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May 15, 2020

The Definitive Guide To Marketing Your Business On Instagram

The main thing that you have to remember on this journey is just be nice to everyone and always smile. Refreshingly, what was expected of her was the same thing that was expected of Lara Stone: to take a beautiful picture.

We woke reasonably late following the feast and free flowing wine the night before. After gathering ourselves and our packs, we headed down to our homestay family’s small dining room for breakfast, where we enjoyed scrambled eggs, toast, mekitsi (fried dough), local jam and peppermint tea.

We were making our way to the Rila Mountains, where we were visiting the Rila Monastery.

We wandered the site with busloads of other tourists, yet strangely the place did not seem crowded. I’m not sure if it was the sheer size of the place, or whether the masses congregated in one area and didn’t venture far from the main church, but I didn’t feel overwhelmed by tourists in the monastery.

Headed over Lions Bridge and made our way to the Sofia Synagogue, then sheltered in the Central Market Hall until the recurrent (but short-lived) mid-afternoon rain passed.

Feeling refreshed after an espresso, we walked a short distance to the small but welcoming Banya Bashi Mosque, then descended into the ancient Serdica complex.

We were exhausted after a long day of travel, so we headed back to the hotel and crashed. I had low expectations about Sofia as a city, but after the walking tour I absolutely loved the place. This was an easy city to navigate, and it was a beautiful city despite its ugly, staunch and stolid communist-built surrounds. Sofia has a very average facade as you enter the city, but once you lose yourself in the old town area, everything changes.

If You Have It, You Can Make Anything Look Good

Clothes can transform your mood and confidence. Fashion moves so quickly that, unless you have a strong point of view, you can lose integrity. I like to be real. I don’t like things to be staged or fussy. I think I’d go mad if I didn’t have a place to escape to. You have to stay true to your heritage, that’s what your brand is about.

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May 15, 2020

Kansas City Has a Massive Array of Big National Companies

We were making our way to the Rila Mountains, where we were visiting the Rila Monastery.

Headed over Lions Bridge and made our way to the Sofia Synagogue, then sheltered in the Central Market Hall until the recurrent (but short-lived) mid-afternoon rain passed.

Feeling refreshed after an espresso, we walked a short distance to the small but welcoming Banya Bashi Mosque, then descended into the ancient Serdica complex.

If You Have It, You Can Make Anything Look Good

Source: MENG posts

May 15, 2020

Program Will Lend $10M to New Detroit Minority Businesses

We were making our way to the Rila Mountains, where we were visiting the Rila Monastery.

Headed over Lions Bridge and made our way to the Sofia Synagogue, then sheltered in the Central Market Hall until the recurrent (but short-lived) mid-afternoon rain passed.

Feeling refreshed after an espresso, we walked a short distance to the small but welcoming Banya Bashi Mosque, then descended into the ancient Serdica complex.

If You Have It, You Can Make Anything Look Good

Source: MENG posts

May 15, 2020

Now Is the Time to Think About Your Small-Business Success

We were making our way to the Rila Mountains, where we were visiting the Rila Monastery.

Headed over Lions Bridge and made our way to the Sofia Synagogue, then sheltered in the Central Market Hall until the recurrent (but short-lived) mid-afternoon rain passed.

Feeling refreshed after an espresso, we walked a short distance to the small but welcoming Banya Bashi Mosque, then descended into the ancient Serdica complex.

If You Have It, You Can Make Anything Look Good

Source: MENG posts

May 7, 2020

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Source: MENG posts

October 31, 2017

Five Levels of Rethinking Recurring Revenue and Retention

Many B2B businesses either have shifted or are shifting to some form of a recurring revenue model. When they do, one of the first things they learn is that renewals by current customers are just as important as―and often more important than―initial sales. If the customer doesn’t stick around for, typically, three to five years, then you’ve lost money on them.

But renewal rates and recurring revenue seem to be stuck. Companies I work with are ones that have been trying to make a difference. They need to significantly increase renewal rates to achieve the growth their investors demand and their teams want and have been using a variety of tactics to do so. But none of those tactics targeted to recurring revenue seem to make much of a difference.

