“The best sellers are the people who make the product,” said my son as we were walking out of a store in a quaint town in Los Cabos, Mexico.
It was an interesting comment made after I had just purchased a pair of earrings for my wife in a jewelry boutique. The buying experience turned out to be an interesting “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” sales story, or in our case, the “Tourist and the Four Brothers.”
A few nights prior, after enjoying dinner in town, we walked the streets visiting local shops. The first jewelry store we visited was run by one of four brothers, all jewelry designers who had followed their father into the business. Each brother had their own style, which was reflected in their jewelry, shop decor and personalities.
The first brother’s store was white and teal, very similar to Tiffany’s. The display cases were decorated with high-end tequila bottles sprinkled among the jewelry, which immediately caught my eye. My wife, perusing the counters, settled in an area with rings while I chatted with the clerk behind the counter about the family and their business.
In working with my wife the sales person failed to realize that he wasn’t selling to a naive tourist but rather a very knowledgeable buyer who at one point in her career had managed a jewelry department for a high end retailer. A mistake often made by sales people who fail to do research on their potential buyers. As he pitched her on a ring she had intentionally requested to see, he failed to notice she was wearing one similar.
When buyers are in an unfamiliar environment, like we were, they will seek to find a frame of reference or an “anchor.” Something that they can connect to their knowledge base to aid in decision making. Being new to the store, and pricing in pesos, my wife “anchored” on a familiar ring. Trying on the ring she was able to assess that it was roughly twice the price and half the weight as hers. Now that she had a reference point, she determined that the store markup was about twice that of a US store.
The second brother’s store was bigger and had a vast selection of jewelry (and no tequila). The clerk, a niece of the designer, greeted us and carried around her calculator while following us around the store. A not so subtle message that she was ready to make a deal.
My wife found an area of rings and picked one out. As she asked questions, the store clerk mentioned they were having a promotion. She then tried to discount to close the deal which kept falling as we were walking towards the door. By the time we left, the price had fallen 40%, with an offer to call her Uncle to get maybe an even better price.
The last store we visited was white, simple and elegant. It didn’t contain a lot of inventory, in fact, one of the display cases was completely empty. The person working behind the desk was not a sales clerk, but an assistant designer who introduced us to the youngest brother in the family and owner of the store. He was the designer and told us about his creations apologizing for the lack of inventory.
We talked about his life, his education in London, and the fact that he didn’t want to get into the family business, but his love of designing drew him in. His real passion was designing furniture which he hoped to start retailing soon.
My wife found a pair of earrings and tried them on. As she did he explained the process used to give the silver hoops their shimmer along with the details about the gems used to enhance them. He brought over other silver earrings and pointed out the differences in the design process.
Deciding to purchase the earrings, we asked if they had a “promotion.” He said that Visa or Mastercard were offering a 10% discount on a purchase. The card companies, not him, offered the promotion.
As we were paying, I noticed a unique bottle of tequila sitting behind the desk. A dark blue bottle with carved symbols of the tequila making process along with the history of the Los Cabos area. He said it appealed to him “because as a designer” he appreciated the craftsmanship of the bottle. I loved the story (and the taste) of the tequila and he offered to connect me with the owner who lived locally to secure a bottle.
The first store tried to position itself as the Mexican version of Tiffany’s. The problem was, we had no prior exposure to the brand, so the brand promise and value were empty. The second store offered choice and price but made us question it’s authenticity and quality. (Given the amount of products offered we suspected the owner couldn’t have designed everything, and the discount made us question if the stone used in the ring was natural or man made.)
Later that night, I got a text from the store owner where we made our purchase, sharing the price and location to pick up the tequila. He didn’t have to follow up with me after we made the purchase but he did. It wasn’t an empty promise made to close the deal which happens far too often, but a genuine gesture.
In the end, my wife received a piece of jewelry she loves and I got a unique bottle of tequila but what we really bought, was the owner of the store. For the 20 minutes we spent in the store, a connection and relationship were formed through storytelling. It was both authentic and passionate, building a foundation of trust.
The experience made me reflect on the effectiveness of our sales and marketing efforts. What if we could train our sales people to act like “owners” or “designers” of the product; how might that impact their success? That question prompted another one which was, how many sales people ever receive training by the product group, or really know or understand the story behind the product or service they sell.
We can’t give the passion that comes with the pride in ownership, but we can train them to be storytellers, because as we experienced, buyers don’t buy from you, they buy into you.
As for the fourth brother, his store never opened. Guess it’s true, showing up is half the battle.
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by Katie Weisz Estimated read time: Less than 1 minute
The conversation of “Do we really need outbound sales anymore?” continued with another lively interview, this time featuring special guest, Brent Adamson. Brent is a distinguished VP at Gartner, and a published author with a lot to say about the case between sales and marketing.
In the interview, CEO, Scott Gillum, and Brent unpack the idea of Challenger, debunking it as a “sales methodology”, and how both sales and marketing should be co-owning the process of the customer and buyer experience.
