I really do want to air an opinion over here weekly.

Let’s see if I can get my act together here. Somehow I manage to post every weekday over on Pink Slip….

Anyway, the other day my brother-in-law sent me a link to a blog post by Lewis Lin, a career coach, who, among other things, offers his clients Google-specific practice interviews. His post was on the questions - including the trick ones - that Google asks folks on interviews. You know, the ones like ‘why is a manhole covers round?’, and ‘how much would you charge to wash every window in Seattle?’

While some of the questions have known answers* - a manhole is round so that it doesn’t fall in - for others, no one cares about the actual right answer: they just want to see how you think a problem through.

When I saw that Lin had Google questions broken down by position, I eagerly clicked into see what questions they asked Product Marketing Managers.

Yawn!

Slug in any old company and product names, and this could be Classic Interview: Anywhere USA.

• Why do you want to join Google?
• What do you know about Google’s product and technology?
• If you are Product Manager for Google’s Adwords, how do you plan to market this?
• What would you say during an AdWords or AdSense product seminar?
• Who are Google competitors, and how does Google compete with them?
• Have you ever used Google’s products? Gmail?
• What’s a creative way of marketing Google’s brand name and product?
• If you are the product marketing manager for Google’s Gmail product, how do you plan to market it so as to achieve 100 million customers in 6 months?

No brain teasers? No ‘how many golf balls fit in a school bus?’, which would check on a candidate’s basic comfort level with numbers. No ‘how much would you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle’ - which would have gauged a product marketer’s ability to think about pricing. Not even the ‘in three sentences, explain what a database is to your eight year old nephew’, an obvious test of someone’s ability to write clearly and succinctly on a technical topic.

Sure, the questions they do ask are decent ones, but couldn’t they have been just a bit more creative here?  Maybe something along the lines of, ‘You work for the company known to hire the smartest people in the whole wide world. How would you effectively communicate with the morons who use our products?’ (I guess that’s the eight year old nephew question. Darn, I am so not googlishly creative.)

Or how about, ‘Your mother is worried about loss or privacy. Explain to her what she’ll gain by having information on every purchase she’s made online, not to mention every web page she’s ever clicked on, out there in the big honking database you just explained to her grandson.”

Or, ‘One of our beliefs is that democracy on the web works. Do you have any doubts about whether this is always going to be true.’

Or my personal favorite question to ask prospective product marketers: ‘If you were going to be stranded on a desert island for a couple of days, would you rather be with engineers or sales people, and why? And just to we don’t skew this towards the engineers, you’ll have ample food and bev, shelter, and a known rescue date. (If you answer engineers, welcome to product marketing; if you answer sales people, there may be an opening in marcom.)

Truly, I am disappointed that Google thinks so little about product marketing folks that we’re not worth anything beyond the most pedestrian of questions. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why, proving - what else is new - that I am just not bright enough to work for Google. Good thing I’m not looking for a job.

———————————————————-

*I have a couple of other answers: a) a manhole cover is round because a manhole is round; and b) a manhole cover is round because it’s easier to roll a heavy object than it is to lift and carry it. So there.

a

What Google asks of its product marketing interviewees

I’ve been at the B2B tech marketing game a long time, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned (and re-learned, and re-re-learned) is that one of the most difficult things to figure out is what market to go after.

Actually, strike that thought.

It’s not all that difficult figuring out what market to go after. What’s difficult is sticking to it.

I’m learning this lesson over yet again, this time through the lens of a client struggling with the challenge.

The company has been around for a while, but with respect to the product offering I’m working with them on, it’s an entirely new space and story, and the mode they’re in is pretty much pure start-up.

They have a complex offering set, well suited - at different levels - to small, mid-sized, and household-name behemoth companies. At the highest level, it’s a multi-million dollar, intensively customized software implementation.

Having one of those household-name behemoths on their client list would, they believe, make the company. Others in the industry - small, mid-sized, and fellow behemoths - would be lining up to buy. If only we could get that first behemoth through the door.