These companies usually rely on two approaches to maximizing renewals. The first is an activity-driven approach, usually focused on adoption. The intent is to determine which activities your customer performs with your product that tend to lead to renewal and then to build a program to encourage your customers to do more of those activities. The second is a conversion-driven approach, where you ask customers for renewals, maybe making special offers for early renewals or upgrades, and expect a percentage to accept your offer. This is very much like your demand-generation process, where you expect a given conversion rate from a marketing offer.

Both of these are good approaches to building recurring revenue, and they work. But if you’ve spent time trying to improve your renewal rates, then you probably have that gnawing feeling in the back of your brain that wonders why this is so hard and why it takes what seems to be either a patchwork or a Herculean effort to make any significant uptick in renewal rates.

If this sounds familiar to you, you’re missing something: you’re not paying attention to what your customers really needed in the first place. You’re probably working with each customer on a recurring revenue plan for what you think they define as success, which is typically a list of activities you’ve developed that you think, statistically, lead to renewal.

But renewal is not the same as a successful customer. We have all become so programmed to define success as a collection of metrics that we miss out on what we really mean by being successful.

For Recurring Revenue, Know What Customers Really Want

I’ve heard any number of marketers and salespeople say to me that customers buy only two things: cost reductions and revenue increases. You might even hear the (highly coached) customer attest to this in case studies. But this is not what the customer really wants.

To build a strong relationship with your customer and ensure they renew year after year, you need to understand both their concerns at every level and the kind of relationship your customer needs to have with you.

Note that concerns in this context are not worries. Concerns mean the things with which your customer or its people are concerned with, think about, and hope for.

The model I use with my clients surfaces customer needs, concerns, and aspirations in five different ways. It looks at the questions you are asking and about your customer’s business and how you are addressing the concerns and aspirations you identify. This model is based on a model of understanding concerns written by my good friend Jennifer Kenny.

When you use this model, it’s important not only to understand what your customers need, what they are concerned about, and what their aspirations are, but also what you can actually deliver. You will not be a trusted adviser to all your customers. Some companies will be transactional with all of their customers. Most will have customers at every level of relationship.

When you understand your customers at this deep level, and you know how you work best with them, you then have an approach to creating, building, and maintaining relationships that will lead to recurring revenue and renewal year after year after year.

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The AMA’s Executive Circle is the indispensable community of executive level marketers who share their passion and expertise to ensure each member’s success.
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September 13, 2017

The One Mistake that Derails Company Growth

You have a pretty ambitious company growth target. You’ve put together a strong team, as well as a great sales and marketing plan based on industry best practices. Your offerings are ready to go. And you launch your campaigns. Everything looks good, and the outlook is rosy.

A few months later, you’re scrambling. Everything worked as planned, but prospects are not hitting your B2B funnel nearly as fast as you thought they should. Your pipeline looks pretty anemic. And you’re missing your growth targets up and down your pipeline.

What Happened to the Company Growth Plans?

If your company is like most these days, the entire company is looking at you―the marketing leader―to explain why things have gone awry and how to fix them. After all, marketing’s job is to drive the pipeline, right?

If you’re like most marketing leaders, you take a look at your campaign. Was the message right? Did we miss something in the design or execution? Then you look at your process. Is there something keeping an interested prospect from taking whatever action you were hoping they would take? Did you fail to follow up? Did sales drop the hand-off of the lead from marketing?

The Mistake

Your problem isn’t your sales people. It’s not your marketing people. It’s your customer.

That’s right, the problem is your customer. In my previous post, I wrote about building a better persona to get a better understanding of your customer (you all did that, right?). If you did that, then the next three steps are:

Decide, based on what you know you can deliver, what specific concerns and aspirations your company can fulfill for your target customer.
Decide what promises you will make to your prospects that they understand will fulfill those concerns and aspirations.
Then build your position and your message around those specific promises.

When you do that, every prospect that receives your message will understand instantly how you will help them and whether they need that specific kind of help. If they don’t, they are not your target customer, and you can comfortably let them go. If they do, they will be interested and will enter into your company growth funnel quickly and easily―and of their own accord.

If you don’t get your target customer definitions, position, and message right, you are marketing to no one. You are putting a bunch of messages out into the market in the hope that they will resonate with someone who will then call you to the benefit of your company growth plans. Your metrics for this type of effort (often called “spray-and-pray”) will be below your industry average, and you will be left wondering what went wrong.

