I talk to a lot of companies that are still hunting for customer #1, or a few sales have been made but the ball isn't rolling yet.
Most of them are making the same mistake: Their public persona is exactly wrong.
I know, because I made the same mistake! But I learned my lesson, and I'd like to share it with you.
Even before I had a single customer, I "knew" it was important to look professional. My website would need to look and feel like a "real company." I need culture-neutral language complimenting culturally-diverse clip-art photos of frighteningly chipper co-workers huddled around a laptop, awash with the thrill and delight of configuring a JDBC connection to SQL Server 2008.
It also means adopting typical "marketing-speak," so my "About Us" page started with:
Smart Bear is the leading provider of enterprise version control data-mining tools. Companies world-wide use Smart Bear's Code Historian software for risk-analysis, root-cause discovery, and software development decision-support.
"Leading provider?" "Data mining?" I'm not even sure what that means. But you have to give me credit for an impressive quantity of hyphens.
That's what you're supposed to do right? That's what other companies do, so it must be right. Who am I to break with tradition? Surely my potential customers would immediately close the browser if they read:
Hi, I'm Jason and I built an inexpensive tool for visualizing what's in your version control system. It's useful for answering questions like "When was the last time we changed this file?" Check it out and tell me what sucks!
I mean, can you just imagine a person with "Software Engineer III" on their business card taking me seriously if I just talked like a human being? What if someone gets offended by the word "sucks?" No no, big companies want to see professional language!
But I was wrong. I'll explain why from the point of view of selling software over the web, but the same lesson applies to every little company trying to get off the ground.
Now repeat after me:
My next sale won't be a 1000-seat order from Lockheed Martin. My next sale won't be a 1000-seat order from Lockheed Martin. My next sale won't be a 1000-seat order from Lockheed Martin.
I'm telling you this having sold software to every size of company from micro-ISV to IBM, and, well, to Lockheed Martin.
Your vision is to land $100k deals with big companies -- and you will! But not today. Today your product is a shaky version one-dot-oh with bugs you haven't uncovered yet, missing 80% of the features big companies require, and with no significant documentation like case studies or a proper manual or an ROI model or a large, reference-able customer.
Today, you're a complete mismatch with Lockheed Martin! But there's a nice big niche that's a perfect match: Early Adopters.
Early Adopters are people who want to live on the bleeding edge. They like new technology, even if that means it's buggy. They like working with teeny companies where they have a personal relationship with the founders, where they are showered with attention, and where their ideas are implemented before their very eyes. They don't mind putting up with a hundred bugs so long as they get fixed fast. They want to be involved in the process.
Tom is an Early Adopter. At Smart Bear I must have had ten or twenty of these guys before our product was stable enough and feature-rich enough to start getting attention from the big boys.
The best part is, this is exactly the moment in your company's life when you need Early Adopters to help you build the right product! You don't need people who download, get discouraged, and then never call you back. You need a chatty Cathy who wants to dive in and help out.
So now back to your website, your blog, your Twitters -- your public corporate persona generally. What do you put up on your website that screams out to those potential Early Adopter Cheerleaders that you are exactly what they're looking for: A cool new company with a fresh product and fresh attitude; a product that might be rough around the edges but is ripe for feedback and collaboration; a company that may be small today but is thinking big.
Well here's how not to it: Say "a leading provider of" and blather on about how you "Provide the ability to quickly and easily do XYZ so you can go back to accomplishing high-value tasks."
Puh-leeze. Can you be more uninspiring?
Balsamiq Studios is doing it right.Read their company page. It's says "Hello." It says "Yes, a couple of guys in a studio." They don't skirt the issues of being a small company:
I know, it sounds iffy: how can such a small team create, test, maintain, market, sell, and support a software company?
Well, that remains to be seen.
Balsamiq made $800,000 in their first year of operations, so don't tell me "big companies" need to hear garbage PR/marketing language. Balsamiq got 100 product reviews during their first six weeks of operation, so don't tell me "a couple of guys in a studio" isn't a good public persona.
You want that kind of success? Stop acting like a faceless, humorless, generic, robotic company!
Put yourself in the shoes of that Early Adopter. Does she want to see useless garbage phrases or does she want to hear about how you totally understand her pain? Should you come off as a big, established, safe company or as a cool, passionate, small team who wants to make a difference? Should you hide behind "Contact Us" forms or display your phone number and Twitter account on your home page? Should you promote features and benefits you don't really have implemented yet or should you promote your forums, blog, and weekly all-customer virtual meeting where everyone chimes in with feedback?
Be human. Stop hiding. Be yourself.
What do you think about how small companies should present themselves to their customers? Is it appropriate to be informal or is formality needed? Leave a comment!
The other day I was involved in an email thread about bulk mailing. While we on the thread generally agreed that bulk mailing was a bulk waste of time I had brought up a process I had used with some degree of success. This process involved sending out post-cards with only one word on them. My theory for doing this was that a post card with one word on it can not be denied, that someone can't pick the card up and not read the one word as they throw it into the trash. With this action I have gained brain-space, even if only for a fraction of a second, I got in through the noise, my "word" was in their brain.
"So what?" you might ask. What does this do for you?
Well consider that you do it a couple of times. That word becomes an accepted data-point. One way to look at it is brand recognition, you know that brand word. Maybe you don't know anything about it but you know the word, it is familiar and in that familiarity it becomes comfortable and perhaps non-threatening. But it comes with a question. What is it?
