Marketing Interactions

From Personas to Customer Scenarios

Personas have been talked about a lot lately.  They've been touted as the big new deal.  Not that I disagree, but they are really just an expansion in utilizing traditional customer segmentation.  I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about online interactions and customer experience and how that extends from personas.

A logical next step for personas is extending them to customer scenarios.  Leigh Duncan, over at Marketing Profs, has a great post, The Power of Personas, that touches on defining customer scenarios. Besides that, her dialogue of a typical initiative meeting is sadly accurate.  When you read it, I bet you're nodding your head.  Who hasn't been in a meeting like that?

But I digress. Anyway, Leigh defines a customer scenario as: "These describe, in further detail, the needs, behaviors, preferences and requirements that will fuel the development of customer experience. Customer scenarios essentially describe the optimal experience the customer should have, and can be used to drive the development process - and as a reality check during testing."

For online application, this means you need to think through the whole process.  You create a link for a user to download a whitepaper.  Now what?  There's a whole host of things you should be thinking about.  Some of them are:

• Why would the user be interested in downloading the whitepaper?
• What value are they looking for or need are they trying to answer?
• What call to action will they get from the whitepaper?
• What emotion will it generate to spur them to take action?
• What happens after they download the whitepaper? What message do they get at the end of this interaction?
• What step is this in the relationship building process?
• How will you get them to move forward down that path?

This is really hard to manage in an online world because the exchange is not under your control.  Not really. Think about what steps the prospect has to go through to become your customer.  What are the transition points?  How do you drive them?  How do you create both an intellectual and an emotional bond with your prospects and customers? 

A clue is that it's not only about the content.  It's also about how you treat them during their online experience.  It's about the experience they have - all the nuances rolled together.

Think about:

• What you say on a confirmation page
• What you offer in addition to a thank you (other links of interest relating to the subject matter of the whitepaper, link to blog on related subject, link to discussion forum, FAQs, etc.)
• How you use your subscription/mailing lists - do you personalize, or send the same thing to everyone?
• What opportunities for collaboration and creating conversation exist?
• What do you do with the information you gather or the knowledge you accumulate?
• How are you asking them to take the next step?  Do you ask everyone the same way?
• How do you want them to feel? (energized, excited, satisfied, more knowledgeable, curious, anticipation, motivated, validated...)

Just a few thoughts about scenario thinking for online interactions.  What are you thinking?

Collaborative Storytelling

What pumps you up? When you come into the possession of new knowledge, what is it that makes it valuable to you?  It may be good enough to have confirmation that an idea you had is valid.  It may also be that you need to go out and share it with others.

Storytelling is usually the result.  What do you think happens around watercoolers?  In fact, the whole reason for watercoolers is sharing stories.  Stories are powerful.  They are personal expressions and, in a company context, they shape corporate culture. 

If you want to build a collaborative exchange on your external websites or internal portals, then I suggest you utilize stories.  Anecdote did a survey in Australia and asked 400 executives to share information about awareness and attitudes of story and narrative techniques in organizations.  They've culled 7 story forms valued within organizations that are great examples of effective knowledge sharing.

Some of them can be effectively utilized on your websites and portals.  In fact, you may use some version of them now.  But, look at how you're presenting the information.  Is it in an engaging format or is it dry, boring and maybe too technical to have your people or your customers fully embrace and "get" it?

• Hero stories for sales - these should be shared on your sales portal.  They can be utilized by the sales team whenever they are facing similar circumstances and insights about how to replicate that success can be learned by others.  The salesperson who supplies the story can become a resource for their peers in these situations.  Plus, they make everyone feel good.
• Success stories - probably case studies now.  How much story is in them?
• Lesson/Learning stories - these can be really powerful.  They can also be painful. Usually they stem from something that has gone wrong.  Instead of sweeping them into a file cabinet, use them.  Find the insights in what happened and turn them into solutions to the obstacles that caused a lost sale or a way to save a defecting customer.  Make them inspirational. The same can be said for your white papers.  Are they interesting for the reader?  Or are they all about how great your products are? Read them again with an eye for what you want the reader to get out of them.

If you can get people to share stories, you've got a conversation that's interesting, most likely effective and will help up your participation levels on portals and websites.  Try using this tactic with your discussion forums to get people talking about an issue that needs insights and exploration. 

Getting people to share experiences can be a huge bonus for companies that need to capture actionable knowledge in order to promote growth.

Which is probably all of us.

What are you doing to facilitate storytelling in your organization?

Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way

Michael Webb's book, Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way's title makes it sound like it'll be a dry, technical read that's too much trouble.  But, I was pleasantly surprised by how easily he acclimates readers to his subject matter and how valuable his insights are.  If you have a sales process and a marketing process, you may want to rethink both of them in terms of a customer production process.

