Be Different or be dead

December 24, 2020

Why ‘ME’ marketing is now the best way to grow sales

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Why ‘ME’ marketing is now the best way to grow sales.

‘ME’ marketing will destroy traditional marketing; it’s all about the individual not the crowd.

Brilliant marketers get that ‘ME’ segments generate higher returns than market segments produced by traditional marketing.

The four bases of commonly prescribed market segmentation are demographics, psychographics, behavior and location (‘geographics’) and the marketing process is to develop programs targeted at potential customers with similar traits within a particular segment.

Segmentation studies are based on observations of population behavior;  the characteristics of the masses (represented by the ‘average’ person in the population) determine the conclusions of the study.

Why are these four segments used as the prescription for marketing segmentation? Because this type of data on people is readily available to the marketer.

Census data provides demographic and location information, billing and web visitor tracking systems produce product usage information and standard market research studies ask for lifestyle preferences which people are generally ok with providing.

For a marketing program, individuals are ‘mapped’ into each of these segments and are assumed to be like everyone else in their segment in terms of their likelihood to be attracted to a particular marketing program targeted to the segment.

The marketer’s assumption is that each person in the segment ‘looks the same’ in terms of the segmentation variable chosen and because of this similarity will all exhibit the same buying propensity.

Source: Unsplash

I’ve always found this assumption to be a non-starter. Just because I’m a skier does not in any way suggest that other skiers would be interested in buying the same products as I do.
And just because I’m in the boomer demographic with a specific income in no way is a good predictor of what others with similar characteristics will be interested in buying. 

In this approach, an ‘average’ target for a service might be ‘a male boomer with an annual income of between $60 - $100K who lives in Vancouver and who has an annual ski pass at Whistler’.

And the flaw is that there may actually be some people who do have the targets attributes and who would be interested in what is being offered, but there will also be many with these attributes who won’t be interested and who will not be interested in the offer.

Traditional segmentation produces hits and misses and the marketer hopes there are more of the former. But you can’t count on it. 

There are two serious issues with traditional segmentation methodology; its underlying assumptions are flawed.

First, having segmentation variables prescribed with the simplifying assumption that people tend to make purchase decisions on the basis of their demographics and so on, is fallacious; people express their differences with their own buying triggers which can’t be prescribed up front.

And second, assuming that people who exhibit the same segment characteristics will make similar buying decisions is simply not true; there are many sub-clusters within any given segment that have their own buying motivations quite apart from those in the overall segment.

‘ME segmentation’ is different from the commonly-used methodology, and should be adopted by a marketing organization that wants to stand out and perform above their peers.
ME segmentation poses the research question to an individual person not the population.

ME segmentation is strategic

It is considered as a strategic exercise which asks the question “How should the market be segmented to expose as many opportunities as I can?” not how do I assign my customer base into the prescribed segments.

The prescribed segmentation variables such as demographics, location, usage and lifestyle are not automatically used; they are given mild attention only: the focus is on determining the appropriate variable that will unlock the growth key for the organization.

The objective is not to place people in the prescribed segments, but to discover the appropriate segmentation elements that will produce the best sales result.

For example, if a specific web application best appeals to a Gen-Z individual with an IOS device, lives in Tsawwassen BC, is a member of a family of 4, and has a household provider who is female, then this is the appropriate segmentation to use.

Source: Unsplash

It’s focus is on differences

Traditional segmentation seeks to define small numbers of customer groups that share similar characteristics, and these characteristics are broad and general in nature.
People who are over 65 years old who have right-of-centre political beliefs, women who live on the west coast who are pro abortion are examples of the segments that are produced by the traditional approach.

ME segmentation, on the other hand, is a process driven by the intent to find differences in customer clusters in order to expose as many customer clusters as possible.

Opportunities come from the differences between people NOT similarities among them.

And greater the number of segments that are defined, the more intelligence you have on each person in the cluster AND the better the ability to match a product, service or experience to their specific individual need.

