One of the things that I learned early when I first started my career in the semiconductor industry was the reference design. At the time modems were all the rage and I was working for a company that was late to the market with their modem chipset. In order to get some consideration and acceptance, the company designed a complete modem with their chipset. It was a reference design. Realistically, it was a completely cloneable product design. Anyone wanting to design, build and sell their own modem could source the exact bill of materials and be in the modem business. And in fact, that is what customers did.

In the electronics industry, reference designs are now all over the place. Whether it is graphic chips, or ARM chips, there is a reference design. From a marketing perspective, they are quite effective in that they provide a simple and well-defined starting point. The designer can start with something that works. And this removes that huge objection that roots itself around the uncertainty of whether the thing will work as advertised. A reference design removes that objection and permits a stronger starting engagement with the prospective customer.

Outside of the electronics industry, there is a wide assortment of vendors who endeavor to achieve the same effect. An out-of-the-box method to show something that is representative of the result that the customer will attain. Of course, in cases where it is just not an out-of-the-box type of solution, there is the reference customer. The reference customer is someone who has adopted the solution and has achieved the desired results. “Do for me what you did for them” is the stage that the new prospect will be most comfortable with.

When you are selling complex solutions, there is more than one way to implement, and there is more than one dependency on implementing that solution. A good understanding of the problem that you are solving is certainly a powerful way to get the attention of your target customer. But that by itself does not translate into real demand for your solution.

Real demand is created when your prospective buyers believe that you have a complete understanding of the problem that you are solving; and that you can provide a testament to the benefits that your solution will realize. This scenario trumps all guarantees. Guarantees by themselves are simply not as strong as the meaning of the word itself. They guarantee something, but never seem to account for the time, resources, or other opportunity costs borne by the customer. I am sure that you will find all those exclusions somewhere in the fine print.

Well you may say that you have that all covered nicely with professional sales reps. But the real challenge is to be able to effectively parlay these skills to the online channel. This is where the buying process begins more often than not. Whether your prospective buyers will order your solution through the web is really secondary. What they will do is go online to learn more about the problem that they are having. They will seek out how others are addressing the same type of situation. And if you can’t put that “reference design” forward in some form, don’t expect the phone to ring.

You might not get it right the first time.

Baseball batting averages are often quoted to highlight the fact that you will not hit it out of the park each time you are at bat. In fact you will have more missed swings, than home runs. It is no coincidence that Babe Ruth held both the career home run record for 39 years, as well as the career strike-out record for 29 years. And with that comes the irrefutable fact that this guy believed that he could make that connection, and that the result was worth the risk of the miss. But you have to keep working at it.

When it comes to demand generation for your business, it is no different. You have to keep swinging in order for your chances to improve. And it is those companies that continually look for ways to correct their swing that end up moving ahead. In the case of startup Wooly Pocket, they recount the fact that they completely re-did their website 4 times in the first 18 months, spending $7,000 the first time, $15,000 the second time, and so forth until they got it right. Now these guys were not hacks. One of the co-founders was in fact a business management consultant.

Another great example is from Neil Patel of KissMetrics who spent $252,000 on conversion rate optimization consultants. Interestingly, his effort also took place over an 18 month period. And again, Neil Patel is an established expert in digital marketing. So, not exactly someone who was making rookie mistakes. Rather, he was continually trying to better his swing, with a firm belief that he could make the connection.

Unfortunately, there are many businesses who have the potential to build a better pipeline. Yet, they are reluctant to keep swinging. It can be costly, and the learning process can be a bumpy ride. But the alternative of not swinging translates into an opportunity cost of not hitting enough. The key to the whole process is to apply enough analyses of the results, and make meaningful conclusions. It is key to answer the age old question: Are you doing the right things? Or are you just doing everything right?

Iteration is the key until you get it right. What you do first is not as critical as what you do second. And yet, there are countless businesses who have a “one and done” approach. They may invest good effort to create their website, and they are done. And the website remains there like a statue being weathered by the elements. It may have had good potential to generate new business at the start. But with inactivity and the passage of time, its potential to attract new business slides to the back of the bus.

