In this article, I discussed how one mid-sized company was using market intelligence to maintain its competitive edge and then asked readers if they had made similar marketing investment decisions.   The article concluded with some questions to which I’d welcome your comments.   They are:

How about your company? Where do you turn for market information and why? How do you use it?

How are you reacting to the tight economy? Have you cut back your marketing resources or increased them?

Are you spending more money on pinpointing your most promising prospects and understanding what induces them to buy? Or are placing your bets on extending your reach–and/or reiterating your current messages?

If you choose to comment, please include the size of your company and the industries and geographies you target to help others interpret your responses.

Thanks in advance for any perspectives you can provide.

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Related posts:

1. Follow the money: How to capitalize on opportunity in a tough economy
2. Is the competition distracting you from becoming a market leader?

Where there’s sales activity, there’s an unmet need

Our clients find that one of the best ways to find out where to concentrate their firepower is to follow the money. They do this by studying recent activity—their own, the competitions’, or those of the companies that are succeeding under current market conditions. Why? Because where there’s activity, there’s an unmet need.

Use knowledge about wins and losses to replicate success

Next our clients look at outcomes. Who won? Who lost? Why? Once they have the answers to these important questions, they know what they need to do to replicate success–their own or that of others who were more savvy or more fortunate.

Follow the money

Here are concrete actions you can take to follow the money and capitalize on opportunity in a tough economy. Start with your own experiences, but don’t stop there.

If your business has won any deals recently, find out what caused these accounts to purchase when everyone else is sitting on the sidelines. What about their situation was different? What compelled them to act now? How did they find your company? What caused them to seek you out? How did they justify their investment?

From market intelligence to marketing strategy

Depending on what you hear, the answers to these questions may shed light on what characteristics separate the prospects that are likely to buy, from those that are not. You may also find out who you need to reach at these companies, where you need to place your marketing messages, or what you need to emphasize in your marketing literature and on your sales calls to capture attention and motivate action.

Competitive intelligence can uncover opportunity

If you haven’t won any deals recently, try to find out whether anyone in your target market has bought from anyone else. If so, you may be able to turn to them for answers to these important questions. Then, you can use that information to remove obstacles to the sale—and replicate their successes.

If neither you, nor your competition, have won any deals lately, don’t despair. You may just be targeting the wrong prospects or using the wrong message.

Validate assumptions to uncover new value propositions

The next line of attack is to go back to your existing accounts—especially those that are actively using your goods or services. Find out not what caused them to buy originally, but how they are deriving value from your solutions today.

It’s not uncommon for companies to buy for one reason, only to learn later that their purchase is more valuable when deployed to meet an entirely different need. If you find that’s the case, ask them how they discovered the new application—and try to quantify the value that they’re deriving. Then, if the value is significant, you’ll want to figure out who else might have similar needs—and rewrite your marketing messages to reflect the value these accounts have discovered.

Keep following the money

Still no success? Then, it’s time to go further a field. Where are companies in the industries you target spending money? Which ones are spending? What needs do they believe their purchases will address?

Once you know which needs are at the top of prospective buyers’ lists, you’ll know where to focus your efforts. Perhaps you can reword your messaging to demonstrate how you address these same needs—or perhaps you can develop a solution that does. If not, you may be able to partner with someone who is addressing those needs to enhance—and add value to their solution.

Change can create market opportunity

When times get tough, the business environment changes, and buyers’ needs and priorities change. Approaches that worked last year—or even six months ago—may no longer work. Nevertheless, strategies that never worked before may be effective now.

But you can only capitalize on market opportunities if you know where they are

The only way to find out what those strategies are is to turn to those that are still spending. Only they have needs that are so pressing that they bought in this economy. Only they know what worked—and what didn’t at every stage of the buying process. And only they know what ultimately caused them to purchase—and why they selected the vendor they did. On the other hand, once you know what they know, you may just be able to get a leg up on the competition.

