Marketing Memos

The only organization better than HP at losing customers was Heaven’s Gate.

I have fond memories of Bill and Dave’s HP, which in no way resembles the current Palo Alto pack. When I wrangled HP manufactured big iron mumble-mumble-mumble years ago, they were reasonably good about customer support though their byzantine processes for achieving such was an exotic form of auto-masochism. Even eating lunch at the HP cafeteria was a rough slog.

It has gone down hill since.

Let’s keep in mind that service is a product, and like all products must meet the criteria of the customer. This includes price, quality and — most important — availability. The on-site service agreement for my laptop recently expired, and I went to HP’s web site to renew it. This was my first mistake since HP’s various business divisions and poorly integrated web sites are slightly more complex than the federal tax code. I spent more time than I have to spare attempting to find the right place to review and update my support agreement.

Rule #1: Make it simple, obvious and easy.

It is not enough to provide a service. Selling the service is a service itself. There are few better ways to lose a customer than to make discovering what you offer and how to buy it a chore. Yet after five different web sites, two emails and one phone call which transferred across three different HP representatives, I was no closer to renewing the laptop support agreement than before I started. A service is a product. A service that cannot be bought is a product you cannot sell. A service that your employees cannot find and deliver is not even a product … it is a strain on the relationship.

Rule #2: If you are going to sell a product, you should attempt it.

Any time a customer or prospect encounters unnecessary friction, they are given reasons to buy from a different vendor. This involves not just the core product (in this example, a support contract) but all other products covered by the brand (e.g. servers, tablets, printers). Unnecessary friction kills sales, and as SaaS leaders like SalesForce.com have demonstrated, a lack of friction accelerates adoption. Oddly, HP understood the key to reducing friction which was to track the serial number of the unit for all sales and support activities. I know this because several HP web sites and four different HP employees asked for the serial number as a prelude to “assisting” me. Yet HP shrouded the simple option of renewing my support agreement in labyrinth that Theseus couldn’t navigate.

In high tech, everyone has to offer service because nobody can support complex technologies by themselves. Treat your service offering as you would your core product. Doing less will result in lost customers, damaged reputation and a brand fewer people will love.

Postscript: I made one final plunge into the HP support pool based on an email from HP’s esupport team. This led to dealing with no fewer than six people in four different departments (including some poor gal in India who could not be convinced that my laptop wasn’t a printer). I remain on hold and fear they will find my skeleton slumped over my desk before an HP support contract can be created.

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There is a reason that blind dates were never very popular.

Marketing and dating are both incremental dances with well understood steps in forming a relationship. Amazingly many companies, and most technology companies, lack even a fundamental notion of incremental intimacy, which many also explain why many techie founders remain bachelors. Anyone who suffered the dating process understands the phases of location, attraction, value and risk assessment. Yet your average technology web site avoids all these steps.

First off is findability. In dating this may involve joining activity groups or hanging out in the right bar on a Saturday night. In marketing it has always been about advertising, and in the modern extension of that, search optimization. Being found is a requirement to being desired. Failure to promote or to be locatable on the web makes the odds of obtaining prospects nil. But just today I ran across a web site for an application platform vendor whose primary landing pages lacked meaningful search optimization. This is akin to longing for love and staying home playing video games every night.

Only after eligible prospects find you can attraction take place. My first boss used to snicker and say “It must be Friday.” When I asked him what brought that up, he pointed to some young lass and said “The single girls always dress-up on Friday.” His point, as it relates to marketing and the entire cosmetics industry, is that you should be attractive at the first meeting. It is not enough to be at the popular meat market or on the web — you have to create a compelling appeal. Show prospects a text-dense web page that offers a tough slog to understanding, and they will turn instead to a more comely contender. Branding sets the mood and encourages the next step in the ritual.

A pretty face is a start, but a potential mate or customer next needs to perceive some value in the relationship. In cocktail lounges potential value propositions are communicated non-verbally — a smile that engenders romantic thoughts, a wink that suggests more base activities, and occasionally even more salacious gestures that should encourage running away. Tech companies by and large are lousy at articulating value propositions, and these value props rarely appear on landing pages. Once your product has been found and shows prospects a reason to be attracted, to then avoid displaying potential value halts the interest of your suitor.

