Drip Marketing Framework

A colleague of mine drew this framework on our whiteboard the other day.  I thought it was spot on so I'm posting it here. It basically outlines the drip marketing process that a salesperson uses to keep a prospect engaged.  I wrote about Drip Marketing in an earlier post.

The framework instructs you to drip the prospect with some information, if you get their attention work to understand what matters to them, if you know what matters to them align your product/service (if possible) to meet their need/pain point.

It's Not Viral Marketing

I wrote about this in an earlier post, but I think it's worth a reminder. Viral Marketing is not:

Telling your friends to Tweet about your new site.

Posting about your upcoming concert on Facebook.

These are simply modern ways of doing old fashioned push marketing.

Viral Marketing is when:

1. one person tells two people about your product (3)
2. each of the two tells two more people (7)
3. each of the four new people tell two more people (15)
4. each of the new 8 people tell two more people (31)
5. each of the new 16 people tell two more people (63)
6. each of the new 32 people tell two more people (127)
7. each of the new 64 people tell two more people (255)

You get the idea.

Viral marketing is when word about your product spreads, naturally, like a virus; and frankly, without much effort from you. Other than making the product worth talking about.

Your Social Network Asset

Currently I have about 80 followers on Twitter, about 500 Facebook friends and about 500 LinkedIn connections.

There's some overlap between networks, but more or less with a few keystrokes I can send a message to 1,000 people that trust me and are attentive and willing to listen to what I have to say.

That is an asset. A social asset. Not only the captive and trusting audience but the ability to communicate to that audience in real-time, whenever I want and as often as I want.

Like any asset, I can make it more or less valuable over time, either by losing or gaining audience, losing or gaining trust, or losing or gaining attention.

I think it's worth thinking about this for a few seconds next time you want to post something you want people to support. Will it make your social network asset more or less valuable?

Email and E-Commerce

Fred Wilson had a post last week called Don’t Forget Your Logged-Out Users where he discussed how social media sites need to pay attention to the value they create for users that aren’t logged-in; i.e. Twitter allows you to see Lebron James’ Tweets without logging-in.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot in the context of e-commerce.  You need to be very careful about what value you provide to a user before you force them to authenticate (i.e. force them to give you their email address). 

Most web services drive the majority of their traffic through email – especially repeat traffic.  As a result, email capture for a new visitor is critical.  It’s hard to get a user to your site, it’s even harder to get them back – in most cases you need their email address to get them back.  An email address allows you to regularly market to that user to bring them back when you have a better or more relevant offer for them.

So when you think about how much value you provide to a user that isn’t logged-in, you need to consider the potential missed opportunity to capture that user’s email address.

I’ve found that when you put up a authentication page before allowing a first-time user to shop, you lose about 20% of visitors; most users came to your site to see what you have and they’re willing to take an extra step to see it.

I’ve also found that when a user comes a site, there’s about a 5% chance they’ll transact on the first visit. 

Think of it this way:

Scenario 1 – Authentication and email capture before user can shop

1,000 New Visitors

800 New Email Addresses

40 Transactions

Scenario 2 – No Authentication before user can shop

1,000 New Visitors

50 New Email Addresses

50 Transactions

Here’s the question to consider when making the decision on how much value to provide to users that aren’t logged-in to your e-commerce site: what’s more valuable to you, 10 transactions or 750 new emails?

Career Insights

Picked up a couple career insights that I thought were worth posting here:

The first comes from a study from the Gamut News via Penelope Trunk's blog.

The study looks at what they call "Career Limiting Habits" or (CLHs) -- habits that prevent professionals from being successful. They surveyed 972 people and found that these CLHs were the most common:

1. Unreliability
2. “It’s not my job”
3. Procrastination
4. Resistance to change
5. Negative attitude

I think this list is spot on.  And it's especially true for startups.  It's almost the exact opposite of a list of habits required to work at a startup.  A top 5 list of positive work habits required to work at a startup would look a lot like this:

1. Accountable for individual and company results
2. Willing to do anything to get the job done; gets hands dirty
3. Starts fast, iterates like crazy
4. Embraces change
5. Positive, must-win attitude

Even at a larger, more established company, if you're practicing any of these CLHs you're making your manager's job harder and if you're making your manager's job harder, you're not going to go very far.  

The second couple of insights involve working with headhunters and come from a guest post on Dan Schawbel's blog about personal branding. Dan is a fellow Bentley alum.

Two pretty straightforward insights that might be useful to know:

1. A headhunter will not find you a job if you are not currently employed
2. A headhunter will not find you a job if you're not working in their area of focus; e.g. if you work in pharmaceutical sales and the headhunter is looking for a candidate for an advertising sales job, the headhunter will not work with you

This isn't to say you can't get a job in ad sales if you're working in pharma sales.  But a company isn't going to pay a headhunter 30% of a first year salary for a candidate that isn't currently employed and working in their defined area of expertise.  They don't need a headhunter to land that person. 

