by William Walsh | Apr 30, 2024 | 2024
As previously published on 4/15/24 in MarTech
Creating memorable experiences goes beyond integrating AI. Focus on small touches, employee empowerment and anticipating customer needs.
What will customers remember after they experience your website, product, service or people? What will they tell their friends or colleagues about their experience — will they even mention it?
A tremendous amount of investment and resources are being focused on integrating AI into the customer experience, from automating responses to comments on social media to improving the call center experience. And who knows where OpenAI’s Voice Engine will eventually take us?
Do you think customers will talk about how they were “wowed” by their AI experience? I’m willing to bet they probably won’t notice. Whatever experience is created from AI will lean more toward “expected” than “exceeding.”
So, how do you create a customer experience worthy of conversation? I was determined to answer that question as I went on vacation a few weeks ago.
Discovering a 5-star customer experience
After seeing Dan Gingiss, author of “The Experience Maker,” at a recent event and with his book in hand, I headed to a resort off the coast of South Carolina to find out how it earned its AAA Five Diamond award and Forbes five-star rating.
It began with a room upgrade because I had booked our stay through American Express. I’ve had this perk for years, yet I rarely receive an upgrade at other hotels we’ve stayed at. And it wasn’t just any room; it was oceanfront with a million-dollar view. Boom, at least one star, maybe more, accounted for in less than 10 minutes.
The next day, at breakfast, we met Lincoln. Lincoln wasn’t just our server; he was our vacation coach. He asked us what we were hoping to get out of our vacation. He then reminded us to slow down, breathe and enjoy our time at the resort. It was a much-needed reminder that we were on vacation and to take time to reset, be present and enjoy our time together.
He also asked, with genuine sincerity, if there was anything he could do to make our stay more enjoyable, which we would later take him up on. Another star earned, thanks to Lincoln.
With our mindset adjusted to vacation mode, we set out to see the resort and walk on the beach. We went to the hotel room to find another surprise that really brought home the art of “wowing” your customers with the little things.
Anticipating and exceeding customer needs
My wife is a member of a neighborhood book club. She, like me, brought her book with her to read and enjoy our newly found free time. The book was left on the ledge of the bathtub and the person who provided the cleaning service to our room noticed that she didn’t have a bookmark.
There, carefully placed on top of the book, was a resort-branded gold tassel bookmark. Impressive! If that attention to detail doesn’t earn you a star, I don’t know what will.
A couple of mornings later, Lincoln was once again our breakfast server. This time, my wife was trying to decide between two tempting items on the menu. Lincoln offered to take the most appealing items from each and make a custom breakfast specifically for her. After all, he asked what he could do to make our stay more enjoyable. Mission accomplished.
His final act occurred on the last day of our stay. We mentioned that we’d be checking out later that day, and Lincoln prepared a “goodie bag” for our trip, complete with utensils. This is a perfect example of going “above and beyond.” We were impressed and touched.
During our stay, it was clear that the resort empowered its employees, from room service to spa to restaurants, to make decisions that benefit the guest experience. Taking a page out of Gingiss’s book, they noticed the little things, like a book without a bookmark.
Delivering exceptional experience through a customer-centric culture
As the bookmark illustrates, experiences can be shaped without even interacting with customers. The power of observation, anticipation of needs and the willingness to act all shape the experience without engagement.
The resort earned its high ratings because employees bought into its mission. They all lived it. It wasn’t one or two things or one or two people; it was everyone. They knew what business they were in and it wasn’t hospitality — it was the experience.
You just can’t tell a customer what your brand stands for. They have to experience it, just like our experience at the resort. We felt the service and experience that earned its well-deserved high rating.
Every touch point shapes the experience. You can’t fake it and customers can feel it. You also have to know what business you are really in. It isn’t a technology you’re selling, but what it does for the users. It’s what it enables or produces, not the feature or functionality.
CX beyond AI: Focus on delighting customers
AI-enabled customer experiences will not be about what the technology can do but what job it does for the user. As an emerging technology, I see early signs this thinking isn’t happening.
Currently, the application seems more about what it can do for the company. Perhaps that’s a valid first step, but it needs to quickly move to the customer experience.
It’s still too soon to know, but in the meantime, there are many things you can do without it. Focus on the small things that delight customers, train and empower your employees and find opportunities to exceed their expectations. Sounds simple and intuitive, but is it happening consistently and across the organization?
