Fastest, Cheapest, Brilliantest - or perhaps a little honesty might be better?

Being a bit of an obsessive marketing geek, I spend a lot of time looking at the way companies present themselves to the market and promote their products and services.

One of the things I’ve noticed in the last few years is the rise and rise of the super superlative in every field of marketing serving every marketplace. You know the kind I mean if you think about it:

•   Eat one of these pills and lose half your body weight.
•   Our Internet service is so fast it delivers content before you even knew you wanted it.
•   Our service is so wonderful a Celebrity endorsed it

You would honestly have to live in a cave with no access to any form of media not to have noticed this. But the big question is why do companies feel the need to promise things they can’t realistically deliver on.

Not sure what I mean, well think about these few examples:

• Mobile telecoms companies in the UK are absolutely adamant that they cover 99% of the population, yet spend five minutes looking at the comments about coverage on social media and you would think the reality is exactly the opposite?
• Utilities claiming that their deals will save you money if you just sign up to one of their 'simple' tariffs that trap consumers into complex and often very expansive contracts – not sure if I am right about that, well why is OFGEN spending so much time investigating it.
•  Lets not even go near the financial services sector with PPI, mortgage miss selling and many, many other examples of big promise, no delivery. 

A very brief and not terribly exact piece of research I carried out with about 30 random contacts showed that around two thirds of those I spoke to pretty much know that the increasingly outlandish promises being made by big businesses don’t amount to a hill of beans (whatever that means) but they still buy from these big players.

So here is a question for you. Does this world of super superlative but mostly empty corporate marketing promises present an opportunity for the rest of us?

Remember Roy Brooks the Honest Estate Agent from the 1960s who made it big by being almost ruthlessly honest about properties he was selling?  What about AG Barr the Scottish soft drinks manufacturer that never uses anything other than humour to market its drinks?

In both cases taking a different approach has paid dividends time and time again, while everyone else is still playing the same old game.

In neither case do they make outlandish claims (except humorously) or over promise on something they can’t deliver. As a result we trust them.

Anyone that has read the book or done any work with me knows that in a connected market feedback – good or bad – is often instantaneous and entirely public through social media, not to mention costly for some companies reputations. So isn’t it maybe a better idea to just set expectations properly and then deliver on them, rather than trying to promise the earth and then deliver a small egg cup of sand?

I’ll leave it to you to work that one out for yourself in the context of your own business but it would be great to hear other’s views on this.

Author – Tim Sandford

You're Not a Marketing Guru?

This article has been bouncing around in my head for a little while. Mostly because I haven’t found time to tell you about the meeting I went to where my client was surprised when I said, "No, I am not a marketing guru."

I have been working in sales and marketing for more than 20 years and enjoyed considerable success in my work as a marketer, but I do not claim to be an expert or guru - I'm still learning new things every day. Then again, how could anyone credibly claim to be an expert when you take a look at the diagram below?

The marketing communications channels shown in the diagram do not represent a complete picture by any manner of means – if I had put everything down, the diagram would have become so complex that it would have been almost impossible to understand.

In the old days, Marketing was much more straightforward with only a few ways to communicate with the market. Now we count more than 60 ways to engage with your market and thousands of individual branded variations in the mix. 

So the question is, how do you get your message in front of your target decision makers and noticed? 

This is where a lot of CEOs, accountants and technicians from medical types to IT entrepreneurs that I’ve met over the years haven’t quite realized yet that it is no longer just about a bit of PR and advertising with a bit of social media chucked in on the side. Its much more complex these days.

In today’s fast moving, connected marketplace, the sheer number of channels available makes it almost impossible to be an expert in all of them, especially some of the more arcane ones.

Setting aside things like the message, its quality, its focus  and so forth, these days our experience shows that a key part of success lies in identifying which of the many communications channels is relevant to your market.

For example, there is absolutely no point in investing a fortune in marketing on Facebook if your target market doesn’t use Facebook as a way of finding out about the kind of products and services you sell. That would be a bit like trying to sell premium beef burgers to vegetarians.

This is something we recommend strongly that you do as part of the development of your relationship with you market - not the selling beef burgers bit. We mean finding out how your target decision makers look for information on the kind of products you sell and concentrate on those channels because they are where you are most likely to get the best return for your marketing buck.

If you do, take the time to do this, experience shows that you increase the chance of your campaigns being successful and generating the demand your business needs - at least a 50 better chance in our experience. 

As for the client I mentioned at the beginning? Well their team is doing well communicating across just 4 channels and generating a much greater volume of enquiries than they had been before using more than 10 channels.

As always we're happy to answer any questions you might have and it would be great to hear your views.

Author - Tim Sandford

(Bye the bye. I'm working with the design guys to publish the full channels diagram, if you'd like a copy get in touch and we'll send you one when its published in a couple of weeks)

The Dangers of Spin in the Internet Age

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I was recently involved in a situation with a colleague where we were considering buying one of a number of products for one of our businesses. As part of this, my colleague asked a question of one supplier (Supplier A) in relation to one of its competitors (Supplier B) and providing supplier B’s web address so that supplier A could answer the question properly.

