I was reading about the beginnings of the mobile payments processor Square in Technology Review. The setting is December 2008 shortly after Jack Dorsey had been replaced as Twitter’s CEO. He was back home in St. Louis visiting for a while, and he bumped into Jim McKelvey (a semi-retired entrepreneur). Although Dorsey had worked for McKelvey as a teen, they had not spoken in years. But as they were catching up on things, they immediately decided that they wanted to work together again – without knowing what it is exactly that they wanted to do. So they spoke every week and one day in February 2009, McKelvey had an incident that was the epiphany for Square.

The part that is quite interesting is that they knew they wanted to work together, without knowing what it was that they were going to work on. So it was during that serendipitous encounter that two entrepreneurs had a chance to share visions. They hadn’t picked a problem to solve. But they knew they were on the same wavelength in terms of the nature of problems. Something big.

It is being on the same wavelength that makes things click. And this is the state that you must strive for with new prospective customers. It is the ultimate state where a potential customer completely shares in your thinking about the problem and just wants to work with you.

In today’s web-centric environment, relationships are started or qualified as much digitally, as in any other way. Think about when you hear of something new. What do you do? Whatever the topic. A company, a person, an event, a place, just some “thing”. More than likely, you will reach for your smartphone, or your keyboard, or your tablet. It is unlikely that you will pick up the phone to call anyone.

And so it begins. The on-line learning process is where your prospective customers will begin their journey. And, it becomes so vitally important for your embryonic digital relationship to facilitate that learning. Your digital presence can’t be just be like an ad. If it is, it will get the same amount of attention as an ad. It really needs to be more like an infomercial.

The marketing and the selling comes second. Before a prospective customer will decide to engage, they need to feel that the information that you are sharing, the insights that are being presented, do in fact apply to their situation. They must see themselves in the context you create, and understand the message. If you own these insights, you increase the desirability to take things to the next level.

And getting to that utopian state will require an investment in communication channels, many of which are digital, in order to keep the learning process going. It is a continual nudging process, with some level of tracking mechanisms to assess how effectively your message is getting through.

You will only get to a willingness for a meaningful encounter, where the prospect is willing to reveal something about their real situation, once you have earned the respect of the prospective customer. If they have learned with you, there is a natural progression that they will want to work with you. If they see that you are on the same wavelength and that your goal is to make them successful, the rest of the details may not be as important.

If, as a sales person, you have ever targeted a new account by going straight to the top, you know what happens. You get sent down to the starting point. Of course, more than likely, you understood that going straight to the top was a long shot. And at least you ended up at a correct starting point to pursue your account development strategies.

Starting your sales process at the bottom of the corporate structure, is not just a ploy to shield the senior decision maker from interruptions. It is also a built-in mechanism for the company to de-risk their engagement with new and unproven suppliers.

This is an important point. Companies always strive to take the risk out of everything they do. Even after you are selected, companies will continue to expend effort to de-risk their decision. So when you are at the beginning of the process, it is advantageous to take this into account by bringing levels of risk that are palatable.

That means that you don’t get to start the relationship with the million dollar sale, or the multi-year commitment, or whatever is akin to a big deal. If you did, the sales cycle would be quite lengthy and you would likely starve along the way.

What is effective is the starter package. By design, the starter package needs to be put together so that the risk is low. And this goes beyond the financial part of the risk. The chance that it will not work, the chance that it will disrupt other processes; all of the risks need to be low.

Of course, a guarantee is important because it does demonstrate the supplier’s commitment to take a risk. But we are not just talking about ‘the guarantee’ because it does not provide for any recovery of the non-financial resources that may have been expended on your product offering.

From a marketing perspective, the product offering must be packaged in a variety of ways. Of course, each offering must have a compelling value proposition in its own right. But the entry point to the relationship, “the starter package”, is especially important. Because this is how momentum and inertia are created to grow the customer. Growing the customer can entail moving them up to a fuller package addressing the same need. Or just as good, a successful experience with the starter package, lowers the risk barriers for other products that you may offer.

