Reading this slide deck from Jeremiah Owyang it chimes nicely with Nick Burcher’s new book on Paid Owned Earned. Nick first told us about his ideas back in June 2011 and we wrote them up.
Here’s the template activity for brands
- Pay first to get the customer’s attention
- Migrate them to Owned sites that you control and give them a reason to stay / subscribe
- Earned – attention and trust brings purchase decisions closer
And by good fortune, Nick emailed us today with a FREE download offering excerpt from his new book. Go to Scribd and get yourself a copy.
Thanks very much for sharing this, Nick and Jeremiah.
Get yourself a copy of the book in paperback or Kindle.
Related articles
- Sample ‘Paid Owned Earned’ by Nick Burcher (thewayoftheweb.net)
- My book: Paid Owned Earned: maximizing marketing returns in a socially connected world [sample chapters] (nickburcher.com)
- Paid, Owned, Earned – a new book by Nick Burcher (laurenceborel.com)
It’s all available on Slideshare via Jeremiah Owyang’s feed. Recommend you pass this onto your retail clients.
Summary of findings
The Creative Agency Secrets team has written a summary cheat-sheet below, if you don’t have time to read the full report.
Make an App for that: Mobile strategies for Retailers
2011 was the year of the mobile consumer take off
- Most consumers are using mobile especially in store
- Shopping is high on the mobile ‘to do’ list
Most retailers are not stepping up to the plate
- Buyers are eager if only retailers had the right mobile app plans to serve them
- Common mistakes: mobile for mobile’s sake, missing the chance to target mobile users
- How the mobile leaders are winning: align mobile with other key teams, focus on what the user needs, allocate the resources necessary to make mobile successful, mobile means multiple platform
Retailers must understand their engagement path
- Map mobile strategy to one of two end goals: Enrich or Engage
- Choose an application type to drive enrich or engage: informational, buy/ship, multichannel lite, multichannel heavy
Appendix A on pages 17 and 18 has a helpful check list which Altimeter used for its scoring.
Take this checklist and use it to write your requirements specification or RFP for your internal team assessment of mobile apps for your retail clients.
How did you get started?
I have been in business development – it started off in traditional sales in late 90s. I got out of US army as engineer electrician for attack helicopters in 1997 and went into technology because I saw what was happening and realised I wanted to be there.
I had a couple of small jobs – one of my foundational jobs Northern NEF hired me as a Sun Microsystems engineer and I was on the geek side responsible for network configurations and management. I converted over to sales there and became a typical sales jockey. After a year I had done quite well and became the director of sales.
And so I started creating strategic partnership with vendors (Cisco, Extreme Networks, Sun) and then I was discovered by Extreme Networks who asked me to work for them directly. Moving from a reseller to a vendor was a good move and I took on a region for them. That showed me the real money that can be made in sales… and then the market crashed. And I had an opportunity to go to New Zealand (where my wife is from) and so we went to give it a try.
NZ was a major turning point in my career – I worked for Synergy International in Wellington. When I moved to NZ I talked to Cisco and the Extreme Networks people introduced me to Synergy and they decided to create a role for me for their new managed services division. We competed with Fujitsu, IBM Global, Computer Services and we did quite well so that by the time I left it had become a $40m division.
But my wife and I missed the US – mainly the more predictable weather, our family, how cheap everything is here and the US lifestyle.
We returned to US in 2003 and I took a job with email services company IMEX Logic that got acquired by McAfee and latterly by Intel. This was a big commute 100 miles a day and an opportunity came from AR Insights a start-up of 3 people – the CEO, CTO and me. We quickly became the major player in analyst relations CRM. This introduced me to the world of analysts – Forrester, IDC, AMR and Gartner and I built a strategic partnership with Forrester.
We needed both the endorsement and relationship with the analysts themselves. Forrester has leadership position groups that they created to interact with their customers e.g. CIO, Marketing, and Analyst Relations. This is an opportunity to bring together experts and those people together face to face at conferences. This gave me access to people who would be and became my customers.
I got to know Ray Wong quite well which is my tie to Altimeter Group – he’s a founding partner. This introduced me to some of the greatest minds in the world or analysts and new technologies and the thought leadership role associated with this type of work.
We are now recognized as a tier one analyst firm. People see us as the legitimate alternative to Gartner and Forrester.
