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Here’s the final in my three-part series on how to market to the human psyche, or to put it another way, how to diffuse the rabid dog response that kicks in when our livelihood is threatened.

I know we’re just talking about software, but consider for a moment what your product represents to new prospects. Sure, it holds the promise of efficiency or cost savings, but it also has the potential to disrupt, and to personally jeopardize their future and social standing at the company if, per chance, they were the one that recommended buying a software that ultimately failed to deliver.

Having survived the axe for one–plus years, people undoubtedly are stressed out and less willing to stand out from the crowd. Therefore, when we go knocking on a prospect’s door, we’ll stand a better chance of them opening it if our marketing collateral and messaging reflects their current frame of mind.

Scientific studies have proven that autonomy (that is, a sense of control) is an effective stress reducer. Nursing home residents are happier (and healthier) when they’re given more control over decision making. Franchise owners believe they have a better work-life balance, even though they earn less and work longer hours than they did as a corporate employee.

And in a more recent example that played out at town hall meetings throughout the country this past summer, U.S. citizens are extremely passionate when they fear they’re losing their choice in healthcare.

In the Chicago area where I live, AT&T is using the “freedom of choice” technique in their own advertising war against Comcast. While both companies offer triple-play packages, AT&T’s TV ad spots make it clear that with Comcast, there is no choice. All you get is cable, home phone, and Internet. AT&T, the ad continues, lets subscribers choose between home phone, Internet, TV, and wireless. While I’m not privy to the results of each campaign, my guess is that choice leads to more customers.

Likewise, as high tech marketers we can foster autonomy by emphasizing the options that already exist when doing business with our company. Here are four possible ways we can convey the sense of control when communicating with prospects and customers:

Choice #1: Options that cater to different types of users.

A choice in packaging to suit casual and power users, different licensing options (SaaS versus perpetual), and flexible payment options alleviate cash-strapped customers and prospects that may want to “get their feet wet” before fully committing to your product.

Choice #2: Collateral that encourages and promotes participation.

ROI calculators the prospects can fill in with details specific to their own companies, and case studies that demonstrate how different customers achieved similar goals by taking different paths to success, are two ways to encourage active participation (and control) on the prospect’s part.

Choice #3: Direct control over the communication process.

Newsletter subscription forms that let people choose how often they want to hear from you as well as the topics they’re interested in, and auto-responders that adjust to our readers’ behavior, can keep lukewarm prospects in the fold.

Even something as simple as giving website visitors a choice in how they contact us can foster a sense of control; with my personal favorite being the “live chat” option.

Choice #4: The freedom to proceed at their own pace.

A common complaint I hear is that eager ISVs push too hard to get prospects to “buy now.” During stressful times, we’d do better if we created multiple paths that allow potential customers to proceed through our sales funnel when they’re ready, which means we’ll have to be patient while we nurture prospects through an ongoing campaign.

Once you’ve identified the many ways that you give prospects and customers the freedom to choose, it becomes a matter of clearly articulating these choices in your marketing collateral and website copy.

In the end, it’s only human nature: We don’t like monopolies, and we don’t like being told what to do. “Choice” can be the start of a sales conversation.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sue Anderson-Lenz

Marketing Lure, Inc.

Today I’d like to continue a discussion I started in my last blog post: “Marketing to the Human Psyche.”

To recap, neural scientists have discovered a link between social needs and survival, a link which could trigger prospects to react to our marketing efforts as if we were a rabid dog.

I know what you’re thinking: “The software we sell isn’t going to harm anyone’s social status. If anything, it will elevate their status when higher-ups in their organization see how much money, time, and/or resources our software saves them.”

That might be true, but before prospects buy your software, they need to buy your story, and logic won’t work if they perceive you as a threat.

There are some techniques –- i.e. qualities –- that a recent strategy+business article suggests can be used to keep the threat response in check. One such quality is certainty. As human beings we crave it, and when we don’t get it, the uncertainty registers as a gap in our brain, causing us to pause until the conflict is resolved.

As marketers, we need to understand that any conflict we create in the prospect’s mind will either slow down the sales process, or stop it altogether. To keep the momentum up, create the perception of certainty. Here are six tactics that will make prospects feel more certain about you and your product.

