Author: remap_content_admin

Here’s what we’re told:

• Marketing is selfish
• Marketing is a scam
• Marketing is pressuring
• Marketing is short-term

Beliefs like this are perpetuated by business owners who don’t know any better. But they’re also embraced by marketing and ad agencies themselves. Of the latter, some do know better, but many just worship – and somehow justify – the scam-magic of marketing, which we associate with “direct marketing”. Like claiming that your online webinar is “full, would you like to get on the waiting list”? Or the more classic version – sending out 10,000 fliers to recoup the cost by getting 13 customers.

According to LinkedIn, there are 665,000 businesses in “Marketing and Advertising” ((The two biggest are Google and Facebook. The next 5 biggest are the “Big 5” advertising conglomerates – Omnicom, WPP, Publicus, Dentsu, and IPG. Collectively, these firms own most of the famous ad agencies (Ogilvy, Young & Rubicam) along with about 5,000 subsidiary agencies. But in a delicious twist on the usual oppressive monopolization of industries, 100,000’s of thousands of small, niche marketing agencies are thriving all over the world.)). And close to 10 million individuals classified the same way – as working in marketing and advertising.

Not easy to change the way 10 million people think about their profession. I am not even going to try. My job is limited to changing just a small group of people – maybe a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, over my lifetime. And one of the things I’d like to change is how we view the role of marketing in our business.

Why do I want to do that?

Because I want to see experts in their fields transform into authorities beyond their fields – visible to the people they serve, not just their peers in their fields. And I want to see them multiply the impact of their practice by digitalizing the way they package, promote, sell, and deliver their expertise.

And you can’t do that if you believe the old story about marketing – that it’s a scam, and yucky, and that you have to use pressure and trickery.

So here’s a new story: marketing helps you change people’s perspective by inspiring them to learn something new, or look at something in a new way. 

Which brings me back to the point – to teach. To say: if you don’t like marketing, if the very word makes you feel ill, then think of it as teaching. This works better if your classroom teaching-style is interactive, but think of your solution as the course curriculum. Think of your business “case study” as a “real-world example” you might read in a textbook. Think of your customers as students, your prospects as future students.

And the questions you ask? Those are everything to your marketing because they spawn ideas about how purchasing your solution might create results. The art of questioning is an effective ideation technique, ((Do you think Warren Berger make a good case for this assertion, A More Beautiful Question? https://www.amazon.com/More-Beautiful-Question-Inquiry-Breakthrough/dp/1491589698)) but the purpose of ideation in marketing is not just to create and sustain better marketing campaigns but to stimulate thinking in your prospects’ minds.

So do you have to make it interesting? Of course. None of us sat through boring lectures without resenting our teachers. Maybe you tell stories, maybe you have good comic timing, maybe you inspire, maybe you create content that is thought-provoking or pleasantly succinct. But part of teaching is entertaining ((Just not in the style “chilled-out entertainer” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDcMBG872sE)).

If you teach your students about your business in a way that relates it to their lives and do so entertainingly, they might listen. And over the long run, they might get clarity on how you optimize or transform their businesses and their lives.

My best,
Rowan

About 13 years ago, I was bumbling through the airport of Little Rock, Arkansas, home to the grandfather of teach-a-man-to-fish organizations, Heifer International. I did not see the Clintons or the Waltons, but I was not alone. With me from my organization (Blackbaud) was the CTO, the VP of something, the VP of something else, the Director of something something, and me.

None of us had the term “sales” in our titles, yet together we were a de facto sales team. And for three days we met, lunched, dined, and talked with an even bigger team of people from the “client side”. 

That’s a sliver of what complex, 7-figure software and services selling looks like, at least with a first-time engagement.

After the contract is signed and the first installment paid, the selling keeps happening, through “services”, whose job is to help the client maximize the value of its purchase by deploying a blend of consultative expertise and custom implementation, as most of us do at our smaller firms. ((Owners of Salesforce implementation and consulting firms need to prepare the for the growing, inevitable competition from Salesforce’s own internal client services team – it’s a lucrative business for an enterprise cloud software platform to enter.))

At numerous points before and after such a deal is inked, both sides teach the other what they know, challenging assumptions, and sparking new ideas.

…

A thought has been rolling around in my head about a book I read 8 or so years ago, The Challenger Sale. In a sign of its worthiness, it looks as though the book has given rise to an eponymous consulting firm, along with dozens of blog and video reviews. 