I see you scratching your heads, but really, the ultimate goal for both sales and marketing is producing customers. Right?

Michael makes a clear case for interweaving the acts of sales and marketing to generate the best results.  He explains how Six Sigma can be applied to this process in a way that doesn't take a Ph.D. to understand. In fact, it may save you from taking on initiatives that will only mask or exacerbate the problems you're having today.

One of the most valuable tools he talks about is customer value mapping.  For those of use who focus on online marketing and sales optimization, these maps can be extremely valuable for understanding and building a productive interaction process that transitions prospects to customers.  It can also help you find out where it's failing or stalling.

But, don't just take my word for it, see Jill Konrath's review, read this PDF of Q&A with the author, and go download chapter one here. You can also check out the Six Sigma Selling Blog.

Facilitating Collaboration

Back in 2000, my company started trying to make an impact with collaboration. Didn't work then, but we kept trying.  Slowly, it has evolved into interactive websites and portals that are embraced by our clients because they don't label it collaboration.  Interestingly enough.

The biggest problem is facilitating the use of the tools and getting people to interact through them.  What I've seen is that if the tools make life easier [and I'm talking substantial difference here] adoption will come.  The problem is when what makes life easier happens AFTER the tools are in use.  Depending on what type of tools, let's say a discussion forum, there's nothing to say or react to until there's a discussion going, which means posts and building an information base that people can act on.

There are a couple of posts about why collaboration tools are underused that are good for thought.  Dave Pollard has a very thoughtful post that lists some reasons to consider:

• People are unfamiliar with the tools
• Tools like Skype, Blogs, Wikis and discussion forums are not intuitive
• Most people have poor collaboration and interpersonal skills which can be exacerbated by the tools
• Training for the tools isn't geared for how people learn (watching, doing)
• People don't know who to talk to or, if they do, those people aren't online

None of these are insurmountable problems.  In order to facilitate the use of collaboration, the way the tools are introduced is critical.  The biggest problem I see with clients is the "if we build it they will come" problem.  Instead of creating the frustration that's bound to occur when this type of approach is used, why not consider hiring a facilitator to direct, guide and train in a team environment and show the users how effective an interactive portal community can be?

The trick of collaboration is to have it be useful.  But the very nature of collaboration requires participation to be valid. One person, alone, will not make the difference. When you implement collaborative tools, the first thing to consider, as always, is what value you are adding to the lives/work of the people you want to involve in the conversations.  How does their participation make their life/work/experience/productivity/success better/faster/richer?

Shawn, over on Anecdote, offers some further ideas about how we could improve collaboration tools. Most importantly, he makes the point of introducing only the tools that are needed and that the volume of content needs to be managed in a way that's workable.

So, how smart your tools are and how well the discussions and content are managed, indexed and displayed in context will influence how successful your collaborative efforts will be.  But learning and facilitation are key points that will get the initiative off the ground. If you are going to invest in the tools, then you should actively manage the adoption and the results by demonstrating the value to the users you are trying to enroll. Reward their participation or they will leave.

How are you facilitating collaboration in your company?

How can Marketing make a bigger impact?

How much do you know about your customers?  Who knows this information?

In today's customer-experience world, the only way your company is going to sell your products is by providing value to the customer.  This can't be your value or what you "think" their value is, it has to actually mesh with your prospect's perspective and recognition of value. 

Value can be nebulous, depending on the day, time, strategic goal or crisis of the moment.  Once you think you know what's valuable to them, do you continue to refine that? All the time? How do you make sure that all your salespeople know? Better yet, are you finding out what your salespeople know and sharing that knowledge across the enterprise?

Jill Konrath has a great post today offering advice for marketers. She talks about a few key things that can be very effective as collaborative web intiatives:

1. "Create a customer-knowledge center.
Develop in-depth information re: customers. Make sure that salespeople can access the info by different vertical market segments and different job types. For example, I'd like to find out about the Chief Sales Officers for large technology firms. Help sellers understand how your value proposition connects with the various decision makers."

Knowledge is powerful, if it's created in an actionable way.  If your knowledge center is part of an interactive sales portal where both marketing and sales can contribute stories, information and tips and collaborate about successful sales, then it becomes an enterprise knowledge center that can evolve and be used by others when they encounter similar sales enconters or to overcome obstacles by building on the successes that have come before.  Depending on how you implement the knowlege center, it could easily provide refined search results that put providing particular value into a context that's empowering to the salesperson and streamlines their process of preparing for and winning sales.

2. "Develop sales tools.
The most important thing you can develop for sellers are tools that help them sell properly. If at all possible, model your tools after what your top sellers create (or would create) on their own...Replace brochures with case studies, white papers, phone script templates, obstacle-handling guides, talk-tracks, question guides, sales-driven PowerPoint presentations, ROI analysis tools, webinars, teleseminars."