What did we tell our friends and family about our trip? Was it the food, weather, beach and the resort’s beauty? Perhaps a little. But what truly captured the essence of our experience was the story of the bookmark — proof of earnest attention to detail.
We didn’t even have to explain it; people just got it when they heard the story. That’s how you build a good reputation and earn high ratings.
by William Walsh | Mar 24, 2024 | 2024
As previously published on 3/12/24 in MarTech
Gain insights on transforming social media from a tactical afterthought to a strategic revenue driver for B2Bs.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Facebook. For the last two decades, B2B marketers have tried to figure out how to use social media to reach buyers.
There have been starts and stops along the way, but we are now seeing social media being used strategically. As a result, CMOs are getting questions from the CEO regarding the role and importance of social media in driving business impact.
Here’s a list of key things CEOs should know about social media in business marketing. The starting point is to determine if social media can have a measurable business impact.
Is it important? Can it impact our business?
It depends on the industry. Your goal is to investigate the possibilities. To do that, you must invest in finding the connection. It won’t just appear, it’s not clean and simple like other marketing channels.
It can be done. For example, if you are in the business of selling expertise, like professional services, here’s a freebie: the answer is yes.
We found a link between online activity and the revenue performance of attorneys. By studying the LinkedIn behaviors of more than 500+ equity partners in a law firm we were able to show a link between the size of partner networks and activity, with billable revenue. Top billers had 47% larger networks than others and 74% higher social scores.
But each industry, business and segment is different. The business impact may be enhanced credibility, increased awareness, improved content distribution and engagement, etc. But if you don’t look…you won’t find it.
Is it strategic?
Social media is now considered the most effective B2B channel for driving revenue, per the 2023 State of B2B Digital Marketing report (download required). Let’s let that sink in. They said “for driving revenue,” not some perceived “fluffy” marketing goal like driving “likes” or engagement. It’s now driving revenue.
Authors of the report, Wpromote and Ascend2, found that 60% of respondents said that social media was the most effective channel topping email, search (paid and organic) and display advertising.
As a result, we now see companies like McKinsey, AWS, Novartis and SAP using very clear social media strategies to drive engagement and content dissemination at scale.
Why? Because it’s where the eyeballs are and social media is quickly becoming (and in certain industries, it already is) the preferred content channel for millennial buyers.
Do we have a strategy? Do we need one?
This one is easy: ask your CMO to see the social media strategy plan for the year. Ask them to explain why you are using certain social channels and what is the goal of each. You may see a look of shock and surprise come across their face.
Even worse, and this happens too frequently, ask them to ask their social media agency what the strategy is for the year and why. And the answer is not because “that’s what our competitors are doing.”
For too long, we have been throwing money and content at social media channels without much thought. Social is often an afterthought and, as a result, incredibly tactical. Do you need a strategy? The answer is yes, for many reasons.
For one, to transition from tactical to strategic, you need time to plan. Producing good content and creative that aligns with a bigger strategy takes time. So, start with having a quarterly strategy and plan.
Effective social media execution takes a village. Start with increasing visibility and changing mindsets. Social must be considered in producing any marketing asset — video, white paper, case study or event. How can social be used to promote these assets? And what will be required or created to support the execution in those channels?
Thinking and planning for those needs helps identify individuals or functional areas that can support building content for social channels. Instead of being behind the “eight-ball” scrabbling for something to post, marketing is now collaboratively building a monthly content calendar.
Regarding the “village,” based on our research and experience, there are four parts of your organization that need to be involved in supporting social media:
- HR for recruiting and retention.
- Sales for new customer wins.
- Product for new product/solution announcements.
- Corporate communication for community outreach, diversity initiatives and causes the organization supports.
They should have input into the plan and stake in producing content to fill the calendar, as well as clear goals they want to achieve. That is, if you believe social media is strategic, if not, then you don’t need any of it.
Should I be involved?
Now for the important piece: should you, as the CEO, participate in social media? That is a question that your organization will need to answer. For many CMOs, the vision of Elon Musk’s tweets dances in their heads when considering involving the CEO in social media.
If the organization decides it is a good idea or you are already active, the question is the extent of your role. Are you best suited to be a content creator or a thought leader, or is the organization better served by having you as a sharer of content? Even just liking content will increase the awareness of your content and, most likely, engagement.
Once your role is defined, the next step is training. Detailed coaching on the proper way to create, share and engage with social media content. This is true for the entire C-suite. We’ve interviewed many senior executives on this topic, and they were the ones who requested to be trained.
