Selling – Andrew Minko

Browser Popups: Threat or Menace?

“Firefox has blocked a popup.” I was bit shocked by this alert because I was on my brokerage web portal. WTF? Don’t their web developers know that only the most scurrilous and evil websites use popups? Didn’t they ever experience the screen being flooded with malicious popups appearing faster than humanly possible to close?

Then I found a website with detailed instructions on how to build popups using Java. It read, in part: “In the past, evil sites abused popups a lot. A bad page could open tons of popup windows with ads. So now most browsers try to block popups and protect the user.” It then went on to provide details on how to code popups.

I thought to myself: Am I really that old? Are evil popups only from a dim, murky past? Has the playing field for popups been so sanitized that popups are considered just another way to show more info to the user?

:: sigh :: The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. If a web developer grew up with modern browsers that blocked popups by default, then popups probably don’t seem so bad. Also, a “chat with agent” box at the bottom of the screen can be very useful. Finally, providing one special offer or survey when you close a B2C browser seems like a good way to increase user engagement.

Now I think the minimal use of popups makes sense. However, let’s not go crazy and try to make the BLINK attribute in HTML or CSS a standard element. If a scurrilous website is too lazy to simulate blinking with a gif file, then they should not be encouraged (lol).

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.

Image courtesy of GIPHY

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

Why Oh Why Didn’t You Sign Up for the Free Trial?

So far, I’ve received 6 letters in the mail from SiriusXM (and many more emails) because my new car has a SiriusXM capable radio. First they begged me to start a free trial that came with my new car. I did not do this. Then they warned me that the trial would soon be over. Then they started begging me to subscribe even though my trial had expired. Not once did they offer me any explanation of what, how, or why I might want SiriusXM.

Previously, I have written that many product managers unwittingly take the approach that only customers smart enough to understand their technology should be allowed to buy it. Something else seems to be going on with SiriusXM. It seems like they believe if you just try it, you’ll love it. It reminds of some of the most challenging video games. There’s very little instruction or explanation. Part of the fun is figuring things out on your own.

One huge problem with this approach is that it’s leaving a lot of money on the table. There are many, many video games collecting dust on shelves. One of my good friends once said, “If a game gets too complicated or confusing, I just stop playing it.”

True, true.

But when it comes to revenue and customer satisfaction, I don’t believe this is a good approach.

So far, I haven’t received any communication from SiriusXM asking me why I didn’t take them up on the free trial.

I wonder how prevalent this approach is? Many companies offer free versions of their software, but I wonder if they follow-up with people who don’t take them up on their offer to ask why? (Or, if the customer abandons the free trail, do they follow up to ask why?)

Image via Giphy

We Only Sell to Smart People?

In my opinion, a lot of product and engineering managers in hi-tech are unwittingly hostile to potential customers. Their attitude, almost incredibly, can be misinterpreted to mean: “If prospects aren’t smart enough to understand our products, they do not deserve to buy them.” While no one ever said this in actual words, the constant conflict over how to market products and services indicates there is something under-the-surface.

One submerged aspect is revealed in the question: How you shop for technology?

Engineers and product managers have the intellectual capacity to review detailed specifications and make rational assessments of which products/services perform best.
Executives, on the other hand, often focus on productivity and efficiency enhancements. They may not understand the technical details, but they respect and understand cost/benefit analyses — especially when costs can be reduced.
Mid-managers with operational responsibilities take the broadest view of all three by considering how technology will affect processes and staffing. It’s may seem illogical, but mid-managers will gladly choose a product that is technically inferior if the selling company is easy to work with, provides excellent training/support, and takes ownership of the employee change management process.

I’ve head these three groups called “tribes” within a corporation: The Executive Tribe, Operational Tribe, and Technical Tribe. The starkly contrasting values of these three tribes can be seen in their answer to a basic question: “What are people?”

To members of the Executive tribe, people are expensive.
To the Operations tribe, people are how you get anything accomplished.
To the Technical tribe, people are single largest source of error.

Moral of Story: The companies that can address the values and concerns of these three tribes will be far more successful selling to large enterprises and agencies.

Image courtesy of GIPHY