Remember the book/movie "The Manchurian Candidate"? A post hypnotic set of commands is activated with a single word. Perhaps this is the reverse, a post-hypnotic curiosity is activated by the word.
So you cold-call the individual you sent the cards to and say the "word" in the introduction, the first words you get out before they hang the phone up. Could this stop them from closing their mind? Could this keep the door open long enough to get a second or third word in? Could they be curious enough to ask what it all means? Could you have a dialog as a result? Could it lead to a sale?
I had noted in an earlier Blog that the key to marketing is to make someone unhappy, it is then the job of sales to them make them happy, that's how the two work together.- -So what are the tools of unhappiness?
Try F.U.D.the acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt!
If someone is happy with what they have you clearly aren't going to sell them a replacement.Only when you break the relationship between what they have and how they feel about it can you expect to get new brain space, and brain space is what you need to convert them into a customer.
So F, U, and D are three great pry-bars or tools you can use to loosen up some brain-space.All of them start out as probes, until one hits a chink in the armor and gets some traction you have nothing, you just slide around on the outside of someone's "satisfaction shield".
You must probe with constant FUD questions to elicit response that will start someone thinking.Do this and in most cases a door will open.Is this marketing or selling? Maybe it's both.
Anyway you must do a series of probative adverts, always asking questions that center around 'what makes you think you are happy'.Maybe you communicate a message that shows why they should be unhappy or happier.Maybe you do positioning statements or explanations that are really questions in disguise.Statements like 'new' or 'better' or the like are really questions, they ask 'why don't you have the newest or the best?'.
Ever consider that the opening of any sales pitch is a marketing message or proposition?You bet it is!Every opening sales pitch is essentially an advertisement.Even if the target says no and walks way, just how is that different than having looked at an ad in a magazine or on TV and passed on it?It only becomes a sales pitch when some brain-space opens up and an idea goes in that can feed the unhappiness and start a change to occur.
In most ways technology marketing and sales is the easiest.Technology offers an addictive solution.Whatever the customer has, it is on the way to being out of date, not enough, too slow; whatever was good about it and made the customer happy is fading away.Technology is about change and change means something better is coming.It is only a matter of time.
What does this mean to the entrepreneur? - - It means two things.One is that the range for new ventures is almost unending and virtually unlimited, it is as wide as the scope of human endeavors and ideas.The second is that you only need to change one thing to make it new; only one problem has to be solved to tap a market.Your business will be based on what makessomeone unhappy. It really is simple after all.
Much of marketing is about the message. And what is the message about? It is about making someone unhappy.
The message is that what they have now makes them unhappy and what you have to sell will make them happy.
A primitive view of one of the most elusive crafts in business but it is true. They won't pick up the phone or tap the keyboard to find out about you unless they are motivated - and being unhappy is one of the best motivators there is. Your message is not about making them happy, it is to remind that they are unhappy and that there is a way to eliminate that feeling.
Dan Ariely Shows Us How We're Predictably Irrational
We think we make logical decisions when purchasing products, choosing a mate or deciding whether or not to cheat. Dan Ariely has some experiments that will make you question just how rational you are.
Ariely makes no bones about turning long-held beliefs on their head. For example, the Law of Supply and Demand, is a principle as important to economics as Newtonian physics. But, it turns out that we are heavily influenced by "anchors," or prices that arbitrarily influence how much we would pay for an item. Ariely tells us about an experiment he conducts in which the last two numbers of the test subjects' Social Security Number -- a truly arbitrary number -- establish the value of items when bidding in an auction.
Brian questions Dan about the value of "free" in influencing behavior. Dan demonstrates that "free" is the Kryptonite that cripples our decision-making no matter how rational we think we are. It turns out that the difference between $.01 and $.02 is small, but the difference between $.01 and free is huge to us.
This discussion of "free" leads us to talk about the "freemium" models that many Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are using to grow their online audience. Ariely recommends discounted trials instead of these free + premium service levels. Once free is introduced, he argues, that's its perceived value.
Ariely discusses his experiments on how we value what we own over what we don't, demonstrates that our level of satisfaction with a purchase is directly tied to our expectations, and uncovers how an expensive brand of aspirin will make us feel better than the same aspirin at a lower price.
There are no sacred cows in Ariely's presentation. He takes on our tendency to cheat when money is involved and the way we our decisions change when we're sexually aroused.
If your curiosity is aroused, expect to be satisfied by the audio of this interview, especially since the price is right: free.
I prepared this presentation so that business owners will look differently at their Web site. There are a few unfortunate thoughts lurk in the depths of our minds when we imagine a Web site to support our business. Here are some of them:
"Building a Web site is more like printing a brochure than developing a software application."
"My Web site is independent of the advertising I'm doing."
"Web developers know how to build Web sites that will help me land more business."
"The look and feel is the most important aspect of my Web site."
"People want to know about my company."
"People want to drill down until they find the information they are looking for."
"Everyone who comes to my site is relaxed and has lots of time to spend."
My presentation offers six ways of looking at your Web site that will make you better at commissioning your Web site's construction.
I hope it will save you the months of lost sales and thousands of mis-spent dollars.
Last month's Bootstrap Web presentation entitled "