Successful Marketing Strategy – Interview With Marcus Sheridan

TrendSpotters Thought Leadership Series

In this episode of TrendSpotters, we take a look at how important blogging is to content marketing and answer client questions with the help of content marketer and blogger extraordinaire, Marcus Sheridan.

Play

The Sales Lion is interviewed about marketing strategy success and blogging on TrendSpottersI had the distinct pleasure of attending last year’s Content Marketing World and witnessing in-person a keynote speech given by Marcus Sheridan. For those of you unfamiliar with Marcus, he has become famous for using content marketing — in particular, blogging — to save his company, River Pools and Spas, from sinking into bankruptcy (pun somewhat intended). He has grown the company’s website to be the number one pool site in the world. In addition, he’s built a vibrant community of marketers seeking to improve their understanding of modern marketing on his personal blog. These days, Marcus travels around teaching and speaking on what it takes to achieve marketing success. To see Marcus Sheridan speak in-person is to witness a passionate marketer who walks the talk. As he takes command of the room, pacing throughout and interacting with the audience, it becomes apparent why he’s called The Sales Lion.

A No-nonsense Strategic Marketing Approach

Marcus has always impressed me with the way he cuts through the nonsense and gets right to the point. In addition to being the catalyst for “The Great Marketing Conversation” webinars we did last year, he was a valuable panelist. The way he uses stories and analogy has a kind of friendly, homespun quality that delivers powerful marketing concepts that sound simple, but when you think about them, make perfect business sense.

Now, before you write Marcus off as someone focused just on B2C, you should know that he regularly advises high revenue B2B companies. He’s found the secret to reaching buyers with the information they are looking for and understands the intrinsic role of strategic marketing in the sales process. As a result, Marcus Sheridan has had a profound effect on the marketing world. His authentic, down-home style and message about honest communication earned him many keynote speaking engagements at the largest marketing events. He also recently got a coveted opportunity to give a Tedx Talk. “The Honest Economy” has garnered over 6,000 views in only ten days.

Keys to Successful Business Blogging

I reached out to Marcus to talk with him about some of the issues we hear from clients as they develop and implement a blogging strategy. He graciously agreed. We talked about:

  • Developing a blog to build an audience
  • Strategizing blog post topics and titles
  • Leveraging content marketing to build trust
  • Addressing customer questions with transparency and not giving up your “secret sauce”

Marcus passionately espouses the philosophy of answering customer questions. It has been the thing that has brought him success and he works hard to teach businesses the importance of something that seems so simple. Yet, many marketers agonize about how to use content marketing to reach their audiences. To quote Marcus on the subject of B2B marketing, his response is straightforward:

“Businesses have questions. They’re hoping someone is willing to give them the answer. That person who answers the best ultimately will likely win their trust. The one that earns their trust will likely earn the sale.”

A Revolutionary Marketing Strategy

Marcus recently made the front page of the New York Times business section with the interesting title, “A Revolutionary Marketing Strategy: Answer Customers’ Questions.” In our interview, he muses about how the article came to be and about the ‘revolutionary’ aspect of transparency in business marketing. I think you’ll enjoy this interview with Marcus and would love to get your thoughts and reactions. You can join the conversation by entering your comment below.

Let’s help Marcus get to the next level and give the “talk of a lifetime” in a Ted Talk. Click here to view his Tedx video. After viewing, click the “thumbs up” button. Then, share it with your network. I hope that you’ll apply what you learn and achieve great marketing strategy success.

Warm regards,

Candyce Edelen
+1 201.751.9494

 

Follow @CandyceEdelen on Twitter View my profile on LinkedIn Featured in Alltop

Why IT Buyers Don’t Trust Technology Vendors

PropelGrowth Blog

Finding Technology for Market Surveillance

Last year, the CFTC (Commodities, Futures and Exchange Commission) had to find or build technology to surveil the swaps market. But they ran into a host of problems in trying to find the right technology solution. In essence, they felt that vendors were not being completely honest with them. A transcript of a CFTC Technology Advisory Council meeting contains some interesting commentary by Hugh Rooney, who is in the Division of Clearing and Risk.

Hugh’s team was tasked with finding a technology solution. This was a difficult task. Swap Execution Facilities (SEFs) are brand new, and swap trading workflow doesn’t match that of other asset classes. So any existing solution will need to be customized to accommodate the SEF workflow. It will also need to integrate cleanly with CFTC’s existing infrastructure.

Vendors Will Promise Anything…

Customer-centric marketing should build trust.Rooney’s team had trouble finding a solution, partly because of the complexity of the functional needs, and partly because, in his opinion, the vendors were not being honest and forthright. He says “…vendors will promise you anything; there is nothing they can’t do. And that’s very difficult to evaluate. [They say they] can build you a system that will do that, and when the day comes, they can’t.” Later in his commentary, he essentially says “talk is cheap” (scroll to the bottom if you’d like to read his testimony).

Minimize Pain, Maximize Value

Any implementation of a sophisticated technology solution will need to meld cleanly with the client’s existing environment – usually a complex infrastructure of in-house and third party solutions. Before they make a purchase decision, the IT team needs to be able to evaluate what it will take to integrate the new product into that environment. They need to know what limitations to expect, what workarounds to plan, and what best practices they can use to extract the most value out of the new technology. They want to minimize pain and maximize value.