If you find yourself looking to make a career change, your best bet is to work through a more traditional staffing agency, go to companies through your network, or reach out directly.

Client Management Lesson #2: Partners, Not Customers

This is the second post in a seven part series on Key Client Management Lessons. Lesson #2: Partners, Not Customers

It may seem like semantics, but I’ve learned not to think of my clients as “customers”.  It has a connotation that implies that you’re inferior to the client.  You’re not.  A buyer/seller relationship is a perfectly mutually beneficial partnership.  You want something, they want something.

Your role in the partnership is to maximize the benefit to your organization and your partner’s role in the partnership is to maximize the benefit to their organization.  If you don’t approach it this way, you’re not playing the game -- the “self-interest game” -- and you’re setting yourself up for failure.

It is this joint self-interest that creates the magical “win/win” -- where you both get more from the relationship than the sum of your combined assets.

Positioning your relationship as a partnership can be difficult.  Clients are paying you a lot of money, they think of themselves as customers, they expect you to jump when they say jump.

To be sure that the relationship is positioned as a partnership, as soon as you take over the account, setup a call with the client and do two things:

1. Define the objectives of the relationship (be sure the objectives are aligned with your business goals and theirs)
2. Define the key metrics that will determine success or failure in reaching the objectives

This is a critical step; it forces you to view the success of the partnership through the lens of business success and "win-win", rather than the lens of client satisfaction or happiness.  Happy clients are important, but they should be happy because you’re helping them reach their business goals, not because you’re treating them like a king that you’re in business to serve.

When a “partnership” is in place, as you move through the relationship and opportunities, challenges and conflicts come up, you can always refer back to the objectives and metrics you’re using to determine success.  This will keep you both focused on actions that drive business results rather than non-essential activities that take you off course.

Client Management Lesson #1: Lead, Don't Follow

This is the first post in a seven part series on Key Client Management Lessons. Lesson #1: Lead, Don't Follow

Intuition tells us that the customer is always right, that good customer service is giving the customer what they want.

Whenever I hear this I think about a quote I read from Steve Jobs.

A while back somebody asked him if he had done any market research while he was building one of his products (I believe the iPod).  His answer was no way.  He said:

"It isn't the consumer's job to know what they want."

I love this quote.  In my experience, I've found that this is absolutely true; most clients have no idea what they really want.  In fact, even you probably don't truly know what they want or at least not what they're going to want.

In order to truly serve a client you need to have the flexibility to be ahead of the market.  And to do this, you need to create an environment with the client where you can do what you do well, where you can lead, where you can innovate.

Remember that you are the expert in your field, you're better at what you do than they are, that's why they 've chosen to outsource to you.

The best relationships are the relationships where a client leans on you for your expertise.  To create this type of relationship, do these four things right up front:

1. Specifically define your area of expertise for the client (where you're going to lead)
2. Define the metrics you use to determine success in that area
3. Set goals for each metric and a timeline for when you plan to hit each
4. Share those metrics with the client and demonstrate how those metrics are perfectly consistent with the overall goals of the relationship

Positioning your relationships this way might be difficult at first -- many businesses have been successful by following their clients,  and doing whatever the client asks.

But if you want to create an environment where you can truly innovate, you need to lead, not follow.

And you’ll find that once you've created this dynamic in the relationship you can move much faster in the market and the relationship will benefit in the end.

You’ll find that rather than being just another vendor that they have to manage, the client will come to you for advice, open up more about their challenges and be more understanding when you run tests and make rapid product iterations that don't succeed overnight.

To facilitate a relationship where you lead, you might need to be more proactive and more transparent than you normally would.   It's worth it.  Show the client data that supports your decisions.  When the relationship is positioned properly, you'll find that the client will require much less control.  In fact, when they ask you to make product changes you can say "no way!"

Of course you need to listen to the client and consider their feedback and you better be prepared to show how the changes you make are consistent with the goals of the relationship (again, try to do this proactively) but at the end of the day, you’re the expert, lead, don’t follow.

Your job is not to give the client what they want; your job is to give the client what they dream about.

Twitter Business Model

The other day Sarah Silverman tweeted a somewhat vulgar complaint about American Airlines.  I'd post it here but it looks like she deleted it from her Twitter account. Her complaint regarded a connecting flight that was cancelled after a 7 hour layover.

Following her tweet, a short discussion ensued between Sarah and her followers about the poor service they've experienced from American Airlines.

As of today, Sarah has 1,692,580 followers.  To give you a sense of her reach, that's approximately the same number of people that will see this 17,000 square foot Walgreen's billboard that rises 340 feet above Times Square in a 24 hour period.

Imagine someone posting a complaint about your company on this billboard?  The damage that can come to American Airlines and other consumer businesses from Twitter is significant.

