Large businesses have a kind of discipline inertia in allocating resources to all the functional areas that need it. Everything from R&D to marketing gets counted in somehow. But for this companies that are not so big yet, there is much more of a shuffling of resources. And it’s not shuffling for the sake of shuffling, or some level of management ineptness. In the name of agility, it is a matter of steering resources to the area where they are needed the most. With a scarcity of resources, there is a level of reprioritization that must take place as the need arises.

Especially in the case where the business has a steady-level of work, there comes about a mindset that marketing and sales efforts can be dialed back. Maybe yes – maybe no. It all depends on how far back you dial. So go ahead – ask yourself a few questions.

Engaging New Customers?
Are you attracting a sufficient stream of new prospects? Even if your business is at capacity at the moment, all customers have a customer lifecycle to them. Customers will come to the end of that lifecycle at various times. You need to have a process running that steadily keeps the pipeline primed.

Dependence on Existing Customers?
Prospecting within the existing customer base is ideal. You can work the relationship with those buyers who already know you from real experiences. But if you begin to rely on a small core of customers for the majority of your business, your relationship becomes more like an addiction on them. A dependency on too small of a customer base will cause your business to go into withdrawal if the customer decides to leave or change the terms of the relationship.

Reflective Marketing Messages?
Are your marketing messages up to date with what your business is doing? Even if you have dialed down the marketing to be at a passive level, what you stand for needs to be out there. With prospective customers doing much more research on their own, your communication needs to be up-to-date with how your solutions are solving problems today.

What Is Your Forecast?
How do you stack up with your forecasting? Can you forecast what you expect in terms of new order bookings and new revenue bookings for the next 12 months? You need to have enough facts and assumptions to gauge what kind of outlook you expect.

Sometimes the most dangerous thing is that you become satisfied when the business is busy. You become heavily focused on fulfilling current customers. And you lapse into that satisfied mindset. “It’s good to be busy”.

But simply being satisfied is not what moves the needle in the direction that you want. There is a reason why Chris Gardner’s book and movie are titled “The Pursuit of Happyness”. In a recursive kind of way, it is the pursuit of goals that is the source of happiness. The danger to your business while you are being busy is that you start to ignore things that are easy to ignore – and then somehow you just outright start to miss things.

Take some inspiration from Oliver Twist and internalize the mindset. “Please sir, I want some more.” When it comes to generating new customers – stay hungry!

If you are that analytical type – this just goes against the grain. Clearly X is the independent variable and Y is dependent on X.

Y=mX+ B.  We all know that. You would really rather that I focus on the X and then tell you what happens when X is varied. And then you are free to produce the Y.

But this is not text book math that we are dealing with. It is the real world. And in the real world, starting with a bunch of X’s and formulating the function for Y is pretty muddied. It’s just that every single X out there does not practice monogamy with just a single function at a time. In fact whatever X you choose to study is going to be part of many different functions. So maybe you should just pick the Y that matters to you and work backwards to figure out which X’s go into the creation of that Y.

In this analogy, Y is the real customer that you need to win over. The one who has the problem that you are solving; understands the constraints and limitations of how they are operating now; would derive great real-world benefits by adopting your product offering; and is WILLING to spend money to adopt the solution. So if you are presented with the real deal – a bonafide customer – you have to treat them as the ideal Y and then go and figure out those X’s and how they come together to make that Y. If you can do that, you have yourself an invaluable source of marketing content which you can use to shape all your messaging and effectively bring in a steady flow of new Y’s.

But often there is a breakdown in getting through that process. Assuming you recognize the correct Y when you see it – i.e. they are willing to give you money, then the bigger breakdown occurs when you derive the wrong set of X’s. And then, in the pursuit of maximizing productivity, you incessantly resort to dividing your labor to focus on cranking out as much of those X’s as you possible can. And so it goes. You could be getting lots of page views, lots of downloads etc. But if you are not getting a proportional increase in sales – you are not getting more Y’s. Have you ever heard some say: “We are doing everything right – but we are not getting results.”

So where does that leave you?

You need to get to know that genuine Y, better than you do. Or you need to get to know more of them. It leaves you with the need to go back to only the bonafide Y’s and try again to figure out what the real X’s are, and how they come together to create the Y. The true challenge rests in how the communication with Y takes place. If you treat Y as a test subject to be diagnosed to find out the X’s, the exchange may be short lived. Nobody really wants to be the test subject.

