Tag: marketing

Don’t SMAC Your Customer! | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

The service provider community is very fond of clever terms, and SMAC — standing for Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud — is a good example of that. However, if you’re a service provider looking to sell to new or existing clients, talking about SMAC may not be the most productive way to hold the conversation.

The most productive way to uncover a significant opportunity is to talk to your customers in their language about the business issues they have. Sure, they’re looking for technology answers to their issues, but very few of them use the term SMAC of their own volition.

So if you’re talking to a retailer about their out-of-stock condition, for instance, talk about the practical ways that your solution will help them identify where they’re out of stock and how you can help them prevent that from happening.

Software tools can be very powerful. But as I’ve blogged several times in recent months, decision rights and buying influence are flowing toward the business users rather than CIOs. Providers must change terminology and communication to successfully capture their attention and serve them well.

Use simple business terms to communicate what you can do for a customer. If you use clever technology terms, you’ll probably just marginalize your impact and consign yourself to the realm of being a geek.

My advice: Keep the acronym out of your sales toolkit. Don’t SMAC your customer!

In Services Marketing, Fruitcake Won’t Bring You New Business | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

One of my favorite quotes of American humorist Mark Twain is: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” He knew the secret of creating effective content: less is more. This is absolutely the case when creating content for marketing your service offerings and capabilities. But it’s not the dominant view, which is why so many service providers’ odds of getting new business sink when they launch new content — sort of like fruitcake.

Fruitcake is dense and heavy. Although it’s sweet and looks like a dessert, many people just pass it around without sampling it. Don’t let your marketing content be like fruitcake. It needs to be like a buntini — light, snack size, easily picked up and memorable. Your marketing intellectual property needs to be short, easy to digest, and easy to refer to other people.

I’ve blogged before about problems with ineffective thought leadership and marketing content. Often the issue is people and companies want to be stars. To be effective and memorable, you need to check that mindset at the door and focus on creating content that is compelling, interesting and based on real experience.

It’s even better if you serve up your content as a story or illustration rather than presenting it in a theoretical context. People gobble up stories. But theories, like fruitcake, are difficult to digest. If you go the theoretical route, you need to increase the level of synthesis and brevity.

Yes, it takes more time and effort to be concise. But your content will be more effective if you whip up a compelling topic, synthesize it down to its essence, present the essence in a short story and then stop. This way you’ll leave your potential customers hungry for more instead of wondering how they can squeeze in a nap to digest what they’ve eaten.


Photo credit: Richard Elzey

The World Doesn’t Need Another White Paper | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Would you maintain a marketing strategy that has shifted to a disadvantage? The answer seems like a no-brainer, but the reality is many providers in the global services market are indeed marching forward with a disadvantaged strategy.

In the increasingly competitive services marketplace, providers are running to thought leadership as a differentiation. That’s great. But here’s the problem: they use white papers to present their thought leadership but, frankly speaking, the world doesn’t need another white paper.

Nearly every provider has dozens of white papers; some have hundreds. Hoping to get past purchasing and get access to more senior people and business stakeholders, providers write white papers with the hope that they will percolate new business.

But the papers are not compelling enough to help increase their customer bases. They don’t differentiate in the area of thought leadership, because most of the providers are talking about the same topics or angles. The strategy might have worked when the topics were new; but that’s no longer the case. White papers usually sit on people’s desks and don’t get read. Even if they are read, they don’t make a strong impression and rarely result in new customers or serving an existing customer better.

For a white paper to work, it has to be different. It needs to be simple, profound and short. Buyers are looking for a practical vision of how to improve their business — they want something different than another paper about the capabilities of some tool or process. The paper won’t be remembered if it just tells the reader how to use a tool or process to do something.

Instead, a white paper with an effective message must ask penetrating questions. The right five questions will open the door.

IBM’s is doing this very well. So is Accenture. Think of their paper that gives an illustration of how a company saved $1 billion. The message is simple, clear, and leaves the potential customer asking questions. It invites a conversation between the buyer and the provider.

Webinars are similarly not effective. Like white papers, everybody is doing webinars and talking about the same thing. There is nothing compelling.

So you’re probably asking: Why is Everest Group doing webinars?

The audience for our webinars is a group of people who have subscribed to our content agenda on certain topics. In the webinars we effectively have a conversation with an intimate group invited to that conversation based on their expressed interest in it. We don’t attempt to evangelize through webinars; instead, we attempt to advance the knowledge of people who tell us they want to learn more about a topic and what’s going on in a particular space. Then we seek to move past the webinars to personal interactions and conversation with individuals.

It’s not that white papers or webinars are wrong in today’s marketing maneuvers. They have their place. It’s just that they are bad vehicles for projecting and demonstrating thought leadership to new people. They tend to be not insightful, all providers have them and the intended audience for the papers and webinars aren’t reading them or attending.

In the global services world marketing leaders depending on white papers or webinars to convey their message need to reinvent their strategy.

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