Solving Not Selling

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Scott Gould

I read this awesome article, Stop Selling and Add Value on Monday from the N2 Growth Blog. Mike Myatt, and his awesome moustache, writes:

Call me crazy, but I don’t want to talk to someone who wants to manage my account, develop my business, or engineer my sale. I want to communicate with someone who wants to service my needs or solve my problems. Any organization that still has “sales” titles on their org charts and business cards is living in another time and place while attempting to do business in a world that’s already passed them by. It’s time for companies to realize that consumers have become very savvy and very demanding. Today’s consumer (B2B or B2C) does their homework, is well informed, and buys…they are not sold.

This is right in line with what we’ve discussed on the subject of ‘Making It Personal‘, and in the ‘PR 2010 Framework‘. By making your product or service an experience by actually solving the problem (of course, the user may not see the problem until you highlight it) rather than providing the tool to do it, you are engaging far deeper with your customer, and can also charge a higher markup.

In fact it’s not just Mike and I thinking about it. Jeremy Epstein (have you seen his client list?) wrote an article yesterday entitled “your value = your relevance“. What a title. Your value to your customer is equal to your relevance to your customer. Beautiful. But also very conceptual. Let’s break it down:

The History Of Economic Progression

A hundred years ago, tell a commoner that they’d paid £50 for a haircut and dry, and they’d laugh at you – why pay when you can do it yourself? 10 years ago, tell average Jane she’ll pay for shopping to be home delivered, and she’d reply she’d rather save the cash and pick them up herself.

The history of economic progression is one of paying for someone else to do what you used to do yourself, for free. My examples are rather peice-meal and conceptual, but there are very intelligent people out there writing about this is hard cover books. My simple understanding is that as technology enables us to become better specialists, and as we culturally have more responsibilities and roles, we are more willing to pay others to handle the things that we don’t have time to.

Of course, we don’t pay them just for their labour. We pay them in accordance to their expertise, their relevance to our needs, the results – the value they impart. Quite simply taking a book, we know that we aren’t paying merely for the product in our hands, but the time and effort that produced the intellectual property that we are reading and receiving value from.

An excellent example is Nike+. Consider the fact that to measure your running day on day, you can simply use a map and a stop watch, and then a some paper to graph it out. But Nike solve a problem by removing the map, watch and effort of drawing by simply giving you something to put in your shoe, and watch in amazement as it charts everything online for you. In fact, what Nike have done is lifted restrictions and just made everything easier by doing all the work for you.

And the happy catch is this: you are paying far more than the free DIY version. But you are getting greater value through expertise, technology, and the reduction of your time, effort, and in some way, the stress of having to do it. As I often say to clients “make it one less thing your customer has to do.”

Solving Not Selling

All this stuff appeals deeper than fiance. It gets down to advocacy, passion, experience, change. Sure, there are inventions that are cheap and cheerful, but the majority of these game changers are lifestyle products and/or services in some shape or form. And very often, they are ahead of the curve.

I’m sure right now that you can think of plenty of ways to solve problems, rather than sell stuff. But as is the nature of innovation, only certain people buy it – early adopters. Many times I thought I had a great idea and everyone would swoop at it, only for it to flop. So I have realised that the need to 1. know you target market, and 2. grow by trial and error, is significant when solving problems. Some tips:

The best place to start, in my opinion, is with Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Art of Innovation‘. It’s helped me no end, and continues to.
Sound the depths. Segment some clients and experiment. Use social media to test the waters, as it is very cost effective and quickly helps you draw conclusions.
Continually re-think and re-write to get down the core of your ‘solution’. I’ll be honest with you, I still haven’t got mine down to a single phrase. If you can only describe it using examples or a paragraph, then you know that you have too much of ‘you’ in mind, and not enough of your customer.
Draw on others. Pass it round the office, bounce it off your friends. Their perspective with save you lots of time, and open new paths to explore.
Adapt in public, rather than perfect in secret. This way you gather a following while you are growing (even if things are unclear), you pick up people who do get it, and you also get criticised and challenged which will sharpen you and help you cut out the rubbish.

I trust these points help you solve a few more problems this week!

Uniting People Around A Platform

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Scott Gould

If you don’t know, in exactly one week I will be running the inaugural Like Minds conference, on the subject of ‘measuring social media.’ I’m going to skip over the back story (which you can read here), and instead get to the point: Like Minds is an example of uniting people around a platform. And I’m going to show you some of the concepts I’ve employed in doing so.