The problem - acknowledged by my client - is that the behemoths view the company as too small (a.k.a., too risky) even if the product were offered for free.

So I’ve talking to my client about forgetting about the biggies - at least for now -and focusing on the lower-end market, for which they have a simpler, less costly, non-customized offering at an attractive price. I’ve even been suggesting that we change our message to let the little guys know that they, too, can have a de luxe, enterprise-class system (almost the same as what the big guys get), for short money. Every time we get near to this decision, though, it seems as if we’ve just gotten on the radar of one of those behemoths. Forget that we’re just column fodder, or something interesting to look at. Once one of those make-or-break household names is anywhere around, well, we just seem to fall into a swoon.

I have assured my client that they can still think big by starting small. That a client list at one level will give them permission to climb up a rung or two. That they may even be able to find small nodes in the behemoths where a decentralized decision can be made to go with them. But I haven’t had much luck in convincing them to place their stake, unabashedly, with the little guys.

What if, they ask, someone from a behemoth comes to their home page and gets turned off?

So, I counter, they weren’t going to buy anyway, right?

That’s true,they agree.

Still…

Hey, I know the attraction of the Big Name Company on your client list. I’ve felt the tug myself. We all want to say that we work with a company that your cousin Susie and the guy next door have heard of. It’s a short cut to telling people what you do - and to legitimizing the work you do. Let’s face it, most of us suffer from the bias that says big = successful, small = loser/wannabe.

But sometimes that glittering object in the distance is nothing more than fool’s gold with the sun glinting off of it. You struggle to get to it, only to realize it isn’t worth the cost. Worse, you look back and see the real nuggets you ignored along the way in hopes of striking it rich.

My client has said that they’re open to considering tabling the idea of marketing to the big guys, which is a positive sign.

We’ll see where we are when the moment of truth arrives and we’re willing to go public with a message that counts the big guys out.

a

That glittering object in the distance…

A billion years ago, when I worked the phones at the Sears after-hours call-in center for the Northeast (a.k.a., the customer complaint center - in those days, we called a spade a spade), one customer - whose paint had not been delivered in time for her husband to paint the house during his vacation - started screaming at me that I’d ‘better ‘get your ass down to Dorchester with that paint.’ Well, I wasn’t going to be getting my ass down to Dorchester with or without the paint, but I could understand her frustration. Here she had ordered paint from Sears. It hadn’t shown up. And she was stuck with her husband underfoot for a week and had no freshly painted house to show for it. No wonder she was ticked off.

Fast forward to a couple of customers I heard from when I worked for a small software company that sold “enterprise development tools” for big bucks. One customer called to let us know that she feared she was going to lose her job because she’d chosen our product over the ones that were cheaper and easier to use - generally a winning combination, but we were very convincing about the merits of our beast of a system  - yes, it was harder to use, but it did oh, so much more for you [if only you could figure out how to use it]. Another customer kept calling to demand their money back. Caveat emptor, pal - that money was already spent and there was no way we were going to unbook it.

It sounds funny when I recount these tales of woe, but at the time - all joking aside (and we did plenty of gallows-humor joking) - it was embarrassing and demoralizing to work for a company with products that, frankly, most of our customers flat out didn’t like.

Fast forward once again. I am now doing free-lance work for a software company with products that the customers actually love.

I do a lot of customer interviews and case studies for them, as well as win-loss surveys. Remarkably, even the “losses” have high praise for our products.

They have customers who are enthusiastic users of the products because the products a) are well designed and easy to use; b) solve a real problem; and c) are priced right (i.e., price is commensurate with value). This sounds like it should be a relatively easy recipe to replicate - kind of like making baking powder biscuits or a fluffernutter. But it’s been a recipe that has quite astoundingly been ignored in many of the companies I worked with when I was a full-timer.

So needless to say I was excited to receive an e-mail yesterday from a customer of the client with the oh, so happy customer base.

