On Marketing

You’re building a marketing plan for a new product. You are familiar with the product’s capabilities and features. You have identified several key applications with attractive value propositions. You have selected the most promising industry segments and narrowed these targets to specific classes of customers within those segments. You have decided upon a channel strategy and enlisted a few initial channel partners. All you have left to do is commission some brochures, data sheets and other marcom collateral and you’re ready to go. Right? 

Nope. Wrong. You forgot something crucially important.

You don’t know who you’re marketing to. I don’t mean what company you’re marketing to. I mean what individual. Not by name, of course, but by identity or role. Here’s an example.

Your product is a specialized computer system that helps charitable organizations be more efficient in their fundraising activities. These organizations tend to be organized as independent local chapters loosely affiliated with a national headquarters. The national office provides some support functions and overall policy but the local chapters are responsible for their own day-to-day operations and finances.

Just think of all the different titles and roles in this organization!

• At the national headquarters there are
  • Chief Executive Officer
  • Chief Finance Officer
  • Chief Information Officer
  • Chief Community Relations/PR Officer
• At each local chapter there are
  • Executive Director
  • Finance Director
  • Information Technology Director
  • Information Technology Consultant
  • Fundraising Director
  • Community Relations/PR Director 

Which of these might be involved in a sale? All of them! So which must you market to? Probably all of them, in one way or another. Which are your key marketing targets, and what are the key messages for each? That’s where you earn your salary. You need to figure out each person’s level of involvement in a potential sale and read their mind to see what interest or concerns they might have. If that person is important to a successful sale, you had better market to them.

In a previous post, I said that marketing is like engineering. A good engineer designs products that can be easily manufactured. A good marketer fields products that can be easily sold. To make your salesperson’s job easy, you need to anticipate prospects’ objections and address them with marketing messages. Don’t make your salesperson do that heavy lifting!

In our example:

• The Fundraising Director will become an early champion of the project if they are convinced that it will significantly increase donations to the local chapter. Value propositions, case studies and testimonials will be important here.
• The Information Technology Consultant will be asked to vet your product for its technical capabilities and features. They will need clear, consise data sheets and technical brochures.
• The Information Technology Director will have to approve this project based on a report from the Information Technology Consultant. Staffing and system load will be important because they affect the IT Director’s ongoing budget. Make sure the IT Consultant has what they need to make a clear case - perhaps even some prepared report or presentation material. 
• The Finance Director will be asked to approve the capital expenditure to buy your product and the ongoing budget changes to operate it. They will need to understand product costs (one-time and recurring) and the value proposition. A ready-made framework for cost-benefit analysis will be helpful here.
• The Community Relations/PR Director may be concerned with the way your system will change the relationship between the organization and its donors. Case studies and referrals from other similar customers will help.
• The chapter management team as a whole may be concerned that their chapter is blazing new territory ahead of the national organization. This may be a politically difficult situation for them. They may need case studies that demonstrate that others have been successful. They may also need extra help with project management so they don’t fail for reasons unrelated to your product.
• The national executive team may have to approve the project, especially if it is a big-ticket item or represents a departure from customary organizational practice. The chapter management team will be making this request for approval. Make sure they have what they need to make a clear and convincing case.

These are just examples, of course. There are probably more players and more concerns and objections.

You needn’t address every one of these issues with brochures and data sheets. Many can be addressed with broad-target tools like trade magazine articles. Just a few articles with a few case studies and detailed cost-benefit analyses can provide all the material your champions need. Make sure these articles appear in in credible publications, of course!

You could consider providing a complete “proposal kit” with a template presentation, financial spreadsheets and boilerplate report text. Your salespeople can use the material to make an initial proposal to their best internal champion. Then they can “accidentally” leave it behind (in machine-readable form, of course) and it’s a good bet it will get used all the way up the organizational chain.

Above all, don’t forget that each role will need material tailored to their concerns and area of interest. Technical data sheets do nothing to convince a financial officer, and cost-benefit analyses do nothing to convince a technology consultant.

So I challenge you: Take inventory of your marketing communications. Can you truthfully say that each has a specific target within your prospect’s organization? And does the content of the piece accurately reflect that person’s interests, concerns and role in the decision process?

Bet you can’t.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 10:05 am and is filed under Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.