August 2020 – Andrew Minko

Content May be King, but Data Is Power Behind the Throne

I have often heard that “content is king” when it comes to demand gen. Yes, content can drive people to your web. Yes, content can fill the lead funnel with the names of people¹ who download content after filling out a form. But, content alone cannot and will not help you understand your install base and how to find others who want to buy your product/service. Only data can do that.

A lot of companies spend tremendous effort on creating content for blogs, white papers, and social media. I guess it makes sense. After all, lead scoring and customer profiling are hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it, no? While it’s true that sophisticated tracking programs² can determine which content is performing well, much more important data is elsewhere. Every company in this millennium uses some form of CRM,³ but strangely most companies don’t seem to use their CRM data base to capture vital information, such as:

Why did we win?
Who did we compete against?
Which people within a customer performed various roles?
What other technology is part of the customers’ stacks?
How many customers do we have by industry?

One of the blind spots here is that the answers to these questions are known by some people. Certainly, eStaff level executives have a good feel for this. For everyone else in an organization, it’s usually buried in emails (unstructured) or known to different people scattered in the organization (fragmented). This important knowledge is just beyond the grasp of effective up-sell, cross-sell, customer references, and other campaigns.

The last question about customers by industry is highly significant. When a company starts to grow their customer base, one of the first questions new prospects typically ask is: How many customers do you have in my industry? In olden days (15 years ago), we called this our “quals” — our proof that we are qualified to work in your industry. I find it remarkable that 5 out of 5 start ups I worked at could not run a simple query in their CRM to determine precisely how many customers they had. This was so, in part, because it wasn’t always clear what was a customer. (I used the word “precise” because cross-referencing the account receivables data base with the CRM data base and tediously resolving the inconsistencies is less than precise.)

A great management consultant⁴used to say: “The truth is usually found in the middle.” To that end, my take is that you need both content and data. If you don’t have an organized and systematic way to obtain data, maybe some of the resources applied to content could be redeployed for data.

Notes:

¹ It amazing to me that most companies have to learn the hard way that people are clever enough to put in bogus information and disposable emails to get content. Thus, putting content behind forms is not a foolproof way to capture leads. At one company, I was in charge of the lead routing table. The first 3 of 80+ “routing rules” disposed of bogus names such as Buggs Bunny and swear words (lol).

² Those sophisticated tracking systems are not cheap. Many companies pay tens of thousands each month for search engine optimization, syndication of content, pay-per-click ads, and “pixel fire” unique browser surveillance. Even more companies layer on more surveillance when they do not get tangible results. Is there any end to this?

³ CRM stands for “customer relationship management” (such as MS Dynamics or Salesforce.com). Here’s another unpopular observation: It’s the customers who manage the relationships they have with companies and not vice-versa.

⁴ My blessed mother taught me that line about the truth being the in middle. It has been borne out countless times in my experience. She also said: “People like to shop, but they don’t like to be sold to.”

For further reading

A simple online search for “best practices customer profile” yielded hundreds of results. One of them provides a nice step-by-step process for using customer profiles for revenue: Five Steps to Creating an Effective Customer Profile for Lead Scoring Note: This resource is 7 years old. Further support for the notion that there is no excuse for modern start ups to trip and fall because of this.

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The Three Biggest Lies

20-years ago, the biggest lie was “The check is in the mail.”

10-years ago, the biggest lie was “Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed.”

Today the biggest lie is “We care about your privacy.”

Recently my cable internet provider updated their privacy policy. They were actually honest about avoiding sweeping grandiose promises. When they rolled out their new privacy policy, they introduced it as:

“We know you care about your privacy and the protection of your personal information.

“We also know it is our responsibility to be clear about how we protect your information.

Like most companies, they then go on for about 2,000 words (10-pages) of detailed explanations of how they share your information with 3rd parties and adamantly refuse to acknowledge the “Do Not Track” setting of your browser. (I consider it less than honest to loudly proclaim “We do not SELL your information” when they have entered into 3rd party relationships to exchange data for the purpose of increasing ad revenue. Consumers are rarely given the information to block this type of sharing.)

