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e-Xpertise in Industry Issue #21
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In this issue...
| Feature Article: |
How to get your customers talking: Allan Behrens asks what makes attending a vendor event worthwhile? |
| Hot Topic: |
Spotcheck - Does your gun fire blanks? Bob Brown recommends that you ask your sales team to look at the currency of your collateral and provides a questionnaire to help. |
| Book Review: |
The Marketing Plan in Colour: by Malcolm McDonald and Peter Morris is reviewed by Mike Evans. |
| Noticeboard: |
SIGGRAPH: 8
- 12 August 2004, Los Angeles. |
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Quote
for Today
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
Peter Drucker
Feature Article: How to get your customers talking!
I can't remember the number of times that I've been asked for the most effective way to develop engagement with new clients. We've all been involved in the discussions which go something like: "...so what's the most suitable event to attract new customers… and by the way, our marketing budget's been slashed again, so this program has really got to cost us as little as possible?"
In truth, as we all know, there's no
silver bullet. What we can do is look at what's worked for others in the past
and if it fits our market we can then reproduce it to suit our own objective.
This of course applies in reverse, if it's not working - don't repeat it.
It is clear that interest in shows and exhibitions is declining. There are a
number of factors which have led to this trend. Not least amongst these is the
availability of information over the web. Customers just don't see the value
of being sold to - and often harassed at shows, particularly if they've invested
in the time and effort to attend. Prospects often get accosted left, right and
centre by salespeople whose smooth sales patter persuades them to step up and
have a look at the latest version.
Once you're on the stand, providing you've
got money, you'll be plied with coffee and biscuits or drinks, sandwiches and
crisps. Does this ring a bell? No wonder potential prospects sit in front of
their computers searching for their particular grail. It's non-threatening and
allows them to capture information at a rate, and in a direction that suits
their objectives, not that of a sales person.
However, customers still want to be informed. This will often take the form
of one or more sales calls. But customers like to feel in control of their destiny.
We have to encourage them, not force them.
So the question is, "how can we
get customers to talk to us and allow our sales people to engage with them,
whilst making the process appear less threatening". More to the point,
"how can we do this in such a manner that shows they've got real value"?
ROI isn't a term solely related to product or service purchases. It also applies
to our prospects' time.
So what makes attending a vendor event worthwhile? It's certainly not, as some
vendor's seem to believe, the "death by PowerPoint" delivery often
forced on unsuspecting audiences. One of the answers is in the category defined
by one of my colleagues as in the "bleeding obvious". People like
to talk. In particular they like to talk to similar people about similar issues.
In fact they love to talk to people that have had a similar problem and solved
it. They want to look at how their counterparts have addressed particular problems
and capitalise on their past mistakes. If a problem is yet to be solved, they
want to pool knowledge with similar minds and investigate alternate points of
view. In the end they will rationalise new concepts to see if there's a novel
means to develop a solution.
Cambashi has held several conferences where peer-to-peer forums have successfully
used this concept to deliver remarkable results. Consistently,feedback from
our events cites that a key element of their success was peer-to-peer discussion.
At the Conference for the Future of Engineering Software (COFES) earlier this
year I had the opportunity to study this process at first hand. The true success
of this event, in my view, lay in the process of networking and peer discussion.
This is not to say that the presentations held no value. They indeed fulfilled
a useful purpose. The key is the content mix. For many, the real benefit of
the conference was in the way it was structured into a series of discussions.
This encompassed both casual discussions, over breaks, and managed one-on-one
and group sessions.
As further evidence, I've had the good fortune to spend time talking to customers
at various product update sessions from a broad range of IT vendors. What stands
out at these events are the intense discussions amongst attendees in break-outs.
Unfortunately this is often overlooked by the vendors in their enthusiasm to
inform customers of new product features. Lest we forget, one of the strongest
references for sale is word of mouth. Good news spreads fast. Unfortunately
bad travels faster. Clearly there's a risk in this, but in reality, we live
or die by our past success.
Does including more attendee-driven content provide a new and valued alternative
to the historic "show and tell" seminars of the past? To some extent
this is dependent on whether this format is repeatable and cost justifiable.
In reality, it's far more expensive when people don't attend because they can't
justify yet another product seminar, even if the title does include"ROI",
"enhanced returns" or "improving your success in".
At the end of the day, we must find new methods of providing value to the attendees.
Perhaps we need smaller more interactive events which encourage greater attendee
participation? But will the vendor's organisation have the creativity and commitment
to meet this challenge and depart from "selling to the customer" to
"encouraging them to allow us to sell to them"?