In 2003 I started an initiative in our church for young people called Feedback. In just under two years we went from nothing to 1,000 young people attending our events every month. Of course, what I didn’t say was that the first year was a failure in terms of numbers – bouncing around the 30 people mark for 11 months. It wasn’t until we ran a Hip Hop event that we broke through 100 people. What changed? We found something that people cared about, and we just provided the platform. In this case, we provided a hip hop competition, some DJing, and let the youth come. Up until then, it had just been a nice evening, but there was nothing compelling or spreadable about it.

The following months, we let bands from high school and college play at our events, and not only did the bands unite around the platform we provided, but the bands brought all their fans too. We found something that young people united around, and we just provided the platform. Over time, we nurtured the bands and helped a handful of them get signed to labels and go onto greater things. Seth Godin talks about this – this idea of platform - but in a stunning act of triumph, I can brag that I discovered this truth before he blogged about it. Go, me.

The other lesson I learnt from Feedback was to allow people to take ownership. Every Friday, we had 40 young people who came to help build the event, plan it, and do the work for it – and believe me, it was serious work. Because they were building Feedback, the brand became far more compelling and spread to their friends and family. When it came to our monthly event, it was these 40 who set the tone in the building. And that’s another important thing. When you have people uniting on the platform you have built, it is easy for the message to become skewed, so you must set the tone.

Over the years since then, I’ve learnt a lot about building communities – not from studying them, but from actually building them. I have built up tribes of young people, tribes of men and women, media groups and student groups – and even to this day I nurture an ever growing group of interns at Aaron+Gould (including the current office star, @tuckshot ), where forward thinking individuals unite around the idea of growth, change and fresh thinking.

From my experience I have found that you must discover what unites people, and then provide the platform for them to do it. Seth, on the front cover of his book ‘Tribes‘, wrote “we need you to lead us.” It’s true. There are large groups of people who want to unite around a platform, but don’t have someone to impart vision, provide direction, and guide with conviction.

Let’s drop the nostalgia, head back to 2009, and we’ll find that Like Minds is the same model. Finding what people want to unite around – collaboration, innovation – and providing a platform.

What this takes perhaps more than anything else is leadership. But don’t quote me on that, I’m still finding out.

10 Tips For Creating Spreadable Service

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Scott Gould

Delivering a great customer experience is equally about sales and service. Great sales gets you market share, but great service gets you both wallet share and makes your customer a brand advocate. Pretty much every business / church / charity / individual, right now, is offering fist-clenchingly bad service – so when you serve them like they are royalty, hey presto!, you are being unique.

Another thought: when you deliver great service, it is often issolated – in other words, between the customer and you. By following the few tips (well, 10) below, you can also begin making your customer service spreadable, in other words, so that people can see how well you are serving. FYI, I define spreadbility as easy of access, ease of use, and ease of share.

Provide multi-touch support. Become more accessible by also taking service issues over Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in addition to your website and/or blog.
Clearly illustrate, that if out of your operating hours, how your customer and get emergency service. Perhaps points them to the social media above. Perhaps, get an emergency phone and sleep with it. In other words, lift the restriction of time.
Provide a non 0845/0870/0871 number, i.e. give them your local office phone number. This creates reassurance. When they call, give your name. Make sure the same person handles the service all the way through, or clearly give the name of the person you handing the issue to.
Remove your ugly call queuing systems and other such nonsense – or if not, reduce them to the simplest thing possible. Insider hint: people get angry waiting on call queuing systems. Also, remove voice activated stuff. It doesn’t work.
When you engage with your customer, tell them exactly how things are going to progress, and keep communicating this. This makes them feel safe, and everyone wants to feel safe when something is broken.
Give your employees who handle customer service more room to offer compensation, and to offer it more quickly. It may cost you, but you will create an advocate. If they want to escalate, let them, and have a great attitude about it, like it is you who is inconveniencing them – because as far as they care, you are!
Exceed expectation. If they are looking for one thing, give them something better – preferable something that they can share. Scale the pyramid of expectation.
When you resolve an issue through a social media enquiry, if the info is not sensitive, publicly answer it so others can see. This way you are both marketing and serving at the same time.
If they provided their social media details, or contacted you through social media, then do this: when you have resolved the issue, publicly Tweet / Facebook them two days later to see how it’s going. If they called or emailed, then call or email them instead. This extra touch shows that you care, and also helps with ease of share because others will see it.
Go to the nth degree for every customer. Turn a bad experience into a compelling experience. Relish the opportunity to turn an average customer into an advocate, and do whatever you can to succeed in this task.

Have fun serving.

Thanks to Conductive for the photo.