Brent also shares three very distinctive approaches (giving, telling, and sense-making) that sales reps are adopting towards information in order to connect with potential customers and buyers.
In this clip, Brent dives into the topic of “the world is crowded with good information.” In sales and marketing, the customer is now surrounded by good, quality information, which is having an impact on their decision making and buying process.
Listen here:
To hear the interview with Brent, listen or download here.
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It was in high school or college…probably a standardized test. The one you just looked at and immediately knew you were in trouble.
A three sentence word problem with statistics. The tension was palpable and you read it, again and again.
Nothing. No recall whatsoever. Your mind was blank as if you’d overloaded every synapse available.
Well, in fact, you had. It’s called cognitive overload and there is a chance your marketing may be causing this same effect.
Cognitive Load builds upon the widely accepted model of human information processing, first published by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin in 1968. It describes the process as having three main parts:
1) sensory memory
2) working memory
3) long-term memory
Sensory memory (ears and eyes), along with long-term memory, have an unlimited capacity to take in and store information. Unfortunately, working memory (how we interpret, deconstruct, and process words and images) doesn’t.
Educational psychologist John Sweller advanced this thinking with his Cognitive Load Theory. This pivotal research revealed how the mind processes information (dual channel – verbal and visual) and the best methods for communicating complex concepts.
For marketers, the key insight is that the mind has limited cognitive processing capacity, both visually and contextually.
Dual channel – humans possess separate information processing channels for verbal and visual material.
Limited capacity – there is only a limited amount of processing capacity available in the verbal and visual channels
Active processing – learning requires substantial cognitive processing in the verbal and visual channels.
Mayer and Moreno then tested their assumptions against the three main parts of memory mentioned above; sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory. Here’s what they discovered:
The mind does several things when overloaded, and none of them are good for marketers.
The first thing the overloaded mind does is to bail, quickly determining whether it’s worth the effort to turn on active processing.
Next, if the mind decides to give it a go, it then looks for the easy route — association. The mind taps into long-term memory and says, “This looks like a lot of work; have I heard or seen this before? If so, then this must be the same thing.”
Lastly, the mind fully engages, but in doing so uses so much processing capacity that there is nothing left over to move the elements of the engagement into long term memory.
The impact for marketers is one or more of the following:
1) your message is ignored,
2) it’s non-differentiate (because sounds or looks like something the audience has already seen or read),
3) the message is received but audiences are not motivated to take action,
4) the message is received, and then it’s completely forgotten,
You just ran the table of wasted effort, thanks to cognitive overload.
Now, let’s apply these lessons to our marketing efforts and identify both danger zones and potential solutions.
Content – Like to use internal speak, long or complex words, tech-jargon and/or acronyms?
Good luck. You’re playing around with what’s called “split-attention effect”, overloading one channel with too much information. It can lead to your message being misinterpreting or missed altogether.
There’s a simple fix: Use a tool like a Gunning Fog index to test your content for readability, break the content up into smaller pieces, balance visual and contextual elements. A picture is really worth 1000 words, at least to the mind.
Video – Using subtitles in your videos? Using text to explain what the taking head is saying? Laying text onto a visual?.
You’re overtaxing the visual channel. Remove the text and add it to the voice-over. Creating 10 minute or longer explainer videos? Cut them into a series of 5 two-minute videos if you want the audience to recall the information.
Digital and direct mail – Like to give the audience lots of options, or crowd a page with offers (like the ad below), and multiple messages? Mistake.
More is not better.
More is overwhelming and you’re headed to cognitive overload-town.
A couple of tools can help fix this issue.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a brain imaging method that assesses the intensity of engagement and whether audiences exhibit positive or negative emotional responses to a stimulus.
If that’s too complicated, here’s an easy one, Eye tracking tests measure the gaze and movement of the eyes. This information can help understand how an audience’s attention is being captured or diverted by particular experiences or stimuli.
How far have we really come since the Cluetrain Manifesto? It’s sad to admit, but arguably true, that much B2B marketing still flirts with mediocrity. Why? Part of what contributes to the mediocrity is the tendency of B2B marketers to race towards “best practices,” seeking, paradoxically, to achieve brand differentiation by imitating the past practices of competitors and predecessors.
In marketing strategy, the perceived safety of doing what others have done is an illusion. “Best practices” are properly reserved for simple situations that can be dealt with according to simple categorical logic. Branding problems can rarely be reduced to such simplicity without overlooking dimensions of the situation. Sometimes those dimensions are critical factors in success or failure.
Once we acknowledge that “strategy by imitation of practices” has a poor prognosis, it’s a short step from there to go looking for a theoretical foundation for action.
Our theoretical foundation takes the form of a “dissenting opinion” towards a handful of (largely unexamined) theories that are implicit in practices and advice widely found in the B2B marketing space. At Carbon, we exploit this contrast as an engine of strategic differentiation for our clients. Here are 5 components of that engine:
1) People have a deep and profound need as social animals to belong to groups, to achieve and maintain status within groups, and to construct and signal identity in the context of these groups.