Fortunately there is a wonderful browser plug-in called Privacy Badger that enables you to enforce “Do Not Track.” I’ve been using it for a few years now and commend it to you https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

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Sending “Is it done yet?” Emails on Fridays is Not Leadership

When I was first promoted to managing people, I was fortunate to work for a big bank. Fortunate because they had a leadership training program. There we learned how to deal with both project and people problems – and how often they are intertwined.

Most of the startups I’ve worked for since don’t offer very much training. Leadership is admired and promoted. However, no matter how cute, funny, or cleverly worded the emails, “leaders” who ping people Friday asking about project status are signaling a red flag of poor management skills.

This is so because project management is far more than leadership. It requires organizing the people and the work. It also requires controlling for progress. No amount of emails (or task management software) can make up for disorganized people and/or lack of resources. If someone wants to be a leader, then they must own the fact that it’s their job to get people and resources organized. If someone else does that, they are not the leader (regardless of title).

Note: Misusing task management tools such as Wrike, Asana, or monday.com is not leadership, either. One can create to-do lists and assign people all they want, but if there is no clear agreement on roles and responsibilities, they are missing the all-important aspect of organizing for success.

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Originally published by me as a LinkedIn in 2018

Heat Seekers Love Your Technology, but Mere Mortals Have All the Money

I once heard the phrase “heat seekers” used to describe the people who are always first to adopt new technology. I like it. This is just my opinion, but I’ve seen this at 5 out of the 5 startups. During the early days, the first customers are organizations that have ample in-house technical resources; they have “heat seekers.” These in-house engineers can evaluate different solutions using their own fairly objective proof-of-concept criteria. They quickly learn the technology and conduct the trial on their own. For these organizations, the superior technology wins the deal every time.

However, I suspect most companies do not have this in-house expertise. They rely heavily on analyst reports (such as Gartner Magic Quadrant) and references. They may struggle with developing criteria for a proof-of-concept trial. They may also give more weight to ease of use and low admin overhead than technical superiority. These potential customers vastly outnumber the early adopters. In order to grow revenue, you have to sell to ordinary companies — mere mortals.

Advice: Use the experience of early adopters to repurpose/reuse POC plans and create ease-of-use features. Makes sure your product benefits companies that do not have large in-house technical resources (use “wizards” and automation to streamline processes).

Better Advice: One of the great sales execs I’ve met taught the team: “When a customer asks for a POC trial, ask him if they’ll share the POC plan with you. They may well say, ‘I don’t have one, yet.’ That’s when you say: ‘Well, here’s one you can start with.’ That’s when you give them our POC plan. Of course our plan will highlight our strengths – the ones in which we’ve invested the most engineering resources and meet the most customer feature requests. Just be upfront about it.”

AI for Your Business — Not Just Your Product

I find it baffling how many starts up bloviate about machine learning and artificial intelligence in their product offering, but completely fail to use any of it in their own business processes. A classic example is RFP/RFIs. These start out as handcrafted, bespoke documents. But when a company becomes successful, they often receive more RFP/RFI requests than they can handle. Why aren’t automated tools for this standard best practices? We’ve had latent semantic analysis (LSA)* of unstructured text for more than 20 years. However, it seems mostly limited to advertising that is supposed to be “more relevant.” This automation could be a powerful force for streamlining proposals and quotes. This is especially true when it comes to answer GDPR and other questionnaires.

Advice: Start using ML/AI tools for proposals and quotes immediately. Don’t wait until you’re overtaxed and deals are falling through the cracks.

Suggestion: Two systems I much respect are Loopio for RFP/RFI automation https://loopio.com/ and Deal Hub https://go.dealhub.io/demo

* Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations. It could be used to take a body of RFP/RFIs and then generate reusable content for completing new RFP/RFIs. While Wikipedia has an excellent overview article on LSA, the main point of this blog post is we can use natural language processing to eliminate the tedious handcrafted approach to a document that is almost universal in technology sales.