Clients Need to Believe and Trust Their Vendor

As a technology vendor, your goal should be the same, and your marketing content should support those needs. But in many cases, vendors’ marketing literature is virtually inscrutable. Most of the content I come across is too light in how the technology applies to business problems, is vendor-focused instead of customer-centric, and provides little insight into how the technology will fit into the client’s workflow and infrastructure.

I regularly interview bank technology buyers about their buying processes. In these interviews, I hear over and over again how TRUST is a key driver for selecting one vendor over another. In many cases, the losing vendor promised more functionality, more bells and whistles, lower latency and lower price. But the buying committee went with the vendor they BELIEVED and TRUSTED.

Customer-centric Honesty Builds Trust

I’ve experienced this myself. When I was selling financial technology, I consistently won clients when we were transparent about how the technology worked, honest about our limitations, and enthusiastic about committing to building out the system to meet requirements where our functionality fell short. I saw many competitors try to pull the wool over a customers’ eyes or sell something that didn’t exist yet. In many cases, customers saw through this BS.

But let’s be honest. Often, lying  or stretching the truth does win sales. I’ve talked to many companies who had to rip out technology after a long and arduous implementation process – because it didn’t perform as expected and the vendor couldn’t deliver on its promises. Anyone who has gone through this painful process is likely to be very gun-shy. Which is why a transparent, honest approach is both refreshing and trust-building.

But We Need to Protect Our “Secret Sauce”

When I encourage transparency, I always hear about the need to protect intellectual property, trade secrets, or the “secret sauce” that makes a company’s products unique. I don’t disagree. If you’ve got some unique approach for how you leverage an FPGA card or get a message to pass through risk checks 30% faster than your competition, you probably need to keep that close to the vest. But most of your technology is NOT secret sauce. And generally, the information that a client needs to be able to understand and trust you has nothing to do with your trade secrets. They need to trust that your team knows what they’re doing, has experience, and can deliver on company promises.

So How Can You Be More Transparent In Your Content Marketing Without Giving Away All Your Secrets?

Here are three suggestions:

Answer your customers’ common questions in your blog

Every vendor gets a consistent set of questions during sales meetings. Some are business oriented, and some are technical. So be customer-centric and answer the questions – even those that might place you in a poor light. You get to control the conversation in your blog, so you can be transparent, but also steer the reader to the more important issues. Here’s a great TEDx Talk on this topic. While the discussion in the video is targeted more at a B2C audience, the strategy applies just as much to a financial technology provider.

Write about use cases with specific implementation problems

Prepare customer-centric use cases that tell stories about implementation problems and how clients worked around them. Show where problems can occur and explain the best practices that can help ensure a client’s success. You don’t need to name your customers in these use cases. Anonymous use cases that are HONEST and TRANSPARENT are very valuable for future customers and can also help retain existing customers.

Create videos talking about implementation approaches

Interview your implementation team about what approaches have worked with recent customers. Again, you don’t need to disclose your client’s name to make this a helpful video. But make it specific to a particular situation and keep it very brief. It’s better to do five 5-minute videos than one that lasts 25-minutes.

I’ll bet you have several other ideas. So please share in the comment section (“Speak Your Mind”).


 

Mr. Rooney’s Testimony

In case you’re interested, here is the full quote from Hugh Rooney. This is a transcript of a live meeting, so ignore the grammar issues.

MR. HUGH ROONEY: I would like to say that, Greg, I was very sensitive to your comments about vendors because internally we are dealing with the same sort of thing. It hit home with me with our risk surveillance for swaps. And we are having a very difficult time melding our technology with what is available from vendors. And vendors will promise you anything, there is nothing they can’t do. And that’s very difficult to evaluate.

We can build you a system that will do that and when the day comes they can’t. And I’ll certainly express your concerns, all yours, but I’m very sensitive to the one about use of vendors and having it integrate with the technology you already have on board. Which I’m not going to talk about today, but the CFTC system for risk surveillance, we are having a difficult time in the swaps world bringing a product that will help us do what we do in the futures.

It’s very challenging and very difficult worlds and vendors are promising. And sometimes their promise is very cheap and sometimes there is no way you guys can have that. This is very productive and I like hearing this. Like I say, we will bring back your concerns.

CHAIRMAN SCOTT O’MALIA: Any further thoughts?

Hugh, this is a vendor conference, by the way, so when you exit, good luck. (the event was held at the FIA conference in Chicago – October 30, 2012.)

http://cftc.gov/ucm/groups/public/@newsroom/documents/file/tac_103112_transcript.pdf  pp. 217-218


 

Warm regards,

Candyce Edelen
+1 201.751.9494

 

Follow @CandyceEdelen on Twitter View my profile on LinkedIn Featured in Alltop

13 Ways to Repurpose Webcasts for More Content

PropelGrowth Blog
At the Content2Conversion event in June, I hosted a roundtable on repurposing content. One of the marketers in our group asked how she could create related content in order to get more traction from a webinar or webcast. Great question. (Note:  While these terms do have slightly different meanings, for the sake of this post, I’m using the terms “webcast” and “webinar” interchangably).