Don't just create flat, static sales tools.  Create tools that your salespeople access from the sales portal.  Tools that marketing can track usage of so they know which of the things they're providing are useful.  Surround the tools with collaborative features like comments and ratings and conversation, so marketing can learn and provide what really works and so that salespeople can learn from their peer's experiences the best way to use the tools. Make it part of your knowledge center and make it a source of measurement to help marketing demonstrate ROI.

Jill has some other good ideas too.  Go read her post.

What is your marketing department doing to make an impact on sales?

The Zen of Participation

Participation is the driving force behind the emergence of social software.  Control is shifting. It used to be that companies would publish information on the network or their websites or portals and people could read but not contribute. Dictatorial in style.  That's different now.  Or it should be.  Or maybe it's that it soon will be, if it's not already changing in your company's network, websites and portals.

Scott Karp's post, The Zen of 2.0, made me stop and think.  "The Zen of 2.0 is about networks — and the connectivity, interoperatbility, and “network effects” that networks enable. No medium, unit of content, individual, application, action, or unit of data exists in isolation. Every action has a ripple effect throughout the network. The term “social” as applied to Web 2.0 is really about networks."

The key for me in his statement is the word "isolation." It's kind of like, if a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to see it, does it make a sound?  As portals become more interactive and encourage the contribution of actionable knowledge that's real, road-tested, sincere and honest, people will be affected by those contributions. Their outlooks will change.  The way they do things may shift to incorporate best practices that were previously unknown. Process improvement may become more holistic as those who excel help those still learning.  Voices previously unheard from may discover they have something to contribute and choose to actively participate and leave their passive role behind.

He also says, "The Zen of 2.0 is a different way of thinking about media, software, content, commerce, etc. that is in many ways completely counterintuitive to the 1.0 way of thinking."

The comparison to 1.0, which pushed static content to people with no invited participation other than perhaps a download, is startling in contrast with many of today's network experiences.  Expectations have changed and there's no putting the lid back on that. In order to grow and flourish in today's marketplace, encouraging interactions and providing rewarding experiences in exchange will become the norm.

"...the reality of the Web is that everything we do, even at the level of clicking links and loading web pages, is contributing to the network."

Which is all about participation.  And the thing here is that not everyone has to contribute, but  everyone who engages, by being there and using the contributed information will end up spreading it through how they internalize it into their own actions.  Whether they gain insight about a new sales tactic from a colleague's success story shared their company's sales portal or learn about how to solve a tricky issue with a product through an exchange between a customer and a support rep, the act of participation (active or not) will increase knowledge faster than static content ever could.

Reminds me of a line Keanu Reeves had in a movie (shamefully can't remember the title). "I'm awed by your ability to show up." (Exact quote not guaranteed)

There's something timely about interactive exchanges.  The immediacy of them elevates their importance on your radar.  The idea that things are changing and you might be missing out on something spurs people to some level of participation. To encourage active participation, take a look at this post by Kathy Sierra about Being Provocative. Her insights give you some ideas about how to drive attention.

Here's the takeaway.  All of it counts. Showing up can make a difference. All of it has impact on the thinking and actions that people partake in because of their connectedness and experience with fluid and actionable information.

In closing, Scott says, "Understanding how participation in the network enhances the value of the network is the Zen of 2.0."

What are you doing to understand participation within your company and how it impacts the work that gets done?

Gartner's CRM Summit - Chicago

It's always nice when one of the big analysts agrees with things I've been saying about CRM and interactions and building a customer centric business.  If you'd like an insider's view of what's going on at Gartner's CRM Summit in Chicago this week, Mike Santoro is blogging about what he's hearing.

So far he has three posts, but you'll want to keep an eye on his blog to see what else he posts.

Day One Observations
Project Management Best Practices and Mobility
Predictions for 2006 and Customer Centric Business

A telling excerpt from the Customer Centric Business post: "He [Scott Nelson, Managing VP of Application Strategy and Governance]  went on to give an example of a company that spent millions of dollars to hire the best sales people, the most understanding customer service reps, the friendliest delivery people. Every channel was perfect except their website was difficult to navigate and their return policy was poor. A customer that had to deal with either of these business elements was instantly turned off. All of the money spent in the other areas was for nothing."

Paying attention to how your customers interact with you online is not to be overlooked.  There are many ways to manage online interactions and to generate demand and build relationships in a productive and embracing way. Not managing your online experiences can greatly affect your customer acquisition, loyalty and retention capabilities.  Worth a thought or two.

The Promise of Technology vs. Status Quo

What keeps you from taking on an online project that you've never done before? Chances are, one of the biggest reasons is the status quo. 

