Marketing to a single person
Marketing is commonly done to single individuals, influencers and sales prospects alike. A number of my posts reflect that reality. Most comprehensive are probably my 2014 post about presentations to small audiences and my 2008 survey of many kinds of influencer. Relevant bits of other posts include:
You can’t sell effectively without listening. This is one of the basic facts of business, yet shockingly many people forget it. You can’t pitch effectively without understanding how the prospect frames what she hears, and you can’t judge that unless you listen to what she says.
from a 2013 post about “fluency”,
If you are a small startup with innovative technology, put as little as possible between your own people who can talk with passion about the stuff, and whoever you’re trying to get coverage from.
from a 2011 quoted journalist rant,
the right person to lead an important relationship is:
- Usually somebody who can truly speak for your company, and specifically:
- Has the knowledge and ability to respond to pushback.
- Knows the influencer well enough to argue back in turn.
- Occasionally an in-house press or analyst relations staffer.
- Almost never an outside PR person.
from a 2012 collection of marketing communications tips, which also makes the point that you should flat-out ask people how they like to work, and a variety of cautionary tales of how one can bungle meetings or other relationship moments.
The above can be summarized as:
- Respect the person you’re trying to impress.
- Treat the person you’re trying to impress as an individual.
- Listen to the person you’re trying to impress.
- Understand and cater to how the person you’re trying to impress thinks.
I could write a whole post on that last bullet point alone.
Here are some further tips for productive single-person marketing and persuasion.
- As in many kinds of relationships, trust is paramount. In particular:
- Relationships should be managed by somebody the other party likes, trusts and respects. Trust is the most important, because if that is present one can work around the absence of one of the other two.
- Trust is important in both directions. If you trust somebody enough, you can bend confidentiality when it helps with clarity or persuasion. Vendors are often too reluctant to do that.
- When all three of trust, liking and respect are in place, you can say things like “What do I have to do to persuade you of X?” or “How persuasive did you find Y?” Those can be very valuable techniques.
- Do your homework. For example:
- If they’re writers, look at what they write.
- If they’re influencers, ask whether they have published “How to pitch me” guidelines.
- If they’re IT users, look at what they might have blogged or presented, and probably also at what their colleagues have.
- Strategize with your targets about how to get more of their attention. For example:
- Some influencers like introductions to users who might offer insight into a variety of topics (not just the ones you want to pitch) — but they often are very picky as to which users those are.
- I like to talk with vendors’ own most interesting employees, which to me means the ones who will teach me about technology, user adoption, and/or marketplace trends.
- People have wildly different preferences about conferences and travel.
- Strategize with your targets about how to have the most impact on them. In particular:
- The template “Here’s a list of topics I think are interesting; which would you like me to talk about?” can work well with people who believe that their time budget only allows them to consider a small fraction of all interesting subjects — e.g. reporters or portfolio managers. I used it a lot when I was a stock analyst.
- It’s fairly common to ask people, before a call, for a list of questions. I think that’s a bit limiting and off-putting, but I also think it can be improved upon. Indeed …
- … before briefings, I often take the initiative to communicate a list of questions, issues, confusions, discussion topics, personal biases, etc., and then encourage the vendor to organize the presentation as they see fit in light of my concerns. Vendors can and should take the initiative in that kind of comprehensive preparation themselves.
- Salespeople have all sorts of sales-cycle-optimization techniques I know relatively little about.
- More generally, if we stipulate that it’s your responsibility to manage a meeting or ongoing relationship process, I’d say:
- Dictating everything isn’t ideal.
- Neither is just asking “What would you like me to do?”
- Better than either extreme is an inbetween approach like “One idea/The default course would be to do X, then Y, then Z — how would you like us to tweak that for you?”
- Note: The open-ended “How would you like us to tweak that?” is meant to get a more accurate response than the binary “Is that OK with you, yes or no?”
- At many junctures your targets will want you to spend more time on some subjects and less on others, while you don’t want to omit those other topics altogether. Knowing how to summarize is key. Brevity is the soul of not pissing the other person off.
And on that note — this post has gotten quite long, so I’ll end it here. 🙂
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This is just me but I find it helpful go to back to Ciceronian rhetoric specifically the notion of invention (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventio) to develop effective arguments for audiences of any size. There’s probably room for an interesting Ph.D. thesis about how to extend classical rhetoric to technology audiences. Between Cicero and Aristotle the basics are there.