Marketing Memos

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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We’re all biased, even those who allegedly are not.

We come by it innocently enough because our biases were taught to us. Some we picked up listening to our parents. Weaker minds are warped by politicians and pundits. Instincts are actionable biases learned through Darwinian selection. Brand marketing’s primary job is to teach bias to buyers and cause customers to favor one brand over others.

But then again, I’m a little biased on the subject.

Stripped of fluffy pseudo-psych speech, biasing is a Maslow tool, designed primarily to avoid risk and in more rare cases obtain self actualization or esteem.  Marketing’s job is to determine which direction (safety or self) will motivate buyers and then teach customers their newfound bias. Apple is masterful at instilling self-esteem bias in gadget buyers. IBM remains very good at selling safety bias to CIOs. Donald Trump is biased about his ego, and that manages to ooze out onto unwitting bystanders.

In complex B2B and technology sales, time is a factor in establishing bias. Since many business and technology products are abstract, people must have functional understanding of the product. As they get to know the product, they perform what I call “mental integration.” They visualize how a product can work in their environment, seeing the relationship between other products, administrators and end users.

They also have time to develop a relationship with salesmen and support people who, if they don’t flat screw-up, will amplify mental integration by demonstrating how your company’s support integrates into their environment.

Mental integration biasing becomes nearly unconquerable to competitors. Once a buyer develops any product or brand bias, the odds of reversing that become difficult or impossible. Getting to a customer first and rapidly teaching them what they need to know in order to develop mental integration creates a buy bias and a competitor block. Getting in first is an advantage, but is not enough. Sales enablement tools must teach the bias on a functional level, but also illustrate how integrations occur. Even a simple diagram of the relationship between components (machines, software, humans, bosses) can create mental integration. Take as a quick example the “patient centered circle” we devised for Public Social Networks. Reports from trade events showed that people immediately understood how PSN’s product established relationships between everyone involved in patient care at hospitals.

Well directed short videos do even better.

You have to teach bias, and when successful you speed and ease sales because buyers are predisposed to your brand. This will bias your sales people to buy you drinks at the next trade show.

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Trust me, I’m in marketing.

If that line made your skin crawl, then you experienced an important aspect of marketing, namely a lack of trust (even Seth Godin noted an inherent instinct to distrust marketers). Where trust is lacking, so are sales. Mistrust prevents people from taking promotions, products and sales people seriously.

It is an ancient survival mechanism adapted for modern ages.

(Mis)trust involves balancing risk and rewards. For example, locales where gun ownership is low tend to have higher burglary rates, which demonstrates that even the dumbest of criminals weigh risk and rewards. If risk is low, humans will accept nearly any reward. Where there is any risk, escalating degrees of mistrust develop. You may hesitate a second before spending a dollar on a soda brand you have never tasted, but you’ll hesitate forever when encountering a pushy car salesman who guides you directly toward $70,000 Escalade when you came to look at Chevy Cruze.

Some industries require overcoming congenital mistrust. Lawyers, financial advisors, telemarketers and mechanics start engagements with zero credibility and have to earn the trust of clients. Other industries, such as B2B software, require overcoming trust deficits for multiple buyer genotypes (a.k.a. personae) and bureaucracies designed to prevent mistakes (e.g. institutional mistrust). One of marketing’s jobs is to understand and mitigate mistrust before buyers are ever approached.

This slows the natural account executive process of destroying trust.

Mitigating mistrust in advance is non-trivial. People mistrust marketing, and are immune to standard claims of value. Tell a consumer that your desktop software package comes with technical support, and they’ll ask if the support center is in Bangalore or Hyderabad. Marketing has to go beyond simple claims to erode mistrust. They must understand the source of the mistrust and then deploy means for indirectly removing mistrust. The most common example is putting customer testimonials on top landing pages to assure prospect that they are not entering unblazed forests.

Where many marketers err is not understanding the source of mistrust or applying the wrong persuasion. Oracle was famous for benchmarking in the old DBMS wars (which they won). Benchmarking erased fears concerning scalability, which in the proprietary UNIX days was critical. Oracle understood the mistrust of CTOs concerning claims of scalability, and relentlessly promoted industry reports where Oracle outperformed everything (even when it didn’t). The CTO mistrust of software vendor claims was mitigated with industry-neutral testing.

Negative trusting works as well. A security software vendor once ran ads on television news networks because they knew CEOs tended to watch those channels. The ads were designed to scare CEOs into believing their data was endangered by hackers, and that the vendor could prevent this. CEOs created data security initiatives and forced this software vendor to be on the short list in part due to a higher level of trust for having been “warned” about pending danger.

This is how politicians work.