But skip the reviews, I can compress the book into one sentence: in corporate B2B sales, the most successful salespeople adopt a consultative approach that challenges the buyer to reconsider what/how they need to buy.

If you view your work as consulting, this is sort of a “captain obvious” statement and a pretty flimsy premise for a book ((And here I have to think of Seth Godin’s recent #mikedrop assertion: non-fiction books should only have to be read for about 10 pages, which is about 3,000 words. Which is to say that the basic concept should be clearly conveyed such that – litmus test – the reader can tell someone else what the entire book is about. This is based on Kindle data)). But for many bearing the job title “sales” or similar, I suppose it’s been quite a revelation. 

To be clear, the Challenger Sale is a good book and worth reading.

But it’s written for the enterprise, for the corporate world “insider”. That world hasn’t fallen apart yet – maybe it never will – but it’s being infiltrated like never before by the independent B2B tech and creative firms. In 2018, VCs invested 251 billion in startups around the world. And for every venture-funded business, there are a dozen more independently owned ones selling software and/or services that solve the same kinds of problems.

…

And on that note, I’m going to get meta and challenge the Challenger Sale’s premise. Or at least, what the premise implies: that you can’t be the type of person who builds rapport and makes an emotional connection.

You see, the book describes 5 alleged archetypes:

1. The Relationship Builder creates connection and maintains relationships over time
2. The Reactive Problem Solver is detail-oriented and a bit OCD
3. The Hard Worker is a manically hard worker (hard to accept that this is a “type”)
4. The Lone Wolf is psychotically self-assured and effective…. but not ultimately effective
5. The Challenger debates and pushes customers and deeply understands their business – which makes this the dead-giveaway winning type.

As if you had to emulate just one. 

Again, these are thought-provoking allegations. You don’t have to be as self-assured and polished as Italian marble to be the challenger that wins big deals. You don’t even have to a smooth talker. Interesting. Nor do you have to be a worker bee. Or detailed oriented, like a good project manager. Or even personable.

In the context of enterprise complex sales.

Why not – why don’t you have to be all these things? Because whatever quality you lack as a challenger will be made up for by your teammates. Because you always have teammates. So you can be even more of a challenger. In other words, even more of a consultant.

Like other indispensable business books (The Million Dollar Consultant, SPIN Selling, Ogilvy on Advertising, Positioning), we have to take the lessons learned from analyzing the enterprise world with a grain of salt when we apply them to the world of the independently-owned business.

Yes, we may challenge assumptions about what and how our customers need to buy, based on a keen understanding of their business and our own. But because we work in smaller teams ((Counterpoint: stop working in smaller teams while keeping overhead low, whatever that means to your business/process)), it’s also possible essential to do so in a way that builds authentic connection based on curiosity, empathy, and goodwill. After all, maybe it is empathy that gives you the finest-grained understanding of how you can help your customer?

On that note – it’s Friday and I imagine that like me, you have worked hard this week catching up after the holidays. Have a restful weekend 🙂

Rowan

Let me summarize the story I told yesterday about a baby dolphin and a Nobel Prize-winner who split live human brains: fuel your business development by constantly taking in new information.

The way I should have also phrased it was: look at familiar information as though it were new. 

That’s sounding too abstract, so let’s take a concrete example of familiar business information: your competitors. Perhaps you already know the following:

• How many competitors you have – both “loose” and “close”?
• Which one or two of your competitors have the highest profile in your area of focus
• Which of your competitors you have beaten for business – and which you have lost too?

When I co-owned a fundraising and marketing technology consulting firm from 2008 to 2017, my answers were:

• About 35 loose competitors with similar and overlapping but not quite the same areas of focus
• About 5 close competitors with very similar areas of focus
• Jackson River had a higher profile than my firm
• Probably 10 or 15 beat my firm for project work – and vice-versa 

That’s just scratching the surface of what I knew about my competitors. I usually knew the names of the principals and key employees, I knew where they had offices, I knew their marquee clients. I knew how weak or strong their content strategy was. I knew what conferences they had spoken at (pretty much all weak). And more.

Maybe you’re following a similar train of thought for your competitors. What else is there to know? Why beat this dead horse? Hold that thought. 

If you’re like me, you’re comparing. That’s essentially the core behavior associated with analyzing this set of key business information we call, “the competition”. 