On the other hand, if Y is treated as a partner in your quest to understand the X’s, they will uncover the gems of information that are invaluable in continuing to formulate and refine your marketing content. And to be that partner for you – you must deliver additional and special value which provides the return on time investment that will genuinely motivate Y. I stand by my conviction, give me Y and I will give you X. And if you can’t give me Y – you don’t have a business.

Prospective customers can be a fickle bunch. One day, there is absolutely no way to get their attention – no matter how much real value you can provide. While on another day – they want to engage with you faster than the speed of light.

This seemingly bipolar characteristic of a prospect’s behavior can’t help but conjure images of the infamous Mr. Market – the fictional character created by Benjamin Graham and often referenced by Warren Buffet. For anyone who has dabbled in the stock market, they know one thing for sure – it is rather difficult to predict the behavior of the stock market on any given day. Yet still, there has to be some mental framework that one adopts to cope with it. Enter – Mr Market. From Warren Buffet’s 1987 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter:

“…you should imagine market quotations as coming from a remarkably accommodating fellow named Mr. Market who is your partner in a private business. Without fail, Mr. Market appears daily and names a price at which he will either buy your interest or sell you his.

Even though the business that the two of you own may have economic characteristics that are stable, Mr. Market’s quotations will be anything but. For, sad to say, the poor fellow has incurable emotional problems. At times he feels euphoric and can see only the favorable factors affecting the business. When in that mood, he names a very high buy-sell price because he fears that you will snap up his interest and rob him of imminent gains. At other times he is depressed and can see nothing but trouble ahead for both the business and the world. On these occasions he will name a very low price, since he is terrified that you will unload your interest on him.

Mr. Market has another endearing characteristic: He doesn’t mind being ignored. If his quotation is uninteresting to you today, he will be back with a new one tomorrow. Transactions are strictly at your option. Under these conditions, the more manic-depressive his behavior, the better for you.

But, like Cinderella at the ball, you must heed one warning or everything will turn into pumpkins and mice: Mr. Market is there to serve you, not to guide you. It is his pocketbook, not his wisdom, that you will find useful. If he shows up some day in a particularly foolish mood, you are free to ignore him or to take advantage of him, but it will be disastrous if you fall under his influence. Indeed, if you aren’t certain that you understand and can value your business far better than Mr. Market, you don’t belong in the game….”

The analogy is that Mr. Market behaves like Mr. Customer, and the rational partner behaves like Mr. Solution. The only reversal is that Mr. Solution shows up daily in front of Mr. Customer, to present a rational view of things and solutions that will make things better for Mr. Customer. But the reality is that Mr. Customer is constantly being bombarded by external stimuli. He can love what you say, or hate what you say on any given day.

With marketing, characterizing and modeling behavior is a key component of developing effective communications. But at the same time, it is important to be wary of the nature of Mr. Customer – i.e. Mr. Customer is not good at being rationale all the time. As Buffet states “it will be disastrous if you fall under his influence”. So stay rationale and don’t go down the rabbit hole.

It may seem like rather a bold statement – to guard yourself from falling under the influence of Mr. Customer. After all, the customer always knows best and this is where you learn most about the solutions you are developing. This may be true in specific instances – such as with prospective customers who are experiencing maximum pain points, and hence are the ones that provide the true data points that guide and shape the solutions that you offer. But once you have a solution and are marketing it – you will in fact encounter the full spectrum of customers – and not just those early adopters.

Once you have a market-ready solution, you are at a stage where your understanding of problem and the solution must be better than Mr. Customer. With some word substitution to fit my analogy, Buffet’s thoughts apply whole-heartedly, i.e.:

“…if you aren’t certain that you understand your value proposition far better than Mr. Customer, you don’t belong in the game”

So how does it all translate to action for your marketing efforts?

1.You must develop a very high IQ when it comes to the problem that you are solving. When comparing to the average customer, your IQ of the value-add which you provide must be higher.

2.You must create messaging in different ways so that somehow it can line-up with a rational mindset that the customer takes on, from time to time.

3.You have to get used to being annoying because your communication will not always be received in a rational manner. Hence, you have no choice but to ignore irrational responses to your message – and just come back another day and try again.

When I graduated from university proudly wearing my iron ring, I faced the same uncertainty as many graduates do – Am I ready? It wasn’t exactly a cake walk getting through those non-stop arduous classes; and dealing with the diversity of topics that all had to be crammed into a few years. And after the rollercoaster ride of small achievements, intertwined with regular doses of doubt of one sort or another, this degree was being bestowed upon me. And apparently I was ready to go out and do something useful in the world.

Like a birdling ready to leave the nest for the first time, I couldn’t help but crave for bit more certainty about the whole. So it seemed like the right time to pay close attention to the profound words of the dean of electrical and computer engineering. And the words of wisdom were:

“What you know is not as important as what you think you know”.

