Yesterday was the first part about the ESD Alliance Digital Marketing workshop. Today, it is part 2 (of 2). Nicolas Part 2: Training and Tools Today's marketers need to be hands-on since there are a lot of different aspects and it is too slow (not agile) to have to use different organizations for everything. Getting from here to there requires training, and there is a lot around. I'm going to skip over a lot of what Nicolas said and jump to his recommendations. Note that these recommendations are for small and medium-sized companies. In a big company, there will almost certainly be a CRM system like Salesforce already in place, and perhaps other tools too. He had a lot more recommendations than these, too many for a blog post like this. I try my best, but a post like this is no substitute for being at the workshop yourself. You should have been there. Dave Kelf Dave warned against using digital marketing and then jumping to old-school sales-guy approach. If your digital marketing just got someone to download a white paper, the last thing they want is a call from a salesperson a few minutes later. They certainly don't want a call from a salesperson before they have even considered downloading the white paper. He encouraged everyone to think of the last time they purchased something expensive in the modern world. He had recently bought a new keyboard, which at $4,000 was hardly an impulse buy. Once you'd have gone to the store and a salesperson would have tried to match you with what they had in the store, but now you go online and do that matching yourself. The website for the keyboard (Nord Keyboards) starts with very general information about what you might want, and then narrow it down depending on what you require (maybe it has to be light to move around, maybe you need a Hammond organ sound, and so on). Gradually you get down to what you want. Maybe you end up buying it online, or maybe you go to a store knowing pretty much what you want. The way most people buy cars today is mostly like this: research online, go to the dealer only when you know almost exactly what you want. The cycle goes something like this: One tool (or is it a technique) Dave likes is called the "six shooter" invented by Chris Went at Cadence (a long time ago). This is a chart created by marketing so that a salesperson could look and seem like an expert. The name comes from the six boxes: To make it more concrete, here it is filled out for a product that used to be called Superlog but got renamed to SystemVerilog when Synopsys acquired Co-Design Automation that created it. You can click on the diagram for a bigger version you can actually read. One of the most challenging decisions is when to engage (as sales) with the customer. If you wait too long you may lose them. If you stalk them you may drive them away. For historical reasons, people who are used to the push sales-model will naturally want to engage too early. But modern customers don't want to talk to a salesperson too early. If you went on a website to look at an organ, you don't want a call from the sales guy saying "I saw you were on our website." It is likely to be counterproductive. It wasn't Dave's analogy, but one I like is that digital marketing is like getting a cat to come and sit on your lap. If you make your lap available, often the cat will come and sit on you, or at least come close. No good comes from chasing a cat. Final Message Only unique and remarkable content can guarantee differentiation in the digital environment. That does not (mostly) mean talking about your products. Digital marketing is about pull not push. A nurturing path (think growing a seed) will bring the customers to sales. Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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