A New Look at Our Competition

Rather than comparing, let’s look at this information a new way by (a) thinking of you and your competition as a unified group and (b) asking yourselves this question: what do none you do to grow our businesses?

Drill down on that question. Of all the businesses like yours – meaning you do the same kind of work for the same kinds of clients – what are activities associated with lead generation that you never engage in? Put a time-frame on it: the last decade.

(You know I like to my 5 to 10-year time frames – that’s why I wished you all a long-term Happy New Year.)

So my business, plus my loose and close competition – what did none of us do during the last decade to grow our businesses?

• Cold-calling – didn’t even consider it (though sometimes buyers appreciate it if it’s done well)
• Email outreach marketing. Considered it but actually did it? Nah.
• Multi-year paid advertising on the major digital advertising platforms (Google and FB)
• Explore paid digital advertising on any niche platforms, like Reddit
• Create self-service, low-touch productized services
• Design and execute a long-term content marketing strategy. Almost all of us did something here. There were plenty of decent efforts. But nothing spectacular. Like Basecamp’s 37 Signals. Or Drift’s blog.

There might be some outliers – Development Seed had terrific content marketing, but they used very focused re/positioning to morph from a world-class Drupal shop (a very strong market position in 2010) into a specialized mapping consultancy with almost no competition. Now they have competition but thanks to their content marketing, they are among the leaders world-wide in their niche.

I will also say, that many of us (more my competition) did lots of wonderful things to grow our businesses – started podcasts, created webinar series, held in-person workshops, created beautiful corporate websites, wrote email newsletters, spoke at conferences and camps, wrote books (rare but it happened), networked furiously, built niche products (like Jackson River’s Springboard), and more. Maybe even studied value pricing. So lots of good stuff was done. 

But for the most part, my competition and I – 30 or 40 firms and over 100 otherwise intelligent firm principles – were scared to call strangers, scared to write to strangers, scared to buy ads, and not disciplined enough to truly pursue a content strategy.

Take action. Hold these thoughts in your head or on paper: You and your competition, as one big group – list what did you not do to grow your business in the prior decade? I’m pretty sure your list looks like mine.

And for the decade coming up – any predictions on what:

• What your competition will continue to not do grow their business?
• What your competition will not do adapt their solutions (like Development Seed) to changing demands? 

Reply and lemme know what you think!

Best,
Rowan

Once in the Pacific ocean, about 200 meters west of the “town” of Puako, Hawaii, I found myself about 3 meters from a wild creature – a baby dolphin, suddenly swimming alongside me.

I’d been enveloped by a Hawaii dolphin pod making their evening migration clockwise up the western, Kohala coast.

The dolphin baby was tiny and round, almost the shape of a rugby ball. And it seemed curious. What is this strange pink fish and why does it swim so slowly – is it trying to make me laugh? But in a flash, two adult dolphins flanked the baby. They seemed to look at me – out of their left eyes. Not threateningly, but more alertly that I’d been accustomed when swimming with them previously.

Fast forward a decade or so later and I come across a research study, “Visual laterality in dolphins: the importance of the familiarity of stimuli” ((https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221742727_Visual_laterality_in_dolphins_Importance_of_the_familiarity_of_stimuli)) which reported that the following observation:

… dolphins used their left eye to observe very familiar objects and their right eye to observe unfamiliar objects

Which is to say, our dolphin cousins take in familiar information through the right hemisphere of their brain and novel information through their brain’s left hemisphere. This is significant partly because unlike human, dolphins brain hemispheres are much more distinct from one another than ours our, due to less developed corpus colossus, which is sort of the bridge connecting the two sides of the brain. Some say we abuse that bridge.

The left hemisphere receives visual information exclusively from the right eye and the right hemisphere from the left eye. Moreover, stronger isolation of brain hemispheres is due to relatively less developed corpus callosum [18].

If this theory is true, it shouldn’t be surprising that I was examined through the left eye and right brain of our one-time land mammal cousins; deep ocean snorkelers must be something these dolphins have seen hundreds if not thousands of times in their lives.

But had I been the first human they’d seen, perhaps they would have let the left brain process me. 

Hemispheric lateralization has become a cloudy subject. Every day new studies are published which contradict others. A quick search on Google Scholar reveals that 104,000 peer-reviewed scientific research studies have been conducted on the subject. I’m not a scientist and I certainly haven’t read 104,000 of anything.