Delivering Multi Touch And Multi Sense Strategies

Posted on October 6, 2009 by Scott Gould

I wrote a while ago that you should cast your bread on the social media waters – in other words, get your message out there without too much prescription over where your message is placed – the reason being that more often than not you get growth from areas you did not expect. Today I’m going to address a way to do that through two strategies. But first of all, we need to define a few things:

A strategy is a set of projected outcomes that move your desired ‘thing’ from one place to another, be it a market position, car journey, a blog rank, increased wallet-share – whatever.
We fulfil these outcomes by employing tactics. In the case of driving from A to B, we require the tactics of driving a car. Note that tactics not are equal to the strategy, they are part of the strategy.
Therefore, in the realm of social media, for example, the tactic of creating a Facebook page and setting up a Twitter account are not a social media strategy. And creating posters and flyers is not a marketing strategy.

I say this because a lot of ‘social media gurus‘ and dodgy marketers across all boards equate hooking one free service up to another a strategy – but it is not – this is just a tactic. We must have strategies that plot where these tactics lead to other than paying through the nose for SEO, PPC, etc. There is more to marketing success than hits and eyes.

Now that we have that out of the way, you may be wondering why I have a picture of our recent Exeter Tweetup above, and thinking to yourself “why is that there?” – Well, I’m so glad you asked! Here’s the answer: every person in that photo is part of a multi-touch and multi-sense strategy that I have employed.

Shock, horror?!?! “You mean they are a part of a strategy?” Well, yes and no. If you mean whether I’m treating them all as a marketing project, then no. But if you mean, am I treating them all differently because of who they are and what we have in common, then the answer is yes.

See the reality is that we are all using multi-touch and multi-sense strategies. Some people that we know are more visual than others, and in order to communicate more effectively to them, it’s all about painting pictures and metaphor. You might not even realise it, but guaranteed there are people in your life that you act differently towards that have different dominate senses, and your relationship works because you are ‘translating’ from one sense to the other.

Making Multi-Sense

We all learn and think differently. Some people see a film and remember the lines. Others remember the car chase scene, where others still remember how they felt about the characters. Any event you hold, any website you have, any interaction you make, anything, is all being perceived differently by people with different dominate senses.

So the question is, are you making sense to all the senses? I look at this a few ways. First, out of the 5 senses, we rarely engage taste and smell in the normal course of marketing (when I run events, I make sure I engage them both.) So that means hearing, seeing and touching. Do you provide content in text, in audio and in video? Do you provide tactile workable examples, and do you provide inspiration testimonials? These are relate to these three senses. If you are missing one out, you are missing out some of your audience (don’t feel guilty, I’m missing out some of mine too – it takes time to build it up.)

Next up is people’s motivational sense. It is considered that people are motivated in two basic directions – either towards success, or away from pain. Given this, do you make sense to both? If you marketing is all about success, then what motivation do you provide for those moving away from pain? And if your products are all about alleviating stress, then what about those who want to move towards something?

Being Multi-Touch

Our second strategy involves how people can interact with you and find you. Last week, when I published my PR 2010 framework, I updated my LinkedIn status to say that I have just published it, and provided a link. It just so happened that someone I’m connected with on LinkedIn saw that, read it, and contacted me. If I have just stuck to my usual Twitter stream, I would’ve completely missed it.

Likewise, I became friends with someone on Facebook the other day whose business I have helped through some of these principles (and a few others too – there’s more where this came from.) As I accepted his friend invite, I look on his profile to see that he was having whole conversations with people on his profile where he had posted links to my articles. There was a whole conversation going on about me but I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t been multi-touch.

Multi-touch, for many, means thinking outside of the goldfish bowl. Don’t just use your preferred channels and methods of communication – experiment with other forms and see how you get on. At the least, as far as social media goes, you should keep your LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles active, and I suggest using Flickr to store all your photos, while using Posterous to link a lot of this together. I regularly get people finding me through all 5 of these services.

Multi-touch really worked for me when Aaron+Gould marketed Touch 09 – an annual Christian woman’s conference with a lot of style. Over the course of a year, but concentrated over a 3 month period, we marketed the conference through multi-touch, across multiple social networks, digital channels, and traditional marketing. Of course, every touch was integrated and holistic, and linked back to the hub – the website where all the information, communication, and bookings existed. This approach increased by registrations by 100% – in a recession.

You also need to escalate multi-touch. Don’t leave your interactions at just tweets. Sending an email is still more personal than a tweet or facebook, because it requires more effort and is kept private. Set up Skype calls with the people that you connect with, and if you are able to, meet new contacts face to face. By escalating the level of touch you have, your relationship becomes stronger, more personal and more unique.

I can quite honestly say that I feel closer to people who I have met face to face and shared only a few tweets than those I have shared many tweets with. When I worked on a fashion start up, I sourced our designers by finding them on forums and emailing hundreds of potentials. After hundreds of emails, I developed the expression that a phone call is worth a thousand emails. It’s true.

