MarketSense

The Forgotten Art - The Thank You Note

In our busy world, it seems to me that we have lost the art of the nicety. My mother taught me to write thank you notes whenever I received a gift from someone not present. I recall laboring over the handwritten Christmas thank you notes to my aunt Inez.

Today, the practice of sending personal thanks has been replaced by a quick email, a phone call or an e-card. However, they just aren't the same as a handwritten note.

I have a good friend that will always take the time to write a thank you note for gifts received. She even does this when I give her gifts in person. She uses the most wonderful choice of blank cards and always writes specifically and personally. Knowing how incredibly busy she is, her notes are a very special touch which I appreciate.

One would think that there is no place for personal, handwritten cards or thank you notes in business. But personal, handwritten cards are about relationships and

business is about relationships

In fact, I have used hand-written notes in business to great effect.

Encouragement and Support

When you have employees reporting to you, it is important to understand what forms of reward they appreciate. Some professionals prefer private words of approval. Other professionals prefer monetary bonuses. Others prefer momento-based awards (plaques, certificates, etc.).

When an employee rises up to a challenge, succeeds at a difficult assignment, muddles on through problems, helps other co-workers, or other praise-worthy activity, a note of encouragement, congratulations, or appreciation perform their special magic.

Business often tends to the impersonal. A personal note acknowledges a person and their value to you and the organization.

Appreciation

In business, we often take for granted when others in our company go out of their way to help us. After all, it is all for the good of the business.

However, I have found that the willingness of professionals to go out of their way for you depends upon a number of things: your affability, your recognition that they will have to make an extra effort, and their personal interest in the request.

After working with a remote team on a year-long project, I wanted to show my appreciation for their efforts. I was able to wrangle some small monetary gifts for the key individuals on the team. I made it a point of writing a personal, customized note to each individual that was sent along with the note.

The response. Many of the individuals regarded more highly the personal note of appreciation than the monetary gift. It's not all about the money.

We shouldn't be surprised. Personal touches ease our relationships and show others they are valued. Just imagine what would happen if we took the time to personally appreciate our customers, our partners, and our co-workers. Because it costs us a little bit more, personal cards and thank you notes stand out. Why not consider ways to incorporate them into your work-life.

Share your stories about receiving or sending thank you notes in business.

Breaking Down the Walls Between Marketing and Sales

In my last entry, I discussed how the walls between marketing and sales had grown to the point that they are now unscalable in many organizations. These walls significantly impair the success of both the marketing and sales organizations as well as the business. It should be a top business imperative to break down these walls. But how does one do that?

1. Make marketing and sales goals one and the same.

I walk into marketing organizations these days and find that marketing is measured on the number of leads they generate. Sales is measured on the deals won and the revenue delivered to the business. In someone's mind, these two goals are related. Unfortunately, the behaviors these goals drive aren't. With lead generation as the marketing goal, marketing has no responsibility for the success of that lead. Because sales has no stake in the creation of highly qualified leads, they can justify at best half-heartedly following up on those leads. At worst, they can ignore the leads altogether.

The goals for both sales and marketing need to be related to deals won and revenue delivered. When this is done, the responsibility for achieving those goals is distributed more appropriately across the two organizations. Marketing must take on a larger share of the responsibility for nurturing leads into highly qualified, ready-to-buy prospects. Product marketing has both the skills and the expertise to play an enormous role in that enablement. Sales must take on a larger share of the responsibility for obtaining highly qualified leads. When sales shares in the responsibility for obtaining those leads, they will take greater ownership of following up on those leads and turning them into deals.

When marketing and sales share the same deal and revenue goals, it changes everything.

2. Build individual relationships between marketing and sales.

Effective business is all about relationships. I have seen organizations where sales, who is supposed to be so good at building relationships, treats marketing like a third class citizen. I've seen marketing organizations whose opinions of sales are that they are badly spoiled children. A lack of respect and appreciation is rampant between individuals and organizations. In both organizations, each sees the other as an inhibitor to their goals (see previous point).

What both sides don't see is that when the other organization is alienated, their own job becomes a lot more difficult. Sales struggles with prospect objections and longer sales cycles. They don't realize that with access to prospects and customers, marketing can provide tools to quickly and easily help sales address those objections. And those longer sales cycles the sales team is encountering? With more visibility into the sales process, marketing can deliver the content that helps shorten the buying process. In the reverse direction, marketing can't do its job effectively without sales' help. Marketing needs sales to share their contact lists, bring in referrals, and solidify references. These all fuel the marketing machine.

The bottom line is that marketing and sales need to spend quality time together. Each needs to see that the other is willing to help them succeed. And when both succeed, the business succeeds.

Today, there is little trust between marketing and sales. By focusing on shared goals and building relationships, businesses can build a powerhouse team that together can achieve much more than the simple sum of the alienated parts.

How Did the Walls Get so High?

I always wondered how the walls between marketing and sales grew so high that they seem unscalable now. This wasn't always the case.

Early in my marketing career at IBM, I worked with a stellar sales team who really appreciated the relationship and the insight and assistance product marketing could provide. Back then, we didn't have dedicated sales engineers. So, it was product marketing who was invited out on prospect visits to assist consultatively in the sale. Those relationships gave both marketing and sales a deep appreciation for each other's strengths. The joint work that ultimately brought in those won deals bound us together.

When I joined Sun Microsystems, we had a dedicated sales and sales engineer team that worked very cooperatively with the product marketing team. Again, product marketing was invited to assist on sales calls. We presented our products. We even trained the sales team on how to effectively sell the product.

