Category Archives: Consulting

July 23, 2014 · 10:19 am

How Do You Like My Tie?

There is an old joke about an egocentric sales guy rambling on and on about his life and success.  He sees the recipient of his boastful rant glazing over and says “But enough about me.  How do you like my tie?”  I was reminded of this as I read about a study conducted by the Online Marketing Institute, who teamed up with Forrester Research and the Business Marketing Association to understand how well B2B marketers gauge their content development skills and maturity.  The headlines aren’t so wonderful:

While 51% of B2B marketing leaders rate their content marketing practices as very mature, an overwhelming 85% fail to connect content activity to business value — and, as a result, fail to retain customers or win their long-term loyalty. In fact, when asked to look back at the past 12 months and rate the effectiveness of content marketing efforts, only 14% of those surveyed gave their content practices high marks for delivering value back to the business.

One wonders sometimes who exactly is in charge at these companies.  If 86% of the executives surveyed think they’re sucking at content marketing, what are they doing about it? 71% of surveyed marketers say their content features case studies or customer stories, but only 3% admit this is a primary focus of their efforts.  Hello?  How is this any different from the sales guy in the joke?

All marketing is about adding value and solving problems.  Hopefully everything you produce does both but it must do one or the other.  Obviously, as the study concludes, B2B marketers have more work to do when it comes to using content to consistently deliver a valuable exchange of information with prospective buyers.  That starts with a mindset to do just that and part of the process is evaluating what you’re producing in that context.  This last bit is the clearest indicator of that.  The study talks about how the content these businesses are producing:

Focuses on closing the deal, not on building relationships. While more than three-quarters of respondents say they frequently communicate to their customer base, only 5% make this a priority, proving that marketers are too focused on acquisition rather than long-term loyalty.

That’s the issue.  What are they (and you!) going to do about it?

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July 22, 2014 · 10:35 am

A Tale Of Two CSR’s

It was the best of experiences, it was the worst of experiences to paraphrase the famous beginning of ” Tale Of Two Cities.”

Customer services

(Photo credit: gordon2208)

The next, little remembered part Dickens’ actual text is “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” With a nod towards that, let me relate two experiences of the last 24 hours and you get a couple of good examples of customer support done at either end of the spectrum.

First, Cablevision. My wife was having issues with the cable TV yesterday. The issue was it wasn’t working. Someone in the house has run her through the troubleshooting protocols any number of times (ahem) so by the time she called customer service she knew that the problem was on the cable end and not something in the house.  The rep informed her there was no trouble in the area nor was anyone working on the lines nearby so she’d have to send out a technician.  She set an appointment for 24 hours later and basically washed her hands of the problem.  My wife then headed out to do errands.  Lo and behold, not one but three Cablevision trucks were on the road working on the lines.  The crew informed her they were doing maintenance and apologized for the brief outage.  By the time she got home, the service was fine and she cancelled the appointment (without speaking to a human, by the way).

Second, AT&T.  Our internet service kept failing yesterday afternoon.  The modem showed the DSL connection was fine but there was no internet.  The rep pinged the modem and said there was definitely an issue but wasn’t seeing any issues except in a town 5 miles away.  She asked me to hold while she escalated the issue to the tech support supervisors.  3 minutes later, she came on the line to explain what was being done and asked me to hang on.  She came back every couple of minutes to update me.  Finally, she said that there did seem to be an outage in the area, gave me a support ticket number and told me when the problem would be solved.   There was a lot more detail about what tests we ran but the important point was that she actively looked for information and kept me informed about what she was doing to solve the problem.  The service is fine today.

Contrast the two.  One rep seemed to want to do nothing but get my wife off the phone as quickly as possible.  She gave little information and what she did give was just dead wrong.  The other one was proactive, communicative, and apologetic.  Why isn’t Cablevision my internet provider too?  Duh.

Customers expect reps to treat them as the VIP’s they are.  While there aren’t a lot of choices about TV or internet providers in any area, there are a few.  I know I can get higher-speed internet from Cablevision.  Think I’m going to make that move?  Would you?  Part of being a good marketer is remembering that any touchpoint the business has with consumers is part of marketing.  It all needs to be executed at the same high level.  If you’re ignoring the customer service reps in your marketing thinking you’re missing the boat, as these examples make clear.  You agree?

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July 16, 2014 · 10:20 am

The Skills That Matter

Some of you know that my professional training was as an educator.  Hopefully that shows on the screed from time to time.  In fact, my wife and eldest child are also trained teachers and my youngest does education as part of her profession.  Focusing on the skills people need is a big deal in our house and that got me thinking about what those skills might be.

I spend a ton of time in the tech world.  There are new skills that my clients feel as if they need to acquire almost every day.  What is the latest and greatest way to code?  How do we employ the social media platform du jour in order to stand out and engage our customer base?  What’s the best way to run an A/B test of landing or other pages to optimize conversion rates?  Those are only a few of the components of the rapidly changing skill set business people might need these days.  You probably won’t find me working with them on those initially.

Instead, I like to start with the skills that matter.  First and foremost of these is critical thinking.  How would I define that?  This is from The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, way back when in 1987 and I think it says it pretty well:

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.

That skill trumps the others.  It’s the ability to figure out what data points matter and why.  It’s understanding core business issues and not permitting the noise of the business world to clutter up that understanding.  It’s what you use, having achieved that understanding, to choose the tools with which to carry out the business goals, strategies, and tactics.  The point is this:  the tools will change; the need to possess the ability to think critically won’t.  Kids learning Word in the schools today may not use it in 10 years.  I guarantee they will need to be able to figure out the world around them.

There are other key skills, of course.  Writing and speaking clearly are the next in line for me since if you can’t explain your excellent thinking it does little good to the business.  First things first, however.  That’s how I see it.  You?

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