Webcasting is an Effective Content Marketing Tactic

Webcasting can be a very effective content marketing tactic if done properly. But you have to begin with the end in mind. Start by addressing topics that your target market is interested in and wants to learn about. Ideally, you should select an “evergreen” topic – something that will be relevant to your target audience for at least 12 months. Try to book speakers who have recognizable names in your target industry to help you draw an audience. Select a moderator who can keep the discussion on topic and guide the speakers through an outline that will allow you to break up the content later for repurposing. While the largest portion of your audience will come from the live event, you should be able to drive traffic to the archive over time. Interestingly, our clients have found that the people who listen to archived recordings of webcasts are usually better qualified sales leads than the people who attend the live event. 

Here are 13 tips for repurposing your webcasts:

Use Every Part of the Buffalo

At PropelGrowth, we constantly talk about “using every part of the buffalo.” When the Native Americans killed a buffalo, they found a use for every part of it, wasting nothing. When we build a content strategy for a client, we build around a “buffalo” concept. Essentially, we create a white paper, research report, webcast or some other type of big content, and then break it up into a dozen or more derivative works to build a content marketing program. But to accomplish this, the buffalo must be designed from the beginning to be repurposed.

Webcasts Make Excellent Buffaloes

If the webcast or webinar is executed well and is not overly promotional in approach (e.g., it’s not just a thinly veiled product demo), then you should be able to capture a great deal of content from it to build out a content program. There are several ways you can pull the content out to repurpose or re-imagine it.

Repurposing a webcast panel discussion makes for an effective strategic marketing plan

Click to view larger

Have a Writer Create Articles and Blog Posts

We like to have journalists listen in to the live webcast and write articles and blog posts based on the content. You can publish the ghost-written articles under the by-line of the key speaker or moderator from your firm. Journalists are trained to tease out the story and write in inverted pyramid style, so they often do a better job with writing the article than a marketing person who doesn’t have that specific journalism background. But choose a journalist with experience in the subject matter. If you’re doing a webcast on financial technology, choose someone who has demonstrated experience writing about financial technology and who is knowledgeable about the issues facing the capital markets industry. It’s unlikely that a journalist inexperienced in this area will be able to identify, understand and focus on the right issues.

Shop the By-lined Articles Out to the Trade Press

Trade publications are always looking for content, and many are happy to publish well-written by-lined articles. So as long as the articles are written without too much of a slant toward your company and product, it’s likely that you’ll be able to place them. Tip: begin with that end in mind before you even start planning the webcast in order to make the topic something publications will want.

Have the Webinar Transcribed

Transcription services are pretty inexpensive. So have the webcast recording transcribed to make it easier to capture and repurpose content. You can also turn this into a branded PDF and post the complete transcript on your site as a resource linked to the recording archive. This helps with SEO and gives people another way to consume the content.

Summarize the Webinar and Discussion Topics in Your Blog

You should be able to get at least 3-4 blog posts out of a 45 minute webcast. One of the posts can offer an overview summary, and others can dig deeper into specific topics that were discussed. Write the blog posts with the objective of getting the reader interested in the content of the webinar. Include a call to action and links to the webinar. This will drive traffic to the webcast. You can also derive blog posts out of the by-lined articles.

Answer Unanswered Q&A

If you’ve planned your webcast topic well, you’ll get some audience questions. If you have questions that the speakers didn’t get a chance to answer, go back to them and solicit responses. Then write up the answers as a blog post. Tip:  Sometimes, it’s easier to get answers from your busy speakers if you call them to discuss the outstanding questions.  Record the conversation, and use the recording to create written answers.

This is also a great tool for use in follow-up with attendees. You can email them the answers as part of your email nurturing program.

Interview the Webcast Speakers for Follow-on Stories

You can follow up with the speakers based on the topics. Many times, they don’t get to say everything they’d like during the live event, either because there was not enough time or because the thought occurred to them later. Interviewing them allows you to capture more content and create more articles and blog posts for follow-on content.

Use Your Blog and Social Media to Promote the Recorded Webinar

Find provocative quotes from the webcast speakers and turn those into tweets, status updates, and call-outs in your blog posts. Then link the tweets and updates back to the blog posts or directly to the recorded webcast, where appropriate.

Capture Short Segments and Re-publish as Podcasts

Look for short segments within the recorded webcast that you can capture as 10-15 minute podcasts on a particular subject. Many times, visitors will be more comfortable viewing or listening to multiple short segments instead of one 45-60 minute recording.

Publish the Entire Recording as an Audio Podcast

There is probably a segment of your prospective audience that wants to hear the full recording, but doesn’t have time to sit in front of a computer for an hour. Provide a way for them to download an audio recording of the webcast that they can listen to during their commute or while working out.

Upload the Slides to SlideShare

If your slides can stand on their own, consider uploading them to SlideShare where they have a chance of attracing a larger audience. Remember to include a call to action where the viewer can find a link to the audio recording.

