Business..and other things.....

Qualifying leads at Trade Shows – a true story

2011-10-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

Before Social Media, SEO, or Hubspot, companies had to engage with prospects in a very strange way - they actually had to talk with them, often in person. And, of course, just as there is now a right and wrong way to qualify leads, there was back then as well.

The following is an example of the wrong way :

I was doing booth “duty” at a large trade show in New York, for a company that sold sophisticated software to large corporations. Our targeted audiences were people who worked in large organizations and consultants who could help us get into those corporations.

All attendees were given badges that contained their contact info in electronic form so that exhibitors could easily capture that info by scanning those badges with an electronic “wand”.

While standing in our booth I noticed one of our young, eager marketeers latching on to anyone who came near her. She would cheerfully introduce herself, smile, and ask if she could scan their badge. Unfortunately, no one turned her down.

The situation got out of hand when I saw her approach a 14-year-old wearing a Yankee cap, backwards. As she smiled and got her wand ready, I began to feel an urge to scream out “Cease and desist!” but realized that my yelping wouldn’t do much for our corporate image. Instead, I calmed down and approached the perpetrator. The following conversation took place:

Me: “Hi Carol, can I have a word with you?”

Carol: “Can it wait? There are a ton of people out here.”

Me: “No it can’t, I need to talk with you now.”

(We walk away from the crowd to the back of our booth)

Me: “Carol, why are you scanning children’s badges?”

Carol: “I was told to scan the badges of as many people as possible, since we need to capture as many leads as we can for the sales force, it’s our job.”

Me: “How much software do you think that kid with the baseball cap can afford to buy?”

Carol: “Well, he’ll get entered into our database and we can categorize him appropriately.”

Me: “Why bother to enter him at all? So he can be a record that will take up space which we’ll have to maintain for years? Do you want to be the sales rep that calls our Yankees fan next week? Should we waste time sending him emails and letters over the next five years?”

Carol: “But in a few years, he might be old enough to be a prospect.”

Me: “Ok, so if he is a prospect in 9 years when he gets out of college, then let’s capture him then. Between now and then, who knows what will happen?”

Carol: “But I’m supposed to get leads from this show, that’s my job.”

(At this point, it was getting close to 5 PM. The trade show had hired a catering service which was in the process of setting up booths to sell food and beverages)

Me: “Carol, come with me for a minute.”

(We walk over to one of the booths.)

Me: “Carol, you see these meatballs? They come from a cow. Let’s say the cow was named Elsie. Let’s say there was a badge next to the meatballs for Elsie. Should we scan that badge too?”

Carol shoots me a dirty look.

Me: “Look, I know we need leads, but there has to be some level of intelligence in determining what badges we scan and what badges we don’t. And I am here to tell you, that our Yankee friend is about as likely to buy software as Elsie is. Should we scan Elsie into our database so we ‘categorize her appropriately’ as well? So why bother to do it with Master Backwards Yankees Cap!”

Carol: “I see.”

Me: “Thank you, sorry for going crazy here, but I needed to prove my point.”

Carol: “How come the VP of Marketing never explained it to me this way?”

Me: “Actually, I am glad he wasn’t at this show.”

Carol: “Why?”

Me: “Because he would have scanned Elsie’s badge.”

Connecting with an audience: an idea that works

2011-10-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Recently, I taught a two-day sales training class in São Paulo, Brazil. I love teaching these classes; they’re filled with role playing sessions and interactive discussions, interspersed with lively, good-natured joking. And the less I lecture and the more students talked and got emotionally involved, the more they enjoyed the class, and the more they learned.

The first morning I entered a large room with rows of chairs and desks facing a raised platform Arriving at the platform, I turned to see 25 professionally-dressed seriously-caffeinated faces staring at me. Each had a blank note book open with pen in hand, determined to listen attentively and quietly while taking notes. These were students from schools that demanded obedience. Would they be brave enough to tell me their names?

Immediately I know this would be disaster. What could I do to break the ice?

I said, “I want everyone to take a piece of paper”; they complied like dancers in a chorus line. I took a piece as well. “Now, do as I am doing please, very carefully, put the paper in your hands, and crumple it up in a ball just like this”. They all followed me with neither a quizzical look nor smile.

“Now, I tend to speak fast, and I know that English is not your first language, so every time I speak too fast, the way to slow me down, is to take this paper ball and throw it at me.” I then threw my ball over everyone’s head. “Now don’t throw it too hard, because you might hurt me. So throw those balls at me, right now!” Everyone threw their paper balls at me and smiled. Fortunately, no one knocked me out but a few throws did hit me solidly, to the laughter of the crowd.

I had them. The ice was broken. It was a great class.

When Marketing Toots the Wrong Horn

2011-10-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

Ever work with a technical marketing person who didn’t really know what your company was selling?

A few years ago I worked for a business intelligence software company. Essentially, we sold business-oriented software, to business people, who were looking to solve business problems. I can’t explain it any more simply than that. This was software that did not interest technical people. Sure, once installed they had to maintain it, but it was not for them.

One day I get an email from our technically-oriented head of Marketing with the latest press release. Here is a short quiz - was the press release:

A) A story about a financial service customers, extolling the virtues of our product, so I could leverage this and send it to my financial service prospects?, or was it

B) A story about a Retail customers, extolling the virtues of our product, so I could leverage this and send it to my Retail prospects?, or was it

C) A story about a manufacturing customers, extolling the virtues of our product, so I could leverage this and send it to my manufacturing prospects?

Unfortunately, the answer was “D, none of the above”. The title of the release reveals all you need to know, “Latest Benchmarking test shows that (My company’s products) runs 27% faster on UNIX Servers than (our biggest competitor’s product)”.

