Please Say When You are Feeding the Fish

nOnly 2% of B2B sales are closed the first time buyer and seller meet.

The other 98% require the patience and persistence of a great teacher—anathema to most salespeople.

Remember Mr. Rogers' penchant for explanation?

No matter the activity, he took pains to explain what he was doing—a technique he adopted for the benefit of the blind, after a 5-year-old girl named Katie wrote to him:

Dear Mister Rogers,

Please say when you are feeding your fish, because I worry about them. I can’t see if you are feeding them, so please say you are feeding them out loud.

Do you have the knack for explaining your value proposition to prospects each and every weekday?

Or do you cast about for the 2% of deals you can close in one fell swoop?

Good luck with that.

Crap Content Portends Crap Customer Care

A friend once told me he paid a call on a prospect while battling a sudden-onset flu. My friend was ushered into the executive's office and promptly threw up on the man's desk. Not surprisingly, he didn't close the sale.

When you publish crap content—ungrammatical, tortuous and jargon-heavy—you kill sales, just as surely as my friend did.

Crap content portends crap customer care.

Need proof? Then consider the following, courtesy of the crap-content creators behind United Airlines' blog, Hub:

Top 5 things to know about the United Polaris experience

We're very excited about our brand new international premium cabin service—United Polaris first and business class—which offers comfort and relaxation for restful sleep in the sky. To make sure you know what to expect with United Polaris travel, see below for a few key reminders. You can learn more at united.com/Polaris.

1. Service


2. Lounge


3. Seat


4. Amenities


5. Cabin names


What makes this crap content?

• Prolixity. Why does the blogger use superlatives to excess? He's not "excited," but "very excited." The service isn't "new," but "brand new." It doesn't provide "comfort," but "comfort and relaxation." The blogger doesn't offer "reminders," but "key reminders."
  
  
• Jargon. The blogger packs the 180-word post with jargon like "long haul," "roll out" and "soft-launched."
  
  
• Nonsense. Planes fly, but since when do "seats take flight?" What the hell are "sleep-focused amenities?" And who really cares that United has renamed its first-class cabins?

Crap-content creators like United's will say: Who cares? It's only marketing content: here today, gone tomorrow. Their indifference reflects the brand's values to a T.

They'd be well served to take the advice of critic Alexander Woolcott:

I count it a high honor to belong to a profession in which the good men write every paragraph, every sentence, every line, as lovingly as any Addison or Steele, and do so in full regard that by tomorrow it will have been burned, or used, if at all, to line a shelf.

Childish Things

May 1971

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

— Corinthians 13:11

As reported after the election in The Wall Street Journal, deans at Cornell, Tufts and the University of Michigan tried to comfort angry students with hot chocolate, Play-Doh and coloring books.

Good luck with that.

My gut tells me mollycoddling is out.

There's something happening here.

A new generation is about to do what a big part of mine did.

Resist.

November 2016

Perhaps because I'm Irish-American, resistance is near and dear. In fact, I came to live in Washington, DC, as a direct result of participating in May Day, a large-scale civil disobedience event held on the National Mall in 1971. It's remembered today because it ended with the mass arrest of a third of the 36,000 protestors (I avoided that fate, to my parents' relief).

For years, we have lamented the generation of "snowflakes" doted on by helicopter parents and their milquetoast surrogates. But the snowflakes' hour draws near...

Arrest may be the cure for arrested development.

NOTE: Opinions are mine.

Breakout Time

Marketers are highly susceptible to bias. Some forms—racial bias, for example—are easy to detect in their work (just watch the holiday spot from Securus); some forms are less so.

Generational bias is one of the latter—and a "silent killer" of customer conversion.

Pop theorists are the guilty party. While they underscore generational differences, scientists do not. Pop theorists would have you believe:

• All Traditionalists are patriots who value only self-sacrifice.
• All Boomers are optimists who value only wealth.
• All GenXers are pessimists who value only ecotourism.
• All Millennials are narcissists who value only praise.
• All GenZers are entrepreneurs who value only... well, who knows?

But if you believe the scientists:

• Claims of generational differences are based on faulty studies—always.
• There are no practical generational differences.

Does pop theory imprison your thinking?

It's breakout time.

B2B Buyers Rational? It Ain't Necessarily So.

The B2B Kool-Aid claims buyers don't behave like consumers.

But two new studies show it ain't necessarily so.

State of the Connected Customer, from Salesforce.com, reveals how consumer-like many B2B buyers have become:

• 83% say technology informs them about product choices
• 80% say they expect companies to respond to them in real time
• 79% say it's vital to have a sales rep who's a trusted advisor
• 75% say they expect companies to anticipate their needs
• 70% say technology makes it easy to take their business elsewhere
• 66% say they'll switch brands if they're treated like a number
• 65% say they'll switch brands if a company's communications aren't personalized

Turned Off, from Sprout Social, reveals why buyers "unfollow" companies on social media:

• 46% say the companies annoy them by over-posting self-promotions
• 42% say the companies post irrelevant content
• 35% say the companies use too much jargon
• 18% say the companies are don't post frequently enough
• 15% say the companies fail to respond to comments

You say, so what, who cares?

Well, Turned Off also reveals 75% of buyers have purchased a product after seeing it on social media.