Upload the Recording to YouTube

You can leverage the search traffic on YouTube to drive more traffic to the recording. But make sure to optimize it with the right keywords. A summary of the webcast also helps optimize it for search. It also helps to give a call to action in your video that sends them to your website.

What Techniques Do You Use?

So there are a few ideas. What other things have you done to repurpose webinars?

Warm regards,

Candyce Edelen
+1 201.751.9494

 

Follow @CandyceEdelen on Twitter View my profile on LinkedIn Featured in Alltop

Why Create Video Content?

PropelGrowth Blog

“If you’re thinking about video, stop thinking of it as an advertising piece. Look at it as a value-add tool.”
— Joe Pulizzi (by way of @Content2Convert)

 

Ask Yourself, “Why Am I Creating Video Content?”

At the recent B2B Content2Conversion conference (C2C), content marketing “godfather” Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute asked a challenging question: ”From the reader’s point of view, why are you publishing content?” 

Great question when you consider the first part of that question — “from the reader’s point of view.” So much marketing is still focused on the company’s perspective that you could almost hear an operatic tenor’s voice singing, “Me, Me, Me, Me.”

During the “Power Panel”, Pulizzi  brought up the popularity of video in content marketing. He stressed the need make videos that serve as valuable tools for the customer, rather than blatant company advertising. Many financial technology companies crank out video after video that extol the virtues of their product and why they’re such hot stuff. Buyers are tired of these overly promotional advertorials. They simply don’t have the time or patience to watch, and they’re not going to trust the content. So in this context, the question at the outset should be, “Why am I creating video content?”

Effective promo video content must facilitate the customer buying processWe’ve seen huge marketing budgets wasted on promotional videos that are essentially talking heads spewing boastful claims. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against talking head videos, they’re extremely useful when they tell customer-centric stories that speak to the needs of the viewer. My point is simply that B2B buyers are sick of commercials and expect more from video content. This is where good storytelling can be of great utility.

Tell Stories Customers Want to Hear

Your company has a unique story to tell about how you bring value to your customers. So your videos need to be about more than product features, speeds and feeds. You need to demonstrate to your customers that you understand their business problem and can help them find the solution. They need to know that you “get them,” that you understand their business problems, and that you can help.

Technology buyers constantly complain that it’s hard to find trusted content to help them make important technology decisions. A well-crafted video series focused on telling stories and educating buyers through each stage in their buying process is a great way to create a connection with a prospective customer, facilitate the customer buying process, and improve sales effectiveness. It will also go a LONG way toward differentiating your company from competitors.

Videos that tell customer stories can go a long way toward demonstrating your understanding of customers’ needs. This helps build confidence in your target audience that your company is able to help them solve some of their most challenging problems. Adopting the voice of your customer and telling stories from their point of view helps earn that trust.

Your Script Needs to Engage the Audience

While it’s relatively easy to make a video these days, it’s not so easy to make one that will resonate with prospects and help drive revenue. Your script needs to tell an interesting story that engages the emotions of your audience and can serve as a tool to help inform the customer buying process. Good videos share a number of important qualities that make them effective:

  • Voice of the CustomerEffective video marketing uses the voice of the customer to make the content very relevant target audiences. This doesn’t mean a customer must actually be portrayed in the video or that you need to name the customer, but the stories being told by the video should use the same language, jargon, business issues and approaches to resolution that your customers use. This ensures that the video will resonate with your ideal prospects.
  • Compelling business issues – Videos that help drive revenue address real business issues that are important to your target audience. This may make the video uninteresting to people outside your target market, but that’s fine. The goal is influencing your sales.
  • An educational and entertaining story – If the viewers enjoy your video and find its story relevant and informative, they’re more likely to share it with colleagues. A powerful script is critical to an effective video.
  • Expert visual design – The same way that quality clothing helps you to “dress for success,” great cinematography, graphic design and high quality animation can help to make video successful.
  • Quality audio production – The quality of the audio soundtrack heavily influences the audience’s perception of the overall video. Poor quality voice-over, background noise, and/or amateur mixing distract the audience from the video’s core message.

Tell Stories That Sales Can Use

On the second day of the C2C conference, Jill Rowley of Oracle spoke about the urgent need for marketing to get great stories into the hands of salespeople. She told the story of a contest that Eloqua ran where customers sent in their stories. She ended up with around 170 customer stories that she could use in her sales process. As the salesperson in our organization, Candyce often tells customer stories at sales meetings. These stories often create sparks of thinking within her listeners. To quote Candyce, “customers find themselves in the stories.”

Effectively Using Talking Head Video

As I mentioned earlier, there’s great value in talking head video. It’s an effective way to get customers to tell their stories to other customers — and people in your organization to tell compelling customer stories. You can also craft great (and sometimes more affordable) video content with the use of animation. The bottom line is the video should serve the needs of prospects and customers.

Video as Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy

In a previous blog post on promo video, I made mention of utilizing video content as part of a complete marketing strategy. Promotional videos can be used to drive awareness, build credibility, and tell customer stories. They can also be very valuable tools for your sales team. More on that another time.

So, in addition to asking yourself, “Why am I creating video content?”, ask, “Who is this promo video for and what do they need to learn?”