What are the key elements to your business development?
Tools to support my efforts: Salesforce.com is our number 1 tool and most of what I do is Entourage and Salesforce.
We are almost all on Mac and so my go-to is entourage for email.
We use Salesforce for total customer management – it’s the start and the finish of the sales cycle.
We customized the set up to create space for project management and for credit management – we offer our services typically through a retainer and this is a block of credits / hours which customers use to engage with partners/analysts. We track credits consumed and remaining. As well as tech trade sales cycle – moving them through the process ladder – prospect – customers and the opportunities and closing cycle.
Do you use Strategic Partnerships?
The short answer is – not really at Altimeter Group.
At Northern in order to separate us from the ocean of resellers selling Sun we needed to have something to set us apart from our competitors.
My objective was to partner with big name brands that everyone knew and create combined services with them – selling turnkey solutions of hardware from Sun and software/services.
Synergy – we partnered with other companies BMC Software, Cisco, HP where we repurposed the methodology of hub and spoke services to deliver a soup to nuts solution for our customer.
AR Insights – we had no name so I needed to partner with people who did have names to create legitimacy and buzz.
Key tips to build strategic partnerships
It’s being out there – being available.
People take advantage of technology to make lives easier and people underestimate the value of being face to face with people who you want to do business with / partner with. What helped me was putting myself into the businesses e.g. being at every Forrester conference. I was polite but in a over-the-top way. I was quite pushy to get there at first and demonstrating my value. After that it was easy to continue to grow the partnership and be viral in my value proposition to different business units.
Make sure you have something of value to offer – don’t go in without a good pitch. It’s easy to burn and you only get one chance.
How to find them – I look at competitive analysis – who are competitors and who are they selling to / partnered with. Who do I want to be my customers and when I identify who my market is, I see who they trust and work with. A friend of a friend is a friend. If they are working with Forrester and I have a relationship with them and are endorsed by Forrester that increases their likeliness of doing business with me.
I am big on relationships – going to conferences and leadership boards builds long relationships – do the late nights and go to the parties. If customers are ladies and they want to dance, you’d better go dance. My customers follow me wherever I go.
When to consider strategic partnerships
They are essential when starting a company – early days of developing or launching. Anyway, if you can latch onto someone who has already made it and has an established relationship it will make your life easier or if you are looking to reinvent yourself (are you behind the power curve on a service or tech) partner with those who have done it successfully, or those companies who can influence the market to your value peopoeisstion.
Salesforce – do you have any issues in getting partners to use it?
It is the bane of my existence – this is very difficult. I typically have to do it myself.
We are now taking a different approach – mandate. If you don’t put it in there it doesn’t exist and doesn’t get worked on.
The soft approach is to start and if not successful then you have to play hardball. The managing partner supports the mandate… a lead not in Salesforce doesn’t get worked on.
They can just email it over – they don’t have to log in to SF…. I’d prefer they log in and they are busy and travelling all the time.
You offer 30 minute calls – are these free briefings?
We don’t charge for business development or briefing. I get involved in these calls…. it is successful. It’s a traditional approach and it has proved its value. Once they’ve listed to any partner they find it easier to buy. Clients want to speak to celebrity.
We have some template products – line items – but typically we bring our customers in under a retainer – they can use the credits for anything. Webinar, speeches, advisory, project work. They can use it with any partner in the group – total flexibility. Also a discount structure the more credits they commit to the steeper the discount.
It is broadly equated to an hourly rate. So1 credit = 1 hour for most partners except Charlene 1.5 credit = 1 hour.
What are your key learnings for other biz dev folk reading this?
Relationship is key = my number one take away from anything. This is the majority of the business relationships are an absolute must = high trust.
A previous employer thinks if a product is good a customer will buy it. Sales people aren’t disposable and relationships are not important.
White papers – we do research and reports but we do it through the creative commons – we publish freely. We see white papers as a conflict of interest and an integrity problem as our partners are analysts. This is because analysts are paid for their unbiased opinion and if a vendor is paying us to write a paper that is favourable to our product – it damages the credibility.
We do provide thought leadership papers – vendors can pay us for these. They are sponsoring the paper and it typically addressed to the industry. We position the ranking for the industry for the product / services they offer. We have guidelines that we write from the heart – despite who’s paid for it.