So let’s go back to the beginning at least – the 1960s-era research of  Nobel Prize winner Richard Sperry. To make a long story short, Sperry audaciously severed the brain’s “bridge”, the corpus callosus – with many people – and afterward found that each hemisphere continued to function. Based on that premise, researchers raced to ascribe personalities to the two sides of the brain. In broad strokes, here is conventional wisdom:

• The left brain is rational and analytical
• The right brain is creative and intuitive

Yes, this premise has been refuted – and re-refuted (I mean, what did you expect when there are 104,000 scholarly research studies on hemispheric lateralization and counting?).

Yet the premise that the right brain creative (or more creative, at least) seems to have withstood the test of time. Daniel Pink wrote a whole book about: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future. And other books piggybacked on that one, such as Thought Revolution, by William Donius, where innovation-consulting Donius discusses his work with the left hand. He has held workshops where ideation is based on writing things on paper with the “left” hand.

In fact, he actually advises the use of the non-dominant hand, be it left or right. But the point is the same one made my dolphin researchers: new information – and new ideas – is to be absorbed with the creative part of our minds.

I’m not suggesting you ideate your new positioning using your non-dominant hand. But it’s important to take in new information. Dolphins know this because the migrate – daily. And things change daily. Increasingly, it’s the same for us. So what new information do you take in daily, and how does that impact your marketing.

Take action. Find a daily newsletter in one of the following areas: psychology, art, economics, finance, medicine. Or more niche – AI, Data Science, public speaking, business news in Subsaharan Africa. As long as it’s (a) something new and (b) something related to your work – but different. And just glance at it every day.

Reply to this email to let me know what you chose!

Have a good day,
Rowan

In 2019, the term “deck” got really popular. It’s been in the digital marketing vocabulary for a decade or so, but something made it trend last year so that what I hear every week was, “we need a deck”, or, “Ok, let’s put that into a deck”. Even, “let’s just deck that”.

I know why this is and I think it’s important that you do too.

Today, inspired by a good conversation with a pitch deck designer/producer, I poked around Google Trends: according to Google Trends, the term “pitch deck” has doubled in usage in the Bay Area in the last year.

Now, a “pitch deck” used to be a vehicle for pitching a startup idea, in Silicon Valley, or a movie, in Hollywood. But we have started to use the word deck to refer to documents meant to achieve other goals.

In the conversations I’ve had with 100+ B2B tech firm owners over the past 12 months, it’s rare than the term deck hasn’t crept into the “marketing collateral” discussion.

Partly because I have inserted the term into the conversation myself.

What do I mean by “deck”?

By deck, I specifically mean a document created in presentation software, mostly Powerpoint, Google Slides, and to a smaller extent, Prezi.  ((There are dozens of others but only noughties-era startup Slideshare, now owned by Microsoft/LinkedIn, has significant usage. But it’s not private, so why not just use a web page and garner the benefits thereof?)) And I mean a document that has the following characteristics:

• Presentation-worthy. In other words, not meant to be not read. And increasingly: meant to be presented over web conference, not in-person.
• Browseable. To the extent that it is read, meant to be flipped through, not necessarily read sequentially. 
• Beautiful. Strong visual appeal and not text-intensive; uses high-impact, high-quality photography and other visuals. It doesn’t need to be mobile-optimized.
• Branded. A deck isn’t just an information container; it’s a brand marketing asset and should be produced at the same level of professionalism as your website.
• Private Information. This is key, even if it requires an NDA. This is what makes a deck useful in a way that a website isn’t. You can put in financials, private information, proprietary intellectual property, UI sneak-peaks, detailed testimonials from customers, and lots of other things that can’t go into your website.

Though, in fact, all this sounds kind of like a website, right? A concomitant trend I am seeing is lighter websites that work together with heavier decks. The economics make sense – if quality levels are equal, a website is about 5 times as expensive to produce as a deck.

Thus, decks have started to slightly usurp the role of websites by becoming a natural extension of them. They occupy a more important role at the bottom of the marketing funnel, right next to – and after – the sale.