I had interviewed this guy a couple of weeks ago, and written up a case study. A few days after the case study was approved, he called and asked me to run some very minor interference for him. Which, of course, I did.

Yesterday’s e-mail was brief. “I have an idea. Give me a call.”

Even though yesterday was a vacation day - my sister and I were painting our niece Caroline’s room “Angel Pink” - I was checking my e-mails, so I called him back.

His idea was for a sales tool that he thought would be useful for us to produce, and that he would like to be a content source for. Yes, the sales tool will also help him with his business, as it will explain why you’re better off going with a company that uses our products. Still, it was a great idea and I told him so.

After speaking with the client, I immediately called one of the folks I work for at this company, and she’s all on board with the idea. It’s now on my to-do list.

But I just can’t get over how thrilled I am - after all these years - working for a company that has customers that like them so much that they come up with ideas for how we can sell more stuff.

Talk about a first!

a

Where do we find customers like these?

Anyway, while browsing yesterday, I read Maria Pergolino’s roundup article on the Marketing Profs recent Digital Marketing World conference, which made me kinda-sorta wish I’d attended.

I’m not going to do a roundup of Maria’s intriguing roundup, but one of the take-aways that made her list was this bit:

Market like a sales person
Marketers want to look like sales reps.  No, I don’t mean they want to golf and jet from city-to-city dining with prospects.  Instead, they want their emails to look like they came from sales reps to encourage email opens- and do so with personalization and segmentation plus tricks like adding “Sent from my Blackberry” or adding misspellings to their emails.  I haven’t tried these ‘tricks’, and saw a some people on Twitter disagree, but others said this was keeping recipients from hitting the delete button and encouraging them to click through on their email messages.

Now, while it may not be a bad idea to try to think like sales person on occasion, based on the great store of experience I have with sales folks, I’m not sure I’d want to market like one, even taking into consideration Maria’s noting that she doesn’t mean we have to play golf. (Thanks the gods for that one.)

Personally, I’ve seen plenty of those spello-d e-mails and snail-mails, which the sales guys generally had me look at after they’d already sent them off. And I have to think that, if I’m on the receiving end, and get something riddled with mistakes, I am not going to be thinking, hey, this guy is really authentic, this isn’t just some dreck from marketing. I’m going to be thinking, hey, this guy is completely careless; if he can’t spell the name of his product correctly, how am I going to trust anything he tells me?

Perhaps the world has changed so utterly that typos are now considered charming and real, rather than cringeworthy, as the typos, spellos, and grammos that have happened on my watch (and there have been a few) have all been for me. (Blogging is exempt, of course.)

What does a misspelling convey that’s positive? To me, it screams I’m in a hurry and you’re not all that important.

I don’t know where I am on “Sent from my Blackberry”, other than to speculate that, unless a sales person is responding to some query of mine, I’d find this pretty annoying after I clicked through on the first one or two and saw that it didn’t deliver something that was plenty interesting.

(And I’m thinking of a great blog topic keying off this post. How about “Sell like a marketing person”?)

a

Market like a sales person? Who knew?

A while back, I was working with a client with a SaaS application. The project I was involved in required my speaking with a number of their customers about how they were doing with the product, what they liked about it, how they benefited…The usual “whazzup” questions.

What surprised me was the number of customers who weren’t using the product - even though most of them had signed up for it months before.

Clearly, at least for the customers who were letting their SaaS app grow virtual cobwebs on its virtual shelf, this product was a vitamin not a painkiller. Now, this lack of use would have been problematic enough in the world of installed software. It’s never good to have products that customers aren’t using, and with installed software you’d run the risk of losing out on a support renewal. But at least you’d have gotten paid for the software.

With SaaS, the risk associated with lack of use is much, much higher. When that subscription’s up, and no one’s using the product, there’s a very high probability that the customer won’t renew. Sure, you’d have gotten a year’s worth of revenue, but what you really want is the ongoing revenue stream.