I explore this topic from a different angle in my previous post: We Only Sell to Smart People

Waking Up in Abandoned Hospital? Customer Support Line?

Some pretty good science fiction books and movies have started with a person waking up in an abandoned hospital. Complex. Confusing. That’s how I approach phoning any large consumer call center. I treat it as a bizarre game. It goes without saying that I’ve already exhausted searching their web site.* When you call, the first challenge is attempting to make the interactive voice-response (IVR) system to do your bidding. Different ways of asking or pressing menu options sometimes works. When it does, that’s victory. When that doesn’t work, the next challenge is to get past the IVR to an agent. (Some companies like Comcast make this very difficult.**) Before you can actually speak with an agent, you’ll hear a recording asking how ignorant you are: “Did you know that many tasks can be accomplished on our website?” Finally, speaking with an agent is often like finding the one other person in the abandoned hospital. They are just as dazed and confused as you are.*** They might know about secret rooms (transferring your call), but some of these secret rooms have no answers.

Drowning in Data, but No Insight

What’s the solution? This is yet another example of most companies are drowning in data gathering but don’t know how to use it. Somehow the Pareto Principle has fallen out of favor. We’ve all experienced it. It’s where we get the phase “80/20 rule.” Roughly 80 percent of your effects/defects come from 20 percent of causes/problems. But it’s hard to imagine that any customer call center has an analytics team who can identify customer call trends. Take for example that recording pleading with you to visit the website. Would it be so hard to ask: “Have your been to our website? Press 1 for yes, 2 for no.” This data point would provide a powerful spotlight on content that’s missing or too difficult to find on the website. It would also treat callers with the basic dignity that you don’t think of them as totally ignorant Luddites.

Are you wondering if I think any call centers are very good? Yes, there are excellent call centers. The United Healthcare call center is at the top of my list. The first contact people are off-shore, but very well trained and professional. Insurance benefits in the US are very complex. The first contact people know how to patch in the right people if needed.

The Uncanny Valley is Horsefeathers

Are you wondering if I know about “the uncanny valley”? Certainly I do. However, the American Express virtual agent suffers from a totally different problem than “the uncanny valley.” They gave the system a human name “Ava” and licensed the absolute best speech production and recognition. It’s my opinion that Ava has the conversational skills of a 13-year old boy barely passing his English class.**** The sound of the voice is young, perky, and professional, but “her” responses are fiercely tactical and argumentative. My guess is that they delegated the “conversation” scripts to one of the most junior people on the team. Would anyone buy at $400,000+ Lamborgini Aventador and then let a 13-year old drive it? It surely seems like hundreds of thousands were spent on the best technology, but human implementation was done on the cheap. ::sigh:: This is not the first time I’ve noticed something like this.

Notes

*I once overheard a frustrated coworker on the phone with a call center agent say: “I’d rather shower in prison than use your call center, but I have no other choice.” Yikes (and LOL).

**With Comcast IVR, if you’re calling from a mobile phone and ask to speak with an agent, the IVR terminates the call. (!?) Then an SMS chatbot initiates a session. Of course, the chat bot can only handle the same exact things as the IVR, so eventually the chat bot has to give up and put in a queue for a call back by a human agent. Again, would it be so hard to ask: Have you tried using our website? 1 Yes. 2 No.

***While I respect that being a call center rep is not easy, they are often at the mercy of scripts which – wait for it – are no better than the content on the website. Also, a very large company will have separate departments to deal with different types of problems. I call these “secret rooms” because you cannot call them directly. You must go through a first-contact agent.

****When Ava first launched, “she” was programmed to start the session by introducing herself: “Hello, I’m Ava…” However if you responded with “Hi, I’m Andrew,” the response was “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.” In normal, human conversation when someone introduces themselves, the other person should, too. The correct response should have been: “Hello, Andrew. How may I help you today?”

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