I read a great marketing book called Converted by Neil Hoyne, who is the Chief Strategist at Google. There are excellent recommendations on how to improve your B2B website. Here are my high-level takeaways:
Marketing, like dating, isn’t an objective affair. Don’t assume that customers are completely logical. Consider emotion in the ways that you present yourself to customers and frame choices for them. There are no certainties in marketing (“days don’t always follow nights”) so embrace rapid and imperfect experiments. Use data to test your assumptions.
Learn fast. A company that continually refines its RevOps data will be a fierce competitor. My recommendation is to look back every two weeks and compile learnings. The reflective conversations will breed more experimentation (hypothesis, data needed, analysis, changes) and learnings. The focus on learnings will enable marketing, sales, customer success, product development, and customer support to determine their own experiments and cadences. It also may reveal experimentation is needed that involves multiple organizational units. It is reasonable to give small prizes to people who suggest innovative hypotheses. This incents experimentation that is not based on the outcomes. Portals (see below) are a great vehicle to share information and collect ideas. “Don’t limit yourself to your own employees, either. sk your partners, your networks, and your agency to join in the contests.”
Culture is a critical component of a startup and it motivates people to do a good job and help advance the whole organization. “How do you guide and bring other people in your organization along the same journey of learning?” “How do you create space in your organization to have the conversations and build relationships of understanding that will advance your company’s interests and your own?” Start with a robust internal portal. E-mail, Slack channels, and cloud-based documents are inefficient and hurt productivity. Make it a goal to drive down the time people spend in their messaging inboxes.
Digital marketing is building a relationship one step at a time. Learn to recognize the signals that are important and respond to them. “Anything you build, whether it’s a creative landing page, ad copy, an email campaign, or a brand, must be built with consideration for the relationships it fosters.” “You know how to identify, develop, and retain the high-value customers, but the messaging — needs to align with their expectations.”
When collecting data from customers, less is more. Too many questions will turn off potential buyers and you’ll bury yourself in data. Collect with intention. Don’t turn a conversation into an interrogation. Before you ask a question, ask yourself how you’ll respond based on the answer.
Recognize that anything you learn has a limited lifespan. You’ll have to ask the question again in the future. Use what you have today, but invest in finding answers for tomorrow. “Opportunities are biased toward existing strategies and metrics. Exploration is the way you open new horizons.” Use data to define MQLs and refine them over time. This will ensure that salespeople (likely founders) get highly qualified leads and customer backgrounds.
The priority is simplicity. Complicated approaches make it harder to have accurate data and make progress harder. Start with a workshop and not a factory.
Start with the people. Data organized on the basis of channels, campaigns, or products is the wrong way to look at data. “A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.” (John le Carre). Have a digital slide for each customer that includes their name, picture and locations with background information about the school. Generate stores for buyer personas to help sharpen your targeting and messaging.
Be able to identify your customers across different information systems.
Form questions to elicit honest answers. “What could we have done better?” All EdTech companies whiff on this as their customer support survey is just a Likert scale.
Be a curious Organization. You want a lot of people in your organization asking questions all the time.
Customize the user’s website experience if this is their first time, this is their 5th time or they are a customer. This is another whiff by EdTech companies. Amazon knows I’m a customer and my order-related information is easily available. Why do I have to navigate to a special support website to see my open tickets?
Mix up and rotate questions each week to gather new insights that would have been missed with a static battery of questions. You don’t need 100% of people to answer a question to glean insights and interactions are not always linear. “Share the insights across the company.”
Ask, “what do you like most about us?” Choose your words carefully when asking questions and build empathy.
When segmenting customers keep these in mind. (1) Have segment sizes that capture a full range of customers (from low-value to high-value). It is important to make sure what you are hearing from each segment is representative of the group. (2) Don’t define the highest-value customers too narrowly so you have enough customers for refining experimentation. (3) Learn as much as you can about your low-value customers so you know what to avoid.
Expand your horizons. “The limited ways in which you’ve tried to reach people, and the focus on reaching only certain types of people, may bound your ability to predict beyond them.”
Embrace human nature. Sometimes a website delay (if done properly) improves the credibility of the results. An eight-step process is more favorably viewed as starting at step two of a ten-step process. Use peer pressure because when unsure how to behave, people look around at others. Print my exposing people to stimulus, such as a word, image or statistic (see my blog about slogans) because it changes how they will respond to future interactions.
