I once knew a CEO who asked me why the phones weren't ringing off the hook. He said that the sales efforts were costing too much money. "We need to make our phones ring!"
There are no shortcuts to making the phone ring. To make the phone ring, you need to establish and strengthen your brand. There is NO other way around it.
The definition of a brand is not awareness or PR or advertising or "lead gen." A brand is not a name or a logo. All of those things can support a brand by clamoring for more attention. Fact is, the attention (once drawn) must be poured into something. That "something" is a promise made and kept. What gets reinforced in branding is this promise.
Positioning and messaging are critical baby steps to brand building. It's out of those efforts that the promise gets made. Then, the promise gets kept through behavior and reinforcement (whether it's customer service, sales behavior, marketing programs, product choice, partner selection, etc.).
The chores do not end there. Marketing must then go out and protect the brand as much as extend it. This is usually considered "tactical" so it often gets ignored. Nothing could be more futile in my mind. There's no use in making a promise if you don't spend a great deal of energy proving that you've kept them. And, you can't prove that you've kept a promise if you don't even know what the promise was in the first place.
One way to make promises easier to define and spread is to keep messaging simple. The technology industry is steeped in a tradition of marketing the complex in a complicated way. This is the baggage we've all inherited in some sense. But, it doesn't have to be this way. Simple messages are easier to support because tactical efforts don't get diffused. But, even more importantly, simple messages are a pre-requisite to establishing brands.
Customers don't always buy what they need. But, customers always buy what they want to buy. The only way they will make an unsolicited call into you is if they know what you've promised and want to buy it. So, awareness alone is not enough to make the phone ring. Further, awareness does not establish the brand - it just strengthens it. Brands are built BEFORE awareness and cultivated long after initial awareness is generated. That's why it's called brand awareness.
Stop selling products and features. Start selling promises. And, selling promises can't occur without a brand. Once people understand your promise, know they want it, and believe that you'll deliver it ... the phones will ring.
- John
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