For more information, check out our video on this topic and download the white paper, “Promo Video for Customer-centric Marketing.”

Additional Resources:

How to Use Video Content to Drive Awareness, Leads and Sales: A Guide (Content Marketing Institute)

Video Content Planning for Events: 5 Hard-Won Lessons (Content Marketing Institute)

Poor Marketing-Sales Alignment Is Costly (Demand Gen Report)

Is Your Video Squandering Audience Attention? (PropelGrowth)

3 Qualities of Customer-Centric Marketing Content

PropelGrowth Blog

In her talk at the Content2Conversion conference this week, Ann Handley offered some great insights on qualities of great customer-centric marketing content.

In case you’ve never heard of Ann Handley, she’s recognized by ForbesWoman as one of the top 20 women bloggers and was recognized by Forbes as the most influential woman in social media. She’s the Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs, and she co-wrote the bestselling book “Content Rules:  How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business

The Best Content Marketing is…

Ann Handley of MarketingProfs speaks at Content2Conversion conference on the best contentIn her presentation, Ann talked about how to create content that offers real value for the customer. One of her slides was particularly potent: “The best content is packed with utility, seeded with inspiration, and honestly empathetic.”

So what does this mean?

Packed with Utility

First and foremost, customer-centric marketing content must be USEFUL to the target audience. It can’t be packed with sales pitches. Instead, it needs to be packed with meaningful information that your prospects NEED in order to:

  • Fully understand and diagnose their situation
  • Effectively evaluate all of their options
  • Manage the risk associated with committing to a solution
  • Understand the full scope of what it will take to deploy

Seeded with Inspiration

Your content should provide seeds of ideas that inspire your buyer. They should come away with “aha” moments that allow them to figure out clever ways to solve their own critical business problems.

If you seed inspiration into every piece, then they’ll keep coming back to you for more ideas and more clarity and inspiration.

Honestly Empathetic

This is the bullet that inspired me the most. Marketers tend to create content from a very limited point of view. It’s as if they’re convinced that their product or tools or service will magically solve ALL the customer’s problems with no effort required from the customer and no risk. But it NEVER works that way.

In all cases, whether you’re selling services or sophisticated financial technology systems, your customers have to cobble together a solution that includes:

  • careful business analysis and specification development
  • a collection of vendor products and internal development
  • teams to implement and run the system
  • the ability to foresee, trouble-shoot and quickly resolve problems

Great customer-centric marketing content should demonstrate empathetic understanding of this situation and provide insights that help the customer understand the full scope of the problem and what’s needed to solve it. The more your content can demonstrate an understanding of what customers are going through, the more likely that you’ll earn TRUST.

The Ability to Empathize and Understand Helps Win Deals

I’ve seen many vendors with more expensive products or even less functionality win deals over bigger, stronger, better funded competitors. In these cases, it’s because they could demonstrate their understanding of the broad problems. Customers trust these vendors’ ability to empathize and help the customer get through the whole process. I think this is why small vendors are such a desirable resource in the financial services industry. Often, the team involved in selling and deployment is senior and really understands the customer. They embody the concept of customer-centric selling. But if they want to spread the word and foster rapid growth, they also need to start embodying customer-centric marketing.

If you’d like to discuss how to make your financial technology marketing content more customer-centric, give me a call.

(Photo courtesy of @LeeOdden)

Warm regards,

Candyce Edelen
+1 201.751.9494

 

Follow @CandyceEdelen on Twitter View my profile on LinkedIn Featured in Alltop

Technology Buying Process – What’s Really Happening

PropelGrowth Blog

The customer buying cycle for financial services technology should be considered in marketing strategies.There has been a great deal written about the sales process, the customer buying cycle and how to align selling with the customer’s buying process. But most of what I’ve seen is still written from the seller’s point of view. What’s really going on behind closed doors when customers are making decisions?

We have interviewed countless senior technology and business executives in tier 1 and tier 2 sell side banks, brokerages and exchanges to better understand their internal buying processes. Here is a summary of our findings, along with some tips for how you can use marketing content to help influence each stage.

To simplify understanding, we’ve broken the process down into stages, but it’s important to understand that the customer does not necessarily view their buying process according to these stages. They may see only 3-4 distinct stages in their buying cycle – awareness, evaluation, commitment and implementation.

Awareness

The buying process generally begins as the client becomes aware of a problem or need. This generally starts with one or two people and gradually bubbles up in the organization. Individuals might begin an independent analysis of the problem and possible solutions, but this approach will not yet be institutionalized. Here, your content plays an important role in helping different parts of the organization develop awareness – help them identify and understand the problem from their perspectives.

Research

As the early individuals gain enough understanding of the problem, they’ll start sharing their thoughts. Once enough people are aware of the issues and generally agree with the business impact, the organization will assign resources to better research both the problem and potential solutions. This may be informal in small organizations, or a formalized process in larger enterprises. But in all cases, a team is formed to research the problem and figure out how to solve it. In some cases, a consultant may be engaged to help define the problem and recommend solution alternatives.