It’s end game is on ‘the many’

As stated above, ME segmentation tries to define as many different customer clusters as possible in order to get closer to the individual with the belief that if you have a tight fit with an individual person, you have a better chance of selling them something than if the person’s desires are watered down by a larger group.

The probability of making a sale increases due to the fact that you are better able to match your offering with the more precise needs. wants and desires of the individuals in each cluster.

Person-research will yield many conclusions; one for each person you talk to.

And each conclusion will be valid unlike conclusions from population research which will be valid for some individuals (who just happen to be exactly identical to the population profile) and invalid for others (whose special unique characteristics don’t match the population profile.)

Better to have 100 different conclusions from 100 individual people rather than 1 conclusion based on the “average” person in a population of 100.

It’s never-ending

ME segmentation is a continuous process of going deeper and deeper into a cluster of customers. Obtaining more and more information on the individuals in the cluster.

The marketer needs to keep looking for differences until they are nose-to-nose with an individual because that’s when total understanding of people’s desires is achieved.

If there were one million customers, the result of the ME process would be one million segments of 1.

What are the implications of a million clusters of 1?

▪️you would be different as few undertake the journey.

▪️you would have more rich and deep knowledge on your customers than your competitors have.

▪️your sales potential would increase exponentially.

▪️you would build both share of market and customer share.

▪️customer loyalty would increase because you are better able to match your solutions to their needs and wants.

▪️you would be better able to survive unpredictable ’body blows’ you might suffer in an ever changing world because you are so tight with your customers.

All because you choose to put in place a marketing philosophy to treat segmentation as a continuous strategic learning down to the individual.

Keep segmenting your market until you are nose-to-nose with a person.

Source: Unsplash

The role of the ME marketer

Within the ‘ME’ context of segmenting markets down to ‘the nose’ of an individual and examining their needs and wants rather than treating markets as homogeneous groups, the ME marketer’s role is different than what marketers have done in the past.

The ME marketer:

— Is driven by individual people have to say, not by what is implied by large markets or populations, and puts the individual before the average needs of the crowd.

— Is ok with the possibility of creating a unique marketing plan and product or service solution for an individual.

— Drives IT to ‘mass-personalized’ serving systems capable of uniqueness delivered to thousands of customers.

— Reserves Customer Appreciation Day events for specific customers who have demonstrated their loyalty to the company for many years.

— Looks to the power of new technology to define the needs of individuals and to use the secrets discovered to create personalized solutions and not to flog their current product portfolio.

— Uses every tactic available to build long term relationships with people rather than flog products at them with a focus on making short term sales. They see AI as a way to create new experiences for people and not a productivity tool.

— Is a strong advocate for the customer inside their organization, ‘doing battle’ for them to protect their interests in their own bureaucracy.

— Does whatever it takes to try and eliminate any dumb rules in their organization that infuriate customers and threaten their loyalty.

Mass marketers are the dying breed of the profession, and it starts with the practice of segmentation.

Segmenting down to ‘the nose of a person’ enables a deep understanding of what people want and desire, and exposes opportunities to not only enhance marketing productivity but also to create sustaining long term value for the organization.

ME markets are superior to crowds.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 12.24.20 at 06:26 am by Roy Osing
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December 14, 2020

Why special marketing deals for new customers are dishonest

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Special marketing deals for new customers is dishonest. Period.

I think one of the travesties of today’s marketing is the special promotion designed to bait or attract new customers. I believe it’s a dishonest marketing tactic which works against customer loyalty.

Most companies use special offers or promotions to bait or attract new customers with the belief they will kick sales up a notch and increase revenue.

For the most part, special deals use price as the hook and are time based to encourage people to make a fast purchase decision.

“For the next three months subscribe to our wireless service and get a free LED TV” is a common promotion offered by many as a way to acquire new wireless customers.

These offers are dangled in the face of a potential NEW customer; THEY receive the free TV.

On the other hand, someone who has been a loyal wireless customer for 10 years gets NADA even though they have supported the company to the tune of thousands of dollars.

This is crazy.

There are two main issues I have with this bait marketing approach.