And Finally…

In a shameless act of self promotion, and in the spirit of experimentation, I want to let you know that I actually consult with companies and individuals on these frameworks, and believe it or not, it even works. And if you want to see how this stuff looks in real life, check out Like Minds, and run a search on it too. It ticks most of the boxes.

Lift The Restrictions

Posted on October 5, 2009 by Scott Gould

Last week I attended the launch night of Carluccio’s in Exeter. I got to talking with the PR guys who had handled the event about my freshly released New PR in 2010 framework, and to illustrate the point, I conducted a little test. I quickly tweeted if anyone had anything to ask the people at Carluccio’s, and within seconds I had responses that kept coming for ten minutes or so. I was able to show to the PR guys that there had firstly already been a conversation about Carluccio’s taking place earlier that day, and that I was able to obtain instant reviews and carry out realtime customer service, with very little effort. You can see the tweets here.

Today I want to show why real time micro media is so important, using my framework from last week.

The model above illustrates the link between spreadability and relevance, measured from static to dynamic. My point is that as technology advances, existing technologies become more static. This means that the difference between static and dynamic is comparative between old and new technology.

As I did last week, let’s take TV as our example. Initially, TV was exceptionally dynamic in comparison to radio and/or theatre. Theatre was fixed to a location, and radio was fixed to a single sense. Television lifted these restrictions by providing entertainment and information without the need to be at the source and instead allowing access from the comfort of your own home, and without the need to supplement what was heard with images produced in their own imagination. Previously, location was governed; now location was guided because individuals could be entertained and informed wherever the user desired (to a certain degree.)

As tapes, and later DVDs, were introduced, this newer technology made TV in its existing form more less dynamic and more static. The medium of tape allowed people to record programmes and play them when they desired to, as well as hiring or purchasing other recorded videos. This lifted the restriction of time, because the viewer no longer had to watch when the programme was aired. Time had previously been governed, but now it was only guided. And so it continues:

Cable and satellite increased the number and therefore lifted the restriction of channels, and increased variety. At this point, terrestrial television became, like, so last season. And again, the number of channels means that the choice is less governed and more guided.
Built in DVD, VCR, Freeview, etc, lift the restriction of dependencies, because they are built into the device.
Hard drive recording on satellite and cable devices lift storage restrictions.
IP TV lifts device restrictions, as you now watch the programmes on your laptop, mobile phone, etc.
YouTube lifts even further time, device and channel restrictions.

Track back over each of these iterations of television and you will also note that each advancement increases the spreadability (ease of access, ease of use, ease to share) of television by becoming more dynamic, more customised, and therefore, more personal. And with each restriction that is lifted by the enabling of new technology, the less governed and more guided it becomes.

The more dynamic and therefore personal a technology is, the more spreadable it becomes.

Applying This To Small Business

I’ve said it again, and again, and again, that mobile technology will merge offline and online together. Recently the User Experience consultant Darren Smith wrote about Foursquare and the ubiquitous world of the future, and how social media technology is enabling real life interaction. I totally agree.

As in Darren’s article, as per my test at Carluccio’s, as well as the recent Exeter Tweetup, and in running Like Minds, real time micro media is a shinning example of guidance over governance, and the resulted spreadability, and the convergence of two opposites of on- and off-line becoming one.

This isn’t for everyone. But for the innovative few out there: by customising your offering through being more personal and more dynamic, by lifting the restrictions that your static competitors fix their customers to, you gain market differentiation and offering a far more compelling experience by creating an alternate, dynamic reality from the existing static one.

Phew! Quite a statement. To illustrate, consider the following restrictions pertaining to micro media and how they can be lifted:

Location. How can you provide high level of support wherever your customer is? Your static competitors require a phone or website – they haven’t even considered a tweet or facebook from a mobile phone.
Time. What happens when your customer is frustrated and it’s out of hours? Your static competitors are sleeping, not tweeting.
Device. Do you have mobile friendly portals for all devices? Your static competitors, if not friendly to none, are friendly only to the device they use.
Channel. Can you be found on whatever social network and micro media your customer prefers? Your static competitors, if they don’t just snub social media right out, probably only have a dead Facebook group at best.
Dependencies. Do you offer a simple and complete service, from start to finish? Do you have procedures to get the info you need in a few 140 messages? Your static competitors require signups, feedback forms, and long processes – all of which just frustrate an already frustrated customer.

By lifting static restrictions, you increase your ease of access, ease of use, and importantly, ease of shareability. As in the Carluccio’s test, realtime reviews come hard and fast, and a dynamic, personal experience will produce positive reviews that will be instantly shared.