The difference a day makes
One day you wake up and marketing is chugging along. You wake up the next day and learn that marketing is chugging down the wrong road.
It’s the 20th anniversary of B2P Partners, and my business partner Wayne asked me what I’ve learned, what would I share. It is absolutely the AHA moment, the epiphany, the illumination that our brand of qualitative or persona research provides. The moment when you learn what’s really going on, and tomorrow is never the same.
Here are three examples:
Your positioning is letting prospects know why they should not buy.
1. Asigra is one of the best companies you’ve never heard of. Since their founding, some 20 years ago, they’ve been known to the SMB market as “The Cloud Backup Experts”. Then, industry accolades persuaded them to target the enterprise. But, during the research, enterprise CIOs told them things: 1. We don’t care about backup, but we do care about data recovery; 2. Don’t tell me my critical data is somewhere in the cloud. Their rebranding, “Recovery is Everything”, was so successful that they changed their business model to focus pricing on data recovery, the value that they were truly bringing.
Your marketing is not responding to their decision-making process.
2. In the middle of a customer research interview the C-level exec, said “Stop. Apparently you guys think that because of my title, you have to send every bit of information to me. You are very important to us, but you’re wasting my time and I don’t appreciate it. Learn how decisions are made here. Meet the talented people who make those decisions. We need you to become a lot easier-to-do-business-with.”
You’re focusing on your product, but that’s not why prospects buy.
3. Trying to sharpen their competitive positioning, Company A was conducting interviews digging for why customers bought. What were the magic words that would encapsule the wonderfulness of Company A, that would, as they say, talk the birds from the trees. They asked a senior executive point-blank, what is the most important benefit our product brings to your company. The response, “Your salesman. Ed has taken the time to really understand how we do business and what we need to resolve the issues in front of us. He’s part of our team. That’s what’s so special.”
After 20 years I’ve learned the answer to the question — Does success hinge on a word, on a thought, on realizing that the prospect is more important than your product — yup.