Certainty-Building Tactic #1: Case Studies

We always knew that case studies can sell, but maybe now we understand a little better why they work: Prospects that relate to the people in our stories gain a sense of familiarity about our product.

Since no two people are identical, however, we need to have a portfolio of case studies that address the industries, geographical regions, organizations, and types of people we serve.

IT folks working in a Windows shop will relate to stories about other Windows-centric IT folks working in similar-sized organizations, government workers will relate to case studies that highlight other government workers, and so forth.

Certainty-Building Tactic #2: Analogies and comparisons

If you’re selling a bleeding-edge product, try to create a sense of familiarity by comparing yourself to a product or concept that was once unfamiliar, too.

Remember when we feared online banking? Nowadays, we don’t give it a second thought. If you can relate your product to something else that once conjured up similar feelings of uneasiness, you’ll help prospects “see” that your product isn’t as far-fetched as one might think.

Certainty-Building Tactic #3: Slower, more manageable steps

Nobody wants to have their name associated with a failed project, especially these days when budgets and job security weigh heavily on our minds. Marketers that sell large-scale, enterprise solutions can create a sense of certainty by helping prospects visualize a path to success.

Here again, case studies work because you can tell stories about how other clients achieved success by breaking down a large project into manageable chunks that fed off incremental successes.

Another way to accomplish this is to develop product offerings that let people buy only what they need right now, while at the same time showing them how your product will grow with them. In effect, people don’t want to buy a super-sized meal when all they need is a mid-afternoon snack.

Certainty-Building Tactic #4: Your own skin

Put some of your own skin in the game by finding ways to show prospects that you believe in your own product.

Money-back guarantees, technical support, and training are just a few good faith efforts that will make them feel more certain about their decision to go with you and your product.

Certainty-Building Tactic #5: Communities

While case studies are great, you can’t ask questions, and there’s always the suspicion that the story glosses over less-desirable bits.

Marketers can eliminate doubts by building into their website a means by which readers can send an e-mail or chat with the people in your stories.

Of course, this requires a bigger investment on your case study participants’ part, so if that seems unreasonable, set up an online community where prospects can freely discuss you and your product with existing customers.

Certainty-Building Tactic #6: An online sandbox

Remember how you felt when you installed Microsoft Office 2007? Despite the fact that I had been using Word for 20 odd years(!?), Word 2007, I found, was extremely unfamiliar and frustrating.

Let’s not follow Microsoft’s lead. Many software companies already offer free trials, but even then, people have to take the time to install the software; a task which can quickly become a roadblock to the sale.

If your software supports it, why not create a sandbox online where people can play with your product? The sandbox environment can be an extremely powerful tactic because 1) it makes it incredibly easy for prospects to demo your product to other people in their organization, and 2) it gives you unique insight into how customers actually use your product.

Stay tuned for my next blog post on November 17th, where I’ll cover the second psychological quality that will keep the rabid dog response at bay.

Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

To win over sophisticated, high tech buyers, we’re told we need to appeal to their rational side, using logic and value to sell, but while this strategy may appear to work in the general sense, there’s some interesting neural research that might make you re-think your marketing approach, especially when marketing to prospects that are stressed out.

Maslow, it seems, may have been wrong about our hierarchy of needs, specifically about our need to belong. While Maslow ranked esteem (which includes respect by others) behind physical needs such as food and shelter, current research suggests that we humans equate social needs to survival.

In a strategy+business magazine article entitled: “Managing with the Brain in Mind,” author David Rock describes how UCLA social neuroscience researcher Naomi Eisenberger used a computer game to measure the human brain’s reaction to rejection.

People in the study believed they were playing a ball-tossing game over the Internet with two other people, when in reality they were the only real person in the game. The game started with all three players (one human player, two simulated players represented by avatars) taking turns tossing a virtual ball. About midway through, the human player stopped getting the ball, leaving the study participant to watch while the two avatars continued to play.