Vision of a Solution

Gradually, individuals in the organization will begin to gain a vision of how the problem can be solved. This vision will generally need to include one or more vendor products, internal development and integration with existing infrastructure and systems, plus an understanding of the need for internal or external resources to implement and run the solution. Usually, the vision will be vague and heavily influenced by one or more vendor solutions. Different individuals and different groups will be arriving at different conclusions, and opposing visions are probably developing.

Evaluation

Generally, a team will be asked to shortlist 2-3 options (may include both vendors and internal development). To do this, they may issue RFIs or RFPs, they will meet with sales teams, review product demonstrations, and try to come away with a clear sense of how each option would work in their environment.

Writing RFIs and RFPs is difficult and time consuming. Often, teams will look for ways to simplify this task. If a vendor can offer a template RFP as a starting point, teams will often use it, customizing and adding functionality based on their understanding of the requirements. But obviously, the RFP will be skewed to the vendor that provided the information at the beginning.

RFPs are generally designed to accomplish 3 things – evaluate the options to see what functionality can be included, understand the relative strengths and shortcomings of options based on the team’s understanding of the problem, and gain a better sense of the costs. The team will use the RFP to create a short list of options.

Shortlisted vendors are generally asked to perform some kind of proof of concept. In some cases, this is a custom demonstration. In other cases, it’s a trial. Generally, the client will go to some lengths to design tests for the functionality that is important to them. But that doesn’t always mean they’re testing all the functionality, or that the tests are reasonable. In many cases, they’re designed to demonstrate a reasonable level of diligence in care from the decision committee.

Internal Selling

During the evaluation process, the champions of the various visions will make efforts to sell their ideas to each other and to decision makers. For example, one bank we talked to had opposing visions for how to automate testing of their trading technology. The US QA team wanted vendor #1, and the UK team wanted vendor #2. Both teams had compelling reasons for their choices, and argued passionately for their positions.

During this process, champions of various options may look for ways to position their favored choice on top, they may look for ways to actively derail what they perceive as competition, or they may “lay low” and let the “cream rise to the top.” While companies always try to make careful, logical decisions, it’s important to understand that evaluation processes can be heavily skewed and is often fraught with emotion and conflict. This is a point where the vendor that does the best job facilitating internal selling can impact the decision, but it’s important to acknowledge that the level of political influence each team has will weigh heavily in the resulting decision.

Business Case

In most cases, at this stage in the buying process, a business case is required. If the solutions are priced under $100K, the cases are likely to be fairly informal and may involve just a discussion. If costs swell above $500K, a more formal process might be needed. The evaluation team may be required to make some kind of presentation of the business problem, risks of inaction, costs, how the products will be used, their plans for the overall solution, results of the evaluation, and cost justification. Sometimes, they’ll need to produce an analysis of the total cost of ownership. In many cases, the TCO analysis will win the deal if one vendor or an internal build option looks like it will have a substantially lower TCO. If your product has a higher starting price point, but you can demonstrate a lower total cost of ownership, it’s important to provide content to demonstrate this.

Risk Mitigation

Different organizations have different approaches for risk management. Some will be relatively painless and require just simple reference checks and legal reviews. Some have an approved vendor requirement that can be a fairly involved process. Purchasing, Legal, Compliance, and Risk Management may all be peripherally involved.

Generally, if this stage in the buying process is painful or time consuming for the vendor, it’s doubly so for the client. So clients are unlikely to take a new vendor through the process unless they are convinced that the return will be well worth the personal cost. Sometimes, vendors can streamline this process by working with partners who are already approved vendors. But that also comes at a cost. Screen partners carefully before entering into these types of agreements.

Implementation

While the contract signing is a “closing” event for the vendor, for the client, the process is not over, and the real pain may just be beginning.  Now the client has to make sure that the implementation goes smoothly, that the product meets expectations, and that customer and workflow impacts are carefully planned and managed. Vendors who make special efforts to partner closely with clients through this implementation process generally come away with the most successful and least painful implementations. If you can demonstrate your ability to reduce implementation pain, provide content to explain how. It will help prospects overcome commitment risk and may help skew a decision to your firm.

For more information on the customer buying cycle, download “Thought Leadership to Support the Entire Buying Cycle“.

Warm regards,

Candyce Edelen
+1 201.751.9494

 

Follow @CandyceEdelen on Twitter View my profile on LinkedIn Featured in Alltop

The True Value Of A Social Community

PropelGrowth Blog

“Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community.”
— Anthony J. D’Angelo

There are hundreds of blog posts and articles debating the value of a huge Twitter following or Facebook fan base. Publisher and editor of the John Lothian Newsletter is a social community leader for the financial services communityBut over the past several weeks, many of us in the financial community have gotten to see the true value of a strong community first hand.

On March 4th, John Lothian, who publishes John Lothian Newsletter, announced that he was taking a 6-week leave of absence in order to undergo double knee replacement surgery and intensive rehabilitation. During his absence, a whole cast of volunteer guest editors have been carrying the torch, helping Jim Kharouf, the President and Editor in Chief, keep the content and commentary going. These guests are some heavy hitters in our industry:

  • Steve Grob, Director of Group Strategy at Fidessa
  • Andy Yemma, Managing Partner at Intermarket Communications
  • Veronica Augustsson, CEO of Cinnober Financial Technology
  • Gary Katz, President and CEO of International Securities Exchange
  • Ed Tilly, President and COO of CBOE Holdings, Inc.
  • Walt Lukken, President and CEO of the Futures Industry Association

John Lothian ribbed by guest editors about running against a 93-year-old woman.The guest editors have been doing a great job, adding commentary and humor to an always useful collection of news articles, plus funny updates about John’s ongoing attempts to beat 93-year-old Eleanor Mandlebaum in a foot race.