The most critical step in dating or vending is risk abatement. Initial conversations with the gal you met at a club quickly exposes obvious risk factors. Is she dumb, does she have emotional baggage, are the voices in her head the cause of her involuntarily twitching? Once you have made your product findable, attractive and shown some value, your customer’s next step is to look for flaws. The common risk factors are things like a lack of features, few customers, no funding, poorly stated product details or general lack of clarity. Circuit City and their CarMax subsidiary became famous for engineering-out negative aspects of their market — reducing common risks. Itemize warning flags for which your prospects look, then remove/improve to push prospects to ask for a first date (a.k.a. a sales call).

Here is your challenge. For the next five companies that you randomly hear of, look at the stages of finding, attraction, value and risk and see is they have engineered their marketing to get that first date with prospects. After reviewing five previously unknown companies, then evaluate yours. If after self-assessment you feel like it is Saturday night and you are watching old movies on TV, then you have your next marketing projects defined.

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I spent last Friday coaching a well funded start-up on the fundamentals of market segmentation.

Yes, in Silicon Valley you can still romance venture capitalists without a complete go-to-market strategy.

Segmentation is the second most fundamental marketing strategy activity, and one that founders rarely contemplate while running headlong into a market. Granted, between technology vision and early adopter myopia, there is little reason to segment market in the earliest phases of corporate life. But go beyond the early days and quick sales to innovators and early adopters and you will see a company flounder as sales slow and individuals attempt selling to anyone. Since new products don’t fill anybody’s whole product definition, selling to everyone means selling to almost no one.

Next comes an entry in the dead pool.

Founders tend not to segment for several reasons, none of which are rational:

Ignorance: Some founders don’t know what market segmentation is or why it is critical. This includes otherwise smart people who have read the standard books about technology marketing (Crossing the Chasm, et al) and should have grasped segmentation’s importance.

Technology Vision: Founders tend to be technologists and see the beauty of design. Their tech vision obscures market vision, and they design products for their perception of niche needs, not from identifying a part of the broad market and designing for it.

Serve Everyone: Founders often suffer from the mistaken notion that they can design a product that suits all buyers. Even IBM doesn’t do this because they can’t either.

Early Adopter Myopia: Success with early adopters blinds some founders to the realities of the majority market and how they must pick a point therein (a segment) to anchor their fortunes.

The time to segment your market is after you have proven that your generic product has early adopter success and before you seek funding. Showing that you know the difference, have broken down the market and have selected a beachhead segment will help land investors.

The way to wisely segment your market is very easy.

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Even heartless people have emotions.

Well, perhaps not politicians, but people to who you sell products do. Even battle-hardened CTOs have emotions that can be leveraged to market your wares. Identifying and correctly touching those emotions is a tricky process and one that can backfire fatally if you choose wrong. It is the difference between smiling at the pretty girl at the end of the bar and stalking her … two different emotional responses producing either romance or incarceration.

Silicon Strategies Marketing’s most popular white paper is “Selling Empathy – the power of positioning and branding.” In it we discuss how emotions work in marketing technology products to IT people, and how emotional drivers should become part of your brand. Every human brain, aside from those in drug addicts and congressmen, has left and right hemispheres that process all we know about the world around us. Emotions swirling in the right side of the skull exist to enhance survival by either instilling fear or attachment and trust. These emotions bias opinions out of instinctive response.

Biasing purchasing decisions is greatly enhanced by toying with understanding people’s emotions.

This is not speculation. Practitioners of neuromarking (the science of monitoring brain activity to see how different marketing activities affect buyers) have discovered that purely emotional campaigns are nearly twice as effective as completely rational ones. Think about this as you scan advertising for servers and software, and see if any of those promotions appeal to emotions concerning the life and work of your average IT slave or executive.  The utter lack of connection to buyer emotions fails to create unfair advantages via biasing.

It’s enough to make you cry.

The case study in “Selling Empathy” was about a company that sold software to make tech support pagers (remember those) go off whenever help desk or network monitoring utilities identified a problem requiring inhumane intervention. It was soulless software intended to awaken sleeping support personnel, which was a tough sell until we identified the uniting emotional driver between help desk staffs and tech support people: that they all had high stress jobs. Using a “peace of mind” branding base, we recast the product as a necessity that was designed so well it reduced job-related stress. We A/B tested advertising and discovered the emotion-based ad outscored the rational ad by 20%. All our campaigns quickly switched to the emotion-tugging branding.

Within a year the head of sales asked that we suspend promotions because his staff could not keep up with inbound calls (which, incidentally, had an 80% win rate).

If you are selling to multiple people or across multiple segments, seek common emotional drivers among key genotypes and shamelessly message/massage them. Side with positive emotions if available, but don’t shun creative ways of using negative ones. Bias your buyers by appealing to their feelings.

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