What Eisenberg found is that the study participants’ brains reacted as if they were feeling physical pain when they were excluded from the game. Even after they realized they were playing with a computer rigged to exclude them, participants still spoke of feeling angry, snubbed, or judged, as if the avatars excluded them because they didn’t like something about them.

Complementary studies further suggest that social situations (e.g. the fear of being shunned) and physical threats (e.g. encounters with a bear or rabid dog) invoke a threat response in the brain that impairs our analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving abilities.

Perhaps it’s this link between survival and social acceptance that’s driving the popularity of social networking sites, and it may be one reason why prospects that are fearful of the economy don’t buy into rational arguments. When we’re worried about losing our jobs, we’re not interested in “rocking the boat,” even if that boat clearly cuts operational costs or improves efficiency!

When we market a product that could be perceived as a potential threat –- e.g. goes against what’s generally accepted, is complicated or risky to implement, etc. -– we can grease the sales process by recognizing our prospects’ unspoken need for social acceptance.

The “Managing with the Brain in Mind” article lists five qualities that managers can use to minimize the threat response. Two qualities jumped out at me as potential strategies marketers can leverage when selling high tech. In my next blog, I’ll discuss the two qualities (hence marketing strategies) in detail.

In the meantime, folks who want to read the entire strategy+business article can do so online by following this link, but you’ll need to register in order to gain access to the article.

Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

Perry Marshall, long thought of as THE guru for Adwords (Google pay-per-click) marketing, has an interesting post on his blog titled “Sometimes Google AdWords is the least effective way to reach your target customer.” In it he mentions four situations in which other marketing tactics (email being one) can be more effective than search.

These four non-search marketing situations are:

Situation #1: When you’re a manufacturer selling parts in large lots to other manufacturers.

As an example, when running a campaign for just such a client, Perry found that a Google Adwords campaign produced mostly consumers wanting to buy the part in single or very low quantities. Not surprisingly the campaign didn’t pay off.

Situation #2: When you’re selling high-end equipment, software or services to high level executives and low level people are a waste of time.

I’d like to add an emphasis on the last half of that sentence: and low level people are a waste of time.

Often said low-level people are assigned initial research duty and it pays to be visible to them to get your name on the long list. We advise clients to be sure this isn’t the case with their product or service before completely abandoning the idea of finding value in search marketing.

Situation #3: When you sell a product or service that solves a problem people don’t even realize they have.

This is bsolutely true. If people aren’t looking for you online, you’re going to have to generate awareness and demand for the overall solution first.

Situation #4: When your buyers are beyond the intro phase, know where they want to go online and are spending time on subject-specific websites instead of searching.

I think this is more of keyword issue than anything else. The more specific your keywords, the closer to purchase your buyers will be. At that point maybe they have left search behind and are more easily found on an industry website. This is where the Google content network – handled correctly – can pay off.

A little testing will answer that question for you.

Over the past half-decade of helping clients attract more leads and customers with search marketing, I’ve occasionally spoken to people for whom pay per click or search engine optimization just isn’t the best approach. The most important question to ask and answer is a fairly obvious one: are my prospects searching for my solution online?

If the answer is yes, go with it.

Technorati Tags: search, seo, search engine optimization, ppc, pay per click, email marketing

Curious about how other business-to-business marketers are investing marketing dollars in 2009? Here is some info that will interest you. This comes from a study, “B-to-B Marketing in 2009: Trends in Strategies and Spending,” conducted at the end of 2008 by MarketingProfs and Forrester Research. The study surveyed 656 marketing management pros in a variety of business-to-business companies.

Competition hangs tough.

With a bad economy weighing heavily on everyone, b-to-b marketers seemed willing to tough it out. 25% planned to increase their budgets in 2009 and 41% said their budgets would stay the same. You could think of it this way: 66% of your competitors aren’t going anywhere. 

B-to-B looks online.

Almost one half of the marketers surveyed (47%) planned to increase spending on company websites and search marketing. This is a very good move and one that we recommend to our clients constantly – first get your website in shape and then get visible to the search engines. Interestingly, only 13% of these marketers said they thought company websites were an effective marketing tactic. I must assume this is because most b-to-b websites seriously underperform. (Read about the 7 critical components of a high performance website).