We, as marketers, put a lot of effort into the process of marketing, including campaign design and the underlying technology. But marketing is still, fundamentally, about knowing what your target customer wants and needs and delivering that in a way that makes them feel like you’re doing magic for them.

If your marketing isn’t yielding the company growth results you expect or want, the problem is not how you’re doing marketing or sales. The problem is that you don’t know― at least not well enough―who your customer is and what you can do for them.

Go back to the drawing board. Get your target customer, position, and message right. Your pipeline and your company will thank you.

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The AMA’s Executive Circle is the indispensable community of executive level marketers who share their passion and expertise to ensure each member’s success.
Learn more — Apply for Membership

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August 1, 2017

Drop the Persona. Market to a Person

Nearly all the marketers I meet seem, in some way, obsessed with personas. A persona is a convenient little tool that describes some set of attributes of a hypothetical―and supposedly typical―customer that are intended to allow everyone in the company to understand this customer and what they want.

If you’ve spent time talking with me about personas, you know exactly how I feel about them: I hate them.

No, I don’t hate the idea that there should be an understanding of the customer, and everyone should be able to see what it is. That’s necessary for getting teams aligned and driving market growth (see my discussion on this in my previous post).

I hate the idea because most of the marketers I meet use them as crutches―and not very useful crutches at that. I hate that most marketers try so hard to be specific and complete in their description of “Finance Francine” that their list of things “Francine” cares about are either redundant or useless in creating messaging that will convince the hypothetical “Francine” to spend non-hypothetical money.

Have you ever seen a list like this?

“CEO Chuck” cares about:

Increasing revenue.
Increasing profit margin.
Meeting set revenue and profit goals.
Not losing revenue.
Not losing profit margins.
Increasing net income.

OK, I’m going a little overboard, but you’ve seen that list. The problem you see with it is that it’s redundant. I see that and something far more dangerous to your marketing:

The list is meaningless.

If the person working on personas in your organization makes lists like this one, you probably don’t ever look at them for anything you do. If you do look at them, I’d ask you whether they help you target content, create advertising, or email campaigns or even inform sales scripts.

A good test for whether you have a useful persona is whether your average sales rep can use the language in the persona document to describe how you help your customer and the prospects on the other side of that table (or other end of that call) respond with “Yes!! That’s exactly what I need!” How often does that happen to you?

So, what do we do about this? How do we get a useful understanding of the people to whom we are selling (and yes, if you’re selling to businesses, you’re still selling to people)?

Focus on the person.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, it is, but then again, it isn’t. They say understanding other people and building relationships is hard. When you are selling any kind of offering, you are building a relationship with another person (or people), and it’s exactly as easy and hard as with anyone.

What’s the key to getting this right?

In an earlier post, I wrote about the importance of knowing how you and your offering make a difference in the lives of your customers. There are three steps to making this an integral part of your marketing:

Understanding your customer’ needs and aspirations―most importantly, the ones they don’t articulate.
Understanding what needs and aspirations you can enable.
Understanding how you help your customer meet those needs and achieve those aspirations.

Revisiting “CEO Chuck,” here’s how this might work:

Chuck runs a small software company. Chuck is trying to solve the disconnects within his organization. He knows that if product, sales, and marketing could stop arguing and get on the same page, it would be easier and smoother to generate leads and grow the sales pipeline. His demand generation leader says the biggest obstacle to getting prospects into the pipeline is knowing how to effectively find the right kind of person to whom to deliver messages. His investors are breathing down his neck about meeting sales targets and showing some eye-popping PR stories. His engineers are bugging him about prioritizing new features and bug fixes, and claim they can’t understand what they should be doing first―it all seems important.

Now let’s say you are selling some kind of marketing product to Chuck. You could tell Chuck your offering increases revenue, and you’d think that would be important enough for him to buy it. But let’s say your offering could help get the pipeline process unified between sales and marketing, and make sure they both have at least common numbers, account information and the like. You could then offer Chuck a solution to at least part of the sales and marketing friction problem, making his pipeline move more smoothly to help grow revenue.

Some marketers will see that as a more specific and, therefore, smaller offer. It’s not. It helps solve the problem your prototypical customer thinks they have. It makes sure you can deliver something they think is valuable to them and that makes a difference in their lives. And if you do it successfully, I am pretty sure they will tell their friends and colleagues you made a whole set of challenges go away.