To get it right, you must develop a marketing tempo that fits the constraints of your particular business and market. It is not a quick and easy process. It is more like a treadmill. And in an increasingly noisy world, now is not the time to make do with a one-and-done marketing approach, that just sits there with unquantified results.

Google strives to endear itself to the individuals searching for information. By algorithmically deriving who is most likely to be worthy of an individual searcher’s attention, they have an unwavering loyalty to the searcher. As for the individual websites, Google offers up paid services to facilitate their websites to be found. What keeps them in strong position is their ability to provide a search engine results page that is deemed to be of highest quality. They have all the answers. But, they are still an intermediary. A powerful one for sure. But nothing more than that.

I have launched a number of products throughout my career, where it was advantageous to extend the market reach by seeking out intermediaries. We are talking about: value-added resellers, distributors, agents, reps. Whatever name they go by, they serve as sales intermediaries who have a certain customer base that they have built up, to which they provide a range of products and services.

Now in all my instances, I carefully sought out and wooed these qualified intermediaries. They serviced the desired target market, and the product offering was complementary to their existing offering. Given a proper fit, the goals of the product launch and the number of real customer engagements were expected to gain momentum at a more rapid pace. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen.

No matter how much interest an intermediary shows in your product offering, their first loyalty is to the end-user and customer who actually consumes the product. If they aggressively promote a new product offering and it is not well received by the end customer, they are concerned about their reputation and relationship being tarnished. And this is a risk that they do not want to take.

So what happens? At best, they will make a soft introduction. And if the customer takes an interest, they will move ahead slowly. At worst, they will make no introduction at all, and wait for a customer to inquire about it. This doesn’t exactly lead to breakthrough sale momentum.

But, given the intermediary’s established relationship in providing comparable or complementary solutions to your target market, the potential is always there. To realize it though, we cannot depend on the intermediary to get the desired sales traction. It is still very necessary to target and woo the end customer with all of our targeted marketing activities, while leveraging all of this activity, to increase the propensity of the intermediary to take action. When there is a take-up by the end customer, there follows the take-up by the intermediary. And only then do we see benefits of a leveraged sales channel.

Well, this is no different in the digital domain with Google. The indexing of your website goes way down to the bottom of the page. You don’t get any attention from Google, until you get real attention from the end customer or from someone who has an opinion that the end customer will give some attention to. And then, all of a sudden, Google cares more.

What it all means is that you are best served by not over-emphasizing your marketing towards Google. They are just an intermediary and will naturally behave like all other intermediaries. They don’t care, until a real customer cares. So, it is far more essential to devise ways in which you can get directly in front of your prospective customers, and those who have influential opinions. Once they start googling more about your company, Google’s interest is enabled. The days of artificial link-building and keyword stuffing are over. Google is now much more focused on understanding the end customer, and so should you be. It all starts with the customer. Off-line or on-line, an intermediary or still an intermediary.

 

All markets are getting more and more crowded with an increasing abundance of product and service offerings. And, although there has been an increase in the number of channels through which customers can be reached, they are also becoming pretty crowded. The only way to prevent our business from fading into the noise is to maintain control of our marketing and sales processes. Two examples of where a business needed to regain control of their key marketing and sales processes are Leica, and Pangea Organics.

In the case of Leica, they are a German manufacturer of precision cameras, where their dealer network in the US was declining. So the company decided to open a flagship retail store in 2012 in Washington DC. But not your average everyday retail store. It included a studio to properly demonstrate the products, a gallery to show the photographic results, and the ability to hold photography courses. Leica is in direct control and their marketing message is now resonating as it should.

In the case Pangea Organics, a skin-care company, they felt they had improved their customer reach, by finally achieving the big time distribution in Macy’s and Whole Foods. But these were powerful partners who controlled their channel to the point where Pangea was hampered in how it promoted within the store, and the costing structure that it had to work under. So they made a drastic change. They exited this distribution channel and moved to multilevel marketing model, which effectively is a network of independent sales agents. Although they are independent, their commitment and motivation is much better suited to the product offering, and their results are now better.