Well that solved things. All that is necessary is to have achieved that state-of-mind where I think I know the issue at hand. And then I can take action and get busy in dealing with it.

As it turns out, there is a important principle in that snippet of wisdom that was imparted on me. Certainty. In the continually changing world in which we operate, certainty is never a definite. It is rarely at 100%. The best that we can achieve most of the time is that we think we know the answer – or we are pretty sure of our thinking. Or putting it another way, we can be certain about most aspects of the issue at hand. And when I reflect on the world of engineering, the mindset certainly holds true. It is just not feasible to know everything – the state of perfection just becomes an obstacle to success. And so it is with certainty – the need to have full certainty stops action from being taken.

None-the-less, there must be some level of certainty that is needed to move forward. And when it comes to engaging new prospective buyers for the problem that you solve, it is really important to understand the buyer’s certainty gauge. Despite the fact that you may have a solution to the prospective buyer’s problem, things will start out with a certainty reading of zero. And the challenge is to move that gauge as far the buyer needs it go to have the willingness to take action.

But moving that gauge takes multiple different inputs. The September 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review indeed has an excellent breakdown of what those different inputs are – or levers are they refer to them. The 4 levers are:

Consensus which is the perception that there are others who share our assessment of things. And when others share our view, it increases our level of certainty.

Repetition which is the process of repeating the message in different ways and facilitating that the prospect is able to repeat their own acceptance of the concepts being presented. And this increases the level of certainty that is felt.

Ease which deals with how easily the concept comes to mind. If the key concepts can be simplified in a way that makes them easy to come to mind, it increases the certainty about them.

Defense which is the process whereby someone is put in position where they must defend their thoughts. And consequently, they become more certain of their position.

When you are moving your prospective buyer through the buying cycle, it is process of progressively increasing their certainty levels about you. And ultimately making them certain enough to take action. The real key is that there are multiple levers that affect the aggregate certainty level. One demo will not do it. One white paper will not do it. Increasing your buyer’s certainty level about your solution will be made up of some proportional mix of those different levers. And that proportional mix will be individually determined by each prospect. As a solution provider, it is key that you devise methods of engagement such that you are working all the levers and customizing your approach to move each prospect to the point where they are certain enough to take the next step.

That’s right. If you are engaging prospective customers who are happy with how things are going in their business, then there is not anything you can do for them. Whether things are actually going all that well or not, is immaterial. Whether they can do things better, whether they can do things differently, or whether they can do new things – it just does not matter if they are happy with how things are. Even though doing something new may create great improvements in their business; and not doing them may hinder their ability to achieve their goals; it doesn’t matter. If they are happy with things just the way they are, they will never be good prospects for you.

On the flip side, unhappy customers are the cornerstone of new business. There is one simple driving force behind it all – people don’t like being unhappy. It’s not that hard to understand. If there is something that makes people unhappy, it continues to bring them down. It has to be addressed. Unhappy prospective customers will not be able to continue running their business with their status quo. Things that bug them will continue to eat away. They may try to suppress the unhappiness, hoping it will go away. But, sooner or later, they will be driven to remove the root cause of what’s making things unhappy.

Whenever someone buys something new, the decision making is always part emotion, part logic. And logic is always the deceptive part of the whole process. That is because you will never sell something to someone based solely on having an exceedingly good rationale. When you believe the just the logic of the whole situation is just irrefutable – there can always be some additional logic that is introduced which can kibosh the whole proposal.

When it comes to generating demand for your product or services, the marketing messaging that you create is crucial in kick-starting a process that will put your prospective customer on the right path. And that is the path that will stir up some emotion and show the potential to remove that unhappiness which your prospective customer can really associate with.

Demand generation is all about seeking out the source of unhappiness and determining how to bring that bottled-up emotional energy to life. And it doesn’t start by asking the prospect about what is their greatest challenge. That great challenge may remain that way indefinitely. It starts by focusing on what is the source their unhappiness. And then telling them stories to make them more unhappy about their whole situation. Ultimately, with a source of unhappiness that is genuine, it will build to a breaking point where things just cannot go on in the same way. And that is when the nature of the dialogue changes and you have a real prospective customer.

Don’t be overly content with happy customers. Even if they are your happy customers, their state of happiness is a reflection of the past. It is something you have done for them that has made them happy. But it is all in the past. To get new business, you want unhappy prospective customers. Driving your business with this mindset will give you both growth and direction of spreading your own solutions to those who need them the most.