Beyond the website and search marketing, 42% of b-to-b marketers said they planned to increase spending on online videos, podcasts or rich media; 41% planned to spend more on webinars; 39% were going to spend more on email. And 36% were preparing to increase spending on discussion forums, social networks and communities.

Offline loses.

Not surprisingly, the tactics that most b-to-b marketers planned to cut were in the offline world – what we think of as “conventional” marketing. This is a trend that has been going on for a while. The percentage of marketers planning to make cuts in this area looked like this: print advertising (55%), TV advertising (51%), radio (48%), trade shows and conferences (43%) and sponsorships (40%). 

Some tactics were projected to maintain the same level of funding: blogs (58%) inside sales/telemarketing (54%) and public relations (53%).

What should you do?

I’ve given my 3 steps for accelerating marketing effectiveness in previous articles on this blog, and they’re worth repeating again. We know they work because we implement them for clients day in and day out with substantial and cost-effective results.

1. Fix your website. I have two things to say about this: 1) your website is a critical part of your marketing program – it’s either helping you or hurting you, and 2) unfortunately, chances are high it’s hurting you. 
   
   
2.  Get visible on the search engines. Prospects are actively looking for you. They’re going to find your competitors. Shouldn’t they find you too? As more and more of your competitors pour online, this may become more challenging but no less important.  
    
3. Nurture the leads that aren’t ready to buy yet. Nearly every company I talk with has a collection of forgotten prospects – those website visitors or inquiries that weren’t ready to talk to a sales person. Many will buy sooner or later. You already know who they are; now do your best to make sure they buy from you. While others spend money generating new traffic, you’ll be ahead of the game.

The steps I’ve outlined here are not only effective, they’re also measurable – meaning you can tell exactly what you’re getting for your money. If you want some help getting started or getting to the next level, check out the website development, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization and lead nurturing programs from Tatum Marketing. Or just give me a call.

Technorati Tags: b-to-b, business-to-business, online marketing, websites, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, lead nurturing, lead development

As many of you know, I have a tendency to get very cranky about money being wasted on marketing. It’s just so dumb. With all the tools at hand for tracking, measuring, and optimizing marketing campaigns, there’s no reason to burn money.

Yet companies do it all the time.

And here’s one method that is particularly irksome: don’t follow up. Or if you do, make sure you wait a while.

Several years ago I saw a statistic on the number of companies that fail to follow up with contacts after a trade show. I don’t remember the exact number but – trust me – it was huge. Somewhere well over 50% of all the companies who spend tons of money planning and participating in trade shows simply never follow up with the prospects they meet. 

I thought this was outrageous until I saw a MarketingSherpa report containing information about how companies respond to email requests. Specifically, the report talks about marketing to engineers, but there is a message in it for all marketers.

Engineers, not surprising to anyone who has worked with them, prefer to communicate by email. So do a lot of other people. They will research products online and then send an email requesting more details. 

What happens to that email at your company?

MarketingSherpa found only 17% of suppliers responded to an email request within 24 hours. The majority (53%) took between one and two days. And everyone else took longer. 

Now think about this for a minute. I want to look at this from two angles. One, you’ve spent a lot of time and money building a solid website that addresses preliminary concerns and questions of your prospects. Your efforts have succeeded in interesting prospects enough to have them reach out, identify themselves and ASK you to contact them. Why would you wait?

The second angle is from your own perspective. Assume you’ve carefully researched a purchase. You’ve eliminated as many sources as possible and now you want some additional information from your top choices. This decision is top of mind with you right now. You send an email. Two days (or more) pass before you hear from the company. What are you thinking now? Are you still as hot to talk to a sales rep?

Probably not.

Things happen fast on the internet. We’ve become accustomed to immediate responses – even if they’re only automated ones. Other things being equal, the sale will almost always go to the team that is most responsive.

What a great opportunity! If you just make sure your marketing or sales team is responding to email requests within 24 business hours you could beat out 83% of your competitors. 

Technorati Tags: email, responsiveness, conversion

Last month one of our clients, Adam Washington (not his real name), achieved a 24% increase in website visitors signing up for a demo of his software. He did it basically overnight and without spending an extra dollar to drive traffic to his site.