If reducing the risk of mistrust is not practical, you may have to raise the value delivered. Remember, people balance risk and reward. A big payoff can counter perceived risk, but only when the risk is measureable, non-fatal and the rewards are significant. People refuse to take long surveys for the “chance” to win an iPad because the risk is known and high (e.g. a waste of time) and the reward is itself risky (the mere chance to win). So either study and reduce risk, or be prepared to create stunning new value.

What do your customers distrust and what is the true source of that distrust? Odds are their wariness is slowing or preventing sales, and it is your job to decrease that mistrust before your sales staff arrives and increases it again.

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The oddest request I ever received from the head of a sales organization was “Can you stop promoting the product for a couple of months?”

It was an old company with a new product that had gone nowhere before I took the reigns of their marketing department. I established a strategy that relied on precise market segmentation, focusing on the top two segments, then making buyers and strategic partners believe we were the only serious product in the market. Sales jumped 26% in the first year, we chased two competitors completely out of our target segments, and had a sales close rate above 80%.

The poor sales folks couldn’t keep up with incoming calls.

The strategy was to bias the opinions of buyers. This required them believing that we not only cured the generic problem (which our competitors did too) but we also cured the buyers personal job-related problem (in this case, that we could reduce their job stress) and that we were a safe bet (which reduced their purchase decision stress). The product was mainly used as a plug-in to enterprise-class applications and IT utilities. By focusing on two product categories therein, and partnering with the top three competitors in those segments, we were able to clearly target 66% or more of the potential buyers in those two segments.

In periodicals read by users of strategic partner software, we bought full page display ads (remember buying those) whereas out competitors kept their 1/4 page ads. This demonstrated greater strength to the buyers, clearly attached us to the partner products, and gave us ample space to communicate our solving buyer generic/functional and emotive problems. We also treated our strategic partner’s sales teams like our own, coaching them on what motivated buyers, what our brand and key advantages were, and why our solution made their product whole. Buyers heard the same story in ads and from their enterprise application vendors (which included HP, IBM, CA and some other obscure firms).

Appearing at partner trade shows merely solidified the concepts we were planting in their craniums.

Being boosted by both presence (ads and trade shows) and partner sales teams, set a brand that biased purchase decisions. When the need to solve the generic/functional problem arose in a prospect’s company, we were perceived to be the only viable choice. A default buying decision was created for them. This all demonstrates the difference between lead quality and lead viability.

A quality lead is one that meets certain criteria (qualifications). The problem with merely qualified leads is that the motivation to buy your product does not exist. Qualified leads are simply people who are approachable and might consider buying your product. A viable lead is one where the likelihood of selling them your product is enhanced. IBM develops viable leads largely through historical brand strength – nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Creating viable leads requires creating positive differentiation in the minds of buyers. The differentiation can be functional – such as broader or superior features – or it can be entirely emotional.

Studies show that emotions sell better, even for B2B software products.

Interestingly, people will echo your biasing once they own your product, even if the branding is not entirely accurate. People need to believe the decision you forced helped them to make was the right one. Thus, biasing decisions to create viable leads then starts a cascade effect, turning buyers into brand advocates and generating more buyers – the buzz effect. Buyers not infected with biasing won’t do the same.

Pick a differentiated brand then find all the vectors through which your target buyers receive brand biasing. They soon will have no choice but to call your sales team.

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“Our market is mature, and is saturated. We have to steal customers from our competitors.”

There are some absurd technology marketing truisms, chief of which is that anything is so static that a market won’t and cannot be changed. Resting on the notion that there is only one recourse to growing a customer base means certain cerebral sediment has set – that market leaders don’t. When your market is saturated, you should think about changing the market or at very least adapting to changes in and connected to your market.

First, no market is ever saturated. New companies come to life every day. A start-up limping along on open source and big dreams will be tomorrow’s Twitter and will need products they cannot afford to buy today. Freemium models work well in markets where long-term customer nurturing can be guided and automated. More mature companies occasionally switch technologies tied to yours, and thus create opportunities for you. There’s a customer born every minute (wait, that doesn’t sound good).

Technology users expand their operational base and augment what forms of technology they use. When a competitor’s customer upgrades their DBMS to support virtual storage, do you offer tools that provide value in the clustered environment? If you do and your competitors do not, then their customer has shifted to a new product category in which you provide value. The market may be saturated, but some products are designed to be more equal than others by anticipating changing customer needs.

Business is always evolving, and thus customer needs tied to changing business directions create new customers. Five years ago the concept of private clouds was vague, whereas today it is part of the IT linga franca. Adapting products to meet changing business trends moves a product along to new customers (those leapfrogging in technology implementation) or those who are following trends as they solidify. Same market, same customers, new needs.

Yes, in mature and saturated markets you need to steal customers from competitors. But how you steal them, how you create them, and how to find new ones is possibly more valuable than expensive toe-to-toe sales battles and prying unwilling people from their preferred technology.

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