It amazes me how many marketers still cling to the image of a linear funnel for the customer journey. Do you know of anyone whose path to purchase just proceeded smoothly from awareness to consideration to conversion. Real life just isn't like that.
A much more apt visualization of the customer journey is a Rube Goldberg machine designed to propel a single marble (representing your targeted customer) to a designated endpoint, which in the case of businesses would represent the conversion of purchase. A Rube Goldberg machine is not typically designed for a direct, linear path.
Aiming to visualize your customer journeys? Are you picturing funnels? Forget about it! Funnels are wholly inadequate to represent a journey that is far from linear without a lot of recursive steps along the way.
A much more apt visualization of the customer journey is a Rube Goldberg machine designed to propel a single marble (representing your targeted customer) to a designated endpoint. In this case, that's , the conversion to purchase.
A Rube Goldberg machine is not typically designed for a direct, linear path.In fact, the setup for such machines lead the marble on a merry dance in which it moves in multiple directions as it comes into contact with different objects that push, pull, spin, and redirect it.
Set it up
In the same way, a customer's journey may begin with a single push. But it can only continue if the framework to keep up the momentum is planned and put into place by someone who understands where an email is needed, where a case study would drive one forward, and also when to give the marble some time to just roll a bit until it hits your next lever.
You don't just build the frames on the fly once the journey begins, which would be tantamount to leaving everything in the hands of your sales rep. Instead, you plan them out ahead of time, so the sales rep is only one of the levers in the whole machine.
See the video below for one such example, and keep your eye on the blue marble.
The same channel has multiple variations of a blue marble's journey from start to endpoint with different touchpoints pushing it along. That's also a great reminder that not every customer should be directed on the same path. Some will be ready sooner and some only later. You need to have several different maps available to suit your different customers. So think segmentation if not fully tailored personalization.
You won't always succeed
One final lesson to derive from Rube Goldberg machines as customer journeys is the fact that a lot of careful planning and setup can go into it without arriving at the desired result of a marble landing in the cup. This happens with the best-laid plans for purchase journeys, as well.
Various things can come up in life that alter the path you were counting on. All builders of Rube Goldberg machines encounter setbacks and failures along the way when things don't go according to plan. You have to be prepared to accept that possibility and work through it.
For example, your prospect's business might have taken a major hit that makes it necessary for him to put off the purchase. That's a setback, but it can be merely a temporary one if you take note of the situation and get a sense of when your customer will be ready to resume the journey.
When you read that in an email on June 29th, your assumption would be...?
That you'll get a gift with some offer that ends on June 30th. So you may click out of curiosity or out of a feeling of FOMO, two strong incentives to open an email. ( See 7 ways to grab customer attention in subject lines)
What would be your reaction, though, when you discover that the gift referred to is not for you but one that the sender is demanding you send by June 30th?
That's what the New-York Historical Society did for its email campaign as you can see from this screenshot of the email: Would you be inclined to feel generous and hasten to make this arbitrary cutoff that the organization says is the end of its fiscal year?
Are you using the right KPIs for your campaign?
I have no doubt this subject line generated more than the usual number of opens. Perhaps whoever was tasked with this email campaign was told that's the primary KPI and so resorted to clickbait that turns into a bait-and-switch.
As Stephen Covey said, "Have the end in mind."
It's important to lose sight of the real end goal -- putting people in the frame of mind to want to donate to the organization.
Tricking them into clicking is not likely to do that.
False urgency
Neither is attempting to create a sense of urgency by declaring you're one day away from your fiscal year. If the donation comes in July. it's not going to make much of a difference.
The only end of year the donors care about is the calendar year if they are able to take a tax deduction for the donation. Remember, when you're asking something of someone else, you have to make it center around them and their needs -- not your own timeline.
If you want to use content marketing effectively, you should always be thinking about what is the likely reaction of your target audience to your communication. Failing to do so leads to major fiascos like the one currently experienced by Budweiser and other missteps described in Major Marketing Missteps from Adidas, M&M's and Coke.