Related articles
- Altimeter Group : A Holistic Approach To Emerging Technologies (altimetergroup.com)
- The Future of the Social Media Strategist (mashable.com)
Chris Heuer Partner, The Conversation Group
Tara Hunt Co-Founder, Citizen Agency
Jeremiah Owyang Forrester
Deborah Schultz Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com
David Parmet Owner, Marketing Begins At Home LLC
Hugh MacLeod Grand Pooh-Bah, gapingvoid.com
How to market into community without appearing totally overbearing?
How do you build the community around what you are doing for your company?
TH – the more I gave away my expertise the more expertise I seemed to get. this giving away stuff led me to give my time to creating new communities (barcamp and co-working). People open up their offices and lives to me when I do this. Social capital – the value of the relationships and your reputation. We are raising our own social capital with what we are doing. online it is about how much you can give away – the best way to get your own stuff you should give more away to help others. You need a patronage model of people in large companies who are prepared to pay for it.
CH – you need a way to sustain your life as well as giving things away free. Tools creating for Web 2.0 is democratising and enabling good to be given back.
HM – STormhoek – sent out 200 bottles of wine to bloggers who asked for it from Hugh's website. And then they sponsored the geek dinners.I never thought of the drinkers as 'the stormhoek community' it was just wine drinkers – but the conversations happening around the wine were interesting. Social gestures beget social objects and these beget social markers. The new N95 and IPhone are territorial demarcations in the phone geek community.
DS – spend your marketing budget by getting out and meeting customers e.g. go to conferences and see what's happening at the fringe. Find the customers who love you and talk to them. In start-ups you have a low ratio of employees: customers don't put up an FAQ, use humans to answer questions. This is smart marketing and customer support. FAQs are for big organisations.
CH – we give it away 'because" we are making it somewhere else. Doc Searle's the 'because' effect.
HM – advertising was all about the message. But online it's all about social gesture. This cannot be faked.
TH – read Blue Ocean Strategies – it's not the brand logo and message but what the product represents.
Questions
Criteria for selecting brand evangelists? JO — it is pretty easy to find your brand advocates because they are talking online in communities, writing, look in customer support forums. there are brand monitoring companies who mine the conversation online who find nodes for your company. DS – Transactions are the by-products of good relationships. When you are in a relationship you give things away for free sometimes and sometimes you pay.
How do you give away things when your product costs a lot? Audi dealerships have free dry cleaning, spa treatments, related products that people you are interacting with value. Or if you are selling something big, can you break it down – do things locally and start bottom up with a local party. Big brands don't have big ideas they have lots of small ideas, doing small things well. Education and knowledge can be given away, be the host of an event, party and failitate the interpersonal communications. JO created an industry-wide wiki about data storage products
Promoting a movie? Put half the movie onto youTube, start a blog. Use partner organisations to promote the story too. Get others to add their stories. THe brands with the best story-tellers win.
How do you rebut the suggestion that giving stuff away reduced the value of your product? DP this is not via an intermediary (journalists, ad buyers) just by going straight to the customers who will actually use it gives you the opportunity for a chatty user to start the conversation. Credible, believable. TH – don't give your products away free all the time, sometimes you should give the things around the product away. Free wifi in a Honda dealership who also brought in free bagels at lunchtime when I happened to be there. But you still need to follow up with these social gestures and create the relationship. Nuanced engagement.
one soundbite – the five steps to building social capital, social objects, passion for people passion in the product, technology changes human behaviour doesn't, nothing replaces listening, people are people.
Is online PR annoying? What you are giving is not a message but a connection to a higher purpose – connect to their feeling. She works for a charity. Have you given people something that they might be interested in rather than what you are interested in. You only talk to people when you need them, this is a problem.
How can I overcome senior management who set unrealistic goals HM – show me where the levers are and how to pull it and I'll write a cheque. this is traditional business. But there are no levers but just people. It takes time to get results online. Get kids who benefit from your programmes on video talking about how they like your playgrounds.
Ethics and marketing is it about profit not goodwill? JO – there is a purpose with marketing. But it's been associated with sales rather than matching the product to customers. PR should be about telling good stories. What's your intenation? Do you intend to take advantage or have ulterior motives.