Where is the money?

Let us know what you’re seeing. Are businesses still spending? Are they spending on similar solutions—but just cutting back? Or are they spending to address entirely different needs?

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“Thank you for your e-mail regarding your account. It is always our aim to provide the highest level of customer satisfaction. We are always concerned to learn that any customer is unhappy with the service we provide.

All applications are processed by our Customer Recruitment Department, so you will need to contact them directly [at phone number] with your request.

I must also advise you that if we do not hear from you within eight weeks of the date of this e-mail, we will assume that your complaint is resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

The note ended with the writer wishing me his kindest regards.

Branding is the sum of the buyers’ experiences

This communiqué came from a business that regularly spends exorbitant amounts of money on branding their company, extolling the virtues of their products, and encouraging prospective customers to buy. Yet, they had clearly not spent as much effort developing their post-sales strategy.

What did this company do wrong? Rather than addressing my concern, the representative first gave lip service to the importance his company places on providing “the highest levels of customer satisfaction” Then, he suggested that I turn to someone else in his company for help. The buck clearly didn’t stop with him.

This “service” representative also made it clear that the onus was on me to resolve the issue. Finally, adding insult to injury, he apologized for the inconvenience he and his company must surely have been aware they were continuing to cause me.

What do you think my impression was of this company? What was the ultimate cost of this communication to the company? What could this representative have done differently to preserve good will–if not the sale?

When you think about these important questions, the answers are probably obvious to you. Why weren’t they obvious to the company in question?

Return on marketing investments are not always positive

It just didn’t add up. This company had invested in a direct sales force to sell me the product. They had invested significant sums in free gifts to sweeten the offer. Yet, in just one email communication, they had succeeded in reversing all the efforts they had made to get my business. Worse, they may have jeopardized any possibility of doing business with me in the future.

Chances are that many of you have received similar missives from equally well-known companies. How do strategic errors like this happen and what can companies do to prevent them?

Product Development – Giving buyers what they want the way they want it

Two posts back, we discussed the fact that if you want to speed up purchases, you need to know what’s important to customers and give them exactly what they want, the way they want it. This company clearly missed the boat. They got the core product right, but neglected to consider the ancillary services required to deliver it satisfactorily.

Although many companies think of product development as ending at launch, that’s not how buyers see it. Rather, buyers view the product in terms of their entire experience—from pre-sales offers, to purchase, to conformity with their expectations about functionality and ease of use. When their overall experience is positive, they buy again. When it’s not, they may even go so far as returning the product or canceling a service.

Nevertheless everyone makes mistakes. When businesses take steps to rectify the error, many buyers will give them a second chance and consider other products. When, on the other hand, companies are cavalier in their treatment of complaints, dissatisfaction can escalate. In the worst scenarios, buyers refuse to buy any products from the company and significant sums of promotion dollars spent on branding the company also go to waste.

Integrated marketing campaigns begin with integrated product development

What can businesses do to avoid these consequences? Here are some suggestions:

• Re-define “product” success to include the buyers’ ultimate satisfaction 6 to 12 months following the purchase, rather than mere execution of a sale.
• Encourage a culture where everyone in the company is motivated to personally contribute to the advancement of buyers’ satisfaction.
• Involve every internal department in the product development process to increase the chances of anticipating all buyers’ concerns, avoiding missteps, and ensuring seamless delivery.
• Ask them to research what actions their organizations can take to stimulate delight in their own areas of expertise—and what practices they’ll need to avoid.
• Review the ultimate proposed delivery process from the buyers’ perspective. What issues might arise? What can the company due to avoid them altogether? For unavoidable issues, what steps can be taken to resolve them sooner rather than later?
• Test the process with real users before launching and correct as necessary.
• Follow up on all system failures and take corrective action.

One manufacturing concern I worked for convened cross-functional teams weekly to review and determine the root cause of all customer-reported problems. First, however, they classified any shipment that resulted in dissatisfaction—for any reason–as “dead on arrival”.

