Category Archives: Product Marketing

B2B Emotive Marketing

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Emotions are valuable, and value is emotional. Value is what you advertise. Ignore features, benefits, functions, the color of the paint on the server chassis or even ROI. These may help create value or close deals, but they are not value itself, and people buy value. Your boss doesn’t value your protoplasm, and if he does there may be a sexual harassment suit in his future. He values what you can help him achieve, which in turn should be what your company needs to achieve. The marketing question is what is valued? Rarely is it a functional process or a technical specification. Outcome is the center of value. Take AwayFind, a company that alerts you when you have an important email waiting. They have many features which are not valuable. The outcome however – to not be enslaved by needing to constantly check email – is very valuable. It is … Continue reading →

Funnel Fun

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I don’t believe in sales funnels. It isn’t that they don’t exist or that customers no longer suffer requisite discovery steps before making a purchase. I don’t believe in sales funnels because one of marketing’s missions is to eliminate friction, to grease the path to purchase. Eliminating levels in the prototypical sales funnel speeds revenues and early retirement. It turns sales teams into order takers. It makes companies famous. But it ain’t easy. For green marketers reading this memo, typical B2B sales funnels have a number of stages where, according to ancient lore, potential buyers fall out. The funnel concept was born in the old days when mass communications were the most common promotional tool. Theory said that you had to cast your lead generation net wide, gathering anything that smelled like a prospect, then toss aside those that failed tests at each narrower neck in the sales funnel. This … Continue reading →

What is Expected

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I don’t expect much, and I usually get it. Expected outcomes are what buyers pay money for. Businesses and consumers lob lucre at vendors in order to achieve something, be it optimizing general ledger processes or smelling better. Expected outcomes, or expectations, are the foundation of all commercial relationships. I give you money and you make me smell good. If the cologne you sold me knocks buzzards off cesspool fencing, then my expectations have not been met. Microsoft and Hotels.com recently brought all this to light by failing to meet basic expected outcomes. When rudimentary requirements are not provided, customers become ornery. The soured relationship creates new friction to selling them more products and removes all incentive to recommend products to other customers (which in the long run is the cheapest and most effective promotional tool available). Knowing and delivering customer necessaries is so basic I find Microsoft’s and Hotels.com … Continue reading →

The HP (Hard) Way

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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 … Continue reading →

Emotion Promotion

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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 … Continue reading →

Integrated Biased

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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 … Continue reading →

Biasing Buyers

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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 … Continue reading →