I immediately felt sick. I picked up a mail order catalogue I had brought from home in anticipation of this type of press release, and went to see our Marketing VP.

“Heinz, why was the last press release about our speed on a UNIX box? That’s ‘nice to know’ info, but what functional VP cares about that?”

“The IT Departments needs to know all the technical specs of our product, since they have to maintain it.”

“True, but we know that IT often only gets called in by the business groups at the end of the buying process, just to validate a decision that has essentially already been made. I think we are cluttering our image in the market, since business people will also get these technical messages, and confuse them with our ‘business value’ messages”.

“Well that’s why you are in sales and not marketing.”

“Heinz, do you see what I have here?”

“Sure it’s a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, why are you bringing that to work, nothing else to do?”

“I brought it here to prove a point. You are delivering technical messages to business people. They want to hear about business solutions to business problems. Seems to me, If they made you VP of Marketing of Victoria’s Secret, you would fire all these gorgeous models, and replace them with a picture of you, standing in a white coat in a laboratory, holding a garment, and the caption would be, ‘we use 27% more lycra in our thongs than our competitors.’ How many thongs do you think you’d sell with that ad”?

Heinz was speechless.

Dashboards - why are so many, so useless?

2011-10-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Most dashboards are designed with no clue as to the meaning and/or importance of this quote.

(BTW, even though this is a blog about data visualization, I won’t show any poorly designed dashboard examples, as they are ubiquitous. Trying to find them is about as difficult as trying to find leaves on the ground in New England during the Fall).

I view dashboards every day; on software company sites, news sites, financial sites, and blogs. Since dashboards can distill so much information and display it in such a small space, they hold the potential of quickly delivering valuable insights; of cutting through the “data clutter” to immediately reveal important trends or truths.

So why then, are most dashboards crammed with so many charts, dials, and graphs that they overwhelm you? Just because you can fit a half-dozen on a screen, why is there a need to do it? (This approach reminds me of my friend Geoff, who, upon hearing that Hellmann’s was coming out with mayonnaise that had half the calories remarked, “great, now I can eat twice as much”.)

I think there can only be two reasons.

1. The designer/developer wants to show off their expertise with Qlikview, or Spotfire, or Tableau, or X product.

2. The designer/developer does not care about the average person, and wants to build smart software for brilliant users.

That attitude reminds me of a meeting I attended at a software company a few years ago. The head of development was upset because he was being asked to make his software “easy to use”. He called it “dumbing down”, and complained that it would be less challenging for his development team to build “software for idiots”. At this point, the President of the company interjected, “if our customers are smart enough to write us a check, then they are smart enough to use our software. And the onus for them to be able to use our software is on us, not on them.”

Want an example of “dumbed down” software. Remember Alta Vista?

I am sure they employed tons of bright people. I can only imagine the passionate debates over what the screen should look like. And, whoever the “winners” were, they could tell their friends to go to the Alta Vista link and brag to them that it was their design ideas that were used. They were responsible for the brilliant idea to place the “Directory” where it is, or to use the words “Useful Tools” instead of just “Tools”.

And then along came this simply idiotic search engine. Boy, did the Alta Vista folks get a good laugh at the simpletons who designed this! Talk about “dumbed down”!

By the way, what’s a share of alta vista stock going for these days?

OK, some of you will say I am being unfair here, because I have the advantage of being able to look back at who won the search engine “war”. To those of you who say/think that, I leave you with one final quote, from George Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

"We don’t need marketing to sell our product! Meanwhile I only buy the coolest things."

2011-09-07T14:44:00.000-07:00

Why do so many technical people think that marketing is not needed to sell the products they make, while failing to see how marketing messages have shaped their own opinions about what they buy as consumers?

I had an experience a few years ago with a technical person who was the epitome of this contradictory view of reality. I worked for a company that had amazing software that let users easily create complex applications with no programming experience. The founder of the company, Ian, a brilliant engineer, took the typical view of sales people – on a scale of which professions one could trust, salesmen placed higher then politicians, but somewhere below prostitutes.

Ian felt that all a salesman needed to do was demonstrate his software. Our bright prospect would certainly have knowledge of all the characteristics of all the products in the marketplace, and choose us since, objectively, we were better. Of course, Ian argued, if the prospect wasn’t bright enough and couldn’t see how much better we were, then we were wasting our time with him and we should move on.

Well, soon after I joined this company we went public. Since Ian was a founder and had many shares of stock, he was an instant millionaire. To celebrate, he bought his dream car. I called him and the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Hey Ian, congratulations, I heard you bought a car. What kind?”

Ian: “Aston Martin DB5.”

Me: “Hmm, a great car. Being a logical, objective engineer, I imagine you created a spreadsheet with all the vehicles you might consider purchasing, then loaded the spreadsheet with every conceivable characteristic, from price, to type of steering, gas mileage, turning ratio, etc, and then rated each vehicle in each characteristic, giving every car a score and that the Aston Martin DB5 won. Correct?”

Ian: “Well, not exactly.”

Me: “Oh? Really? Well then, why did you buy an Aston Martin?”

Ian: “Because that’s the car that James Bond drives.”

Me: “I see. So you had an image of a car, created by a fiction writer, and when it came time for you to spend your hard-earned money, you decided that this car, driven by a fictional person, was the car you wanted to buy.”

Ian: “Yes.”

Me: “So, marketing, which created the image of that car in your mind, played a role in your buying decision.”

Ian: “Yes.”

Me: “Why then, don’t you think that marketing plays a role in the decision making process of our customers?”

Ian: Silence.