It’s tough to create the kind of following that will step up like these six guest editors have done. You don’t accomplish that with random tweets and updates, or product-centric blog posts. You achieve it by spending time every week creating useful content, establishing real relationships in your industry (not just online), and building trust over time.

Congratulations to John Lothian for building up such a strong and loyal audience. You create great content, and we all appreciate you. We’re rooting for you in both your recovery and your race with Eleanor.

Warm regards,

Candyce Edelen
+1 201.751.9494

 

Follow @CandyceEdelen on Twitter View my profile on LinkedIn Featured in Alltop

How To Lose A Customer In Two Easy Steps

PropelGrowth Blog

No Helpful Content, Just Email Spam

Your email marketing strategy may be too company-centricI’ve been getting bombarded with promotional emails recently from a web-based company that I use to market my rental properties. I’m already their customer, and have been a customer for several years. I love their service. They help me find tenants very quickly for a reasonable price.

The promotions offer discounts if I buy an ad within a limited period of time.  There is no content — no help to landlords on how to decrease turnover or maximize profits – just sales spam. I don’t have lots of rentals with lots of vacancies. I need to use their service maybe once every year or so. Hence, I am not interested in receiving their promotions.

I Tried to Unsubscribe

I got tired of the spam, so I clicked unsubscribe. Problem.

The unsubscribe page makes it clear that unsubscribing will delete me from ALL their lists. So that means when I have a property listed on their site, I won’t get notifications if someone sends an inquiry.

Let Them Eat Spam!

I decided not to unsubscribe, and sent them an email asking them to remove me from their marketing list but to keep me subscribed to emails related to my listings. Here’s the response I got:

Hello Candyce,

Thank you for contacting [Name Withheld].

We apologize if the Promotional emails are too frequent. Our Marketing team releases a new promotion routinely once a month for our clients to be able to save a little money on their purchases. Recently with the launch of our new website [withheld].com for Property Managers the marketing emails may have climbed to two a month. It is very important to our business to update our customers on new features and promotions. Again we do apologize if this is felt as too excessive.

Thank you for being a valued customer. We’re committed to providing you with the best service possible. If we may be of any further assistance to you, please contact us.

Have a Great Day,
[Name Withheld]

What About The CUSTOMER’S NEEDS?

Are they kidding? It’s important to THEIR business to update me on promotions? What about MY business as their customer? This is a great example of what NOT to do when nurturing customers. The company is so focused on their needs, that they pay no attention to their customers’ interests or needs.

“Nurturing” Me Isn’t Going To Make Me Need Their Services

I’m not their typical customer. I made it clear in my email that I am a small client with very infrequent vacancies. I’m not interested in using their service when I don’t have a vacancy (obviously), and I’m not going to have an increase in vacancies just because they send me “nurturing” emails.

So Here’s The Thing…

As marketers, this is a really easy mistake to make. We get so wrapped up in OUR content and OUR strategy, that we don’t consider how it’s affecting our existing customers. So be careful. Step back and reconsider your email marketing strategy. Do you have any blind spots that might frustrate or annoy certain groups of customers?

Warm regards,

Candyce Edelen
+1 201.751.9494

 

Follow @CandyceEdelen on Twitter View my profile on LinkedIn Featured in Alltop

Promo Video Within A Content Strategy

PropelGrowth Blog
Get me into a conversation about content strategy and you’ll no doubt hear the term “use every part of the buffalo.” Apart from the Native Amercian reference, it refers to leveraging multiple forms of content on a particular topic. For example, a white paper on big data and personalization is generated. That long form content can spawn shorter content assets — blog posts, an article and a video. These pieces can point to one another, as well as to other related content. This helps to cast a wider net for your target audience by increasing the access points to your thought leadership content and therefore your company. It also increases the ROI of your marketing budget spend.

The C-suite Wants a Variety of Content

Promo video works best when part of a well-defined marketing strategy.Many companies expect one piece of content to do all their lead generation work. But the Forbes/Google study of senior executives found that most executives like a mix of text and video. They might watch a video at the beginning, but then they want to obtain additional information through infographics, articles and other text-based content. According to the Forbes study, 65% of executive level decision makers visit company websites after viewing a video.  So every video MUST include a clear call to action, leading the prospect to the next piece of content in your program.

Video can also make an overall campaign more effective. For example, 76% of senior marketing executives say that integrating video links into email campaigns increases click through rates.