This illustration is an over-simplification for the purposes of keeping this post readable. But the point of doing this exercise―and doing it well―is you get to understand your customer as a person, not as a hypothetical persona or profile.

And when you stop making claims to a persona and start making promises to people, you can start delivering real value and changing their lives.

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The AMA’s Executive Circle is the indispensable community of executive level marketers who share their passion and expertise to ensure each member’s success.
Learn more — Apply for Membership

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June 8, 2017

The Path to Growth: Five Stages of Position-Product-People Alignment

For nearly any business, the path to growth happens when you know your market and have your product and your people aligned to the needs of that market. For young companies, such as the technology startups with which I work, this alignment can make the difference between a future IPO and shutting down the business.

Exceptional Growth Requires Expert Navigation

As companies start and grow, they begin to discover not only their own expertise, but, more importantly, their market, its niches and segments, as well as its quirks, needs, and wants. I think of this as navigating the discovery of a new land, full of opportunity and fraught with danger. Finding the path to growth is challenging, but the closer you get to your particular path, the more rewarding it becomes.

The path to exceptional growth is the precise alignment of your product (and capabilities), your position (the needs and wants of the market), and your people (their execution of your processes).

Most businesses go through five stages of alignment:

I’ve outlined this for a typical technology startup, but this can apply to any business or product line.

1. Suspicion

When a company is just starting out, the founding idea comes from some knowledge that a handful of potential customers may need something like the product being contemplated and a founder’s belief she can address that need differently from how it is being solved now.

The market is unknown territory. Whether there are more than a few potential customers is unknown. Any knowledge of a path to growth is nothing more than a suspicion. The product is brand new, so it is still trying to find the needs with which to align.

2. Discovery

As the company starts to sell products and find customers, it has also found a wider range of ways its product meets the needs of a wider range of customers. There may be little consistency from one customer to the next, but they all find the company has something that meets some set of needs.

This stage of discovery is an important step for every company. The company learns some of what is possible and can start to consider which of the many types of customers will suit it best.

At this stage, there is still very little alignment among position, product, and people, as the company is trying to do everything it can to meet the needs of any customer who shows up. The most common cause of failure at this path to growth stage is a product that is not growing to meet these diverse needs, meaning the company can’t deliver on its promises.

3. Map Making

The company has now become more adept at finding customers and finding ways to discover and meet their needs. While there may be little consistency as to these needs from customer to customer, some commonalities are beginning to appear.

These areas of commonality are the segments and niches in the company’s market. Knowledge of these shows the company what will work best for its own strategy and objectives and will eventually help it better understand how to compete with direct and indirect competitors.

This is where alignment becomes critical. As the company learns where it can be most successful, understanding the needs of that segment and how the company can meet them differently from what has come before becomes critical to continued growth and advancing to the next stage.

The most common causes of failure at this stage are either not seeing the emerging segments making it hard to focus, or not continuing to build product that meets the needs of the coalescing segments, again causing the company to miss keeping its promises.

4. Navigation

The company has seen success in one or more segments and must now choose to focus on one at a time. Exceptional growth requires thinking smaller. Let me repeat, as this is not always intuitive:

Exceptional growth requires thinking smaller.

Focusing on one position in the market—one set of needs, met in a differentiated way, in one segment—allows the company to build a product, train its people and develop processes to focus on demonstrated success—and start to repeat that success. This repeatability is the key to scale.

The most common cause of failure at this stage is not aligning product and people with the chosen position—the needs of the customers in the company’s market segment. This is lack of focus, one of the critical elements of exceptional growth.

5. Acceleration

With product and people aligned to position (market needs), the company is seeing an increasing number of customers, as well as a decrease in the effort it takes to find a customer. The repeatability inherent in focusing on a chosen position allows the company to scale its operations and delivery in a very precise way.

This same repeatability at this path to growth stage allows the company to define segment after segment and pursue them in the same way that it pursued the initial segment, creating another layer of scale and accelerating growth.

The most common cause of not being able to achieve this scale is not getting the people and processes in the company aligned to delivering the needs of the chosen segment(s), causing the company to stumble in execution.

