Soulmates: Marketing and Change Management

Their eyes meet across a crowded room. Drawing together, they begin a conversation and discover that they have much in common – core values, personality, life goals. They make plans to meet again, filled with wonder at how the hand of fate has seemingly led them to find each other.

Who are these two souls? Marketing and Change Management. Two disciplines that aren’t typically thought of together, but which are in fact very similar in their goals and objectives and who powerfully complement each other when combined. At their cores, marketing and change management are about influencing behaviors and attitudes of a target audience to move it in a desired direction. For marketers, that direction is purchase; for change management practitioners, that direction is adoption of new processes or technologies. The terms change, but the concept is the same: persuade individuals to move from their current state to a desired future state.

There are two ways you can get people to do what you want them to do: force them or persuade them. Needless to say, while there have been times in history when force has been coldly effective, companies in the free world today have to rely on persuasion. This means that they not only need to have a clear picture of where they want their audience to go, but to do this they also need to have a strong understanding of the attitudes and motivations of the audience. This is true whether your audience consists of internal users of a new technology or prospective customers of your product or services.

Whatever the audience and whatever the desired action, marketers and change managers therefore need to begin by making sure they can answer the following six questions:

  • What audience need is addressed by the solution?
  • What is the audience’s current way of addressing that need?
  • Will the audience immediately understand the benefits of the solution?
  • Will the audience need guidance on how to implement the solution?
  • How does the audience typically consume information that relates to this solution?
  • For any of the questions above, are there any significant segments of the audience for whom the answer would be different?

When marketing strategies and change management initiatives aren’t supported by answers to these questions, they fail. The failure might be immediate, or it may be longer term, but ultimately any effort to influence decisions and actions not built on the foundation of this understanding cannot succeed.

At the end of the day, then, marketing and change management are really just two sides of the same coin. For practitioners of either, this should be cause to rejoice as the thinking and experience of both disciplines can be mined for ideas that help improve outcomes. And perhaps both disciplines will end up living together happily ever after.

When Engineers Speak: 4 Key Cloud Marketing Implications

For marketers, almost nothing is as valuable as hearing the unvarnished, unfiltered point-of-view of buyers. At last week’s Massachusetts Tech Leadership Council’s “Cloud Seminar: Choosing the Right Cloud for Your Business,” marketers would have had a lot to listen to.

Speaking to a sophisticated, engineer-centric audience with over 20 years’ experience in development and operations, GitHub’s Mark Imbriaco didn’t pull any punches in presenting his perspective on the myths and realities of the benefits of the cloud.

  • Cost savings? Myth.
  • Means of avoiding IT bottlenecks? Myth.
  • Driver of increased agility and speed to market? Definite reality.

From a value proposition perspective, the implications are clear: be wary of emphasizing cost and operational advantages of your cloud solution because they’ll like meet with skepticism.

A panel discussion featuring engineering executives from Carbonite, Ipswitch, Acquia, and Scribe built on Mr. Imbriaco’s perspective. In responding to questions about their infrastructure evolution, they said that decisions about when and how to deploy IaaS, PaaS, and S(torage)aaS would always be based on the strategic business needs for a given initiative or project: when time-to-market is critical or in which utilization is highly unpredictable, cloud is attractive; in a scenario with consistent demands and a need to control variable costs, cloud is a poor choice.

This nuanced view of the application of cloud services should point marketers towards the development of materials and campaigns that enable the customer to drive the buying process based on specific requirements for specific projects. Specifically, the following would likely be effective:

  • Inbound marketing to allow prospective customers to pursue the information most useful to them
  • Web-based self-diagnostics to help prospective customers learn which cloud solution may be the right one for them
  • Sales enablement tools to facilitate sales’ role as a partner and helpful guide
  • Cross/up-sell marketing based on utilization data to take advantage of natural evolution of needs

“Sincerely, Vice President”: Why Marketing for Sales Is Vital

Since EMI’s founding over 20 years ago, a core focus has been what we call “marketing for sales.”  One of the key propositions of this focus is to bring marketing principles, strategy, and messaging to the point of sale. And it’s obvious that many companies struggle with this, as we often encounter samples of sales campaigns that demonstrate a lack of marketing expertise.  One such example is below.

The goal of this email is to get the target audience to attend these sessions, and certainly there are elements in the email – the prominence given to the information table to attract the eye, the “Last Chance” message at the top of the email – that head in the right direction. However, the ability of email to achieve its objectives as effectively as possible is undermined by execution that fails to adhere to basic principles of email marketing:

  • Having a single, prominent call-to-action. In fact, the only call-to-action in the message is to respond to the email and write a message stating which session is preferable.
  • Facilitating response by offering multiple response channels and making it easy to take the desired action. There is no opportunity to click on a link to respond, no number to call to register, no button taking you to a form on which you could register. Any or all of these additions would have increased response by making it easier and more straightforward.
  • Offering a compelling and prominent headline that draws the recipient in. What is the headline of the email? Is it the small message at the top saying this is the last chance to register? If so, only the more patient readers would find that sentence because it is overwhelmed by the logo immediately below it.

Based on the content and the fact that typically this company is a very effective email marketer, it seems likely that the email was sent not as a marketing campaign, but rather by the sales team. This ineffective email is precisely why “marketing for sales” is so important and represents such a powerful opportunity for many companies.  Imagine how many more prospects would have registered and attended these events if the email had offered large buttons for each event which, when clicked, would have registered the clicker and taken them to a confirmation page that offered them a “save to Outlook” option. Consider how much more compelling it would have been to have a name in the closing, rather than just “Vice President”.  Injecting marketing expertise into sales channel activity means more registrations, which means more attendees, and that means more sales.