AbleBrains

An Attitudinal Segmentation Primer

Did you know that you can segment your market based on the attitudes your customers have toward buying your products and services?  And that if you do this you will be able to separate out high return from low return customers?

Did you know that when you combine this type of segmentation with demand modeling you can also optimize demand for your product or service?

Did you know that you can dramatically improve your win-rate over your competitors by personalizing content and offers specific to what a particular consumer's style is -- talking in their language about their concerns?

Download Attitudinal segmentationAblebrains.  As always, I look forward to your comments and feedback.

Finally, A Choice Modeling Primer

I bet you didn't know that Choice Modeling was initially a psychological theory on how people choose foods they want to eat.

I bet you didn't know that economists picked it up to predict the choices consumers would make for goods and services.

I bet you didn't know that the first "business" application of a Choice Model was in the planning for BART - the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

I bet you didn't know that you could use choice modeling to plan a new product, optimize an old one, create an effective pricing strategy, figure out if you can raise prices AND raise market share, stop customer attrition, streamline your product portfolio or figure out what features and positioning your clients care about most.

I've written a lot about choice models and how powerful they are, but now I've put together a short deck using a variety of sources that lays out the history, methodology and application of choice modeling in business.   

Download Choicemodelingprimer and please, I look forward to your comments.

Where's the Personalization in the Enterprise Software Buying Experience?

Can someone please point me to all those great personalized B2B web sites?  You know the ones... they kinda ask you as you hit the home page who you are, gather some basic demographics/firmographics and then proceed to customize the content experience for you so you're more likely to find what you need.  

  I get that experience when I visit B2C web sites... Amazon for instance.  They've used past  behavior to craft a personalized experience for me that I enjoy.  And in the words of the man himself (from a 1998 interview):

 “In the online world, businesses have the opportunity to develop very deep relationships with customers, both through accepting preferences of customers and then observing their purchase behavior over time, so that you can get that individualized knowledge of the customer and use that individualized knowledge...to accelerate their discovery process.

If we can do that, then the customers are going to feel a deep loyalty to us, because we know them so well. And if they switch to a competitive website, as long as we never give them a reason to switch, as long as we're not trying to charge higher prices or providing lousy service, or don't have the selection that they require; as long as none of those things happen, they're going to stick with us because they are going to be able to get a personalized service, a customized website that takes into account the years of relationship we've built with them.”

How about that? ...

 ..."accelerate the discovery process" -> make it EASY and FAST to find the content that satisfies

..."feel a deep loyalty to us: -> Brand affinity is the crown jewel of a great customer experience

...acknowledging and building upon "the years of relationship we've built with them." 

If that's what can happen in B2C environment, don't you think some of that might be useful in B2B interactions?  Is there such a chasm in thinking between what works in a consumer oriented engagement vs. a B2B oriented engagement?  I guess so.

Name me an enterprise software play today that doesn't have years worth of relationships built up with the majority of their customers.   The millions of members of the community sites associated with SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are a testament to those relationships. And these community sites are quite personalized. But what about the core web experiences of these organizations... and what about (hush!) the prospects?   

Don't they deserve to have an "individualized" experience as well? Why wouldn't they? Would you agree with me that most software today, regardless of provider has "right to play" functionality?  That the capabilities of various solutions whether on-premise or on-demand aim for "good enough" equivalency? Yes, I know a lot of you may have issues with that statement and I grant ahead of time that of course each vendor has a sweet spot (or is that a 'suite-spot' ?), or their technology aligns better with the prospect's IT environment or processes  or the look and feel appeals more (OK, have I covered all eventual issues now?). So if the functionality is roughly equivalent, don't these organizations stand apart from the pack based on relationship and ultimately Brand affinity? What was that Bezos was saying about customer loyalty? Oh yeah its the key to his business.

Most sales professionals I speak to tell me that its all about the relationship.  Its the relationship that sells the deal.  Customers say the same thing!  That being said, then the earlier a firm starts building that relationship with a prospective customer and the richness of those early building blocks are keys to winning the deal. Its about getting folks to the rich content they need as quickly as possible.  Its about creating an immersive and fun experience for the prospect, who when they finally leave your site say to themselves, "wow, they had exactly the content I was looking for" (read: they made my work life easier).  "I'm going to look at these guys more closely."