Don't lose the goodwill you've built up over years to a thoughtless marketing message, get a seasoned pro to craft the right message for your organization and your demographics. Learn more here and book a free consultation call.
There is a kind of disconnect is very common in all kinds of businesses in which the sellers fail to see things from the customer's eyes and project their own tastes and values on others. It doesn't occur to them that other people have their own calculus and that features and benefits they go on and on about may not matter to them at all.
In chapter 23 of The Little Prince, we get the perfect illustration of the misalignment between the value proposition of a product and what the customer actually wants in the interaction between the prince and a merchant he meets on his travels: .
"This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need for anything to drink.
"'Why are you selling those?' asked the little prince.
"'Because they save a tremendous amount of time,' said the merchant. "'Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week.'"
"'And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?'"
"'Anything you like..."
"'As for me,' said the little prince to himself, 'if had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.'"
This is highly relevant in an age in which marketers have convinced businesses that they have to espouse causes to push on their customers. M.T. Fletcher debunked this effectively in a June 2023 AdAge article entitled Why Brands need to stop 'purpose' pandering:
Politics and purpose are not the same, rarely mix well, and yet marketers continue to wade into social issues they are unable to navigate. Some seem wholly dismissive of their own band DNA, which might explain why today's advertising seems so disposable.
We said this more than a year ago after a major study by the Brunswick Group demonstrated that most CEOs felt their brand needed to take a stand on social issues, while less than third of consumers wanted to see politics in marketing --roughly the opposite of what every agency was telling its clients at that time. Just because some major brands got away with it, and in a few cases hit all the right notes, doe not mean my toothpaste has any credibility in telling me which cause to support or when to feel outraged or guilty. It's stressful enough being told I have to floss everyday.
When Alexis reassures David by telling him "People aren't thinking about you the way you're thinking about you" on an episode of Schitt's Creek, she accurately describes the spotlight effect.
What's true for individuals is even more true for businesses, especially B2B brands. The people working within them see their own spotlight and believe that their company news carries the same weight for the world at large as it does for them.
If you are one of those people, then it's time to snap out of that delusion and stop embarrassing yourself by assuming all applicants and new hires should have heard of your company before they tried to get a job there.
Why should they when they're not even your target customer? Remember: when your services are sold only to other businesses, your offerings are completely irrelevant to individual consumers.
There's absolutely no reason why an individual would be following your little startup and thinking about you the way you think about yourself. Even if you make it to unicorn status, that won't make you stand out among the thousands of other unicorns out there.
And as for those businesses that may have heard of you because they saw your represented at a trade show or they saw your ad, that doesn't mean they're just dying to hear all about your struggles and triumphs.
All they're really interested in is what you can do for them. So if you just go on and on about your accomplishments, you will not only fail to impress your audience, you will likely lose their attention altogether.
Brands fall into that mistake of playing the hero of the story they present because they have that skewed perspective of seeing themselves at the center of everything. But effective marketing is about allowing your customers to be the heroes.
While tech does indeed play a role in data-driven marketing, Rutsky considers it only one third of the story. And getting the story right is actually the key thing in effectively connecting with B2B customers, just as it is for B2C customers.
From the tales of Homer to comic books and films like Star Wars, and even Disney’s Moana, stories of a hero’s journey remain persistently popular. Rutsky credits Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for breaking down the steps involved in such stories.
Rutsky quotes Campbell’s summary of the journey story on p. 95 of his own book: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
In his own words, Rutsky described it as the hero’s perilous journey far from home to bring “a magical gift” to improve his own world. Such stories are a great way for marketers to present a product or service that will solve a persistent problem for the business customer. And they often do so, but what they tend to get wrong is the casting of the hero.
“Don’t make the product the hero,” warns Rutsky. “Make the customer the hero.”
A young Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone in Disney's animated movie.
While it is very tempting to give the starring role to what we’re selling, you must resist that temptation. Consider what's of greater interest to your target market and how story lines typically play out to audiences. In narratives of legends, we're not nearly as interested in the engineering of Excalibur or as we are in the hero who manages the wield its power as the rightful king.