How did he do it? He simplified the request form.

Adam got rid of a bunch of questions that weren’t necessary and asked only for information he really needed: the visitor’s name and email address. (Interestingly, through testing we found that adding a field for the visitor’s country increased response.)

The original form looking like this:

The new form looks like this:

Instead of spending a ton of money to drive more people to his website, Adam focused on the visitors who were already coming there. As a result of the form change, he was able to get many more of his website visitors to take the action he wants – and needs – them to take: download his product demo. This ultimately resulted in more sales opportunities for the sales team at a much lower cost.

Think about that for a minute.

Imagine this is your company. Let’s say 20% of the people who fill out the demo form eventually end up buying your product and an average of 80 people download the demo each month. Let’s also say that each purchase is worth $5000. Your product revenue is currently $1,200,000 annually.

By getting 24% more people to fill out the demo form as Adam did, you would add another 20 people to the pipeline each month and – if everything else remains the same – that adds 4 additional customers (@ $5000 each) every month. At the end of the year, revenue has increased by $240,000 and it cost you nothing!

This is why we advise so many of our clients to focus on optimizing conversion rates and not just on generating more leads. There are an almost unlimited number of ways to get more prospects moving through your pipeline – and all of them are less expensive than generating the prospects in the first place.

In the spirit of full disclosure, let’s go back to Adam’s form for a minute. You may have noticed that the phone number is missing from the new form, and if you try to pass this directly to a sales team for follow-up you’re likely to get some very loud pushback. In fact, one of our next tests with Adam will be to add the phone number back into this form and see what happens to the signup rate. There are also other ways to get the phone number for the sales team, but that’s not the point of this article.

The point of this article is to show how a few minor changes within the marketing process can have a dramatic effect on the number of prospects who make it through this conversion point in your marketing process and ultimately on your revenue.

Is Adam’s success with the demo form experiment a fluke? It could be – time will tell whether or not the modified form maintains its high performance level. But based on our experience with other clients like Adam, it will almost certainly continue to provide Adam’s company with increased prospects week after week after week.

Technorati Tags: conversion, optimization, prospects, leads, website, revenue

Yesterday a client sent me a great article from the Harvard Business Review called In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers. I urge you to read it.

The premise of the article – which is written by Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin and Geoffrey Moore – is that you can motivate executives to fund the purchase of your product or service even (or maybe especially) in a downturn by persuading them that your solution is not just nice – it’s essential.

This is not a startling new concept. We’ve been advising our clients for the past nine months to move beyond being “nice to have” and position themselves as a “must have. But the authors of this article provide a process for doing so.

Unlike popular consultative (or solution) selling models, which start with figuring out what prospective customers are worrying about, the authors suggest that it is our jobs as sellers and marketers to tell potential clients what they should be worrying about. They call this “provocative selling”.

Basically the steps are these:

1. Find a critical issue that is not being addressed well by most organizations.
2. Develop a provocative, original point of view about that issue. Come up with a new way people should be looking at the problem.
3. Deliver your provocation to an executive who has the ability to do something about it and show how your novel approach can help.

Let’s use marketing as an example.

The critical issue.

At Tatum Marketing, our experience in working with technology and other B2B companies shows that business owners and investors are increasingly agitated about cutting costs AND generating more leads. But the more they cut costs, the fewer leads they generate and the more danger they create for themselves – not only for surviving the down economy but also for protecting their market share and being correctly positioned for a recovery.

Business owners and marketers can run around in this vicious cycle for a long time – getting deeper and deeper into a whole, but it really is unnecessary.

The provocation.

Business leaders are too focused on cutting costs and not open to opportunities that are staring them in the face.  Most marketing programs are so full of leaks and wasteful spending, just plugging the holes can save money – while at the same time increase the amount and quality of leads or traffic being generated.

Put into the hands of professionals who know a) what works and what doesn’t work, b) how to get the greatest results for the lowest cost, and c) where to find and plug the holes, marketing efforts can deliver more leads even with a reduced budget.

