lets start with the list of competitors, which seems to grow every single year...

More Competitors: In every market, there are competitors literally tripping over each other. Let’s take a quick glance. In software analytics, there were three key players. Business Objects, Cognos, and SAS. Now there are well over a dozen. In healthcare analytics alone, there are about two dozen when as little as 5 years ago, there were about two or three legitimate companies. Lets look at healthcare a little more. Look at all the markets Stryker has invaded. What about J&J? Boston Scientific? Abbott? Medtronic? Let’s get really granular and look at patient monitors. There are now about 10-12 companies and the industry is really locked in a “cat fight” meaning, no one company holds a technological market lead.

If your marketing plan doesn’t have a plan to rise above your competition and stand for something, it will be mired in a price war.

More Products: Because companies don’t discontinue their old products, there is a mass logjam of options that buyers face. Every year, more and more and more products get launched, the bulk of which represent small incremental improvements that usually don’t even get noticed by the people you are trying to sell to.

To make things even more confusing for buyers, few companies do a good job not only of differentiating their offerings from competitors, but they do a bad job of differentiating among individual products within their own product portfolio!

More Messages: What makes complex sales complex is the number of people who impact the purchase of a product. Too often we see a single message about a cool feature, or engineering advance, and nothing that is really rooted in the motivations of the buyers themselves.

The days of this type of marketing are over. Only sophisticated messaging is going to work for sophisticated audiences. People that care about workflow want to see workflow messaging. Those that care about TCO want to see how a product saves money and/or delivers an outsized benefit over time. Those that care about ease of use want to see how it is easier than existing products. Too often, buyers are left scratching their heads, asking "what's in it for me?"

More Channels: This one is self explanatory. The old rules on where your target audience is are now history. We are finding in a recent campaign that the way to our B2B audience is not with B2B trade publications. Its with Facebook and Twitter.

This list could really be about 10 or 12 bullets long, but I focused on the most obvious ones.

In my next segment, learn the effect that all of this competition and their massive product portfolios is having on corporate brands-and what you can do about it.

The need for a new way to market

2011-04-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

I spent 13 years successfully selling high tech products that ranged in price from a few grand up to ten million dollars. For the past 5 years, my agency has been helping these companies market their products and drive sales. We’ve interviewed literally hundreds of reps and managers. And yet, with all of our personal and client experience, the same song keeps being played out: lowest price wins. Why? Because the only differentiator the target audience sees is “price”.

There is NEVER “Less” competition: In order for companies to grow, they have to invade new markets. So each year, there is more competition than ever before. Is your value prop rising above the horde?

Products no longer get sun-setted: Companies don’t have enough faith that their customers will migrate to the new product, so they never discontinue the old one. This has a bucket load of unintended consequences, the LEAST of which is a confused sales force and target market.

Too many companies say the same exact thing...: How often have you heard the word “Innovative”? I’ll stop there...

... in the same exact way: There’s more to brand strategy than simply identifying the key feature and having the agency find a cool visual for it? There’s more value to a product than its coolest feature.

People are not Vulcans: They why market to them like one? People have needs and wants. They have problems and goals and a fundamental desire to be valued and not screw up. Bypassing all of these buying triggers results in a huge lost opportunity.

There’s a better way. We’ll show you how. Keep checking in.