Few people would disagree, but just the same, this point of view on motivation is still mostly ignored in B2B marketing and sales strategies that emphasize rational business benefits. As deals get bigger, and buying committees get larger, the error of underestimating this factor in motivation becomes more regrettable.
2) Most of the time the human mind is operating in a state characterized by a fast, non-deductive, association-driven path.
This view, deried from behavioral economics, stands directly opposed to the classical economic imagination of people as “rational actors.” Something at stake in this dispute is our understanding of how we best achieve desired meanings in the mind of our customer. Should we focus on telling people what we’d like them to believe, or should we design a coherent fabric of associations and invite people to participate in constructing meaning from it? Most zig, we zag.
3) B2B buying is a group decision, and group decisions are chaotic and non-linear. On good days they resemble the pursuit of design problems. On bad days they resemble a garbage can.
This take on decision theory (and thus buying) stands in contrast to the (usually unexamined) assumption that business decisions are pursued in a logical process that begins with a stable set of identities, goals preferences, and advances in a straight line towards the optimization of outcomes. This assumption is perfectly aligned with the metaphors of “funnel” and “buying journey.” Just not with reality.
4) Experiences are meaning-making opportunities. Stimulus and response are separated by a meaning-making operation.
This stance is opposed to the mechanistic behaviorism that lurks beneath notions like “monetizing eyeballs,” “unique selling propositions” and “the b2b content factory.” Notions like these come and go, but the underlying assumption, for all its flaws, seems hard to kill.
5) Firmographics and role titles are more useful for counting potential customers than they are for building strategies that move those customers to action.
This stance contrasts the segmentation assumptions of most B2B marketing and sales organizations. We see that as limiting in two ways – first, it’s non-differentiating since firmographics and role titles are no mystery to competitors. And second this knowledge is not as helpful as people generally imagine in persuading prospective customers to adopt a belief or a behavior.
We don’t dispute that strategies resting on contrary philosophies have worked in the past. But looking forward, we see value migrating from tangibles to experiences. B2B buying groups will grow larger in the face of more difficult decisions. The pace of change and disruption will pick up. B2B commercial opportunities will increasingly be initiated by customers and mediated through inbound channels as the first point of contact. As a result, this is an environment that favors our “dissenting view.”
Pat and I shared our key learnings on executing Challenger across a multitude of marketing activities: customer understanding, marketing messaging, content strategy development, content and sales tool production, and lead generation.
On March 8th at 11 am (EST) Jessica Cash and I will be presenting Using B2B Content to Drive Alignment & Accountability, details on the event and registration below.
Overview:With increased budgets comes increased calls for accountability. Today’s top marketers are using Commercial Insight, personal value, and help from peers to craft content strategies that result in more than just customer engagement. Learn best practices and ways to avoid common pitfalls that often leave marketers struggling to improve lead quality.
Join Jessica Cash, Head of Sales and Marketing Solutions Product Development at CEB, and Scott Gillum, President of gyro in Washington, D.C. as they answer questions, such as:
How can marketers avoid always defining their business solely from the legacy perspective?
How does redefining themselves allow for better alignment with customers?
How can value drive customer action?
Jessica and Scott will be holding up the mirror in order to show how CEB is applying these best practices and principles in their own marketing efforts, so come ready with questions!
Did you know, that until recently restaurant owners only cared about the cleanliness of the food prep area? Most customers, and owners, assumed that if someone got sick after dining out it was because of food poisoning. That was until Carbon Design and Challenger Inc. helped “challenge” the norm by showing owners that half of the outbreaks in a restaurant were caused by people to people transmissions.
Now owners know where the “hotspots” are, and as a result, restaurant are cleaner than ever. Grab your face mask and enjoy a safe night out, but you may want to avoid the raw oysters 😉.
CASE STUDY
How do you do it? By giving clients and users what they want. Using the remaining budget that was to be used to update the site with the new branding we designed and built an entirely new site on a new platform. But audience needs are constantly evolving so the work never stops. Our team continues to audit performance and make improvements.
As a result, the two-year journey has paid off with the site being named #1 in the industry. Even more importantly, their key priority areas (site search, attorney profiles, etc.) were ranked in the outstanding category. Proving that excellence is a journey not just a destination.
CASE STUDY
It’s not unusual to find companies referring to their relationship with clients as “partnerships.” It’s common to find client logos on vendor websites. But how often do you see an agency or consulting firm’s logo on client websites? If you visit www.evepark.ca – that’s exactly what you’ll see.
Carbon Design, represented side by side with, a global architecture powerhouse, a world-class designer, and the project principal: the innovative green-tech engineering firm, S2E Technologies Inc. Under S2E’s leadership, these firms are inventing a new consumer category – one that integrates bold new ideas about housing and transportation – and radically resets the carbon footprint of both at the same time.