Personalization is not an end in and of itself.  Personalization is a cornerstone for relationship-building. Many times your a prospect's first impression of you is online.  Don't you want to put your best foot forward?

Can You Predict How Your Market Will Behave?

You can't?  And you call yourself a Marketer???

Granted, market modeling was never the traditional purview of marketers, but seeing how Markets have  evolved, gotten so much more competitive and so much more saturated, I don't know how you can pass up a chance to be smarter about the way your organization goes to market.

Wouldn't it be useful to know that if you altered the price point on your product or were able to modify its deployment time (or any other attribute of your offer) what the effect on your market share would be?

There's a whole mess of techniques to derive these predictive market models. Just take some of these with a grain of salt. Not all ways of predicting market behavior actually predict!  Many chomp only on historical data so they predict "backwards" not forwards.

Seriously though, the ability to predict how your market will behave in the face of a change in strategy or offer execution is essential to being a smart CMO.    Don't just be about the brand. Granted the brand is important but integrating marketing science into your GTM strategy will drive the brand (and of course Demand) to new heights.

You've got to be looking to pull every single competitive lever you can these days.. heck not just these days,  all days.  If you want to learn how to predict how you're market will behave, let me know and I will  hook you up!

Enterprise 2.0: New Tech, Same Old Marketing

Walking the floor at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today I was struck how after all these years the needle hasn't moved much in terms of how a technology company markets themselves.   There's the obligatory vendor pavilion with the obligatory hard copy collateral, obligatory demo stations, obligatory elevator pitches and the obligatory badge reading and card swapping.  

And I'm scratching my head asking myself "Why?"

According the the CMO Council only about 7% of a firm's leads comes from events.. just 7%, whereas 52% come from Customer Referrals.

So I ask again. "Why?"

Part of the answer lies in the conference circuit itself.  This is how its been done in the past, its worked and this is how future conferences are planned.  In-person networking events are an entire ecosystem of vendor, consultant and author promotion.  Business gets done because of these events. Education gets done. And these are good reasons to have them.  But looking at that 7% number and thinking about the Cost Per Trade-show lead, I gotta think from the vendor perspective, there's a lot of room for improvement.

Consider the following scenario...

Good Booth staff talk to many individuals.  They engage in conversation.  They have the opportunity to actually figure out whether or not the individual they are talking to is worthy of future conversation -- of lead nurturing. What if... what if, your booth staff were trained to ask a series of questions, say 7 in all. And based upon those 7 simple questions, you could predict what type of buyer your booth staff was talking to?  Or if indeed they are buyers or influencers at all?

"Hi, I'm Steve.  I am the VP of Biz Dev for Widgets Inc."

"Hi, I'm Joe.  What does Widgets Inc. do?"

"We make Widgets!  Can I ask you a few questions?"

"Sure."

"How large is your organization?"

"About 1000 employees"

"Do you have a large technical staff?"

"Nope. Pretty small in fact, that's why we don't do a lot of custom development work"

"Who makes purchase decisions for Widgets at your company?"

"Oh that's the Executive Leadership Team.  We have to prepare ROI business cases and present them at the Monthly Operations Meeting -- our MOM."

"How cute!"

Ding Ding... you're done!  In this hypothetical, Steve has determined that this company, in high likelihood has an ROI motivated buying style, at least in regards to its IT purchasing behavior.  Now this is a simplistic scenario and granted that it won't work in all cases but even just getting your booth staff to focus more on conversation generating firmographics rather than uni-directional broadcasting is a step in the right direction.

Now, each set of questions (a Question Tree) for an individual organization will be different based on their products, services and market space but you get the idea. And it will take some work to figure out ahead of time, WHAT ARE THE QUESTIONS which identify and predict what type of buyer you are talking to.  But if vendors at trade shows were to begin to take this type of scientific approach to how they talk to folks I guarantee that they will see an uplift in quality of time spent on these leads.  Meaning, the profile of the leads that the firm will follow up on will have a higher likelihood of being qualified to pursue.  Further, the firm can de-prioritize those folks that won't ever buy from them.

Many CMO's bemoan the quality of the leads or lack of leads found at conferences.   Providing some training around conversational rigor can go a long way to improving the value vendors get from trade show attendance. And that makes it all worthwhile.