Hot Topic: Spotcheck - Does your gun fire blanks?
Before you have a chance to deliver your sales pitch, your prospective
customer is likely to have looked at your company website -will he find that
the sales and marketing collateral scheme you designed several years ago is
still relevant? This is one of the key weapons in your sales and marketing arsenal
and is often the most neglected. It's not surprising that this should be the
case. Once the production mechanism has been established, it's left pretty much
alone for years. Here are four good reasons for dusting it off and taking a
fresh look at it:
1. there's a new person in the job
2. the business has devised a new strategy (or sometimes one has been imposed)
3. the company that produces your collateral has become careless (perhaps because
the process is not scrutinised)
4. marketing communications is centralised and the local budget needs to be
trimmed
I'm sure you all know the "in-tray exercise" where you divide all
your tasks into piles that are either urgent or important. Collateral is one
of those tasks that always make it to the important pile but seldom rises to
the top of the urgent pile. By the way, the usual outcome of the exercise is
to realise that you spend most of your time doing work that is urgent but not
important! OK, so we all accept that collateral is important, since there is
absolutely no point in putting the sales team into the field, properly armed,
but with the wrong kind of ammunition.
At Cambashi, we believe that more than 3 years between strategic reviews of a key marketing process is far too long. We know that the markets and our customers' value indicators change much more frequently. The sales team, and the climate they sell in, should be the drivers. Many experts have written on the subject of collateral and most sales and marketing managers and practitioners can point to their preferred pundit. The problem is that, once established, the collateral production process is seldom critically reviewed.
There are various categories of collateral,e.g. product data sheets; company profiles, position statements, thought leadership white papers, etc. The advent of the web has changed the relative importance of these different categories. Some may no longer be relevant. However, customer success stories remain one of the most valuable collateral types. They can be handed around by our friends in the prospect company to members of the decision making group that we can't even get to visit our website, let alone us.
Although some companies do this extremely well, and consistently, for others it remains a continuing challenge. Our research for the last 20 years confirms that what people value most is the insight that is provided by reading and learning about the experiences of other people who have faced the same challenge.
We've put together a simple self-assessment checklist with a scorecard and explanatory notes which you can print off our website.
There are a number of ways that you can use this. Of course,
if you would really like to do some benchmarking against your peers, then please
contact me. However, you can also print it off and do the exercise off line.
If you have strong nerves, you could wait for the next sales meeting, ask your
sales team to complete it, and then invite your marketing manager along to hear
their views!
Book
Review : The Marketing
Plan in Colour by Malcolm McDonald and Peter
Morris
Butterworth-Heinemann ISBN 0-7506-4759-0.
This updated edition is highly unusual in that it adopts a comic strip format to present Professor McDonald's recommendations on effective and efficient marketing planning. He developed his classic views at the Cranfield School of Management and this format, first published in 1987, is a highly accessible variant.
The Book explains how to integrate the marketing process
with the other key strands of business planning: sales; product development;
finance; personnel; and distribution. He shows how to reconcile divergent objectives
in each of these areas by resolving a series of audits and SWOT (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) analyses into shared assumptions about
the business environment and a set of objectives and strategies.
He goes on to consider plans for marketing communications, pricing, distribution
and then links these plans to sales and market information and forecasting as
a total system.
Management teams and sales representatives don't get the time to read lots of
books. However, if you are only going to read one book on marketing, then this
is the one. You may know all that is in it, after all marketing is just common
sense, but I bet you don't do it all.
The strongest part of the book is the way that it shows how to link market segmentation
analysis through sales coverage planning to the advertising and sales promotion
plans. My criticisms concern coverage of the trend to provide hybrid service
and product solutions and the role of value added resellers.
I think that managers in smaller businesses selling information technology to
industry would find this book particularly useful. It could provide excellent
preparation to ensure that the management team turn the efforts of an "away
day" into revenue and profit.
SIGGRAPH 2004: 8 - 12 August 2004. Los Angeles, California. SIGGRAPH 2004 is the world's premier marketplace of computer graphics and interactive techniques.
TEAM: which includes the following shows; DES, TCT 2004, Inspex, CIM, Motion and Control, will be held in Birmingham from 28 - 30 September, 2004.
APICS: International Conference and Exposition, 10-13 October 10-13, 2004, 2004. San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, California. The four-day international conference combines high-quality education with unmatched peer-to-peer networking and a showcase of leading suppliers.
A full list of industry events can be found at IT industry events on the Cambashi website