More and more leading edge marketers are adding marketing automation tools like Marketo, Eloqua, Manticore, or SilverPop to their marketing toolboxes. And for good reason. Amongst marketing automation's greatest strengths are its abilities to more easily integrate campaigns, analyze response, and improve the results of marketing activities.
More enticing is marketing automation's ultimate reward -- enabling marketing to play a critical role in revenue attainment.
But to realize this reward, you need something more than the marketing automation tool. You need a strategy built on a proven methodology.
Start implementing your campaigns and gathering metrics. It won't be long before you realize this truth for yourself. Marketing automation can help you execute your marketing activities faster. Bad tactics more quickly in. Poor results more quickly out.
Let's be clear. I am not demoting marketing automation tools. To the contrary, marketing automation tools are the essential foundation to on-going, successful marketing contribution to revenues.
What I am saying and what marketing automation vendors are advocating is that this success cannot be achieved without an underlying strategic methodology.
And what are they recommending? Universally, marketing automation vendors are talking about buying process based methodology.
So, what is a buying process methodology? A buying process methodology is
What makes a buying process methodology successful?
Buyers buy when their needs are met. A buying process approach focuses on anticipating each need of a prospect as he/she works through the buying process.
Recently in this blog, I have concluded an introduction to the different stages of the deliberated buying process. This is part of the foundation for our buying process methodology.
To realize the benefits of the methodology, we recognize the symbiotic relationship this methodology has with marketing automation tools. Implementing a buying process methodology without a marketing automation tool is challenging.
Marketing automation helps you visualize, model, implement, track and adjust your buying process strategy.
Are you already intimate with your marketing automation tool? Are you just getting started with your marketing automation purchase? Or are you still evaluating the purchase of a marketing automation tool?
In all cases, it is time you looked at a buying process methodology so that you can achieve those ultimate marketing automation rewards.
Learn more about our buying process methodology with our eBook - Understanding the Buying Process
If purchases are what every marketer strives for, then returns are the marketer's best kept secret. If you've spent 3 months of marketing and sales activity, the return of a purchased product turns out to be quite costly.
Buyers always reevaluate their purchase decision after the money has exchanged hands. They may do it immediately, or they may do it at some point in the future. Regardless of when they reevaluate, the outcome of their evaluation impacts your business.
The buyer's evaluation criteria is quite simple:
If their product experience doesn't match their expectations, bad things happen.
If a product return stems from a product defect, you have a quality issue. Quickly replace the offending item with a working one and you can minimize the damage.
If the product return stems from discontentment with the way the product met expectations, you have either a communication problem or a relationship problem.
Shelf-ware is a hidden problem for marketers. Your product has been purchased, but it ends up not being used. Yes, the marketer gets the money, but nothing else is gained in the transaction. Not product loyalty. Not brand building.
Shelf-ware is the bottom waiting to fall out of your business. What appears to be healthy on the surface (sales) is masked by a slow death of disinterest.
Some products or services will need to be repurchased in the future. Clothes wear out. Machines break down. Subscriptions expire. An unsatisfying original product (or brand) experience, limits your ability to capture that repeat purchase. Say good-bye to high customer lifetime value.
Long lags between purchases can make uncovering the original purchase issues very difficult. Customer satisfaction studies are one way of staying on top of buyer satisfaction.
Now, more than ever, unhappy buyers have a multitude of forums to broadcast their complaints. Those complaints can influence greater numbers of prospects than ever before. This means that marketers have to take customer complaints seriously.
Marketers should always create mechanisms and encourage disgruntled customers to communicate their issues directly with the business. Marketers must monitor social media, rating web sites, etc. to intercept problems before they blossom into brand damaging rants. Be aggressive in fixing the problem both with the customer as well as with the issue's origination.
As you can see, a product return is the least of a marketer's problems.
The road from a prospect's selection of your product to handing over the money is littered with potholes. And most of those potholes are of our own creation.
Now, if you are selling a product that only needs to be repurchased every 3-5 years, you may be able to live with the inefficiency. However, in our renewal-heavy, Software as a Service (SaaS) world, this inefficiency will absolutely kill your business.
If there is one truth to give us context for creating purchase efficiency, it is:
Your job is to make it easy for your buyer to purchase in his/her preferred channel, with his/her preferred payment method.
The buyer has worked through their buying process without engaging a person. Company XYZ does not offer on-line purchase. The company forces the buyer to complete the purchase through a sales representative.
The buyer's purchasing department requires that all business purchases are to be made via a purchase order. Company XYZ doesn't accept purchase orders.
In order to obtain corporate reimbursement for a purchase made on a personal credit card, certain proof of payment must be submitted. Company XYZ has no way to create paperwork that meets the buyer's requirements.
Company XYZ only offers individual, non transferrable licenses for its product. The buyer needs a more flexible sharing or use-based option.