The status quo says that everything should stay the same.  Status quo clings to the If It's Not Broken Don't Fix It theory.  Status quo says taking chances is too risky.  Status quo is ultimately about playing it safe, protecting egos and fighting inevitable change.

When you're trying to evolve a business, status quo can be your worst nightmare.  In today's marketplace, change is happening at record speed.  If you don't join in the new, more socially driven, interactive environment developing on the web, will you get left behind?

Maybe so, maybe not.  But take a look at your interactions with your customers.  Do you see any room for improvement that can provide positive impact for both you and your customers?  (Remember that your employees and partners are also "customers"). 

Seth Godin's post, Top Ways to Defend the Status Quo is a great list of all the reasons you'll probably hear inside your company when the subject of change is brought up.  Some of my favorites are:

• "I don't think our customers will go for that, and without them we'd never be able to afford to try this." [Have you asked them?]
• "We'll let someone else prove it works... it won't take long to catch up." [You're choosing to be second, third, or....?]
• "It's never been done before." [God, what an opportunity!]
• "We're already doing it." [Really? Are you sure?]
• "That will never work." [Why not? This one is like the proverbial brick wall. Sheesh!]

When you're considering an online project, you're biggest concern is what will happen if you fail?  You can't afford to have your new effort fall short.  Or even worse, not pay off as projected. On the other side of the scale is all the bad things that will happen if you don't undertake the intiative.  Like, we'll stagnate, our competition will get the advantage, our customers will choose another vendor, we'll lose our place in the analyst line-up.

Those are real pressures.  They are worth considering.  But the object of online projects is to add to your flexibility, agility, and growth.  Battling the status quo is the reasoning behind a phased implementation.  Do a little at a time, verify it, tweak it to high performance and then move on to the next piece.

The real problem that causes status quo to kick up is often that companies bite off more than they can easily handle.  The longer the time to launch, the more time for doubt and second-guessing.  The more time you allow for the marketplace to keep changing while you're still building the big thing that will change the world.  And yet, by the time you complete it, the world will have moved on, proving that all the doubters were right.

Innovation can be a messy situation.

But, if you take small steps and phase your implementation, building in measurements for success along the way, you can benefit from the following:

• small wins that get good attention
• the ability to shift perceptions
• adoption and input that help refine further phases
• the possibility of shuffling initiatives to meet changing needs as they happen
• BUY IN

The most important thing to realize is that standing still gets you no where.  Inertia gets you left behind.  But incremental change is easier to swallow.  It's only a mouthful instead of the whole enchilada and people can handle something they can chew on. 

What are you doing to make sure the status quo doesn't paralyze your company?

Communities Take Work

Transitioning your website from a marcom destination to an interactive community experience takes a lot of work.  You might think you have the best idea in the world and if you build it, they will come.  But that's not necessarily true. 

Most communities are not MySpace.  What I mean by that, is that they won't become overnight phenoms. With B2B, it's even harder.  Endeavoring to offer something valuable that business people will spend their time participating in is a difficult challenge.  Time is precious.  Worthwhile experiences are hard to come by. 

So, what do you do?

Getting people to participate in a community is a relationship-building challenge.  You can have all the bells and whistles in the world, but if your content is not continuously fresh, if your purpose is not perceived as valuable, and their experience isn't worthwhile they won't come back.  Communities are built by creating that need to return because the experience you deliver meets a continuing need.

It can't be a one-time need or, once they've visited and found the solution, their impulse to return is diminished.  This is why customer portals can be viable if focused on delivering a perceived customer value. It can't be just the place at the end of your URL.

When evaluating or building your community, think about and focus on the following:

• Why do/would your customers log on to the site?
• What interactive tools can/will they utilize to meet their needs?
• Which tools are used most? And how can you build off those features to deliver more and deeper value?
• What are you learning from your users? This includes site analytics, feedback, participation levels, support requests.
• How fresh is your content? Continuously?
• How involved is your participation? A community won't thrive in a vacuum.
• What benefits is your company getting from the community?

That last one threw you, didn't it? A community is a mutually beneficial experience.  Or it should be. If you don't perceive a value or utilize the community to benefit the company, then you won't manage it in a way that builds loyalty and participation. Enthusiasm and sincerity must shine through or your community will be the worst thing you've ever done in providing customer experience.

One of our customers is building a fantastic community for their global customer base.  They created it as an extension of their marcom website. It's obvious to new customers there are benefits beyond the initial purchase. It's also obvious that the company's customers have lasting relationships with them and receive value from their extended participation.

• They work on it daily. 
• They have team meetings three times each week. 
• The entire company is invested in contributing to the online community's success. 
• They continually refine existing tools and design new experiences from what they learn.
• They are responsive. Immediately.

They are successful because they believe in what they're doing and in providing the absolute best experience they can. Then they try to make it better.  It isn't easy. But it's very effective.

What are you doing to build community with your customers?