Technology marketing epiphany

I got interested in search marketing and online marketing because it lets customers be in charge of the process and it enables companies to observe and respond to customers’ interests.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

• Customers use search engines to find sites that are relevant to their search.
• They visit the sites that appear to meet their needs
• They find the information they need to research and to make a purchase
• They complete their transaction online
• They get the support information after they start using the product.

A pure form of marketing
Search engines and well-designed websites make possible a pure form of marketing where the company makes itself easily found, makes information easily available, and makes it easy to do business. Amazon is the biggest example, but there are many others in niche markets.

Online marketers have developed a process for interacting with customers that does away with the traditional categories of marketing, sales and support. It is a continuous process in which the customer receives value before, during, and after the actual purchase transaction. This process has three primary characteristics:

• The company aligns itself with the customer’s buying process, not the other way around.
• The company tests, measures, and analyzes everything to respond to the customer.
• The company adds value to the customer at each stage of the buying process.

Extending pure online marketing to business technology marketing
How could this process be extended to the business-to-business purchase of technology? It’s not easy or obvious how to do this. Large technology purchases have some common characteristics which make it more challenging for the seller and the buyer:

• The product or service is complex
• Multiple people are involved in the purchase
• The buying process takes place over many months
• The cost is high
• The buying process includes online and offline activities, including a face-to-face relationship with a direct sales rep

Opening my eyes to a new way of thinking
My experience with search and online marketing opened my eyes to the possibility of a marketing and sales process that was more aligned with the customer. Reading about the experience of others has opened my eyes to how the principles of search and online marketing might be applied to the complexity of the technology buying process.

First I started reading Patrick Fetterman’s blog. Patrick has spent many years in technology marketing and recently started working at a software company that develops manufacturing software and is steeped in the ideas of Lean Manufacturing. Patrick wrote a great series on “Why I think most technology marketing is a waste of time and money.” He lays out some fundamental problems like:

• A lack of alignment between product development and customers
• Marketing communication that is more date and event driven than customer driven
• Conflicts of interest on the part of trade journalists and industry analysts
• The disintermediation of the sales force by the internet

Applying Lean Thinking to marketing and sales
Patrick’s series led me to wonder how the ideas of Lean Manufacturing could be applied to the process of marketing and sales. Fortunately, Michael Webb is way ahead of me and last year published “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way“. His book and his blog “Six Sigma Selling” describe how to approach marketing and sales as a continuous process that is aligned with the buyer’s journey. The two most fundamental ideas are:

• In the same way that manufacturing is a process of adding value to raw materials until it produces a finished product, marketing and sales is a process of adding value to the buyer until the buyer becomes a customer. Every marketing and sales investment must add value to the buyer.
• Marketing and sales is a production process that provides measurable value to the company. Marketing and sales activities should be measured at each step of the process; cause and effect should be studied to improve the process; value is determined as that which the customer will use time and/or money to take action and obtain.

These ideas have been an epiphany for me. They have an over-riding organizing principle (all marketing and sales activities should add value to the customer), they include a toolset, and they can be verified because they can be measured. Now I’m spending a lot of time trying to apply lean thinking ideas to marketing projects.