I’ve never worked directly for a SaaS provider, but I have worked for hosting providers, and customer churn was a big no-no.

Customers slipping away meant loss of revenue and loss of face. And we all knew the fast rule that it costs a lot less to retain an existing customer than it is to find a new one.

Now, we weren’t always brilliant concerning what we did about it, but we did pay plenty of attention to customer churn. And with hosting, the problem wasn’t that the customer wasn’t “using” our services (although certainly many had locked into to contracts that anticipated higher growth than they actually experienced). With SaaS, it’s so much worse.

Anyway, I mentioned my “findings” to my client - VP of Marketing - along with some suggestions that might help solve this problem. He told me that he was well aware of the problem, and was trying to get “the company” to do something about it, but they were so focused on winning new customers for a new product that they weren’t paying attention to the ones they already had in the fold.

As they’ve just passed the first anniversary of their SaaS application’s release, I should check in with this client and see how things are going with respect to churn.

My guess is that they’re in for a douse of reality, and that they’ll be putting into practice some measures to make sure that they retain existing customers by doing whatever hand holding and prodding they need to do to make sure that they become active users.

There was a round we used to sing in Girl Scouts that went “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other’s gold.”

Same goes for customers - especially when they’re using subscription based software apps.

a

Make New Friends, But Keep the Old

I wasn’t familiar with this nomenclature, but I instantly got it.

• Vitamin = nice to have
• Painkiller = gotta have

Grrrrrrr.  How many hours have I spent over the course of my career trying to convince someone that the expensive horse pill I was trying to get them to gag down was actually going to save them some pain? As often as not, it was just a vitamin - easy enough to do without. And as often as not, the customer had another way to take care of whatever my horse pill vitamin was going to do for him (or to him). Mostly, he could keep on wolfing down a Brussells sprouts on Wonder Bread sandwich each day and end up in the same place vitamin-wise. Now, I might have looked at that Brussels sprouts sandwich and known with absolute surety that my product was better all the way around. But, of course, when you factored in price, there was seldom any comparison. Brussells sprouts on Wonder Bread was, invariably, nearly free. Plus, it was the way things were always done. Folks had even acquired a tolerance, if not a taste for it. Why start paying big bucks for my horse pill?

Anyway, I went to The Google and found that the vitamin vs. pain-killer argument is that of Microsoft’s Don Dodge. You can check out Don’s full (and excellent) post here.

Naturally, we’re better off when our products are painkillers, i.e., solve a problem that is not of the elephant on the table variety, but is a bona fide elephant standing on my foot problem. Get that elephant out of here, and give me something for my damned foot!

One thing that Don points out is that many products fall into the vitamin category - until disaster strikes. Then, all of a sudden, they’re a painkiller. Backup is an example that he gives - although, when you think about it, if you only start using backup after you’ve lost all your data,it’s more of a prophylactic than a painkiller - unless it can be used to restore the lost data, in which case it’s painkiller plus prophylactic. (Two mints in one!)

In any case, even if it’s imperfect, the metaphor is apt.

And there is considerable (additional) wisdom in Don’s post.

You really ought to read the entire thing, but I’ll leave you with this:

Understanding what makes your product a “must have” painkiller versus a “nice to have” vitamin is the key to successful marketing. Identifying the key pain points and how your product solves them in a simple value proposition is job one. There are sometimes “trigger events” that cause these pain points. These “trigger events” cause your product to convert from a “vitamin” to a “painkiller” for customers. Qualifying your sales leads by trigger events and pain points will help focus your sales and marketing efforts and result in much higher win ratios.

Think real hard, right now. Make a list of the pain points your product solves. Make a list of trigger events that cause the pain to happen. Now think about how to identify these “trigger events” as they happen among the hundreds or thousands of potential customers. Get this right and your sales productivity will sky rocket. Get it wrong and your sales people will end up “dialing for dollars” and wondering why they are not being successful.