There are five types of decks that most B2B tech solutions firms should consider owning:

1. One-pager factsheet. For your corporate brand or for any of your branded solutions or products, something printable and offline readable.
2. Orientation manual. I wrote a post about my own version of this, called my client orientation manual.
3. Proposal. In the creative/agency world, using the deck format for proposals is a little more established; this trend took hold about 3 to 5 years ago. But most of them are still much, much too long. Proposals should be 1 to 5 pages at the most unless stipulated otherwise.
4. Solution presentation. This is the closest thing to a pitch deck, in that it’s purpose is to make the case for a sale of a solution, as opposed to making the case for a loan or equity investment. So instead of a “product sheet” or a “spec sheet”, it’s how does your product create value in very specific terms?
5. Case study. To be clear, a case study also belongs on your website, in web page format. No doubt about that. And there’s a case to made for the text-intensive, document format case study, for some business scenarios. But guess what – most people don’t want to spend more than 10 minutes reviewing your case studies and they want to be able to flip through it (and read valuable private information). Deck.

If you review your existing material now, does it pass muster as a deck? Is it presentable, browseable, beautiful, branded and does it possess valuable private information?

There’s still a case to be made for the text-heavy document format; the report, the ebook, the whitepaper. (The case study is an edge case and could fall into either category.) But this kind of collateral is a lot more work and a lot more thinking.

In the meantime, fire up Google Slides and get your key business assets into deck format.

Have a good one,
Rowan

The good people of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island – or at the last the neuroscience researchers who work at the local laboratory – shared some findings last month on experts’ brains.

When learning a new task, brain activities alter over time as mice transition to an expert from a novice. The changes are reflected in neural networks and neural activity. As the animal’s knowledge grows, neural networks become more focused. ((https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191118110956.htm))

The brain itself morphs. Like those “This is your brain on meth” commercials from the 90’s but in reverse. For a scientist or a neurologist, there may be other takeaways, but we can’t really evaluate them without scientific training; what’s key is that the physical constitution of the brain changes as you gain expertise in our very small mammalian relatives, at least. 

Or how about this – let’s just pretend that your brain grows as you acquire expertise; it doesn’t really matter if it does or not. It’s just a good metaphor.

What in the heck does that have to do with generating more sales-qualified leads? Or more to the point – growing your business’s revenue at 20% annually over three years? ((For Hinge, this is “high-growth” – that seems like an acceptable definition and a worthy goal, right?  https://hingemarketing.com/blog/story/the-2018-high-growth-study-is-here)) 

It’s relevant because however you package it, you are selling expertise. To the extent this is not the case, you’re selling your labor. If you sell labor, you grow  your muscles; expertise, your brain.

Hold that thought for a second and I’ll come back to it.

Now consider the following chapter titles of Loserthink, by Scott Adams (Dilbert creator and author). The book’s goal is to help us think clearly. I’ve ommitted the intro and concluding chapters:

• Chapter 3: Thinking Like a Psychologist
• Chapter 4: Thinking Like an Artist
• Chapter 5: Thinking Like an Historian
• Chapter 6: Thinking Like an Engineer
• Chapter 7: Thinking Like a Leader
• Chapter 8: Thinking Like a Scientist
• Chapter 9: Thinking Like an Entrepreneur
• Chapter 10: Thinking Like an Economist
• Chapter 11: Things Pundits Say That You Should Not Copy

See a pattern here? The book is about thinking clearly by thinking like an expert – or lots of different types of experts. He’s not talking about thinking like a bad artist, an incompetent engineer, or a non-successful entrepreneur; in fact, he cites numerous renowned experts (in their fields, if not in society at large) in each chapter. ((Unfortunately the book isn’t as good as the chapters make it look, because it doesn’t necessarily explain how each type of expert’s thinking differentiates itself from the others. And maybe I need to re-read it, but it also doesn’t settle the question of whether it’s possible to think like an expert without having said expert’s level of expertise. But it’s worth reading.))

He’s talking about thinking like people who’s own brains may have been – possibly – reshaped as a result of cultivating remarkable expertise.

This matters in two ways:

1. Like everything else, marketing is trending intersectional and multi-disciplinary. Thinking about your company’s marketing like an artist and a psychologist should be non-controversial at this point. But also consider thinking like an engineer, leader, and entrepreneur. Also, marketing and business development (sales) are becoming more and more inextricable, at least from the perspective of the owner a complex solutions firm.
2. The key to successful marketing is expertise. That is to say, whatever your organization does, the success of its marketing is closely related to the expertise brain-growth you achieve, mostly in the area of solving the most painful or urgent (or both) problems your clients’ experience.