Then came the explosion of the World Wide Web and it seems like everything changed. Product marketers now had a new medium for presenting their content - the Internet. Their workload saw manifold increases. With less time to nurture the relationships with sales, marketing started throwing their internal content onto shared intranets for consumption (or not) by the sales team. Without the regular contact with sales, product marketers lost their access to critical information about the prospects and the sales cycle. Sales was left to their own devices to complete the sale.

Along came permission marketing and online newsletters. Marketing's focus shifted to driving lead generation volume. As marketing programs connected with prospects, those leads were thrown across the wall to sales, never to be heard about again. Marketing suspected that sales wasn't really doing anything with those leads, but they had no way of really knowing. Sales found the volume of the leads rather daunting and the value of those leads questionable.

The advent of Customer Relationship Management systems only further highlighted how high the wall between marketing and sales had grown. Marketing now had a way to prove that sales wasn't doing anything with the leads they generated. They could see all of those marketing dollars spent on developing leads going to waste. Sales was cast in the role of the culprit and marketing in the role of the police.

This is where I find many companies today. The connection between marketing and sales is broken and in some cases hostile. The organizations no longer share common goals. Marketing loses, sales loses, and the company loses. With so many resources available to us, we have lost the most valuable resource of all - strong marketing and sales relationships.

It is imperative that these walls be broken down. My next post will discuss ways to build stronger marketing and sales cooperation.

Top 5 Product Marketing Activities for a Successful 2010

The new year gives each of us an opportunity to take a fresh look at our products. But a product marketer's job is multi-faceted. Our responsibilities can be overwhelming. And that is before we get mired in the flames of fire drills.

If you have only 5 key activities to focus on that will help you build your professional success this year, what would they be?

Here is my top five list.

1. Talk to your customers and prospects.

A lot has changed in the past year. The on-going economic downturn has altered business-as-usual. Chances are that you have already seen your own traditional assumptions ripped apart. Use the new year as an opportunity to find out what is going on in your customers' and prospects' world. Listen for new pains and new challenges that can open up new opportunities for your company.

2. Revise your buyer persona(s).

If you don't have buyer persona(s) that encapsulate your knowledge about your key buyers, create them. The challenges of the past year are sure to have changed your buyer's attitudes, motivations, behaviors, and size of their pocket book. Use your conversations with customers and prospects to glean this critical knowledge. You will be amazed how your efforts with buyer personas will stimulate internal conversation and open up new avenues for success.

3. Review your product's benefits, features and value.

Over the past year, the business environment has likely changed your prospects' and customers' needs and priorities. Now is the time to check to see whether what your products deliver align with those needs and priorities. If they don't, you will find it an uphill battle to sell this year.

Identify product changes that must be made. Investigate new product opportunities that are uncovered.

4. Identify and fill gaps between your prospect's buying process and your marketing and sales processes.

We forget that our prospects have options. Every time your marketing or sales activities don't meet the prospect where they are in their buying process, you create a gap. You may think that gaps are o.k. Your lead nurturing program or sales rep will step in and save the day. Think again. Gaps are open invitations for your prospect to get their needs met elsewhere -- talking with others, searching the Internet, and finding your competitors. Gaps sabotage your own marketing and sales efforts.

If you haven't mapped out your prospect's buying process, now is the time to do so. By doing so, you won't lack for new and innovative product marketing ideas for the year.

5. Embark on a mini web content overhaul.

If I could pick one product marketing activity that offers the biggest bang for the buck, it would be improving the web site content and flow. Your web site has the greatest opportunity for engaging your prospect and ushering them through the majority of their buying process. To do this, it must anticipate the prospect's questions, concerns, and objections. It must encourage exploration by different types of buyer modalities. It must speak to the interests, needs, and motivation of the prospect. And it must do so in the prospects' language.

Need some help getting started? Check out my eBooks:

Killer Messaging - 9 Mistakes that Kill your Marketing Messages
The Customer Value Proposition
Understanding the Buying Process

To Create or not to Create a Whole Product Bundle

We've been talking about whole product bundling. Today, we will focus on how to decide whether to create a whole product bundle.

When investigating any product formation, a product marketer usually researches questions like:

• Are buyers likely to have any of the whole product components at hand?
• What affect does adding these components have on the cost of the product?
• Does the addition of these components increase or decrease the longevity of the product?
• What are the manufacturing implications of the whole product bundle?
• What are the service implications of the whole product bundle?
• What affect does adding these component do to the buyer's perceived value of the product?
• How does the product price need to change to cover the costs of these additional components?
• How does the whole product affect the financials for the product, product line, and brand?
• How do these components change the way our product is compared with the competition?

The answers to each of these questions warrants detailed investigation and analysis. However, the answers can still create conflicting trade-offs. So, how does one decide?

I suggest that the decision point be around one question.

Can you sell the whole product value to the buyer at a viable price?

At first this one question may seem simplistic. What about supply? What about demand? Not to diminish them, but to me, these are implementation issues.

The critical point is that to achieve whole product success, you must be able to persuade many buyers that your differentiation is worth the delta in price. That means two things.

1. The differentiation must be important and attractive to the buyer.
2. The price differentiation must be commeasurate with the perceived value.

The value-price question is fundamental for any product, whole product or not. However, it is easy to use implementation challenges as an easy excuse not to deliver a whole product. With the global resources we have available today, implementation hurdles shouldn't be show stoppers. They should be challenges that spur the creativity of the entire enterprise.