Now, you need not only a strategy and a quarterly plan but also social media training. But you don’t have to have it all at once.
Now that I know this, what do I do?
Social media is not considered strategic in many B2B organizations because it’s tactical. It’s tactical because it’s not planned. It’s not planned because no one has created a plan or calendar.
There is no plan or calendar because there is no strategy. There is no strategy because it’s not considered strategic. It’s not strategic because it hasn’t been connected to business impact. There, that’s what you do.
by William Walsh | Mar 10, 2024 | 2024
As previously published on 3/7/24 in MarTech
Every year, B2B marketers gather in Scottsdale, Ariz., to mingle and talk shop. This year, they talked a lot about AI.
The B2B Marketing Exchange (B2BMX) conference takes place annually in late February or early March at The Phoenician hotel in Scottsdale, Ariz. I was in attendance, along with a good 250 to 300 marketers. It was my first event since before the COVID-19 pandemic. Toss in representatives from about 75 vendors and the event was thick with pitches, presentations and promotions.
My goal for the three-day event was to check out and learn more about new technologies from the sponsors and gain insight into the top issues that practitioners are wrestling with day-to-day.
Here are my takeaways:
The major themes of B2BMX 2024
Artificial intelligence was everywhere
AI was everywhere — the vendors in the exhibit areas, the presentations and in conversation. That said, I didn’t really see anything that knocked my socks off. A bunch of generative AI content tools were on the vendor floor and featured in presentations, but nothing that was game changing.
Vendor consolidation
Vendor consolidation was not necessarily an official event theme, but martech consolidation was a definite vibe. From what I heard from vendors and marketers, the day of reckoning is upon us. Marketers are drilling into ROI, contract terms, spend and functionality. Ironically, Scott Brinker’s Chiefmartec newsletter came out during the event and announced that SaaS martech stacks shrunk 8% from 2023 to 2024. I expect that number to be much higher next year.
My favorite sessions
Keynote
Dan Gingiss, author of “The Experience Maker,” presented a lively and entertaining discussion of his WISE framework for creating notable customer experiences. Here’s the key point from his presentation: If something is expected or “normal” do the opposite. But to do that, you have to make time for it. Too many people are just going through the motions. To create truly memorable experiences, you have to take the time to think about it. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as how you respond to a customer on the phone. In fact, one of his examples was hold music.
Favorite workshop session
My favorite workshop was called “From Strategy to Tech Stack.” I actually never got to see the presentation — they couldn’t get the projector to work. So it became a “fireside chat” with Megan Crone from Palo Alto Networks and Amy Holtzman from CHEQ. The topic centered around cybersecurity for marketers, specifically protecting pay-per-click campaigns from bots. We’ve long known that bots are a nuisance on blogs, etc., but AI bots have become much more sophisticated in evading standard bot protection mechanism like CAPTCHA.
Most interesting vendors
- Writer. Writer is probably the best LLM (generative AI content) provider of the bunch with an impressive client list to boot. The template-driven approach was smart and well thought out.
- CHEQ. CHEQ is the vendor I didn’t know I needed. It’s ugly out there, and getting more dangerous every month. This is the tool you need to protect your marketing investments.
- The B2BMX event app. To me, the most impressive technology I experienced was the event app itself. The app allows you to customize your agenda, reach out and connect with others, download the presentations, track your points for visiting with vendors and apply the points you earned to SWAG.
Best vendor SWAG
Speaking of SWAG…
I don’t know if it was the “best,” but I will say it was the most usual giveaway I’ve seen at an event: an eye mask. But here’s the funny thing, there is no company branding on it so I don’t remember the vendor. A stand out giveaway with no branding… hello, marketing?!
Final word
B2BMX is an event for practitioners: managers, senior managers and director level attendees. I was surprised that many of the sessions didn’t reveal new insights (particularly relating to ABM) despite the fact that I hadn’t been to a conference in nearly five years.
It left me with the impression that we are still chasing the shining new technology instead of performance improvement. As an example, the sessions with the highest attendance (from what I observed) all had AI somewhere in the title or description.
by William Walsh | Feb 28, 2024 | 2024
As previously published on 2/28/24 in MarTech
When he was a kid, Scott Gillum dreamt of running a business. He made his dream come true with a company focused on work/life balance.
