Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
(Imagen 4)
The next time I send something to a company that claims a “bias for action” as one of its Key Super Duper Principles, I plan to call the company five minutes later and say, “Hey, it’s 9:53. I submitted a request at 9:48. Why aren’t you talking to me yet?”
The same goes for all Key Super Duper Principles. If a company says something is critically important…then its customers, prospects, partners, employees, and competitors will all be watching to see if the company is serious.
(Imagen 4)
Have you friends frequently and warmly connected with you…until they didn’t? Becoming former friends, ignoring and abandoning you, becoming silent and indifferent?
Sales prospecting can be similar. Someone eagerly wants your product or service immediately. But they delay in getting back to you, plead that other critically important issues have arisen, then go silent entirely, their former desire evaporated.
I’m sure some hard-boiled salespeople believe EVERY prospect can convert, but it ain’t so. And my earlier advice applies to business prospects as well as to personal relationships:
“If my former friends’ focus is elsewhere, my focus won’t impede on theirs.”
(Imagen 4)
Companies ask you to register for webinars with your corporate email address and job title.
But how many companies NEVER confirm your registration?
There are at least three reasons why you may never get that confirmation email:
And of course there’s a third reason: the company evaluated your registration and determined you’re not a qualified prospect. Maybe you work for a competitor. Maybe you won’t buy and will instead try to sell—which the company will deduce by my job title of “Product Marketing Consultant.”
Disqualification can be legitimate. The purpose of an awareness webinar, like an awareness blog post, is to identify prospects who will become buyers.
But over-disqualification has its price. If my registration for your webinar is never confirmed because of my “Product Marketing Consultant” job title…well, I guess I can’t talk about your webinar, can I?
Mitratech allowed me to attend its TPRM-focused “frame, assess, respond, and monitor” webinar…and I talked about it.
Just a thought.
Case studies are powerful marketing collateral for companies.
Why?
Because if you select your subjects carefully, your prospects will say, “That subject is just like me. And the company’s solution solved the subject’s problem. Perhaps the solution will solve my problem also.”
Ideally a company would want to publish dozens of case studies, so their prospects could find one case study—or perhaps two or three—that describe the exact same problem the prospect is encountering.
But case studies are by definition more difficult for a company to create.
Perhaps that’s why there are so few published, recent case studies.
On Tuesday I had the occasion to visit four technology websites.
And the approvals don’t just involve the end customer.
A former friend interviewed many customers but was only able to complete one case study; the approvals from company legal, other company executives, and the end customers were overwhelming, delaying the other case studies.
So how do you expedite case study creation and approval?
Here are three tips to expedite the creation of case studies.
If the sales rep, program manager, or the subject itself can provide the basic facts beforehand, then the interview can simply consist of confirming facts and filling gaps.
Whether you use the STAR method (situation, task, action, result) or some other method (I prefer the simpler problem, solution, result), take the facts you gathered above. Then fit them into the outline and into the story you want to tell. Then see what pieces of the story are missing.
Since the subject has already consented to the case study, they should consent to the meeting being recorded.
The most efficient way to do this is with one of the popular AI note takers, which lets the case study writer review the actual words from the interview without going back and forth through a video recording.
And AI note takers are more efficient than the way I used to transcribe case study interviews.
Here are three tips to expedite the approval of case studies.
The language of the contract with the subject may have clauses regarding publicity.
If the subject wrote the contract, then it may prohibit any promotional publicity whatsoever, or it may dictate that any publicity must be approved by a high-level governing board in a foreign country.
If the provisions are onerous or impossible, don’t use that subject and find another.
Let your approvers know what’s coming, and when you think it will come.
Once I submitted a case study for pre-approval even before the results were available. This subject had a lengthy approval process, so I wanted the approvers to see the first part of the case study as soon as possible.
While the case study may be critically important to you, it may be merely important (or even inconsequential) to the lawyer with 50 other tasks.
From the lawyer’s perspective, it may be better if the company does NOT publish the case study. Fewer potential lawsuits that way.
Do everything you can to expedite the approval. If the CEO is demanding a published case study in three days, say so.