If I’d truly understood this 25 years ago, I could have avoided buckets-full of pain.

Instead, I spent more years than I care to remember popping a horse pill and some customer’s mouth, and clamping their muzzle shut until they swallowed it. Some of these horse pills, I’m afraid, weren’t even nice to haves. Quack medicine was more like it!

a

Vitamin? Pain-killer? What’s your product do for humankind?

a

Opinionated Marketers staycation

Anyway, Avaya took a page from a similar playbook. They did so by tying their “anyplace, anywhere” communications offerings to the “anyplaces” that Bostonians might find themselves in.

I like advertising that speaks directly to its audience - persona, vertical, or - in this case - the locals. And Avaya got it most of the way right. But they were a little tin-earish on a couple of things, which leads me to believe that they didn’t run it by a true Bostonian. Now, most of the world’s population might not notice the wrong notes - just like they don’t seem to mind the almost universally dreadful fake-Boston accents you hear in movies* - but, since the ads were aimed at Bostonians, I bet I’m not the only one who picked up on:

• “Boston Commons”. Boston Commons? No such thing. It’s Boston Common.
• Fenway Park. Yes, it is indeed Fenway Park, but none of us would say Fenway Park. We’d say Fenway.
• And, since one of their “anyplaces” was “the airport”, why didn’t they say “Logan” while they were at it, rather than “The Airport”.

Okay, I’m being a nitpicking meanie here - and I really do like this type of advertising. I don’t know whether it’s more effective than generic ads, but I’m guessing (and hoping) that it is.

So to show my goodwill, I’ll make another point to underscore this one, by telling one on myself.

Years ago, a software company I worked for decided to go vertical, and our first vertical was insurance. We put a couple of things in our product that addressed industry-specific uses - one I remember was allowing for “monthliversaries” of data. In our literature, we talked about issues and trends that were insurance-industry related. And I put together a very nice little story-board presentation about how one insurance company would use our product. It took a client to point out that insurance companies were either Life or Property & Casualty, but they weren’t both. Ouch. I was a little embarrassed, but the embarrassment served me right for pretending that I knew jack about insurance companies. Yes, I had both Life and Property & Casualty, and they were from different companies, but I’d never given any thought to why that was the case.

So, if you’re going to do any directed communications that are talking local, vertical, or persona, you really need to make sure that you speak the language. And if you’re not a native speaker, it’s probably best to run whatever you’re saying by a native.

*One of the only good ones was Leo DiCaprio in The Departed.

a

Nice try, Avaya

As always when I buy an item even vaguely electronics related - and, thus, encased in impenetrable plastic packaging - I have to prepare myself both psychologically and physically for the opening ceremony. So, even though the package was on the smallish side, I made sure that I had industrial strength, elbow length gloves  to ensure that I didn’t slice off a finger tip on a sharp edge; goggles to protect my eyes from flying shards of plastic; and a full array of cutting implements (hack saw, cross-cut, steak knife, chainsaw, pinking sheers, ice pick). I did my usual preparatory exercises, lifting a few weights to make sure I had sufficient arm-strength for the task. Then I set out to separate the headphones from their plastic-fantastic cocoon.

As I was making a surgeon’s determination about what instrument to start off with, I noticed that, on the back of the package, there was a small, marked out area (plastic intact, but outlined and more or less pre-cut)that looked like you could push it in. Once pushed in, it appeared that you might be able to have your first, all-important “I’m in” contact with the packaging.

So, I gingerly prodded at the flap-pish area and, amazingly, it was easy to push right in. With something to grab on to, I was able to easily and quickly peel off the back of the packaging. Miraculously, it came off in one piece.

Sure, there was still another layer to go through before I could actually get at the headphones and, given my years of experience with electronic packaging, I anticipated trouble.

There was none.

The headphones were easily extracted.

So bless you, Logitech for listening to your customers as they yelped in pain, reading those blood-stained letters pleading for a better way to package your products.