MarTech columnist Scott Gillum runs his business Carbon Design from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He knew from a very young age that running a business was what he wanted to do. He just wasn’t sure what that meant. That led him on a circuitous path to learning a lot about business and marketing, and then having to unlearn some of it.
Q: How far back does the business thing go?
A: As a kid, I always dreamed of having my own company. I would wake up and remember having these very vivid dreams that I built a hotel or restaurant. I’d tell my mom about it, and she’s like, “You know, you should be an architect. You always think about building things.”
And so I always knew I was going to do something in business. So here’s my strategy in high school to figure out what I was going to do with my life: I was reading the Fortune 500 and I saw that most of the CEOs in the top 200 companies had their JDs.
And I thought, “Well, that’s it. If I want to get to the top with a company, I should go to law school because they all have their JDs.” So my college career was designed to get on the path to going to law school. I was a political science and economics major and I did two internships at law firms and realized, “Oh my god. I hate this.” So I got a bit smarter and realized what I really like is business, and it isn’t the law.
Got around to figuring out how I could go to grad school and get my MBA and get somebody to pay for it and that sent me on the path to where we are today.
Q: I can’t remember any of my dreams from high school, but I’m pretty sure they did not involve starting a business. What attracted you to it?
A: What I liked about it was the problem-solving, figuring things out was the appeal of it.
It wasn’t until I was 52 that I started a business of my own. With two kids in private schools or private universities. So the worst time to do it, but that’s when the opportunity was there, right? And the two years after starting the business were the hardest years of my life.
Part of the reason for that is that If you’ve been in a certain type of workplace for 30 years you’re accustomed to having a paycheck every week. You’re accustomed to understanding how you’re going to pay your taxes. How you’re going to get your insurance, right? All these things just happen. And you’ve been conditioned that way. It took two years of being an entrepreneur to figure out how to unwind that mental model of how I should think about making an income and a living. Figuring out there’s a different way that you can make a living.
That’s maybe the hardest part of being an entrepreneur. There are different ways that you can find insurance. You can figure out how to pay your taxes. But there’s a big hurdle for people trying to leave where they are working for someone else. In the current environment, where you’ve got a home, you got a mortgage payment, you got kids in college, to flip that upside down and become an entrepreneur, it’s very, very difficult.
Q: What do you like about marketing?
A: I like trying to figure out why things don’t work. And so when I founded Carbon Design, I founded it because of two things that don’t work right. The original idea for it was backward in terms of starting a business. I focused on the people and not the clients.
While I was working, I saw this next generation, the millennials, come in, and I came to the realization that their work styles are very different. And not in a bad way.
For example, I was doing a big rebranding project for a client. We just finished one phase and I was looking for the creative director and he was gone. We’re going to the next phase, and he was down backpacking through South America. And bells started going off in my head.
Q: Like that sounded pretty cool?
A: Yeah, I thought about the experiences I had when I was in management consulting. We would lose people when they became most productive. When they got five, six, seven years of experience under their belts, they would get married, and then have a family, and then we would lose really talented associates. They would try to come and work part-time, but they never felt like they could balance work life. They’re always feeling either like they were disappointing the client or disappointing themselves as a mother or father or whatever it is.
So the founding of Carbon Design was built around the idea that people really need a different way to work. They need to put their lives first and get that straightened out, then the work will come, and it’ll be really good. If you don’t have your life right, the work is going to suffer. And that’s the foundation of the company.
We’re on demand. We’re remote. We’re all freelance contractors. And you make your own time. You do work where you want. All we care about is your deliverables. Good quality work on time, it’s all we care about. So I started the company backwards with that. I figured if I get a good core base of people, then we’ll get clients and we’ll do really great work and we’ll retain them and get referred.
So the first question was really why aren’t people engaged in work anymore? If you looked at the Gallup poll before COVID, work engagement has never been above 32% in 20 years. I wanted to know if we can find a way to get people engaged again.
Q: That’s the first thing that didn’t work. What’s the second?
A: The second question relates to B2B marketing. There’s been all this investment in technology in data and insights, but performance hasn’t improved. Why? Why are we not improving performance? That got us on another journey, and we developed some proprietary, performance-based marketing tools. They allow us to understand people as individuals and to look at the softer side of sales and marketing. Because, if our job as marketers is to get somebody to take action, we have to understand their motivations and beliefs.
So we do a lot of psychographics. We use AI personality profiling tools. We know preferences in terms of content. We know preferences in terms of visualization. We’re starting to take in the people component, not just the title or a role. You add that in, you start to get better performance.
