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Marketing Is as Easy as 7-6-3
September 16, 2008

This week, I am posting about interesting and useful exhibitors and sessions at last week’s Print Buyers International Conference, held in Boston. Yesterday, I prowled the exhibit hall and today I will discuss a session presented on Thursday by Peter Muir, principal of Bizucate, called “Sitting at the Big People’s Table: Ideas and Initiatives for Organization Success.” The session was targeted toward the print buyer as marketing consultant—which is essentially what a print buyer is, after all—and how to attract new clients as well as add value for existing clients.

Muir describes this in terms of what he refers to as his patented “7-6-3” approach, which boils down to:

• First, understanding seven things about a potential client (who they are, what they do, for whom they do it, how they do it, why they do it, where they’re going, and where you as a marketing consultant can and can’t help).

The answers to these questions can be found easily enough; once you have a prospect or lead, it’s not difficult to do an Internet search for their Web site and the Web sites of their customers. Dun and Bradstreet also has a variety of tools to get profiles of companies, too. Other data sources—both governmental and non-governmental—also can provide a lot of information about entire industries, which will enable you to understand your potential customer’s business even more.

• Then, the answers to the seven questions are viewed through the lens of understanding six fundamental reasons why people/companies buy things (to save or make money, to make them or their organization look good, to make their life easier, to save them in some way, to challenge them, and/or because it is the “right thing to do”).

These six items remain virtually constant from company to company and industry to industry. Once you understand a potential customer’s business, you can map the six reasons that people buy things to a specific company.

• Then, based on this “homework,” develop three ideas—three good ideas—you can bring to a potential client that will help their business. Ultimately, you want these ideas to help you get in the door; yes, it may sound like you are giving away stuff for free, but, let’s face it, most people want to “see the goods” before they’ll buy.

Does this approach work? Yes, Muir says; very often, it will get to at the very least a face-to-face meeting with a client.

The rest of the session discussed media mix and changing communications media—topics about which I have written in this space about ad nauseam, and which I will continue to dwell on in tomorrow’s post when I look at Reynolds DeWalt’s session on “The Anatomy of a Cross-Media Campaign.” But it’s worth extrapolating here on what Peter said about “doing your homework.”

One of the chief ways of getting new marketing clients is to cold call. That term is a bit of a misnomer; calling should never be cold. In fact, it should be downright warm. That is, whenever you make first contact with a potential client, you should know as much as there is to know about that company, the industry they are in, who their clients are, and what the major challenges in their industry are. (Yes, this sounds an awful lot like the seven Know Me concepts.) If you are a marketing services provider, a print buyer, or other media buyer seeking new business, your research efforts comprise your own marketing initiative. How do you market yourself as a marketing services provider? By demonstrating that you know the potential customer’s business, and can offer compelling ideas to help them expand their own business.

Now, when I say that you need to know a customer’s business, it’s obvious that a couple hours’ worth of poking around on the Internet—or even a more rigorous research effort—is not going to make you the expert on every nuance of an industry that is foreign to you. For example, if you are approaching a company that makes scientific laboratory equipment, you’re not going to want—or be expected—to know how to run gas chromatography tests. But you should at least know enough to be dangerous. And you what they say about walking a mile in someone’s shoes.*

But alongside knowing your customer’s business, you should also know your own. That is, you should be conversant in the effectiveness of different media for achieving your clients’ goals and growing their own businesses. And a big part of that is knowing why people print things, why people don’t print things, why people might use other marketing tools, and what the effectiveness of those tools is. Where are the customers’ customers? How does one reach them? How does one not reach them? It’s a disaggregated world out there, and as I have often said, many media are needed to wrangle folks back into a sizable audience.

If you’re getting the idea that marketing involves a lot of research, you are absolutely correct. It may sound like a lot of unbillable time spent up front, but in the long run, customers will appreciate the effort and it will pay off in the long run.

*Speaking of walking a mile in someone’s shoes, I came across this fun fact in a review of a recent business book called Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years, by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui:

[A]fter World War I, more than 75 percent of U.S. Air Mail pilots died in crashes on the job. The mortality rate was eased only when the Postal Service required the managers who ordered the pilots out in bad weather to go along for the ride.

Managers often have no idea what the people under them do, or how tough their jobs may be, until they have to “walk a mile in their shoes.” As marketers, we may not be able to wear our customers’ shoes, but we should at least be familiar with their shoe size.

Posted by Richard Romano on September 16, 2008 | Comments (0)