Marketing Research shortens the sales cycle

At BB Marketing Plus, we work with clients to look at the whole picture, upfront, from the perspective of prospective buyers. To step into our clients’ buyers’ shoes, we do a lot of primary marketing research but we also gather information from internal experts–such as sales people and customer service personnel–who know from experience where potential pitfalls lie. Cross-functional development teams then use this knowledge to guide the entire product development and launch process.

We find that mapping the buying process —and finding out exactly what prospective buyers expect at every stage—greatly increases our clients’ ability to hit the mark with both their product offerings and their marketing messages.

How does your business find out what’s important to prospective buyers so that you can give them what they want—and do it their way?

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1. Maximizing Sales Productivity Depends on Meeting Marketing Requirements
2. Shorten the sales cycle: one marketing message at a time
3. Will prospective buyers turn to you when they’re ready to move forward?

First impressions count, but don’t do the job

When it comes to others, we only form a general impression. At this point, despite the fact that you may have told them much more, prospective buyers are likely to remember only one thing about you at best. It may the first thing you said; it may be something they heard about from someone else; or it may be the thing that resonated most with their top concern the day they encountered your company. Whatever it is, they need to know a lot more before they buy.

The problem is that prospective buyers are still too busy to learn about your company and its services. In fact, one of the greatest obstacles to a sale is getting your marketing messages through to the intended audience. Hopefully, you’ve made enough of an impression, to elevate your company’s marketing communications above the clutter. If so, your next challenge is staying in touch so that you can help prospective buyers move through their buying process. Any missteps and they’re likely to buy from someone else.

Brand building one step at a time

Before they ultimately buy, decision makers will need to:
• Become aware of all the services you offer
• Associate their needs with these services
• Think of your business as the “obvious” choice
• Remember your company when it comes time to buy

The best way to move prospective buyers through these steps is sequentially: one message per communication. Again, they don’t have the capacity to take in more than one detail about your company at a time.

Email marketing may be the answer

One of the best vehicles for your “drip” campaign is a newsletter—conventional or email depending on your audience. Nevertheless, each communication must be directly relevant to their concerns; else it too will remain unopened.

So, in preparing the subject lines and headlines of your missives, return to the four marketing questions we discussed last week. To increase the relevance to readers, and memorability, consider adding a story that illustrates your point and resonates with what you’ve learned about their experiences. Examples of how your accounts have triumphed using your solutions is often the best way to advance your agenda.

A typical email newsletter might describe a service you offer, provide a case study of how one of your accounts benefited from its application, and appear under a headline mentioning both the company that deployed the solution and the impact it had on their business.

Assuming that the featured business is in the same industry—and has the same issues—as your reader, your readers will be anxious to read all about it so that they, too, can achieve success. The following newsletter will follow a similar format but for a different service. One communication at a time, you’ll ensure that prospective buyers:
• Become aware of all the services you offer
• Associate their needs with these services
• Think of your business as the “obvious” choice
• Remember your company when it comes time to buy
For an example of how to implement this strategy, see this article on clinician marketing. As a bonus, you may be able to apply some of the techniques I’ve described to help your physician clients market their practices.

A drip campaign can shorten the sales cycle

So how does a drip campaign shorten the sales cycle? Although your target audience may contain thousands of people, only a few of them are ready at any point in time to buy. Moreover, even if you had the staff, it would be very expensive to follow up with them individually on a regular basis. Done well, your newsletter is likely to reach a small percentage of your audience just as they are ready to buy. If these companies contact you, you’ve generated a qualified lead—and reached someone who is ready to buy right away–without investing in expensive one-to-one prospecting or in manually helping them through their buying process.

Using an email newsletter or conventional print newsletter serves a second purpose. It serves to brand your company as a helpful and authoritative resource. Even if these companies go out to bid, your organization will stand above the crowd. You may even be able to bypass the time-consuming due diligence that companies use to evaluate prospective providers—because they already feel confident in your ability to deliver.