Q: What are you looking forward to in terms of marketing?
A: I’m glad you asked. We’re on our third version of an AI tool. And this one, I think, is really exciting and fun. We are using an AI tool called Cassidy. It’s a business development assistant and a project manager assistant.
The nice thing about this tool versus some other tools is that other tools are always prompt-driven. And the output was only as good as your prompting, and who has time to figure out what the right prompts are?
With Cassidy, you feed it knowledge. It sits on top of our Google Suite, on top of the knowledge and extracting the knowledge out of our drives. And it also reads our website, it picks up our tonality, our brand voice. So for me, what’s very exciting is that we are a business that operates with no overhead.
The way our organization is built, we’re very flat. We can scale up quickly and scale down, and we don’t have any overhead. What we try to do is we price efficiently, and we try to get most of the fees that we collect to our freelancers. So we have a model that means you make a lot of money working for us.
Now we have an assistant to aid people coming to work with us. We plug them into our G Suite, and they know where to find this proposal or this project, We’re super excited about it.
by William Walsh | Feb 17, 2024 | 2024
As previously published on 2/15/24 in MarTech
In the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey, the astronauts come to the frightening realization that Hal, the AI supercomputer, runs every aspect of the space station.
A discrepancy between the ground computer and Hal begins the process of the astronauts believing that Hal may be going rogue. When they ask Hal why there may be a difference between the two computer systems Hal responds, “It’s a human error, as it also is…”
Our first experience with AI began in late 2019 when we began experimenting with an IBM Watson application. We used an AI tool to profile the personalities of buyers to help a client narrow down the 17 personas that came from the product marketing group to 4 actionable personas.
From there, we built a business on the tool which we call personality based marketing. The enabling AI tools we use, Crystal Knows and xiQ, can quickly determine the personality of an individual using DISC segmentation.
Our second experience was right when Chat GPT 4.0 was launched and we added Jasper to help us with content and image generation. We used the tools to help generate content for websites and images to give our creatives a head start.
Honestly, we have had mixed results. The tool being prompt driven, made it challenging to get the output we desired. And given everything else going on in our business we really didn’t have the time to continue to learn and perfect the prompts. Plus,with each new release of the tool, brought a whole new set of best practices on prompting.
This has now led us to the third round of experimentation with an AI platform called Cassidy. The new tool is potentially a game changer for us and possibly the beginning of a modern day Hal. Unlike previous tools, Cassidy will learn about us on its own.
It has read our website, and it is integrated into our G-Suite, Chrome browser and Slack application. It will understand and communicate in our brand voice, act as an assistant, and execute its own workflows. For an organization like us, a fast efficient agency with little to no overhead, this can be a true game changer.
The future of AI is bright but it’s also going to be bumpy. We know there will be shortcomings in this new wave of technology. For example, based on what we have now observed using the first generation tools, we know that biases exist in the tools.
The second generation taught us that the output is only as good as the input. The age old saying of “garbage in, garbage out” is still true despite how smart the technology may be.
In fact, many believe that ChatGPT 4.0 is getting worse, not better, as it becomes more widely distributed. A discussion thread on Open AI Developer Forum from November entitled “ChatGPT is Getting Worse and Worse Every Day” includes 182 comments, all of them in agreement that things are, in fact, getting worse with each release.
Developers point to increasing error rates, low retention of previous commands and outputs, and general lack of support. Even going so far as to say the ChatGPT 3.5 performed better than the most current release of 4.0. So we can, for now, put aside our concerns that Hal is going to be taking control of the ship.
Be that as it may, we have built Business Development and Project Manager assistants with a knowledge base created by integrating our proposal and project drives. These AI assistants will be able to help our team increase efficiency and one day, automate the proposal writing process.
It’s also integrated into my Chrome browser so it’s reading my email, attending meetings, and archiving and indexing the websites I’m visiting. Perhaps someday soon, it will begin drafting and responding to my emails…on its own.
Until that day, it will require our time to shape it into what we want (or need) it to be. And that’s the point, we will make AI into what it will be, and many have done so already. And, even though we have moved from “machine learning” to machines that learn, it is a good reminder that “Artificial Intelligence” is actually better described as artificial human intelligence.
A technology built by humans, and trained on what humans have made, will not be perfect…just like its creators.
And in case you’re wondering, this post is 100% human generated.
