The Age of ME (It’s About the Users, Dummy)

I’ve been wrestling with this post for a few weeks now.   What I want to talk about is user-centricity.  But that sounds like  pop-business BS or some MBA-ish clinical term.

The kernel of my thought is we need to make all of our marketing efforts more about the human beings who will use our products and influence or make buying decisions. By “marketing”  I mean Marketing (from strategy to tactics) and by “all” I mean all.  Product, pricing, promotion, distribution.

I’ve written recently about the future of enterprise sales.  But it’s about much more than how we sell.  It’s about what we sell, how it’s packaged, and how we talk about it.

In the beginning there was technology.  We talked about features (it’s got an x-57 flux interface!).  Then there were benefits (tastes great, and it’s less filling!).  We’re now in the Age of Me.  People want products that specifically talk to their needs, and they want to be talked to as human beings. In the Age of Me, our b2b life is heavily shaped by our b2c experiences.

Humbly submitted, here’s my manifesto for the new age, the Age of Me.    To dominate this new era, we must:

Show Empathy

• Talk about our products in terms familiar to the problems our users are facing.
• Be relentlessly goal-oriented in our product design.  Solve actual problems, not theoretical ones.
• Delight users.  Seriously. People have to be emotionally gratified by your product, not just functionally appeased.  Elegant  aesthetically pleasing products usually outsell functionally superior but uglier, more confusing competitors
• Whatever it is, make it easy. Reduce clicks.  Make next steps obvious.
• Be forgiving.  People make mistakes.  Allow for user error and let errors help teach users how to get the most from your product.

Minimize the ‘Time to Aha’

• Let prospects try our products and get meaningful value for free  before purchasing to prove it for themselves.
• Find ways to delight users quickly — let them have their own epiphanies. Quickly.
• Push yourself to remove unnecessary steps or options.
• Help them share their successes with colleagues and friends socially.

Support the Buying Process

• Focus  sales and SE teams on facilitating departmental purchasing and  ‘connecting the dots’ across larger organizations.
• Where possible, enable self-service purchasing to let adoption grow organically.
• Offer self-service support and educational resources.
• Take the complete view — examine the customer adoption process from desire (search) to initial interaction (your website) to trial to purchase to upgrade.

Talk to Human Beings

• Speak in familiar, conversational language (no one wants to buy an end-to-end integrated multivariate widget)
• Engage with prospects where they are — blogs, Twitter, user groups, etc.
• Acknowledge short attention spans.  Write for brevity.  Entertain where possible.  Use graphics and videos.
• Solicit feedback and admit when you’re wrong.  Humans, being human, don’t always get it right.  Other humans appreciate when you admit this.

Let the Product do (some of) The Work

• Marketing requirements must drive product design.  If the product itself does not help sell, then you’re in for a long, tough slog.  Align marketing and product design and engineering.
• Enable self-service trials and upgrades from within the product where possible.

Become a Quant

• Instrument your customer experience to enable A/B and multivariate testing.
• Develop a culture of experimentation.  Test messaging, UI, pricing, packaging, etc.
• Track metrics publicly so that everyone in your organization can see where and how things are working (or not).

Without being melodramatic, I honestly feel that the software industry is in the midst of a user-driven revolution.  Lots of factors are driving it:  open source, cloud-based infrastructure, social services like Facebook,  demographic shifts that put more ‘digital natives’ in positions of power, an economy that has slowed traditional enterprise procurement processes, etc.   Whatever.  There are probably 20 factors I’m missing.    But the reality is the world has changed.  And it’s not going back.

Embrace the Age of Me.  It’s fun. And you’ll probably disrupt some existing, stale businesses in the process.