In the movie “The Truman Show”, Jim Carrey plays a character where he unknowingly lives his life in an artificially created reality. When the character becomes suspicious that his interactions with the world are not genuine, he begins a quest to discover the reality, and starts to behave in unpredictable ways. It is a great satire that brings attention to the fact that behavior changes when we start to treat something as a device-under-test.

When marketers hear the words “marketing automation”, there is an inherent lure to a utopian state where we can setup our computers to automatically coax and nurture visitors to the point where our sales efforts are completely concentrated in the right place. We certainly want to be convinced that it is possible. Unfortunately, humans do not have a history of reacting all that well to these marketing mechanization effects. I don’t see anyone raving about their great experience on receiving robo-calls; or their great experience in navigating the telephone keypad (“Touch “1” for…); or their delight in receiving what appears to be a robo-tweet; or about their great experience in talking to call center reps with ID#s and no direct call-back numbers.

There is an important tenet that cannot be forgotten. Our prospective customers are human. And given the complexity of human nature, we must recognize that some things can be mechanized and some cannot. There is no doubt that marketing automation can increase the productivity of our marketing efforts if done correctly. And if done incorrectly, it can spurn away potential customers that could otherwise be a great fit for the products and services that we have to offer.

Before we can start automating anything, it is a key pre-requisite to develop both our messaging and an appropriate level of marketing content, which will be effective in showing up on search results. Not any old search results, but search results that are presenting answers to the type of problems which customers are seeking information about. This is the key starting point from which it is possible to start to apply analytic tools to understand the digital behavior of our visitors. It is all about characterizing behavior. What brought them to us? How long did they stay? What areas were most interesting? Did they make repeat visits? With an aggregated set of behavioral data, it provides strong feedback on what messaging is effective or ineffective; and where our marketing communication emphasis needs to be applied. If we get in our visitor’s way by asking for an email, with no justification, we are just encouraging them to bounce. And that just deprives us from the opportunity to learn more about them.

If we can get to this key milestone of understanding what prospective buyers are interested in, it is then possible to use marketing automation to up the ante, in terms of what marketing content can be provided to them. But marketing automation becomes somewhat of a misnomer for what is happening. It is really “permission marketing” that we are transitioning to. And it only works if the information is perceived as useful by the visitor. If it is, it then becomes permissible to up the ante again, with new offers.

We can only expect marketing automation to get us so far. There is a reason that it is not called sales automation. Regardless of what point system we develop to score the visitors, the best that our marketing automation system can achieve is arrive at a “marketing qualified lead”. To convert it to a real lead requires that human touch from our sales people. Don’t let your marketing automation efforts be “The Truman Show” where prospective customers are spurned to run, or duped with false promises. Find ways to better understand their behavior and invest in creating information that will help them. They will be more likely to stick around and take your call when they step forward in the buying process.

You want new customers to knock on your door. This is the most desired state.

Prospective new customers will want to contact you when they believe that there is a semblance of a solution for them. But what makes them believe that this is the case? The situation that you are painting must resemble their situation in order to allow them to self-identify. This is what causes things to click.

From the perspective of customers, there is always more than one way to deal with a specific situation. And so what is it that makes one solution preferred? When potential customers are cast into a marketplace where the vendors are all striving to differentiate their offering, it all becomes much less obvious which solutions merit more attention.

To get through this wall, the context of your messaging must allow potential customers to see themselves. An understanding of all those great capabilities and benefits will not do it alone. There is often that lingering doubt. Will it work for me? Is it worth it? Should I wait?

But if a prospective customer hears of the story of someone who was in a similar situation, it becomes the ultimate trump card. The whole mindset shifts to one where the situations are compared to decide whether one can serve as a proxy for the other. And if there is a match, it is quite likely that the propensity for engagement increases.

A skilled salesperson would be able to readily determine which solutions present themselves as a good fit for new customers. And they would be able to naturally migrate a customer through progressively changing needs. But therein lies the problem. With the plethora of solutions out there, new customers do not want to engage directly, until they themselves have determined that your solution could be a good fit.