Examples abound in all industries. Accountants often start with tax returns, and somehow move into consulting and advisory roles. Microsoft started with an operating system, then office productivity tools, then server software etc. Symantec started with a bunch of miscellaneous PC utilities, and built upon that success substantially.

The key is to recognize that the starting point is necessary as a way for the customer to de-risk their initial engagement with you. You may in fact have a great product offering, with a great value proposition. And your marketplace may even be warming up to it nicely. But if it does not fit into the entryway that is provided for it, it becomes really hard to get started. It is important not to ignore this. Many a competitor has been able to seize a market position, simply by having an entry point that made it easy to get started.

So what do you expect from a guy who worked at D.E. Shaw in the early 90s as they were pioneering their use of quantitative methods applied to the practice of portfolio management? You can expect that he figured out how to build algorithms, based on a ton of fluctuating inputs, which produced the optimal output. You can expect he figured out the impact of all those individual inputs, the interplay between them, and the tell signals on which direction the output was likely to lean towards. The financial data was available. It was just a matter of figuring out how to apply the math. Of course, the guy is Jeff Bezos. And you can expect that when he started Amazon, he brought the same tool set with him.

Entrepreneur magazine recently ran an article profiling Boomerang Commerce and their Dynamic Price Optimizer product. It was founded in 2012 by Guru Hariharan, an ex-Amazon employee, and sheds a small amount of insight into the extent to which Amazon invests in algorithms. The part that is noteworthy is the gap which Guru sees between Amazon’s tools and its competitors. It was “mind-boggling” as he says. Advantage: Amazon.

The crux of it is based on both portfolio theory and game theory. Complete analyses are done first on historical data sets in order to construct a model. And then the fun begins. It is all about finding the levers and how they will impact the output. Although this is a retail industry example, the same concepts apply to any competitive industry, where customers have choice and aren’t completely constrained. The handiwork certainly sounds no different than D.E. Shaw. It’s just a different data tap.

It really is all about the more free flowing information available to any customer, and the ratcheting up of competition. Customers hear about something new and they go to the internet. And Google allows them to piece together the information pretty quickly. So if the customer is able to “know all”, it naturally turns up the need for suppliers to be gathering the same market intelligence, and figure out how their portfolio as a whole is responding to the aggregate of customer buying decisions.

At one time, I remember needing to complete field reports to document win/loss scenarios and send them off to marketing. Never to see them again. And at times, I used to wonder: how long are we going to be pummeled before someone at the factory connects all the dots. In today’s markets, lagging in your analysis and competitive decision making, will penalize you harder. Whatever market you are in, you have to know whether your whole “portfolio” (i.e. your messaging, positioning, business model, and compete tactics) is game worthy.

The heart of business today is information. More specifically current information. Certainly there are a lot of business process automation projects driving productivity upward. But there must be an equal emphasis on using data to drive your compete level. With an ever increasing use of the internet, by both man and machine, the data is breeding. It increases the need to collect that market data, find out how to sift through it, and determine which levers will enable you to compete effectively.

Elaborate con movies are one of my favorites. And no, I am not taking notes and making a playbook. “The Sting” is one of the classics that just stands out. Con overlaid on con. You better be wide awake for this one. Truth or lie, fact or fiction. As with all great cons, nothing is what is seems to be.

What I find intriguing is the entire setting. The mastermind has to think through the entire sequence of events. The interconnections. The interplay. The indications of when to proceed from one step to the next. The plan B. The type of players needed. Individual mindsets and their needs. It is all thought through. The con artist is a student of how things work. And that is a key take away for all of us.

You can imagine if the sales process was a one-step ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. Do you want it or not? It sounds like an ultimatum of sorts. And buyers certainly don’t like ultimatums. If you are selling anything beyond the most commoditized of commodities, you are assuring yourself a ‘no’. And that gets you nowhere.

