Effective Product Marketing Rules #3

This is the third in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.

Effective Product Marketing Rule #3: If you are talking to someone you don’t know, you are not communicating.

At first read, this one strikes me as one of those "can’t possibly be true, can’t possibly be false, quite possibly makes no sense" statements that’s pretty much devoid of meaning. And then I said to myself, "those folks over at Pragmatic Marketing are pretty darned smart, and all of their other rules seem to be true - and practical." So I took a few minutes to parse through this rule, and try to figure out what it’s all about.

And here’s what I’ve come up with:

"Talking to", in this context - i.e., talking to someone you don’t know - really means "talking at."

You don’t know anything about the other guy, so you just talk at them. What you’re saying may or may not be of interest. It may or may not be useful. It may or may not be relevant. But you have really no way of knowing. Because you don’t know who you’re talking to.

This is a mistake that pretty much every marketing and sales person I know has been guilty of at one time or another.

You’re so happy to just get someone on the phone that you start blathering about your company/product/self, without establishing who’s on the other end of the line. Maybe you got the wrong number, but who cares? There’s someone breathing - real human contact! Maybe you’ll score!

Some poor schnook meanders into your trade show booth during a slow period, and you collar them with "Let me tell you about our product," without trying to spend a couple of seconds asking them why they’ve stopped by. Maybe it was just to grab one of your tshotkes, or a mitt-ful of Hershey’s kisses from your candy dish. Maybe they’re a live one, a real bona fide prospect, but you’ll only know that if you actually start a conversation with them.

You’re so excited about your new product that you write an unreadable data sheet that outlines all the bits, bytes, widgets, and whirligigs included in it that you forget to mention what it is, what it does, and what it’s good for.

The analyst you’re briefing is letting you run through your entire 50 slide PowerPoint deck without interruption. Oh, boy, they must be interested.

And - my personal favorite (and a variation on the theme just above) -   you’ve gotten an in person call, and you’re going to stand and deliver that sales presentation and demo if it kills you - or if it bores your audience to death. (Every time a sales person has asked me for help with a presentation, I remind them that - especially if they’re giving it to a small audience - if they’re still doing all the talking as of the third slide, this is a bad sales call that’s probably going nowhere.

Hey, we all like to talk - but sometimes we have to remind ourselves that this also includes the other guy. And in order to get to know the other guy, so that you can really start communicating, you need to do a little listening.

Now, you may need to prime the pump by asking a few questions. And there may be circumstances in which the person across the desk will just sit there with folded arms and a zipped lip. (In my experience, 99% of the time these are losing situations. The person with the folded arms has been forced into this situation somehow, and most of the time, the best thing you can do after a few attempts at opening that person up, especially if they show no flicker of receptivity to your message or your charm, is to stop talking and move on. (Unless you’re really so enamored of your own voice…

No, communicating is a two-way street, not a one way street for you to go speeding down. And the only time you can truly communicate is when you know at least something about the other guy. No, you don’t need to become BFF - that’s Best Friends Forever for those who don’t speak texting. But you do need to know enough about who they are so that what you’re saying is something that actually matters to them, something that acknowledges them as a person - not just as a prospect who may or may not buy what you’re selling.

Even if you’re communicating through passive means - your collateral or your web site content - it will come a lot closer to true communications is you’ve gotten some information right up front that lets the reader know that you have some inkling about where they might be coming from - something that demonstrates that you’re aware of trends, industry happenings, their job pressures, etc.

Just no talking at people!

A little more conversation, please….

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