And it can do so without endangering the future of the business.

The delivery.

If you’re a business owner or an executive who can do something about this critical problem, I have an offer for you. If you qualify, we’ll take a look at your marketing program – perform a diagnostic study. We’ll show you exactly how you can fund a more efficient marketing program, exactly what results you can expect from it and in exactly what order you should address it.

Interested? Just send me an email or give me a call.

But whether or not you’re interesting in my offer, everyone in B2B marketing or sales should take a look at the HBR article.

Technorati Tags: lead generation, cutting marketing costs, provocative selling, marketing

If time is money and cash is king, then where does that leave Twitter?

The media tells us social media sites are where we need to be, but does all the time and effort you spend translate into new business or higher customer retention?

If you’re a high-tech firm that has derived tangible business benefits from your Twitter investment, I want to hear from you!

Share with me how you’ve worked Twitter into your marketing plan *plus* the specific, measurable results you’ve achieved since its introduction… and in return your company could earn a prominent spot in an upcoming Twitter story I’m writing.

But please, no pie-in-the-sky…. Don’t tell me how Twitter helps you create “brand awareness,” or how you’ve built up a following of thousands. None of that matters if you can’t tell me how you’ve turned that into money for your firm. I need real data, practical examples, and concrete tips to make this story truly valuable and entirely different from all the other puff pieces out there.

Help out your fellow cynics. Summarize your real-life Twitter experience in a short e-mail sent to sue-at-marketinglure.com, and don’t forget to tell me how I can reach you for a follow-up interview.

Thanks in advance for your help and insight!

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

P.S. Deadline for submissions is March 31st.

At the beginning of a new year – be it calendar or fiscal – it’s traditional (often even required) to plan out the next year with all the lofty goals and tactics to be deployed to meet those goals.

It’s January. Do you have a plan? Do you really need one?

I understand that planning is necessary for budget allocation purposes. And, it’s a fantastic method for setting measurable goals and holding someone accountable for meeting those goals. If everyone did this, I’d be a big fan of the system.

But it’s my observation that far more often than not, this annual planning session itself presents a big obstacle to getting anything done. The current system works only under two conditions: 1) when you have a well-staffed internal marketing department with people who know what they’re doing or 2) you pay to have someone outside the company develop the plan for you and then you’re really dedicated to execution.

In most small and even mid-sized companies the reality is that this planning never gets done and I think that’s because it’s just too much – too much time, too much expertise required, too much distraction from activities that directly increase revenue.

It’s also been my experience that on the occasions that a marketing plan actually does get done, it rarely gets followed. So what was the point?

I’m not even sure that an annual marketing plan is a good idea – unless you realize that it must be dynamic. If you’d created an annual plan at the beginning of 2008 and executed it to the letter – without adjusting for economic changes – you’d probably be in big trouble now.

But this article is not for those who are successful at marketing planning. This article is for company leaders who haven’t gotten around to creating a marketing plan – or who have created one that sits on a shelf.

Is the lack of a marketing plan keeping you from moving forward with your marketing? Then stop worrying about the plan and try this:

Figure out the single most important thing you need to accomplish with your marketing in 2009. It shouldn’t be too hard to do that. Most business owners tell me they want more leads. In this current economy, it may be that you really need to cut costs (without lowering marketing effectiveness, of course).

Focus single-mindedly on this objective and you’ll protect yourself from being distracted by marketing programs and tactics that you think you should be using. (For example, social media is very hot right now, but its ability to quickly drive leads for business-to-business firms is still in doubt).

If you really feel the need to create a plan, check out Guy Kawasaki’s matrix for what he calls the world’s shortest marketing plan.

Otherwise, just ask yourself these questions:

• What do you need to accomplish most?
• How are you going to do it?
• Who is going to be in charge?
• How much will are you willing or able to invest in the program?
• When do you want it launched?
• How will you evaluate its success?

If you don’t have all the answers yourself, that’s good. You’ll be forced to seek expert help whether from the inside (internal staff) or the outside (outsourcing). Involving the experts is not a bad thing.

Technorati Tags: marketing plan, outsourcing, strategy, getting marketing done