Understanding your market and how you can meet the needs of the customers in that market in a different and differentiated way is the foundation of creating exceptional growth for your budding business. Once you get your position right, precisely align your product and your people to that position, and you can find your unique path to exceptional growth.

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The AMA’s Executive Circle is the indispensable community of executive level marketers who share their passion and expertise to ensure each member’s success.
Learn more — Apply for Membership

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April 25, 2017

Customer Messaging Balance: Two Traps to Avoid

Developing customer messaging for your company at any stage can be fraught with difficulty. Even when it seems straightforward, marketers tend to fall into one of two traps. These are well-illustrated by how companies in my industry, technology, have approached talking about themselves and their offerings.

Trap One: You Say You Want a Revolution …

This is the most common customer messaging mistake technology companies make, and I’ve seen this across many other industries. You want your offerings to be not only different but also new and different. In tech, this sometimes takes the shape of claiming “you don’t even know you need this yet.” While there are some companies that can pull this off (Apple, historically), most can’t.

My friend and colleague, Martina Lauchengco, writes, “The Revolutionary Messaging Fallacy happens when those creating customer messaging make leaps into benefits or transformational language as if what their product did and why someone should care is already accomplished and understood” in her article, cautioning against claiming to be too revolutionary.

The problem with trying to be revolutionary is that it’s limiting―often very limiting. Yes, while some markets are ripe for disruption (and not necessarily technology-based), the vast majority of customers in most markets are looking for something to solve a particular problem (see Christensen’s book Competing Against Luck about how products are hired to do a job) and to solve it in a way they know and understand.

Side note: If you want to understand how much of your market is looking for proved vs. revolutionary solutions, consider a research project based on those suggested in Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

Unless your intent is to address the small part of your market that can accept something revolutionary, stop trying to say you’re revolutionary. You’ll just scare off everyone else in your market.

Trap Two: Walk the Line

I’ve been around the technology industry long enough to see not just the disruption that can be created but also the bandwagons on which everyone else tries to jump to get a piece of that disruption―whether in market share or in reputation by associating with the lead disruptor.

One of the trends most interesting to me as a marketer is the way companies try to become part of a particular trend or movement. The first one I was a part of was the “dot-com” trend of the late 1990s. For most companies, it wasn’t just a web address, it was how they told their own story. Even the largest companies wanted to jump on this customer messaging bandwagon (do you remember when Sun Microsystems was “the dot in dot-com”?).

Then there was a bust, the dot-com market died, and in its place was the cringe-worthy “Web 2.0,” reflective logos and all. Even I am guilty of jumping in this bandwagon with “Learning 2.0” and “Sales 2.0.” Then Zuora showed up and wowed everyone by being the platform for the “subscription economy.” Every company wanted its own economy, and some jumped on the bandwagons of the “gig economy” and the “sharing economy” and even, in environmental circles, the “circular economy” referring to the market for reused and recycled products. Now, “economy” is running its course, and I’m starting to see companies calling themselves “the <blank> transformation,” as popularized by the book The Fourth Transformation (by Israel and Scoble).

If you haven’t guessed where I’m going here, the trap customer messaging trap for marketers can easily fall into is sounding like everyone else in the market. If a prospective customer who knows nothing about you can’t tell the difference between you and your competitors and you can’t explain it in a sentence or two, you’re not going to win them over.

The Customer Messaging Balancing Act

If you can’t be revolutionary and you can’t be like everyone else, where should your customer messaging be? To me, the answer is simple: what difference do you make in the lives of your customers?

I don’t mean that you save them X dollars or Y minutes in some task. That’s not life-changing.

Here’s an example of what I mean by “life-changing:” When I sold a solution for sales leaders to better predict results, I would address a fear every single sales leader has: walking into their CEO’s office and telling her they were going to miss this quarter’s number (maybe, again). When we took away that fear and that conversation, we made a difference in their lives.

Ask yourself what difference you make in your customers’ lives. Explain how you do that better or differently than everyone else. Distill it into a story everyone can understand. Make that the crux of your message.

And let everyone else fall by the wayside as they fall into one of the traps.

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The AMA’s Executive Circle is the indispensable community of executive level marketers who share their passion and expertise to ensure each member’s success.
Learn more — Apply for Membership

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