I know several companies (particularly airlines) are already using Twitter to communicate with frustrated customers.  I believe there’s a huge B2B revenue opportunity here for Twitter.

If I was American Airlines, I'd pay a lot for a Twitter application that would integrate into my CRM or customer service software where I could view all of my @mentions sorted by the number of people that follow the Tweeter.  If American Airlines is able to turn Sarah into a happy customer and can get a positive Tweet from her, they’ll get 17,000 square feet of Times Square advertising for $0.  A pretty good investment to make in one customer.

I have no idea if Twitter is already doing this or if they're considering B2B CRM as a future revenue stream.  But it seems to me that there'd  be a significant revenue opportunity if Twitter was able to effectively integrate their reach, data and users into a company's CRM systems and process.

Bad Negotiators Use Emotion to Negotiate

I just went on a rant about this and a colleague told me I should blog about it so here goes. I had a call the other day with a big client. The call was a preliminary negotiation call. We’re going to discuss terms of an agreement extension in a couple weeks.

From the outset of the call, the client surprised me by being both rude and confrontational -- lots of sarcasm and sighing. They explained that they might want to go to RFP. Oh, and of course, they want a fee reduction this year.

Not a nice way to start off a call between two companies that have had a very positive relationship for many years. Why would they start the call this way? Are they just rude? Are they really mad?

I don’t think so. My answer is that they’re bad negotiators that don’t want to do the homework and preparation required to get what they want.

Good negotiators don’t do this. Good negotiators are polite, friendly, do their homework and have ruthless, rock solid business angles as to why they should get what they want. Good negotiators don’t simply threaten to go to RFP; rather, they build leverage by citing the rational, business reasons why they might end up going to RFP (budget cuts, poor performance, shifting priorities, changing markets, competition, etc.).

When negotiators don’t have rock solid, logical business arguments they’re forced to rely on fake, insincere emotion to make their argument.

My advice: rather than put yourself and the people on the other end of the phone through this nonsense, reschedule the call for a later date until you can do your homework and prepare your angles. That’s a lot more fun and productive than just pretending to be mad.

Drip Marketing

In an earlier post I wrote about what makes a good Tweet. The best Tweets are those that make me laugh or provide me with an interesting insight or make me look at something differently I follow about 150 people on Twitter and I have a pretty high bar for what I keep in my timeline. If a Tweeter isn't adding some kind of consistent value in those 140 characters, I'll stop following them.

There are a lot of similarities between being a good Tweeter and a good marketer. If what you're saying to prospects/clients isn't highly valuable and said very efficiently, it's a matter of time before they tune you out.

I've begun pushing my team to have "Twitter-like" conversations with clients and prospects; I've also heard this referred to as "drip marketing". That is, provide the client with regular, short and highly interesting/engaging/insightful pieces of information (most often without an ask) that educate the recipient and -- just as importantly -- change their perception of what you do in a favorable way. I like to think of these as small, mutual gifts -- they provide both parties with some benefit.

Ideally, I've asked my team to try to keep their drip emails down to 140 characters, though depending on the message this can be quite challenging.

Regardless, the aspiration is simple: be really concise and be really interesting.

7 Key Client Management Lessons

A few weeks ago I was asked to teach a "Client Management 101" class. I was happy to do the class but wasn't all that excited about its title.

I believe that the basics of client management are mostly intuitive.  And the parts of it that aren't intuitive can pretty easily be found in a book or online.

So a class on the basics of client management wouldn’t be very interesting or insightful and wouldn’t really make the listeners any better at client management -- not to mention it wouldn’t be very fun to teach.

So I decided not to teach the basics; instead, I came up with a list of 7 key lessons or insights that I've picked up over the years that would've helped me quite a bit had I understood them when I started my career.  Some of them are provocative and many of them are counterintuitive.  I decided to keep the list to 7 because it forced me to pick the most interesting.

I put the 7 lessons into PowerPoint, added some personal stories and took the class through each lesson one by one.  The class was very well received and spurred some great conversation during Q&A.

I thought I'd capture and share what I presented on this blog.  Here are the 7 Key Lessons:

1. Lead, Don't Follow
2. Partners, Not Customers
3. Manage Expectations (it's easier)
4. Ask for More
5. Everybody Has a Boss
6. Know Your Audience
7. The Bigger the Crisis, the Bigger the Opportunity

Posting them all at once would make for an extremely long blog post…so I’ll post them individually over the next several weeks.

What We Don't Know

Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, said this back in 2002 when responding a to a reporter’s question about links between Saddam Hussein and terrorists seeking weapons of mass destruction.  It came up again Monday in a column in the Wall Street Journal. “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one."

I’ve always loved this quote; it’s very humbling and so true in business and life (and of course politics and war).

In short, there are things we don’t know that we don’t know we don’t know.