Now, Logitech may have done this years ago, but I think I’ve purchased a product from them more recently than that.

But whenever they came through with this breakthrough, it’s a most welcome one.

Would that other electronics products companies would follow their lead.

a

Bless you, Logitech

1. First up, thou shall not equate going viral with success. They point out the failure of the OfficeMax “elfyourself” campaign as an example of one that had high participation, but didn’t produce sales or brand recognition - people who knew the campaign didn’t associate it with OfficeMax. Now, there may be times when you don’t want your viral campaign associated with your brand, but introducing a new product that you absolute don’t want connected to your old brand in any way, shape, or form (e.g., your brand is associated with geriatrics, and your audience is hipsters) is the only one I can think of. And that no sales thing… Maybe okay if you’re in the long-slog, enterprise B2B world, where it’s impossible to tie any one event or activity to a sale, but in a consumer-retail environment? Gulp.

   The point that Chris and Geoff make is that there should be some point to your wanting to go viral - i.e., it should be based on a strategy. Just going viral isn’t a substitute for that.

2. You’re no longer in control. And if you think you are, you’re mistaken. So stop trying to control things, and don’t even bother to pretend that your press releases are blog entries, or that your data sheets are Facebook content. What you really want out of social media is for someone else to be doing at least some of the talking for you. Sure, you can prime the pump - IBM, of all companies, has had some good stuff on YouTube - but, at the end of the day, if you think that you’ll look good by cutting and pasting content from your website into the comment section of the blog of someone writing about your industry, think again.
3. If I’ve got the next sin right, it’s lose the idea that your customers are dying to jump in and do your social media work for you. Unless you’re ab-fab certain that they’ll be motivated by the very thought of making a fun video on your behalf, lose the campaign idea about the big contest to get your customers to do so unless you’re willing to make it worth their while. (They cite an example from Heinz that offered $57K for a winning commercial about ketchup. Who’d of thunk it? Money talks.)
4. The next one intersects with a real sin - don’t let yourself become the “john” by paying bloggers to prostitute themselves by writing about your products. Although they don’t say so, I will: this doesn’t mean you can’t slip a free product or whatever into the hands of someone who might be interested in writing about you. But it does mean that you need to take the risk that they’ll say something negative. Once you pay someone to say nice things about you, and folks find out, no one will trust you or the paid endorser.
5. Don’t treat social media as if it’s the exclusive domain of PR - this is way too limiting. Sure, PR needs to play a central role, but make sure you also include product development, service and support, research… This is excellent advice - and advice that I give clients all the time. If you’re in a techie field, the last thing you want is some flak from your PR firm making cut and paste comments out in the blogosphere. What you do want is your experts - those who have something to say that goes beyond boilerplate, and identifies them and your company as someone whose voice matters - out there making good points in online forums.
6. Paid advertising on social media sites is a bad idea, since it won’t yield the “social media ’superfecta’” that Chris and Geoff define. That’s where your social media campaign results in “sales results, Google results, third-party endorsements, and user-generated contented by real people carrying the message in unison to other forums, venues and, ultimately, to more consumers.” Paying good money to plunk your message in an ad box won’t work and will, in fact, increase campaign costs and, thus, the ROI threshold for the campaign.
7. Sin number seven strikes me as manifold. It’s bad if you don’t have a plan, don’t just look to the big dog blogs, and - my favorite (and one I’ve posted on before): don’t start blogging unless your willing to make a “long-term commitment.” (Do I hear an ‘amen’?)
8. Don’t expect social media to go it alone - it has to be integrated into your overall marketing program. “Social media is a strategic amplifier for your campaign, not the entire campaign.”

While I don’t find most of these sins mortal in nature, they’re definitely in the capital-v-Venial range, and should be avoided if you don’t want to endanger your marketing soul.

Anyway, while I think I’ve done the article justice, if you want to hear it from the horses’ mouth, the full article is definitely worth a look.

a

Let he who is without social media sin skip this one (but that’s not most of us)