I have seen LinkedIn outreach campaigns, Google Adwords campaigns, and SEO-focused content marketing campaigns die on the vine. No good ideas. There are lots of hacks to ideate – brain games. But growing your expertise is not a game; it’s a long-term struggle and the only fountain that produces good ideas on a continuous basis.

My best,
Rowan

• It’s long, like complex B2B solutions often need to be
• It’s transparent. What is the thing you get? If the thing you get is reports, say reports.
• It doesn’t contain cliche’s or “jargon-cliches”. The term supply chain is now so over-used it has become almost meaningless. Ditto for risk assessment. 
• It’s detailed: the reports come not from “Financial” data, which could be almost anything, but from markets, which means equity, credit, or bond markets to the audience, from market news, and from market and regulatory filings.

For most of us, this is greek. But for a specific audience this means something, or is at least compelling. As my client I and crafted this messaging together, we searched our memory banks for specifics.

As you do the same, be suspicious of any term that rolls off your tongue too easily. Such as “market data”. Because that term’s ease is acquired through overuse. And overuse means it probably has less meaning than an alternative.

By examining the alternatives (such as the seemingly awkward term “filings”) we found an accurate way to describe how the complex becomes simple. And why the solution in question is valuable. Or at least we set the stage for doing so – after all, this just a slogan, not a content strategy.

But in the process of architecting this slogan, we cemented a product design roadmap. 

Marketing and product design are the same thing. If you disagree, let me know why.

I’m really looking forward to 2020. Drop me a quick line and let me know what you’re going to be working on.

And have a great weekend 🙂
Rowan

On July 15th 2018, David C Baker wrote about using a “Client Orientation Manual” as a marketing tool((Here’s David’s great post:  https://www.davidcbaker.com/using-prospective-client-orientation-as-a-marketing-tool)). I will repeat the advice he gave to open up his article: 

“Before you decide that this might not be interesting enough to read, consider passing it along to a key leader and letting them take charge of this project. You’ll be amazed at the impact on your firm.”

I took this excellent advice and have been using my own client orientation manual for just about a year and a half now. You should too, for reasons that David breaks down very well. But my version of the client orientation manual is a little more modern (and a little more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants) for reasons that I want to break down really quickly.

It’s Informal. My manual omits the formal documents and concepts (“typical agreements”, “change orders”, “approval policy”, “quality checks”). Why? Partly I don’t want to focus on what happens if things go wrong. But partly because I think we all should move towards lower-touch, self-service modes of paying and getting paid. Because life is too short. In fact, my manual contains a link to an online ordering page. That said, for more formally structured consulting firms in particular, you might consider a version closer to what David C Baker recommends.

It’s cloud-based (in deck format). Rather than being a formal PDF, let alone a printed artifact as David suggests, I use a Google Slides deck. This makes it incredibly easy to update, easy to share, and easy to access. It also lets me walk through the deck if need be on a call with prospective or new clients, partners, or anyone else who cannot figure out what I do from reading my website. ((It was wonderful validation to see another marketing consultant (and a much smarter and more accomplished one than I am) also use Google Slides to publish. Except he takes it about 10x further and puts his entire website on one Google Slide: http://inboxcollective.com))

It’s frequently micro-updated. On the first page of my deck, I claim it’s the 12th version, though looking at my edit history in Google Slides, I see that I have actually made changes to it on 47 different days (some of them minor). One of the beauties of Google Slides vs a traditional web page (or Powerpoint) is that it encourages frequent and collaborative updates. 

Speaking of which, version 13 of my client orientation manual is coming soon, as I narrow my focus in 2020 in three areas:

• Emphasis on creative ideation as the foundation of all marketing, business development, and product design.
• Blending of B2B and B2C approaches, partly to better serve Digital Health entrepreneurs. And partly because our society and its economy seem to blur those lines more and more. ((Here’s an interesting idea for a whitepaper or research project: how do you apply ABM (Account-Based Marketing) to B2C sales and marketing? If you have any ideas, let me know ))
• Focus on delivering agile advice: more self-service, more iterative, and more productized. I’m done with monolith marketing assessments, plans, and “strategies”. Advice should be dispensed the way software should be built: iteratively.

By the way, I will also continue to focus on what I don’t do – another of the many joys of writing your own client orientation manual.

Want a head start? Copy mine and start hacking away:

http://bit.ly/31ADqSI (Open in Google Slides and save your own copy)

My best,
Rowan

Wishing you a year full of good luck and good deals. May your life be blessed with peace and prosperity in the new year and all the years to follow. Happy new year!