Significant price differences for the same product across channels can stall or redirect the buyer's purchase.
Return policies, end user licensing terms and restrictions, next steps, additional costs... any product detail which comes as a surprise to the buyer can deter the purchase. More importantly it can introduce trust issues that completely derail the purchase.
Company XYZ's on-line store isn't clear about communications, privacy, security, and credit card handling policies. What buyer will risk identity theft to purchase there?
The buyer has an urgent need to purchase your product. However, the product is out-of-stock in their preferred channel. Will the buyer wait, go elsewhere or change their selection?
Your goal should be to move the buyer from product selection to purchase as quickly as possible.
The greater the time lag between the decision and the payment, the greater the risk that the buyer will abandon the purchase with you.
Shared purchase channels create their own payment completion challenges. A dedicated purchase channel would be one that sells only your product(s). Dedicated channels don't introduce competition that could derail the buyer's payment. However, dedicated channels may not be the buyer's preferred channel.
Buyers often will enter a shared channel, firm in their product choice. Yet, a number of factors could change which product they ultimately purchase. Competitive promotions and discounts can alter a value-based decision. Unavailability and last minute surprises can trigger a new selection.
You have invested significant assets to motivate your buyer to purchase your product. Make sure that you design the final payment step to simplify and expedite the buyer's payment.
Read more about the buying process our eBook Understanding the Buying Process or in this blog series.
We cannot stress enough the importance of creating a positive emotional connection with your buyer. Without that "good feeling", achieving the final sale will be elusive.
Positive emotional connection isn't just about interpersonal interactions. The buyer's emotional response is based on all of the buyer's interactions with you, your product, and your brand -- not just your sales team.
Let's reiterate again the emotions you need to create throughout the buying process in order to stimulate a sale.
Now, the hard part. How do you create these positive emotions in your buyer? You create strong emotional connections by driving emotional consistency across all of these areas:
Do not underestimate the emotive power of your look and feel. Lightness and space create a sense of openness, of breathing room.
Tone and voice create a sense of sincerity, honesty and approachability. Does the content tone depict you as personal, professional, and encouraging?
The content should be about the buyer, not about you. Does your content portray you as a distant entity or a personable, trustworthy associate.
Say what you mean, mean what you say, and stand by what you promised. Listen and affirm. Learn and grow. Really care. Be a servant not a ruler.
So, what happens if along the way the buyer starts forming a negative connection with you? Is the sale lost?
But to get the sales you must turn around any negative emotions. It isn't easy.
Changing the emotional tenor at this stage requires a personal touch. You must be open, not defensive, willing to do what it takes to make the situation right in the eyes of the buyer. This must be done with unfailing attention to consistency of your behaviors.
But negative emotions can be turned around. It will take an investment to do so. In cases where you succeed, the war stories can do more to build your reputation than anything else you could try to orchestrate.
We are in the final stretches of the prospect's buying process. Your prospect has understood their need, researched the alternatives, and evaluated their options.
You are waiting for the buyer to make their decision. They seem to be taking forever. What is holding them up?
If the buyer's issue is with questions or concerns, the good news is that you can fix this by:
Audience interviews are a great mechanism to help you understand prospect and buyer issues.
If the buyer's issue is with the need or a compelling, stand out alternative, you haven't lost the sale yet. These issues often point to a failure of the buying process to date to adequately develop the pain and the solution.
It is most important to recognize that the buying decision will not be based solely on the merit of your product.
Did you notice that I repeatedly said "you" instead of "your product"? This isn't a mistake. Buyers will tend to humanize products. (That is one of the reasons why branding continues to play an important role in product selection.)
Creating that positive emotional connection that helps you sail through the selection stage is not easy. In fact, it is so important that I will focus on it in my next blog entry.
It continues to surprise me how many marketers leave the definition of decision criteria for their product to someone else.
Every product has some areas where it excels and other areas where it may weakly compete. Perhaps marketers are afraid that buyers won't purchase their product if they know beforehand the product's weaknesses. If this is truly the case, the marketer has bigger problems than verbalizing the product's weaknesses.
The result is that buyers are often on their own when it comes to defining decision criteria for a purchase.
In certain cases, buyers can turn to analysts, reviewers,or consumer agencies to learn how to evaluate the product's usefulness for their situation.
They may also turn to the volume of information on the Internet to supplement their research. In this age of abundant communication, marketers can't hide their dirty laundry for long.
It is time that marketers start thinking differently. After all, it is the marketer's job to find good matches for its product. The best way that marketers can find these matches is by being honest and clear about the situations where their product works best. This also involves helping buyers not select their product when it is not suitable.
I often find that marketers are deathly afraid of admitting their product's weaknesses. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, if they don't admit the weakness, it doesn't exist.
I tend to look at it another way. If you can find buyers who are delighted with your product despite its weaknesses, you have a business. If you can't, you need to fix the product so that it can enable a viable business.