1. It’s lazy marketing

First, it’s lazy marketing. The easiest thing to do is to give stuff away with the mistaken belief that if you do, the recipient of the gift will somehow feel obligated to enter your loyalty tent and remain dutiful henceforth.

What a joke.

Despite the studies marketers trot out, people value what they pay for, and if they pay nothing to move from another supplier to you they laugh under their breath and wait for the next juvenile marketer who comes along and makes you a better offer. And when they find one, bye-bye.

2. It’s intellectually dishonest

Second, bait marketing is not only an insult to the loyal customers who have given themselves to your organization for years, it’s also intellectually dishonest.

Existing customers rarely qualify for the bait deal. The free TV is NEVER offered to the customer who has been loyal for 5 or 10 years!

They have steadfastly paid their bill on time every month. They have put up with the odd price increase and policy change but their loyalty has been resolute.

And they have rarely been offered a deal on anything. They may have been thanked for their loyalty with words or an annual free calendar, but certainly nothing as substantial as the person being baited.

And when they discover that a special promotion is being offered to new customers and ask for the same deal they are told “I’m sorry you don’t qualify for this promotion”.

How do they feel? Second rate? Third rate? Don’t rate?

Special offers should be placed at the feet of your loyal customers fIrst. Reward or retention marketing may not be as sexy as its bait cousin, but special deals should be extended to existing customers FIRST!

It’s an awesome way to thank people for their ongoing support and return the favour with a token of your appreciation. Think about it as re-investing (in them) some of the revenue they have generously given you over the years.

But companies rarely use promotions this way.

They’re afraid of losing money.

They actually believe that if they offer the new customer deal to an existing loyal customer they will lose money; they don’t want to take the revenue hit from current customers taking advantage of the savings.
They don’t feel it is necessary to offer the promotion it to loyal customers to encourage them to stay. And if an exiting customer takes the deal they don’t believe it stimulates new sales.

These are bogus arguments for a number of reasons:

Offering something special to your loyal fans will surprise and delight them

They will stay loyal to you as long as you serve them well. And they will act as your best advertisers by telling the story to others about how great you are. Revenue will grow as a result.
Ever done a Net Present Value calculation on a customer who has been with you for 10 years? Is it a big number or small number. Right!

If you don’t include them they will find out

They will know that they are not included in the deal and they will be angry and feel neglected. They might leave you, but for sure they will talk you up to their friends and family as a selfish organization that does not care about their loyal customers. They will slander your brand; shouting out your lack of integrity and honesty.

If your special deal attracts someone because of their thirst for your low price, what makes you think they won’t leave you for a better offer?

A special targeted at ‘switchers’ is also fuel for more switching. Then you have realized zero return on your promotion investment and you have given your current customers reason to leave.

Investing in your loyal customer base always makes sense

You’re not reducing your margins by offering them the special deal, you’re reinvesting some of your margins in them to maintain their loyalty. Why do companies buy back their own shares?

(Read the fine print. This offer is for ‘new subscribers only’. As a customer for many years, this reduces their brand value in my eyes…)

It’s time organizations re-think the strategy behind ‘the special deal’ which is unethical and dishonest.

Any way you cut it, the deal strategy for new customer acquisition is risky.

Smart marketers go for the sure thing in the long run.

Show customers why they should stay with you.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 12.14.20 at 06:30 am by Roy Osing
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November 30, 2020

What is the best way to decide among so many options?

Source: Pexels

What is the best way to decide among so many options?

▪️You’re being inundated with information.
▪️You’ve got opinions from literally hundreds of people; there are too many ‘experts’ out there.
▪️You‘ve got too many choices; it’s like a restaurant menu with 15 pages.
▪️Theory seems to lead thought leadership; academics abound with their lofty advice.
▪️Those with the most lofty academic pedigrees seem to command credibility.
▪️Everyone seems to know what you should do.

All you want to do is make a decision that is right for you, but you can’t. There is just too much help; advice is ‘raining down’ on you — you have too many choices that you can make.