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1. Shortening the sales cycle starts with getting into buyers’ minds
2. Shorten the sales cycle next year: Year end marketing planning
3. Will prospective buyers turn to you when they’re ready to move forward?

Getting the sale depends on affirmatively answering all three of the following questions:

• Have they heard of your business?
• Do they know that you can address the problem?
• Will they remember you when it comes time to buy?

Brand awareness is not sufficient. Think back to your own experience.

Sure, you’ve lost sales because prospective buyers haven’t heard of your business. But, I’ll bet you’ve also lost business because prospective buyers just didn’t realize that you offered a particular product or service.

For example, three years ago, when I needed my hedges trimmed, it never occurred to me to call the arborist who prunes my trees. That is, not until I asked a neighbor for a reference and she told me she used my arborist.

I was taken aback. Even though I was highly satisfied with his services, it just never occurred to me that he also trimmed hedges. That’s because in my mind he was a “tree specialist”.

And, my mistake was not uncommon. In fact, most people only think of your business as doing the last thing you did for them–unless you take conscious steps to correct that impression. We’ll discuss how in a future post.

We’ve also all lost business because we’re not “top of mind” when the buyer finally develops a sense of urgency. We’ll also discuss how to stay high on prospective buyers’ radar in a future post.

In the meantime, we’ll discuss 4 questions you need to answer before launching a marketing campaign or engaging an advertising or public relations agency.

Who do you need to reach?

Often, it’s not just the decision maker. While he or she may make the final decision, many others often influence the sale. Without first engaging these individuals’ support, it’s often impossible to sway, or sometimes even reach, the decision maker. Prospective audiences for your marketing messages may include industry analysts, trusted advisers and internal staff such as technical evaluators and financial personnel.

How do you get their attention?

As Marshall MacLuhan said the media is the message. That means that the delivery vehicle is often as or more important than the message.

Most people are busy performing urgent tasks and are not receptive to messages about anything else—unless the information comes from a trusted source. Examples include advisers, existing suppliers, trade publications to which they subscribe, or presentations that they attend.

If, on the other hand, the prospective buyer is ready to purchase, he/she may be actively seeking out information. In that case, consider adding paid Internet search and website optimization to the marketing mix. If you’re already a trusted source, you may be able to save money and go direct—via telephone, email or direct mail—with confidence that they’ll open your communication.

How do you capture their interest?

Always speak specifically to the most pressing concern of the target audiences–in their language. General messages are not nearly as effective. So, it’s essential to first identify the target audience—and then what’s keeping them up at night.

As we discussed last week, you may need to prime the pump before speaking about your solution—or even the benefits it offers–if the problems your solution addresses are not particularly pressing. Consider developing intermediary messages that heighten prospective buyers’ awareness of the consequences of not addressing the problems your solution addresses. Follow those with messages that generate a sense of urgency about addressing these problems sooner rather than later. Then, and only then, will prospective buyers be receptive to messages about your solution and the benefits it delivers.

When is the best time to deliver your message?

The best time to deliver messages is when the audiences are most receptive. That however is hard to establish. That’s why marketers often say, “It takes 7 impressions to make an impact.”

In some cases, key events trigger needs for services. For example, everyone needs accounting services when taxes are due. Many require accountants when starting or acquiring a business. Nevertheless, the safest approach is to communicate your marketing messages consistently and frequently since recipients are generally pre-occupied with something else. Just by the law of numbers, if you communicate often you’re more likely to get a hit.

Once you get the answers to these questions, you’re ready to begin promoting your solutions.

Next week, we’ll discuss what to do once you prospective buyers’ attention.

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Related posts:

1. Shorten the sales cycle: one marketing message at a time
2. Shortening the sales cycle starts with getting into buyers’ minds
3. Capturing buyers’ attention: What makes a value proposition compelling?