Author Archives: Anthony Nygren

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.

Marketing in the Coronavirus Crisis: Notes from a Discussion at the Boston Meeting of the Gramercy Institute

Just before everything shut down in the face of the pandeminc, a group of financial marketers convened in Boston for a meeting of the Gramercy Institute. The session was billed as focusing on the topic of ”What’s New and What’s Next in Financial Marketing“ and indeed much of the content touched on the future, but, taking a cue from the news at the time, the host initiated a discussion of marketing in a crisis.

Broadly, the conversation fell into two buckets: communication “best practices” and the role of marketing. Two key take-aways:

  • Communication “best practices.” There was agreement that transparency and authenticity were key to building connections with customers, but also that there was no clear playbook for communication frequency and channel. Discussion participants recognized the need to respect the limited time and frayed nerves of customers but also saw potential value in providing clear guidance in an environment filled with uncertainty. Likewise, they recognized the need to find a balance between communication overload – exacerbated by the worldwide turn to digital communications in light of severe restrictions on face-to-face contact – and the value of demonstrating presence and building community when so much of the current crisis feels (and is) isolating. Finally, participants expressed mixed feelings about finding opportunities in the crisis. Many said that this was definitely not the right time to be promoting products. Some made the argument that people are looking for concrete assistance and that there was a place for tasteful promotion of solutions that could meet the needs of customers in the current environment.
  • Role of marketing. As the discussion turned to the role of marketing amidst the crisis, there was widespread consensus that in some ways the environment was one in which marketing could really prove its value in building relationships with customers and prospects and in delivering timely, conscientious, clear communications. Even more, though, there was agreement that marketers at B2B financial services companies should seize on this as a chance to forge a closer partnership with their sales colleagues, who are likely to be struggling to adjust to a world in which face-to-face contact is minimized or even completely foregone. Everyone agreed that if Marketing could find a way to enable sales to leverage digital and voice channels to nurture relationships at a distance and at scale, it would have a significant impact on the ability of the company to navigate these difficult times.

While the event was likely the last in-person meeting for the near future for most in attendance, it was a valuable opportunity to share ideas with colleagues and learn from each other as chaos seemed to be descending. It has given us much to think about as we all now hunker down, socially isolate to try to stay safe, and think about what the future might hold in store.

Resistance is Mutable: 5 Keys to Driving Technology Adoption in Financial Services

Technology is continuing its push to take over all aspects of customer workflow in financial services, from paperless onboarding to risk assessment apps to instant loan decisioning to algorithm-based portfolio construction. In fact, there are few aspects of the customer lifecycle that can’t be touched by technology. But “can’t be” is different from “won’t be” and that distinction often comes down to adoption by customer-facing personnel. While few technologies are perfect and there’s often a specter of tech replacing humans, in our experience neither of these is typically the cause of tech adoption struggles. More often than not, tepid adoption is due to a failure to appreciate the intensity of people’s resistance to change.

You may think that the current system is so inefficient/ineffective/clunky that everyone will love the new one, but that is not the case. Why? For starters, nobody likes to be told what to do. Moreover, even when people work with far-from-perfect systems and processes, they don’t always embrace the new, required solution because they have devised work-arounds that have become an integral – if imperfect – part of their routine. Finally, for customer-facing personnel, you can take whatever resistance exists and multiply it by 10 because those on the front lines of customer interactions are understandably anxious about using systems they don’t know and trust when under the pressure of dealing with customers looking for quick resolutions to their problems.

To overcome these obstacles and drive long-term adoption, here are five key components for success:

  1. Understand the audience. When you want to figure out how to get customers to buy, you seek out research and information about their attitudes, behaviors, and pain points to identify points of leverage. Driving adoption is no different. Sitting with, talking to, and watching future users in action will fundamentally shape how you should present the new technology to them and how you can communicate its value more persuasively.
  2. Appreciate their anxiety. Change is hard. As the saying goes, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Dismissing or underestimating the anxiety surrounding technology change is practically a guarantee that you will underinvest in driving adoption and will fall short of your goals.
  3. Calculate the impact. How much time saved? How much more accurate? And, most importantly, how do those gains translate into benefits to the users and their work? Most change management efforts come equipped with an ROI calculation, but these calculations are often based on a hypothetical future state, rather than the users’ current state. Identifying the time spent on activities today and the potential value of that time redeployed will lead to more compelling adoption communications grounded in reality.
  4. Market the change. Driving adoption means influencing behavior. Influencing behavior is the primary job of marketing (albeit one that typically applied to prospects). The same core elements of a successful marketing campaign – nailing the message, identifying the most effective communication channels, and measuring results – should be applied to your adoption efforts with all the rigor and discipline of a lead generation or customer retention campaign.
  5. It’s a marathon not a sprint. If you were launching a new product to a skeptical market, you wouldn’t promote it once at launch and then never again. Driving tech adoption must be approached the same way. It’s fine to launch with a splash, but if that isn’t supported by ongoing efforts to highlight successes, handle ongoing objections, and measure effectiveness, the opportunity for wide-spread adoption will be missed.

If these five components make driving technology adoption sound like a marketing campaign, that’s because it is. Many businesses talk about “selling” users on new technology but miss the most important inference of this language: before selling, you need marketing. A company may not get as excited about 95% adoption as it does about big, new sales deals, but the amount of money invested in new technology means that it should. A great but unused application has as much value to the company as a big but unsigned customer: None.