Some of the worst sales I have seen happen when a product purchased is not a good fit for the buyer. The pain and anguish these sales cause the business and the customer can be extreme. Why try to make a square peg fit into a round hole?
Do you want to expedite a sale? Do you want to create a good buyer match? Then help the buyer understand the decision criteria they should be using when evaluating solutions for their need.
Be free to not have your product rise to the top in every situation. After all, isn't that what differentiation is all about?
Simplify the pros and cons of the important criteria. Position your product accurately against the criteria. You will save the buyer time. You also will build an amazing amount of trust with the buyer. That trust is your most valuable asset in a successful sale and in an unsuccessful one. With it, buyers remember and return to you for their other needs.
In working with clients, the area that consistently needs the most work is prospect education. It is not that marketers don't educate their buyers. The problem is that the focus of that education is largely around the product.
Product-centric education is self-serving. "You"-focused product education cannot establish buyer trust. And buyer trust is always an important element in the purchase decision.
So, what is a marketer to do? We've been taught that data sheets, technical white papers, product specs, features and functions should be our primary output.
It is time to change our vocabulary and our content mechanisms. We must re-orient them both towards the buyer.
As we've seen in the awareness of a need and framing a need buying process stages, we should enter the buyer's world by helping them understand their need and its potential solutions. However, just because a buyer has framed their need doesn't mean that they no longer need to learn about their need.
The buyer is always learning about their need. If all you offer is product-oriented literature, the buyer must translate that into need-related concepts. Every aspect of your product content is evaluated based on the buyer's understanding of their need. You talk about features. The buyer tries to translate those features into use cases.
And if the buyer cannot figure out how your product details satisfy his/her need, he/she will exit the buying process. Unfortunately, ineffective translation happens all of the time.
The way to help the buyer is to write need-oriented content. Types of need-oriented content include:
You will note that a need-oriented list doesn't include product feature descriptions, data sheets, or technical white papers. Yet some of the information found in those type of documents is represented in need-oriented content. The difference is the contextual entry point to that information -- the buyer perspective not the product perspective.
Finally, content that answers buyers' questions will always be more engaging. I am not talking about frequently asked questions lists. FAQs are a lazy marketer's tool.
Take the time to understand the buyer's question and its related follow-ons. (How many times does one question lead to another?) Then determine how your content will organize related questions.
There are four benefits of switching from product-centric content to need-oriented content.
One of the easiest ways to test the value of your content is to source it on your web site. Introduce it. Follow the visitor analytics. Compare it with other content. Play around with navigation devices to the content. Ask your visitors to rate the content.
Never get to enamoured with your content. Learn from your metrics and be ready to dump old content and write fresh content.
So, your buyer has become aware of his/her need/want/problem. They've been talking with their friends, looking for expert advice, and generally socializing their need.
As they process all of that information, they hone in on the mechanism that will make or break your ability to get through to them. That device is the problem frame.
For many needs/wants/problems, there are a variety of ways that each can be satisfied.
Let's take the example of a United States buyer who needs to replace his/her car. To start, he/she has 10 U.S. brands to choose from. Each of these brands offers numerous product lines. Each product in the line has plenty of different configurations. And this is before you add the 9 international car manufacturers with their product lines and configurations.
To keep the selection process manageable, buyers frame their need. That frame is their way of narrowing down the world of solutions to a smaller set.
Frames define the scope of the buyer's solution search.
In selecting their frame, your product will either be included or excluded for consideration by the buyer.
In our car example above, say the buyer frames his/her need as
If you are GM, what is the chance that you are going to get the time of day from the prospect while in his/her buying process? Close to zero unless something unexpected happens to cause the buyer to revisit his/her frame.
Unexpected things do happen. Look at the runaway car issues Toyota recently has faced. But can you really count on a major gaff by a competitor to give you entrée into the buyer's process? To put it another way, if you are GM, you would have to wait another 40 years before that will happen again.
So, if being included in the buyer's frame is so important, how can you ensure that your product is included in the buyer's frame?
This takes us back to the awareness stage in the buyer's process. In order to help the buyer frame their need, your product needs to be found in at least one of the places the buyer is going to use to socialize their need.
You want to be the leading source of information about the buyer's need. You want to become the trusted advisor. You want to subtly help the buyer choose a frame that will include your product.
Car manufacturers spend millions of dollars a year creating frames. They do it with branding. Think of Volvo. Safety comes to mind. Think of BMW. Ultimate driving experience comes to mind. Because of the myriad of car options available in the marketplace, car manufacturers invest in branding to align with framed needs.
Not all of us have thousands to invest in our brand. But in this Internet age, you don't necessarily need to.
What you do need to do is ensure that your products can be found. Once found, you need to be the best at helping the buyer understand the way to frame his/her need.