In absentia of direct human contact and without another customer proxy, it becomes necessary for new customers to use the information that you provide, to self-diagnose their own situation. So the onus is on the solution provider to create self-diagnostic methods for prospective customers. This is what the incognito customer really is trying to do. They are trying to self-qualify themselves before they reach out to a supplier. By establishing an effective way to guide the self-diagnosis, the prospective customer will arrive at the level of self-awareness which enables self-identification for the solution that is being offered.

The process is simple enough. The challenge lies in how you present the stories, and how you enable potential customers to self-qualify. Deriving the key insights from actual customer experience is not always apparent, and does require a closer communication with those real users. Determining how best to break down the self-diagnosis or self-qualification steps also may not be immediately apparent. They can only be uncovered from a true understanding of how customers are dealing with their current situation.

So there you have it. The greatest propensity to action is when a potential customer initiates first contact. To get to this much desired state, you must enable a prospective customer to easily self-identify with the problem you are solving. They must see themselves within the messaging context that you create. And that is when the great epiphany occurs. Round peg meets round hole.

Everyone knows that creating a positive customer experience is what it is all about. The individual outcomes, and their interactions, creates a real boon for business growth. And the tell-tale signs of a positive customer experience are not so hard to identify. Customers will:
-feel good about their purchase
-want to share their story
-will return to the vendor seeking more
-will shun alternatives
-will provide genuine feedback to the vendor

So no doubt, it is important to focus on creating those positive customer experiences. But getting there does not boil down to a bunch of incentive schemes to get more “Likes” or “tweets”. Getting there boils down to understanding what kind of customer experience is valued by your target market, and then investing in those areas. It is this understanding of what your customers value that is the real holy grail of creating those positive experiences and outcomes. And this is where the formula for getting there becomes less obvious.

The customer experience is borne out of some blend of 3 major components:
-The product/service offering
-The pricing/delivery offering
-Company support, both pre and post purchase

Determining what your customer segment values is determined by which 2 out of 3 items that they value most. They cannot choose all 3. Playing with the combinations allows us to see how things fall into place. If customers want the best product, and best price, they will not get the best support. Or if they want the best product, and best support, they will not get the best price. And if they want the best price and best support, they will not get the best product.

Of course, customers always want it all. So establishing an understanding of how your customer’s value system works, and henceforth their expectations, really needs to tie back to 2 fundamental points:
-The nature of the problem that your product/service offering solves
-The commitment the customer has to addressing the problem

And these are the key insights that need to be discovered and leveraged in order to drive positive customer experience. If the nature of the problem that you are solving is deemed important, and the customer’s commitment to solve it is high, then the user experience with the product/service offering is a high priority. And this is where investment will yield the best dividends. Conversely, having great pricing, great support, with a mediocre offering will fail to be achieve a positive customer experience, because you may be failing to deliver on the real usage needs.

Generating positive customer experience does not have a universal formula. It boils down to the things that you do well, and that are valued by the customer. It is the job of your sales and marketing efforts to find ways in which to communicate these aspects, such that it resonates with the customers whose values match yours. Of course, this sets off the whole cycle. Awareness. Interest. Demand. Purchase. And ultimately a positive customer experience which then causes those most desirable customer behaviors, that can truly catalyze your business growth.

So what exactly is business development anyways?

Does anyone really know? Is it sales? Is it marketing? Is it sales and marketing? Is it strategic alliances? Is it joint ventures? Is it mergers and acquisitions?

Here is the real test. Ask a number of different people what business development is and you will get a number of different interpretations. In honor of defending the turf of sales and marketing domains, here is my take. “Business Development” is a title that has crept into the vernacular of sales and marketing, in some misguided effort to embellish things. The ugly side effect is that, rather than being a proxy for the functions of sales and marketing, it creates fuzziness that results in negative synergy between the two functions.

If someone is in sales or marketing, and they are labelled as business development, it is an excellent way lose focus. What really happens is that the focus will shift around, shifting both priorities and responsibilities. Simply because of the lack of a clean delineation. And without the proper focus, it is more likely that the end result is a lack of business that gets developed.