What is of interest to the audience is how they can use your products and services to solve the problem. They take on the role of the hero, thanks to the magical sword that will enable them to slay the dragon. Or they will be the CMO that is able to deliver targeted campaigns via the real time data updates that come through your tech solution.
“The Sci-Fi Shopper: How to Future-Proof Your Brand for the New Consumer” is the title of the ebook they published on the subject. Darin Archer, Elastic Path’s Chief Strategy Officer, spoke to me about the difference between assumptions about the appeal of technology and how it actually can be useful in building better relationships between brands and consumers.
Their initial premise was that the “Jetsons” style tech that can be done today is what consumers want. But as it turns out, consumers don’t care about the wow factor of experiencing “sci-fi” style technology. What they really care most about is convenience.
The advanced tech that they found attractive was not “the super flashy,” Archer said, but “what makes my life easier.” As the report tells marketers, today’s consumer “expects streamlined, easy and frictionless” purchase processes. The brands that will win customers are the ones that will deliver it to them.
That means that brands should look into anything that can make it easier for customers to finalize the purchase. That’s where voice activation can be helpful. But as for the tricks of AR and VR, customers, they’re only of interest if they are perceived to be useful. Archer observed that they found that 56 percent of shoppers said VR was over-hyped, but only 38 percent said that of AR.
He suggested that this could be due to the fact that at present there are more practical use cases for AR than for VR. He offered examples like showing what a kitchen appliance would actually look like, in its place in your kitchen, or how a rug not just fills your living room but how it looks under your furniture.
Brands and customers not on the same page
What’s really interesting is how the brands are so far off in identifying the primary concerns of their customers. For example, the top item on a customer’s wishlist (67 percent) is checkout-less payment options.
Only 18 percent of brand representatives identified that as what their customers would like to have. They failed to perceive that customers really wish “to solve pain points like long lines,” Archer pointed out.
The second technological convenience customers would like is smart devices. More than half (58 percent) identified that, but only a quarter of brand representatives understood that to be desirable for customers. There was a similar gap for voice-enabled commerce, which 57 percent of customers said they wanted, and only 23 percent of brand representatives anticipated that.
Lately, I've been thinking about business terms that only came into being in the past decade or two. Among them is RevOps, short for revenue operations. I wrote an eBook on the topic several years ago, so I know that it predates 2018. But I wanted to pinpoint the term's origin.
I asked Bing, and this is where it gets interesting. What it said in answer to the first prompt, "Who coined the term revenue operations?" was contradicted by the second. Here's the response to the first prompt:
The term "revenue operations" was coined by Chris Goede, the former Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot. Goede first used the term in a 2016 blog post, in which he argued that the traditional sales and marketing functions were no longer sufficient to drive revenue growth. He proposed a new approach, which he called "revenue operations," that would bring together sales, marketing, and customer success under a single leader.
Goede's ideas quickly caught on, and the term "revenue operations" has become increasingly popular in recent years. Today, there are a number of companies that specialize in helping organizations implement revenue operations practices.
Here are some of the key principles of revenue operations:
Alignment:Revenue operations requires close alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success. All three functions must work together to create a seamless customer experience that drives revenue growth.
Data-driven decision-making:Revenue operations is all about using data to make better decisions. By tracking key metrics and trends, revenue operations teams can identify opportunities to improve the customer experience and drive revenue growth.
Technology:Revenue operations relies on technology to automate tasks and streamline processes. By automating repetitive tasks, revenue operations teams can free up time to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Revenue operations is a relatively new concept, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way organizations drive revenue growth. By bringing together sales, marketing, and customer success under a single leader and using data-driven decision-making, revenue operations teams can create a seamless customer experience that drives revenue growth.
Second attempt
Not being a novice at generative AI, I decided to corroborate what it said and asked" Did Chris Goede coin the term revenue operations?" One would assume Bing would say "Yes," to be consistent with its previous answer. But then one would be wrong. This is what it responded:
No, Chris Goede did not coin the term revenue operations. The term was first used in a 2012 article by Jason Lemkin, the CEO of SaaSquatch. However, Goede is credited with popularizing the term and bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.