And as a result you’re stressed out, you’re stuck in the evaluation and consideration mode. You can’t move.

So what do you do when you are inundated with good intentions?

Here are a few suggestions based on what worked for me over too many years of sitting in the dark ‘under the mushroom’ while bits and bytes lay siege.

1. Get your priorities straight

You can’t evaluate the worth of someone else’s advice if you don’t know precisely (ok ‘sorta know’) what you want to do.
So sit down and define what you need; the specific objectives you want to achieve, and assess the advice out there with your needs as the context.

And try to define what you need in the short term rather than over a longer time horizon. The thing is, the long term never shows up if you can’t manoeuvre yourself through the short term. Long term results are achieved generally through sequential successes; there are simply no silver bullets you can rely on.
Do the hard work everyday. Get a nano-inch of progress everyday and the future will take care of itself.

2. Look for people who have similar backgrounds

You need to be able to relate to the person spewing advice at you, so take some time and research the advisors. Pick one who is the closest to you in terms of life experience, education goals and career aspirations.

Find someone who is relevant to you in the cloud of those who may have great credentials but are not on your wavelength.

3. Focus. Focus. Focus

Pick the top three things you need to sort out, not the total basket of goodies you face.
We all get sucked into ‘boiling the ocean’; believing that unless we solve each and every challenge we face, we are incomplete and will fall short of the perfect solution for ourselves.

The truth is that 80% of our problems come from 20% of the issues staring us in the eyes.

Roy’s Rule of 3: find 3 things that matter and conquer them; forget about the many other things that really don’t make a significant difference to your life.

So filter the volumes of information ‘raining down’ on you and pick 3 sources and study them; do your own due diligence on your discoveries to decide what is worthy of your attention and following.

The reality is that you simply don’t have enough time to chase every information source or piece of guidance anyways, so it’s critical to bear down on those few things that have a good chance of helping you achieve your goals.

4. Don’t rush

You didn’t reach your current state overnight so it’s ok to take whatever time you need to move forward.
I’m an advocate of ‘getting it just about right’ and then moving quickly to execution mode, and this applies to sifting through the barrage of data hitting us.

The thing is, though, try and be as thorough as you can in the briefest time available to you. If you need an extra week to assess the most appropriate course of action for you to take, then take it.

5. Track what you do

It’s important to understand what works for you and what doesn’t because your actual experience should inform subsequent actions you decide to take.
Your Plan A will not likely succeed; they rarely do. So it’s exceedingly important that you have data on your attempts to learn from and refine your next steps.

It’s great that there is a plethora of information at our disposal to help us make decisions, but there is a dark side that needs to be avoided.

The actions presented here when you have too many choices will help you navigate the information avalanche and find a nugget or two that will make the difference.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.30.20 at 05:45 am by Roy Osing
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November 16, 2020

3 easy ways to avoid being a one-sale wonder

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3 easy ways to avoid being a one-sale wonder.

How many salespeople would consciously put their sale at risk in order to protect a long term customer relationship?

How many would continue to put time in with the customer even though they realize the probability of making the immediate sale is low?

How many would put their yearly quota in jeopardy in favour of securing an account for the benefits they will realize over the long term?

I suspect there would be an extremely small number of salespeople who would put up their hand and fess up to sacrificing the short term for the long term; and that is sad, unfortunate and just plain bad business.

The flogger is bad business

The fact is, an unrelenting focus on the immediate sale increases the chance that the salesperson will be a ‘one-sale wonder’, a ‘flogger extraordinaire’ who will be unable to offer any long term value to their organization.

Long term value creation in sales is all about building strong intimate customer relationships that will yield a relatively stable and healthy cash flow over future periods; it’s not about making the sale today.

The role of sales must change from the flogger of products and services to the ‘gatherer of friends’

Relationships are all there are in sales and it is absolutely critical that they be protected, nurtured and strengthened in every moment a salesperson has with their customer.

The absolute worst thing that can be done is to erode the friendship by maintaining a short term product sale focus.