If not…well, that’s why you’re a salesperson. Oh, you’re NOT a salesperson? You are now.
You don’t have to go it alone. If your staff is stretched, or if your staff has never written a case study before, Bredemarket can help. Visit my content for tech marketers page.
(Imagen 4)
This week I’ve been expanding an internal document for a Bredemarket client.
I guess I could call it a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document for salespeople, although it contains more than just the FAQs.
Why expand it? Because we added new FAQ categories.
(Right now a lot of you are making notes to scrub Windows 10 from your marketing collateral. Good for you.)
Of course, FAQs aren’t the only content that product marketers create. There are others.
If you need help creating or maintaining your content, Bredemarket can help.
(Imagen 4)
Is there an easy way to detect potential business partners to avoid?
There are reliable business partners, and unreliable ones.
I’d like to share my thoughts on how to gravitate toward the former and away from the latter, and why this is critically important to your business.
We all work with a variety of business partners: clients, prospects, vendors, agents, evangelists, and the like.
Some business partners are really good at:
When business partners pay you, set expectations, communicate with you, and keep in touch with you, you know that you can rely on them.
On the other hand, some business partners are really “good” at:
After you pull these shenanigans on me, I quietly brand you as unprofessional…and unreliable.
So how do you avoid the unreliable business partners? Here are three tips:
Obviously you don’t want to deal with unreliable people, but why should you be so proactive that the unreliable people avoid you altogether?
At Bredemarket, I continuously return to the topic of focus (ubiquity or docking or whatever). And if I focus on attracting reliable business partners, and convey that the unreliable ones should stay away, then Bredemarket’s reputation as a quality provider will be enhanced.
And the people that want me to halve my prices can go to Fiverr…or ChatGPT.
The reason that I redirected the purpose of my Substack posts is because much of my audience there isn’t familiar with the…um…minutiae of biometrics and identity. (For example, my reference to minutiae would probably go right past all but two of my Substack subscribers.)
My Substack audience is best served with awareness content.
But awareness content is not only informative and educational.
It also makes prospects aware of your company…which is critically important.
Last month I said the following about awareness:
“Technology marketers, do your prospects know who you are?
“If they don’t, then your competitors are taking your rightful revenue.
“Don’t let your competitors steal your money.”
Perhaps steal is a harsh word, but it’s accurate.
Or perhaps a better word is indifference: your actions indicate that you don’t care whether customers buy from you or not. If you cared, you’d actually market your products.
“Nonsense, John! We have a sales staff. Who needs marketers?”
Especially when content marketing may take up to 17 months to convert. That doesn’t help the current quarter.
But your sales staff cannot be everywhere. If your prospects don’t know about you and aren’t reaching out to you, then you have to reach out to them.
And the calls? “Hi, I’m Tom with WidgetCorp.” “With who?”
So how is that current quarter looking now?
Your current quarter and future quarters would look better if your secret salesperson were working for you. As Rhonda Salvestrini said:
“Content for your business is one of the best ways to drive organic traffic. It’s your secret salesperson because it’s out there working for you 24/7.”
But the secret salesperson won’t engage your prospects until you act to create that content.
Talk to Bredemarket about your content, proposal, and analysis needs: https://bredemarket.com/cpa/
Before your competitors steal more from you.
(StealthCo picture from Imagen 3)
So what are you doing, Jane?
“I’m a Scrum Master. Very busy.”
Who are you working for?
“I can’t tell you. We’re in stealth mode.”
When will you emerge?
“When we are ready to blow the world away.”
Um, how do you know that you will blow the world away?
“Our leader says so. And she knows what she’s talking about. She attended Stanford.”
But is anyone checking your assumptions?
“Of course. All 23 employees…forget I said that number.”
But what about your prospects? What are they saying?
“We know they will love it!”
Did they say they will love it?
“We know they will!”
What if the prospects learn about your stealth product and decide it sucks? And all the years you’ve spent developing in isolation are in vain because of a lack of true customer focus?
“That won’t happen. Our leader knows what she’s talking about. She founded one successful company, and uses that experience to guide us remotely from Texas.”