Video Content Should Be Strategic

Your promo videos should be part of a continuum of related content that helps to complete the picture. We recommend creating a content program around a theme, and using the video to drive an audience into that program. The promotional video includes a call to action guiding the viewer to the next piece of content – or to multiple content alternatives. For example, you might have an infographic aimed at someone in the awareness stage of the buying cycle, and a white paper or buyer guide for someone who might be at a later stage. As you guide your customers through a continuum of connected marketing content, you help them step through each phase in their buying process.  You also nurture a relationship of trust that helps your company achieve the coveted status of a Trusted Advisor.

When producing video content, go beyond a merely tactical approach that will surely have a limited influence. Consider your target audience and form a strategy that will help your company get the most bang for its marketing buck.

For More On The Subject…

If you’d like more information about video content production, click the link appropriate to where you are in your buying process:

To Buy Or To Build, Is That The Right Question?

PropelGrowth Blog
I’ve been working on a buy vs. build white paper for Progress Software this week. It’s focused on the decisions that senior financial technology executives face every time they need to deliver new functionality or systems to support their business. I thought I’d share some observations gained while doing the research for this piece. Some will be pretty obvious; others might come as a surprise. I’d love to hear your observations and feedback, so comments are encouraged!
Financial services technology companies are often faced whether to "build or buy" or "build and buy".

Build or buy is never a simple binary choice

Except for small sell-side firms and buy sides with little or no in-house development talent, the buy/build decision is rarely, if ever a simple binary choice. Even firms with a clear in-house build bias tend to buy certain portions of the infrastructure and software, where it doesn’t make sense to re-invent the wheel. In fact, I focused the white paper on the decision continuum.

Small firms and buysides often buy

Small firms that lack development resources almost always end up buying pre-packaged software, a need that hedge fund service providers, packaged software providers and sell-side shops have effectively leveraged for years.

“Not invented here” shops shoot themselves in the foot

In some cases, I think the “not invented here” technology departments shoot themselves in the foot by building custom technology to deliver functionality that is relatively commoditized. Wouldn’t it be better to focus your hotshot development teams on the functionality that really differentiates the business instead of reinventing wheels?

Ultra low latency HFT players build everything

Of course, there are firms out there who even design their own hardware. Those firms are generally technology houses that do trading, rather than trading houses that rely on technology. Years ago, I talked to a prop firm that was customizing the firmware on all their routing and switching technology. I assume that this is a fairly standard approach today for the ultra-low latency high frequency trading shops.

Secret sauce vs. commoditized infrastructure

As we all know, keeping the “secret sauce” secret is a common motivator for building in-house. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t leverage pre-packaged components to build an in-house system, allowing the team to focus on that secret sauce instead of building infrastructure.

Many systems in the trading workflow are commoditized

Let’s face it, market data feed handlers, FIX engines, smart order routers, matching engines, message buses, order management systems, and pricing aggregators are no longer “secret sauce.” These systems are commoditized, and unless you’re focused on ultra-low latency, it rarely makes sense to build them in-house.

Problems with Offshoring

When firms try to leverage offshore resources to build specialized functionality, they sometimes end up with disappointing results. I’ve long suspected that part of this is a cultural issue. American and European firms tend to expect financial technology developers to think for themselves and apply what we might call “common sense” in this country. But that doesn’t necessarily translate to other cultures. It’s my understanding that universities in some countries train developers to code exactly to the specs.

An Indian friend of mine told me a story that illustrates this. He was given a project in school to code a system based on a spec in the text book. He followed the instructions, but the code didn’t work. So he fixed it, got the app running, and turned in his assignment. His teacher gave him an “F” because he didn’t conform precisely to the specification in the textbook. I realize this is a gross generalization. Also, the incident he described happened about a decade ago, and things have changed radically in recent years. But nevertheless, cultural issues do affect the success of projects, and the more specialized the functionality, the more critical the impact.

Risk of single purpose applications

There is a huge problem in the industry with applications that are built for a single purpose. While these purpose-built applications are faster and cheaper to deploy up front, they are often rigid and hard to evolve as the market changes. Most banks are dealing with a hodge podge of siloed applications that are not documented, hard to support, and that drive up ongoing maintenance costs.

Ongoing software support costs

Business cases justifying in-house builds rarely do a thorough analysis of ongoing software lifecycle costs. But Mark Lutchen, former global CIO of PricewaterhouseCoopers, now head of the firm’s IT Effectiveness practice says, “70 percent of software costs occur after implementation. A rigorous lifecycle analysis that realistically estimates ongoing maintenance by in-house developers often tips the balance in favor of buying.” Here’s an interesting InfoWorld article on the topic.

Little content helping with build or buy decisions

There is remarkably little content out there targeted at helping the senior technology executives in the financial industry make buy/build decisions related to trading, surveillance, compliance and risk management software for the financial services industry (at least that I could find via Google). I found this surprising, given the fact that every financial institution faces these kinds of decisions on a recurring basis. Providing content like this, written from a neutral point of view, can be very helpful and can position your firm as a trusted advisor.

Much of the content I did find was actually just thinly veiled sales pitches. Financial technology white papers are marketing tools and need to deliver an ROI. But your readers will immediately see through advertorials and won’t trust the content. So be careful.

Warm regards,

Candyce Edelen
+1 201.751.9494

 

Follow @CandyceEdelen on Twitter View my profile on LinkedIn Featured in Alltop