When it comes to sales and marketing functions, roles and responsibilities need to be quite clear. Sales is all about the here and now. They must be focused on finding ways in which to solve particular issues that a prospective customer may be having now, with the products or services that they represent now. It is their responsibility to find those prospective customers who are qualified to buy now, and win their share of those opportunities. Marketing is not about the here and now. It is focused on generating all that awareness and interest that stimulates and creates the marketplace for those who can benefit from the product or services that they offer. It is their responsibility to find ways to create a pool of qualified candidate customers, who are ready for the here and now.

Given the completely different timeframes, and different outputs, these two functions just cannot be grouped together in any manner. Because if they do, the immediate and urgent priorities always take precedent over the longer term ones. This inevitably translates into more resources going into the sales effort, with marketing efforts being degraded into a random and dysfunctional set of activities. Unless you are in a business that does not need very much of one or the other (i.e. there is not much requirement for the sales effort, or there is not much requirement for a marketing effort), then the overall process of growing new business degrades.

In today’s marketplace, buyers have a myriad of choices. And they use the internet as a tool to narrow down a short list of potentially qualified suppliers. As it turns out, these buyers are spending more time engaging through marketing communications in order to narrow down that list. It means that the scope of the marketing task has increased, simply because of the fact buyers are weighing that information more heavily.

So what does it mean for your business? Start by jettisoning the mindset that ‘business development’ brings with it. Don’t allow sales and marketing activities to be blended together. They are separate tasks which are both vital to growing your business. Separate them. But make sure that the buyer’s journey effectively crosses over from one to the other as seamlessly as possible.

Once in a while, I come across someone who makes the assertion that there is “no marketing required” for the business that they are in. This always gets my attention. Where is this utopia? So I listen carefully with both ears to try to discern how their alchemy works. The result is always made up of half-truths, and unfortunately, the person is treating them as absolute truths. So let’s take a run through what causes some business people to think this way.

All of my customers know me.

That is quite an enviable position to be in. But your business is not an episode of Cheers “where everybody knows your name”. Just because they know who you are, respect you fully, and may even be loyal customers, it doesn’t translate to a permanent commitment to continue to buy from you.

Are these the type of customers who just love the status quo? Who are not going to invest any effort into seeking out new solutions to existing problems? Who do not come across any new problems? Or look for better ways to do things? Unlikely. Customers are always on the lookout for alternatives to improve. If you do not market new and different ideas to them in some form, you are putting yourself in an excellent position to miss the turn when their thinking changes.

I know all the potential customers.

Quite an impressive feat. But how well do you know them? Are you sitting with them continually? Is it an absolute direct line, from dealing with their issues, to having a mechanism to inform you of how they are addressing these issues? Do you have a defacto perma-presence among them? Unlikely.

You only have a limited time with your existing and potential customers. Even in the same industry segment, your customers are all trying to differentiate themselves in some way. Hence, they all have uniqueness which is a culmination of all their distinctive characteristics. Bringing out that distinction requires you to shape your marketing to elicit a response. And by this process you will get to better know your customers. It would be nice if you could just get them to diligently fill out questionnaires. But, even if they utterly respect you, you have to fulfill the ever pressing question that hangs over them, “What’s in it for me?”.

The product/service markets itself.

I would agree that the customer experience garnered from the use of your product or service has incredible power to secure an excellent standing in the eyes of your customer. This implies that it would be completely intuitive for the customer to seek you out for any issue that is within the realm of the issue that you are currently helping to address. Unlikely.

Customers have their own way of looking at things, and create their own perceptions. Somehow all of this marketing messaging that is flowing all around them, in all its various forms, adds to those perceptions. And one of their behaviors is pigeon holing. Supplier A for issue X. Supplier B for issue Y. If you are going to be pigeon holed, it is you who need to drive that marketing message to ensure that you are put in the right set of pigeon holes. You current product/service has already been assigned.

On whatever scale you operate, marketing is a key connection to your customers. It is a key process, not only in servicing and evolving with the needs of your targeted marketplace; but also in helping you define what business you are in. Whether it is direct marketing or targeted marketing, or any one of a number of different models that may be best suited to your business, it will help you drive your business in the right direction.