Who is this leader?
“Elizabeth Holmes. Have you heard of her?”
There are potentially valid reasons for entering stealth mode, including protecting trade secrets and keeping the competition away.
But…there is a risk if you also keep the prospects away from your stealth mode operations and fail to engage with them. Who knows—maybe your prospects might have some ideas of what they need, and that information might be good to know. Your unicorn rockstar fearless dear leader may not know EVERYTHING.
If you want to work out a strategy for getting prospects engaged, let me ask you a few questions. Book a free meeting at https://bredemarket.com/cpa/
(Wildebeest bridge picture via Imagen 3)
A few of you know the particulars of this story about avoiding long-term risk for short-term gains. But the particulars aren’t critically important to most readers.
One time a company wanted to enter a new market. This new market would completely change the way the company did business, both from a technological perspective and from a business perspective.
While the technological challenges were daunting, as usual the business challenges were even more so.
The biggest risk to the company was that the new market operated on a different revenue model, one in which revenue was deferred.
In a publicly traded company, or even a privately held one, the powers that be are reluctant to undertake an initiative where they won’t get any revenue for 18 months.
“The quarter ends in less than 8 weeks. We want revenue NOW!”
So the company hemmed and hawed about entering the new market, scared of the financial risk. Finally it told its prospect that they’d enter the new market…if the prospect would make an immediate down payment. The prospect was not pleased and went with the company’s competitor instead. And the competitor continued to dominate this market.
For a time.
A few years later, the original company decided to accept the financial risk and, in the words of Devo, “go forward” and “move ahead.” And luckily for the company, it wasn’t too late. The company successfully entered the new market and became a dominant force.
We see this today, where a number of companies are struggling to survive. They do the prudent thing, letting go of the employees who don’t provide immediate revenue and concentrating on those who do. The engineers who can code something NOW! The salespeople who can get contract signatures NOW!
This isn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do. If your firm is about to close its doors, you have to do whatever you can to keep the business operating.
But what after that?
Continue to act in a reactive way, chasing the next short term deal?
Good luck.
Plant sex. It’s difficult, because the stationary nature of flowers complicates sexual reproduction. But as you will see, the solution to the plant sex problem can also solve the marketing problem of your Inland Empire firm.
According to Let’s Talk Science:
Flowering plants reproduce sexually through a process called pollination. Flowers contain male sex organs called stamens and female sex organs called pistils. The anther is the part of the stamen that contains pollen. Pollen contains the male gametes. Pollen must be moved to a part of the pistil called the stigma for reproduction to take place.
From Let’s Talk Science.
Because flowers cannot cross-pollinate by themselves, they need to attract bees (or other insects) to help. So the flowers just bat their little flower eyes, and the excited bees take the pollen from one flower’s anther to another flower’s stigma/pistil.
Surprisingly, plant sex has EVERYTHING to do with your Inland Empire firm. Your firm is “a flower attracting bees.” So I’ll show you how your firm can attract the bees to spread your pollen and spawn results.
Now you don’t need to be like a flower and have an anther with pollen to attract prospects. The business equivalent of plant sex is inbound marketing. HubSpot defines inbound marketing as follows:
Creating tailored marketing experiences through valuable content is the core of an inbound marketing strategy that helps you drive customer engagement and growth.
From HubSpot.
Unlike outbound marketing in which your firm goes out and grabs the prospects (hopefully not literally) through trade shows or cold calling, in inbound marketing the prospects come to you. And because the prospects are in your invisible trust funnel, you don’t have to log them in your customer relationship management system or track them (and their precious metrics) in your traditional sales funnel.
Or your non-traditional sales funnel with a “messy middle.”
The “problem” for those who thrive on marketing analytics is that you don’t know who is in your trust funnel. I know from experience.
But if your business can get that trust funnel working, the revenue will come. Not immediately, and not when you expect it, but it will come.
Inbound marketing can attract “trust funnel” prospects to your firm by creating content that speaks to their needs.
And Bredemarket is ready to help your Inland Empire firm create that content and ask the necessary questions to drive results. Click the picture to learn more.
Bredemarket