Selling a product or service is a process. The sales cycle for a candy bar at a checkout stand might be short, but it’s a process, one I call PAINT.
Pain: I’m a little bit hungry for something sweet and there’s nothing but healthy stuff in my shopping cart.
Awareness: Oooh, candy bars.
Interest: I like dark chocolate Milky Way. There’s one right there.
Negotiation: I have enough pocket change.
Timing: No, don’t put it in the bag, I’ll just take it. I can finish it before my wife sees it.
We’ll come back to PAINT when we talk about lead scoring, but in the case of the dark chocolate Milky Way it’s a score of 458. Done deal.
In general for any relatively complex product the process is some variation of this greatly extended process:
Pain — We have an issue that would be good to solve
Awareness — There are solutions for our issue
Interest — Tell me how your solutions will work for us
Consideration — Show me your success stories and implementation details
Comparison — How do your solutions compare to competitors
Negotiation — What do we get and how much will it cost
Adoption — Help me get our people to use this solution
Extension — Let’s add other users/divisions
Standardization — Let’s deploy it everywhere
In traditional marketing we attempted to intercept people somewhere in the Pain, Interest or Consideration stages of the cycle. Were we gained response we qualified the responses according to some lead scoring criteria such as BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timing) and then tossed it over the wall to sales, who promptly ignored anyone that didn’t have a check in hand or a thousand users. They then claimed that they had cold-called everyone who bought, that the leads were useless, and they needed a lot more of them.
No more of that. Now we can connect to everyone that has the slightest interest, stay with them throughout the sales cycle, delivering exactly the right information they need at each stage of the process. We can cue them up for the sales force or even take the sale directly, then mature them into as large a customer as they can be, and turn them into evangelists for our products.
In other words, the conversations that we are entering into support the entire selling process, not just the beginning of it.
That’s a huge difference in the value of marketing. Marketers are no longer just some folks that might be helping sales or pushing prospects into an online store. Now we can be true marketers–making customers happen. We can control the entire relationship. It’s a great opportunity.
It’s also critical to the survival of your business–if not today, then someday. It may seem that if you’re selling a product or service that delivers more value, is cheaper, lasts longer, delivers higher performance and has the best reputation that you should win every sale. But the truth is that everyone, even purchasing departments, buys the stuff they want to buy.
But even if you could rely on the superiority of your products to always make the sale, then as soon as your products get leapfrogged then the other guy wins. Or should. The continued existence of Microsoft is clear evidence that it simply doesn’t always happen–or at least it doesn’t happen simply always (says the Sphinx). Obviously there is something else at work here–or a lot of things.
You initially build your position in the market on value, performance, and real advantages. But that can’t be the only brick in your foundation. You need the stories, the conversations people have about your products and services. The more evangelists, the more people who are bought into and committed to your company, the stronger your brand is. If your brand is big there will be many more conversation and stories swirling around, if it’s healthy the conversations will be mostly positive and frequently helpful.
I’m going to show you how to locate, stimulate, monitor and join those conversations. I’m also going to show you how to become a thought leader in topics and markets that are important to you. How to translate that leadership into monetary value. And how to use the conversations you take part in to improve your company, your products and your market share.
How Can You Fix It When You’re Not Sure It’s Busted?
Will the ideas in this book cure all our marketing problems? I’ll answer that question with a question: Do you even know what your problems are?
I suspect you don’t.
Not because you are not good at your job, but because business issues are complex. When I say complex I don’t mean difficult, I mean they have a vast number of variables, most of which are only loosely identified.
One reason physics succeeds so well in answering fundamental questions is that physicists are careful to limit their quest for answers to things that are not complex. It’s one thing to construct formulas that relate pressure, temperature and volume to ideal flow. It’s another thing entirely to predict fluid flow through real-world plumbing. The best you can do is an approximation, because the environment is not completely described and controlled. Too many loosely defined variables. Too much chaos, too much complexity.
Of course it was an enormous disappointment to scientists that the deeper you go into simplicity–to the most basic building blocks of the universe, the less certain we can be about even simple things, like where a particle is and how fast it’s moving. At the heart it’s all statistics and approximation. It should come as no surprise that complexity arises everywhere.
Marketing problems suffer from many many layers of imprecise communication. We rarely even know if the problem we think we are solving for our boss, our stakeholders, our customers, our prospects is even the one they want solved, or if the solution looks adequate to them. Part of the problem is improper focus–we pay more attention to the solution than to defining the problem. Part of the problem is inherent complexity–fix it here and you break it there, or perhaps worse, fix it here and nothing happens. Part of the problem is imprecise language and the lack of a clear communication between the person with the problem and the person aiming to solve it. By clear communication I mean an understanding of what constitutes success–what some people refer to as an obligating issue. “If I make that purple, will you buy it”.
The reason I’m so high on all these new tools, and especially on Keywords is that they are not complex. They are extremely specific, the data is easy to extract and results are easy to measure. They have a fundamental defining nature because they are so terse. There’s a million editors honing the sense. All the tools and techniques I’m going to show you can provide a lot of clarity in both directions. But the shaman still interprets the bones. How valuable they are, depends on how well you use them and whether or not you are lucky enough to ask a relatively simple question.
So NO, it’s not a cure all. But you already knew that.