There is no question that those who own the customer relationship, control the fate and direction of the business. But owning that relationship means that you must maintain a level of connectedness that suits your specific product offering. And if you put too much in between your business and your customer, there will undoubtedly be less opportunity for communication. Less opportunity to show the value you provide. And less opportunity to gather that all important market intelligence from real and prospective customers.

The more that the value of your product or service offering needs to be communicated to your prospective customer, the more important it is that you stay in control of the process. No one is in a better position to communicate the value of the offering than the business that is actually creating it. But the reality of penetrating any marketplace means that it is necessary for you to find channels to the prospective customer that you are after. And this is where the whole intermediation process starts to set in. So it is a bit of a Catch-22. You need to go through some intermediation to get in the channel. But as soon as you add a layer of intermediation, your level of control and influence is reduced.

Whether you are going through the internet, or whether you are going through dealers or agents, as soon as there is an intermediary, it is vital to understand the nature of the relationship between you and the intermediary and how it will impact your control of the customer relationship. Too many layers weakens the connection. Too many sources of conflict weakens the connection. Too much power imbalance weakens the connection. Too much cultural differences weakens the connection. The more dimensions along which you and the intermediary differ, the more dilution to your entire marketing and sales process.

When it comes to an intermediary, you must ask yourself the question: Are you part of their business model? Or, are they part of your business model? But even though you may be able to answer yes to both questions, you need to ensure that you are able to retain the degree of connection to the customer that you need. Without it, you will lose the ability to control the direction of your business, and that is a losing proposition.

Quite often when companies are under pressure to bring on new customers, there is a burst of energy driven into random acts of marketing. When I come across these situations, it always reminds of the The Three Stooges episode where they are hired as sales reps to sell a product called Brighto. The only thing that they know is that it “makes all bodies new”. When 2 of the stooges debate what the product is for, the smart one bops them, and advises them that it is for sale. So they run through the downtown streets, approaching random strangers, promoting and selling this miracle product. With no knowledge of what the product is for, how to use it properly, or who may benefit, they create those crazy comical situations that result, which do more harm than good.

Clearly this is not the kind of result that you expect from your marketing initiatives. And, although the Three Stooges’ situation is completely farcical, it happens all the time. Marketing may be an afterthought while things are going ok, and the company is busy enough catering to existing customers. But there comes a day suddenly when new customers are needed. And borne out of some notion that the company does indeed have a broad set of capabilities, the marketing net gets cast quite widely. Figuratively, it is much the same as that paper posting on the light pole at the street corner.

There are places where prospective customers expect to learn about new products and services, and there are places where they do not. Certainly there is a level of serendipity that can and does occur in bringing businesses together with new prospective customers. But, both the overall context and messaging play a vital role in actually being able to obtain attention and proceed further. If you do not understand the behavioral characteristics of your customer segment, you cannot market to them. You may not even be able to sell to them. So your starting point and progression needs to be mapped so that you get better at this, and the process yields improving results as you go along.

Those who are anxious to cast a wide marketing net will want to cite the favored phrase: “Half my marketing is working, I just don’t know which half.” I agree that there is certainly more than one touch point for your customer. But it still has to be a touch point that fits into a circle where the prospective customer is willing to give attention to your solution. Multiple communication channels will always be necessary. But, it is not the same thing as finding a situation where the prospective customer is captive, and then imposing marketing messages upon them.

What it comes down to is that in order for your marketing to be effective, it cannot be random. It must be targeted to a behavioral set that fits your customer persona. It is not a one-step process to figure out what really makes your customer tick. The effort must occur on an ongoing basis. You can start with assumptions and engage in marketing activities where both the goals are set, and the results are measured. And by seeking to understand, you will come across the marketing tactics that work for your offering.