Isolated tactics do not get you very far. What is essential is that you invest in learning the big picture. How does the buyer discover their problem? What makes them care? What motivates them to do something? And where does it go from there?
Yes, of course there are models for this. There is the most famous of them, i.e the AIDA model (i.e. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). And there are also several others. Some are simply derivatives, and some are different. For example REAN (Reach, Engage, Activate, Nurture); and AISDALSLove (Attention, Interest, Search, Desire, Action, Like/dislike, Share, and Love/hate). Whichever the model, the fact remains that these models have been applied to drive the marketing and sales strategies for various classes of product.

But the base model only serves as a starting point. There is the model itself. There is the tweaking and customizations that may be needed to apply to your specific scenario. And then there are a set of tactics that need to fit with the model.

One tactic does not a strategy make. In moving along the buyer’s journey, a set of tactics needs to be applied at each major stage of your buyer’s decision-making approach, in order to fulfill the buyer’s goals for that stage. And there needs to be effective transition steps to make the jump from one stage to the next.

The cost of your prospective buyer’s participation at each stage is a key aspect of the journey. Whether that cost is: time, convenience or money, it has to fit with what your prospective buyer is willing to surrender.

In today’s hyper differentiated and hyper competitive world, there is an unwavering pressure for results. With the rush to implement tactics, the possibility is there for tactics and strategy to get mixed up. The risk of course is that it’s just helter skelter. Too many tactics at one stage of the buying cycle. Not enough tactics at another stage of the buying cycle. And the premature loss of prospects just translates into wasted resources. Don’t succumb to this. Get a handle on the big picture first, and methodically figure out the sequence of events. And it’s not about being a con. It is about being able to effect the things we understand.

There is an assortment of media and marketers who are losing their way in adapting to models of engagement that fit with user behavior. As an example, Yahoo is one media platform that is thwarting my efforts to consume their content in a natural way. What is really hindering this is the presentation of AdChoices to look almost exactly like all the real article summaries.

A general media platform like Yahoo serves as a good source for casual leisure reading when I want to take a break from something. Their content curation is getting pretty good. But when the ads are disguised to look like regular content, it makes it harder to just peruse. Now, it forces me to keep my guard up so that I am not duped into reading ads. I am taking a break to cull the headlines and find new and interesting stuff, not to read ads.

While I am in complete agreement that marketers must travel along the path of their customers, I am not a proponent of hiding in the bushes. By pretending to look like something else, the deceit just creates an obstruction to the regular content review that I want to do. This type of disruption does not feel all that different in its effect, than the pop-up banners that have been beaten down quite drastically from the early days. To me, these in-line ads which look like genuine content just feel like disguised pop-ups. But, I actually have to scan it. Conscientiously determine that it is an ad. And then move on. And that is annoying.

As I say, I don’t feel hostile to an ad being in-line. But it must be instantly distinguishable from real content. Let’s not pretend. No-one likes to be conned. Visitors on a website are not there to be subject to a bunch of parlor tricks. The real outcome of using these tactics is the opposite of trust. Visitors to some extent are forced to keep their guard up so they are not duped into giving their attention to something that they are not interested in. And if a visitor is constantly forced to keep their guard up, it becomes a tiring process and eventually they stop visiting. I would say that is the wrong result for all involved.

We are in the midst of transformation in content consumption, and it is the content consumers that are taking control. If content is going to be put in front of them, it has to fit with their expectations. Content is content. Ads are ads. Visitors will always show up for the content and avoid the ads. While content needs to work hard to convince the visitor that they have something new, interesting or meaningful to say, ads must march to a different drummer. Ads must work with that ever slightest amount of attention and put all their effort in communicating one thing. If there are 2 things, that is too much to process and there needs to be second ad for that other thing.

Unless everyone suddenly decides to pay premiums, content and ads will always be joined at the hip. But they can never be treated the same. The resulting confusion just messes everything up.