That’s the message I got today from probably my favorite contractor of all time, Joana, from Manila. By the way, if you ever need a fabulous part-time executive assistant, let me know and I’ll make a referral.

Aside from acknowledging the plain fact that success in business is partly about luck – in the short term – here’s what I loved about Joana’s message: “and all the years to come”.

There’s this number range that keeps bouncing around my head. It’s about 5 years. Consider these three common business remarks and observations:

1. According to the Gartner Hype Cycle, a technology, language, or technology platform usually stays hot and leverageable for about 5 to 7 years. ((https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/5-trends-appear-on-the-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-2019/)) Java, 3-D Printing, Ruby on Rails, iOS, the list goes on. Many platforms, such as Salesforce, stay hyped for longer, but the 800 lbs automaton-gorillas like McKinsey and Accenture dump cheap offshore labor on them and they cease to become leverageable 
2. “Referral chains tend to decay over a period of 6–9 years” – David C Baker. And David wrote that about 11 years ago, so I am going to cut the range down to 4 to 7 years because job tenures are shorter than ever. ((Job hopping is on the rise https://www.nbcnews.com/better/business/job-hopping-rise-should-you-consider-switching-roles-make-more-ncna868641)) Your former clients and coworkers referring you – this depends on them not quitting their formal career and starting a yoga studio in Costa Rica.
3. “People overestimate what they can do in 1 year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years” – Bill Gates.  Cut that range in about half and you have: about 5 years.

This last observation should be the motto of every content marketing agency, by the way. And for that very reason, the five-year range is where the highest focus of your marketing strategy lies. 

I’m all for short-term marketing and a balance between inbound and outbound marketing. But the tricky part is that those don’t exist in parallel. A marketing strategy should tell you what to do next month but also set forth five-year goals.

To be specific: what will you do on Thursday, Jan. 2nd, 2020 that will create warm, inbound business opportunities in the fall of 2025?

This is a content marketing question.

In the meantime, I’m also wishing you a year full of good luck and good deals!!

Rowan

You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology
– Steve Jobs

This was Steve Jobs off-the-cuff response to getting trolled by a techie who tried to call him out for removing LDAP from the Mac operating system. Does anyone remember LDAP? I didn’t think so. We remember the liberating experience of using Macs, especially in the pre-Windows 7 era.

This customer-first mantra has become product design 101.

But what’s 102? Where does the customer experience start? The answer is that it depends, but let’s assume that it often begins at price. In other words, it begins with figuring out the price. Cost. Investment. Of what you’re selling – of what it will take, as one my subscribers has put it, to transform your customer from Frumpy Lumpy with a broken kazoo into the Pied Piper for their industry.

Have you ever written a 20-page proposal and put the price near the end? Have you ever reviewed a 20-page proposal and skipped the entire thing to get to the price first? Yes to both here. And it’s the same effect when reviewing web pages for products and services offerings. The pricing is a frame of reference for everything else you have to say about your solution. And it’s usually one of the first, if not the first page you visit on a website.

Quick side note: “investment” has become such an over-used term that it has begun to feel pushy and “salesy”. Consider just saying “cost” or “price”; say the term that people naturally say, rather than the term you think makes them more likely to buy.

If the customer experience begins with price, then isn’t the pricing page itself an excellent place to start to design your product? 

I’m working with assumption here, however: that pricing – done right – is more than just a number. It’s the number plus everything you get for it, the most important features, timeframes, caveats, and details. This is an excercize in compressing complexity into a very small space.

And if you are offering multiple price-tiers, pricing becomes even more complex. Three excellent examples:

1. Active Campaign: https://www.activecampaign.com/pricing/ 
2. Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/pricing
3. Meg Cumby https://megcumby.com/work-with-meg/

As you can see, whether you are a lean tech company, a multi-billion dollar global software company, or a solo consultant, a pricing page is much more than a few numbers.

And it’s a great way to define your products (and in Meg’s case, her productized services).

Take action. Get out the wireframing tool (ie the pen and the paper), draw your website, writing Plans and Pricing on the top, and name some prices – then justify them. You have just started to redesign your product.

Even if you have never talked about your pricing in public (and never intend to), this exercise might teach you something about what you’re selling and make it easier to talk about it.

Have a great weekend,
Rowan