At this point supplier A was the preferred and my colleague was asking a legitimate question that would probably have resulted in a decision in favour of supplier A.

The response we got from supplier A is when it all went wrong and led me to writing this blog in the first place.

The response from a sales person in supplier A suggested that they were the only credible company and any other company like supplier B was simply a new kid on the block and probably wouldn’t last 6 months. The sales person also went on to make suggestions that supplier B was offering loss leading services and other statements designed to discredit supplier B.

Remember that supplier A had been provided the web address for supplier B – it will be clear why in a few minutes.

On reviewing the response from supplier A, my colleague and I decided to check up on some of the statements made, just to be sure and found the following:

• Supplier B has been trading for 10 full years longer than supplier A – this took two web searches and 3 minutes to confirm.
• Supplier B’s business has been profitable every year bar its first year since it was founded and profits continue to grow steadily  - one web search, two documents downloaded and 5 minutes to confirm.
• Supplier B’s mature business gives it economies of scale that mean it can offer its products and services are lower cost while still being profitable – same search as point two. 

So in less than ten minutes supplier A, went from being our preferred choice to rejected for two reasons: 

• First they tried to spin us with a ‘stock’ answer that had not been researched, had no justification and was materially untrue. 
• Second, despite the fact that we gave them everything they needed to give us an honest answer, they chose to spin and as a result we lost faith in their sales person as a credible, honest person, which in turn meant we lost faith in supplier A as a whole.

Would you make a different choice in our shoes?

When selling it is natural to want to put your best foot forward and ensure your company is seen as the best. However in an age when information is so easy to get online about virtually anything, trying to spin a potential customer is both dangerous and I would suggest unprofessional. You will get caught and these days it doesn’t even take ten minutes.

This is just a recent example of something that so many companies and organisations fail to grasp. In the Internet age, the availability of accurate, information about virtually everything including from finance to customer satisfaction means that spin is becoming less and less easy or credible, especially if it is rushed as a way of addressing a potential negative. Anyone with any experience of social media can reel off half a dozen corporate brands that have made appalling mistakes with reactive spin that have cost them dear.

So what is the point of the first negative blog I have written in years? Well simply this, you can do brilliant work creating a positive business, a positive image and a great product, but it can be trashed in a matter of moments unless you are prepared to ensure that everyone working for your organisation takes the same care with your reputation it can very easily be damaged. 

The good news is that this is relatively easy because it is about process and education to make sure your people know how to manage this properly and keep your business' reputation 'in the black' as it were.

As always I hope this helps and it would be great to get the views and experiences of others.

By Tim Sandford

Marketing ROI 2 - Should Marketing (& Sales) be measured on customer satisfaction?

In my last blog, I started a discussion about measuring the return on investment in Marketing, suggesting that when it comes to sales and marketing we may well be measuring the wrong things, or at least ignoring elements that have a direct impact on the ability of sales and marketing to generate leads and sales.

In most cases measurement stops almost as soon as the prospect becomes a customer. At that point the new customer is introduced to a whole new group of people and functions to process the order, deliver the product, support the customer and so on.

These are often tightly controlled departments where the focus is on cost control and limiting the amount of service provided to customers – the opposite of what sales and marketing promise in order to win the customer. There is nothing wrong with that so long as the right expectations have been set from the beginning by sales and marketing. On the other hand if the wrong expectations are set....

There is a generally accepted rule in this space that a happy customer will tell 5 people, but an unhappy customer will tell 26 people about their bad experience.

So here is a wee thought. If you want to make sure that you keep on the right side of your customers perhaps you might want to include customer satisfaction as one of your key measurements and making sure that sales and marketing are part of that measurement.

'But surely that belongs to Customer Service?'

Yes and no is my answer. The yes part is obvious because after the deal is done the customer should be looked after by appropriately focused people.

At the same time, having run a few pretty beefy sales and marketing functions in my time, one of the things that can be extremely damaging is marketing and selling to the wrong kinds of customers in the first place. That is definitely the responsibility of Marketing and Sales.

For one large software firm I did some work with, one of the most costly problems in the business was inappropriate sales to inappropriate customers. It happened because the sales team was under enormous pressure to sell, sell, sell, which coupled with unrealistic sales targets meant that marketing and sales were more interested in making any sale than making sure they were selling the right products to the right kind of customers.

The result was actually a less profitable company with a poor reputation for two simple reasons:

• The cost in time, refunds and so forth to sort out the issues caused by sales to the wrong customers
• The cost in reputation that made it significantly more difficult to generate sales with the right kind of customers.

So bearing that in mind, do you think that customer satisfaction is something that should be included in the measurement of sales and marketing?

More tomorrow, but in the meantime it would be great to hear others’ views on this.