It’s all very well that sales leaders espouse the building relationships vision; it’s quite another when sales is confronted in the field with a situation where the organization’s products and services don’t meet the customer’s requirement.

Square peg in a round hole

This is the moment of truth. It’s that moment when the intent and action collide to discover if the organization is really serious about building long term relationships or whether it’s merely an aspiration with no substance.

Let’s face it, there are times when there isn’t the right fit between what the customer wants and what the organization supplies. It’s not a catastrophic situation; it’s impossible for an organization to expect to have a solution portfolio to match every problem their customers experience.

Your solution perhaps doesn’t have the right functionality to do what the customer specifically wants, or it might not be available when the customer wants it, or it might not meet their price expectations and there’s little to be done to satisfy them by adding value to the solution and selling at a premium price.

When this happens, the wrong thing to do is to try and force fit the organization’s solution into the customer’s problem in order to try and make a sale — again, it’s product flogging behaviour that will punish friendship building and long term performance.

Not only that, it’s more than likely to fail. Customers generally don’t like to get bullied into a sale and if a salesperson is into the force fitting mode, the customer will know it and will not buy. And two negative results occur. Not only is a sale not made, the friendship is diluted by the flogging behaviour.

The right thing to do is to walk away from trying to satisfy the customer with the organization’s solutions and refocus the energy on determining what can be done to ensure the relationship is deepened.

These 3 principles should govern what a salesperson should do in this situation.

Sales Principle #1 — Own the customer forever

What does ‘owning the customer forever’ mean when the right solution for your client is not available from your company? If it’s not spelled out in detail, the salesperson won’t know what to do and how to behave and could risk the relationship ‘going south’.

Every action taken by the salesperson must be through a long term lens and leadership must draw a line of sight from this lofty goal down to the specific actions a salesperson must take when confronted with the challenge of a product or service misfit.

‘Owning the customer’ is a long term investment, not a quick buy-and-sell transaction

You cannot leave it to the salesperson to decide how to respond; they will behave the way they traditionally have: bail on the friendship because there’s no quota payback from hanging around.

Sales Principle #2 — Do whatever it takes to protect Sales Principle #1

Every action sales takes must serve the purpose of solving the customer’s problem with whatever solution is available and from whatever organization supplies it.

Owning the relationship is a caveat-free goal without the constraint of solving the customer’s problem only with the organization’s solution set.
Rather, it’s an empowering notion that says to the salesperson “Go wherever you have to and do whatever is necessary to solve the customer’s problem. Period.”

It’s a narrative that needs to be an automatic response to a product or service deficiency — if this, then that.

It’s about you!

If you’re looking for a silver bullet to blow your customer away, this strategy is it. It basically subordinates the short term needs of the organization to the immediate needs of the customer; it says emphatically to them “It’s all about you.”
As a loyalty building behaviour it’s probably the most powerful thing a salesperson could do.

Sales Principle #3 — Pay for the behaviour you want

If you want sales to behave a certain way, you must pay them for it. That’s the way salespeople are.

If it ain’t in the sales compensation plan it doesn’t get done

Declaring the customer ownership goal and defining the specific behaviour sales must exhibit in order to achieve the goal is not sufficient; a measurement and reward system must be in place to ensure the right behaviour is constantly being practiced.

The measurement tool is simple: ask the customer if their salesperson offered other company’s solutions. If you don’t have a customer perception survey — the sales Report Card — in place, you should, because it’s the only way to get a handle on sales behaviour.

Owning the customer is more than sales revenue performance, it’s doing the right things today that will enhance the chances of maintaining a healthy revenue stream from the customer over the long term.

The rewards system is equally straightforward: include a compensation component in each salesperson’s annual performance plan for this practice. If 20% of their annual bonus is related to ‘selling someone else’s solution’, it will get done.

Building a long term friendship requires a great deal of emotional energy relentlessly applied day in and day out. And it involves sometimes taking a step back from our needs to put the other person first.

This is such a time in the world of sales, and those organizations who make the practice matter are the long term winners.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 11.16.20 at 04:02 am by Roy Osing
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