In 2016, Goede wrote a blog post for HubSpot in which he defined revenue operations as "the alignment of sales, marketing, and customer success around a shared goal of driving revenue." He argued that revenue operations is essential for organizations that want to grow their revenue and compete in today's competitive marketplace.
Since then, Goede has continued to speak and write about revenue operations. He is also the co-founder of Revenue Collective, a community of revenue leaders who are committed to driving revenue growth.
Third time not a charm
It then continues to plug RevOPs, but that's not of interest to me with this query, so I put in another one: "Was Jason Lemkin the first person to use the term revenue operations?" I find it truly fascinating that this stumped Bard, as indicated by this response:
I do not have enough information about that person to help with your request. I am a large language model, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions, but my knowledge about this person is limited. Is there anything else I can do to help you with this request?
Round 4
So I gave it another shot (and if this doesn't prove I'd be an amazing prmpt engineer, I don't know what does). I put in the query: "When did the term "revenue operations" first appear in print?" That got an answer that reinforced the second one with some relevant context:
The term "revenue operations" first appeared in print in a 2012 article by Jason Lemkin, the CEO of SaaSquatch. In the article, Lemkin argued that revenue operations is a new discipline that combines sales, marketing, and customer success to drive revenue growth.
Here is the excerpt from the article:
"Revenue operations is a new discipline that combines sales, marketing, and customer success to drive revenue growth. It's about creating a seamless customer experience that drives more sales, more upsells, and more renewals. It's about using data to make better decisions about where to allocate resources and how to improve the customer experience. And it's about automating tasks to free up time for employees to focus on more strategic initiatives."
Since then, the term "revenue operations" has become increasingly popular. There are now a number of companies that specialize in helping organizations implement revenue operations practices.
Here are some of the key benefits of revenue operations:
Increased revenue: Revenue operations can help organizations increase revenue by improving the customer experience and driving more sales.
Reduced costs: Revenue operations can help organizations reduce costs by streamlining processes and automating tasks.
Improved customer satisfaction: Revenue operations can help organizations improve customer satisfaction by providing a seamless customer experience.
Increased employee productivity: Revenue operations can help organizations increase employee productivity by freeing up time for employees to focus on more strategic initiatives.
I got this question from someone on LinkedIn: "If I might ask a question, how do you feel your PhD has helped you in your content writing?"
I'm not a degree snob. In truth, you don't need a PhD to produce content. Some people manage quite well with no degree at all.
The reason I completed the degree back in my early youth is that I thought I'd make a career in academia. Several years of adjuncting disabused me of that notion.
Here's the gist of the answer:
It helps in ways most people don't appreciate because they think about content marketing as just applying SEO tricks (plug in the keywords, use the right tags, follow a template, and put in a clickbait headline).
You get boring, predictable, and disappointing content when that's all you've got. Even if the information is accurate -- and it frequently is not -- it is not going to be a pleasure to read.
Aiming for high quality content takes more than formulas. And that's where the skills related to earning a PhD are relevant:
🗃1. The ability to do research to find out what you need to know about the industry, product, and the customers who use it to present a clear and accurate account rather than fudging things. 🔍2. Obsession with tracing quotes to the original source This is very important in an industry in which people tend to copy each other and lose the context and the year of the stat, presenting old information as if it's current. 🗺3. Vision combined with practical planning Completing a PhD doesn't just take a big idea but organization, persistence and an understanding of how to break down a huge project that last years into smaller steps. You have to do the same when planning a content marketing strategy and content calendar. 📚4. The best models for content in your head I have a lot of literature in my head that I can draw on to make interesting connections and offer memorable phrases that resonate.
*Yes, I used a stock photo to represent a graduation. I didn't attend any of my own since the 8th grade.
Learn more about what I've done as a content marketing specialist, particularly for B2B tech, here: Experience and Testimonials To book a free phone consultation, use this Calendly link
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