"Very knowledgeable, easy to communicate with, very proactive. I can't think of anything you could improve; everything went very well."
Tod
Schiff
Field Applications Engineer
Analog Devices
TechPromo, February 2007
Marketing Newsletter For Technology Promotion
Surveys Versus Interviews - Who Is Your Prospect, Anyway, and How Do You Climb Inside His Head?
Discover Their Attitudes and Values
In a recent BtoB
magazine feature Connecting
With Engineers, author Roger Slavens points out the need to get away from
the stereotype of the geeky engineer. Slavens quoted results from McClenahan Bruer
Communications' 2005 survey Breaking
the Code: A Look At Engineers' Attitudes and Behaviors. Slavens still
seems to advocate treating engineers in a general way, considering what he calls
their 'deeper psychographics'.
Terms like 'psychographics' drive me ballistic. Even if you're going deeper, pigeonholing prospects doesn't work. You get their general characteristics, and miss the message they're really after. But discover their biggest worries, and you have the secret to the heart of a campaign. You need those specific problems just to plan a product, long before you offer your specific solution. Survey data doesn't begin to tell the whole story.
How do you find out your prospect's problems, the ones they lose sleep over?
You gotta talk to 'em!
Be Specific
I
was disturbed enough to respond to the feature's excerpt in McClenahan Bruer's
blog:
"Broad surveys tell you things like affinity for Star Trek and preference for friends with technical backgrounds. But they don't give you the specifics of the biggest problems an engineer faces."
A Respected Interviewer Gets Critical
Answers
"Interviews with the client's customers or field applications
experts many times will reveal the big problem I can build an article or case
study around. The emotional factors come out,too.
When you want to understand a prospect, there's no substitute for an interviewer the subject trusts. An interviewer with a technical background like the customer's can find out things surveys won't tell you.
Surveys can establish broad strokes, but specific information about your target market shows you what a prospect really needs. Most technical advertising is too generally focused, and many ads are unmeasurable. Claude Hopkins wrote about the importance of providing service tailored to the prospect's specific needs in his classic "Scientific Advertising" in the 1920s. He also was among the first to measure response to a campaign. Many manufacturers today ignore his principles."
You Can't Talk to All of Them
McBru's Senior
Communications Counselor Jeff H. brought up the impossibility of interviewing
every engineer.
"In reference to your post about whether to rely on surveys
or not, do you think that b-to-b technology marketers should interview each engineer
with whom they're communicating before embarking on a communications campaign
of some sort?
Obviously, individual interviews can help color an entire integrated marketing campaign with application examples (for example). But wouldn't it be inefficient to interview each and every target before planning, say, an online advertising campaign? That's one instance in which surveys come in handy."
But
Interviews Find Out What the Customer Values Most
I agreed on the impossibility
of talking to every engineer. But "...talking with the client's FAEs, or
one of the client's primary customers reveals what the customer values most. A
trusted interviewer gets answers a focus group or survey never could.
Those answers can be the key to that conversation with the prospect *any* successful campaign needs, online or in print.
Last year I spoke with a fastener distributor to research copy for a postcard promo. I discovered the most important benefit was on-time delivery of what was actually ordered to customers like Fender Musical Instruments. That was not one of the benefits I'd guessed before the interviews. The marketing agency I was working with hadn't discovered it either."
Discover
and Enter The Conversation
"Granted, a product's customers won't give
you every answer you need for a promotion. Survey data give you the broad outline.
But it comes down to a specific conversation your marketing piece has with the
prospect. You need to talk to enough prospects or the client's customer contact
people (or both) to understand what that conversation should be."
Jeff
responded with a quote from my post:
"You need to talk to enough prospects
or the client's customer contact people (or both) to understand what that conversation
should be.
Couldn't agree more. That's why I like working solely with b-to-b technology clients and am a big proponent of customer reference programs. Both give you the opportunity to talk to all types of folks involved in making the tech industry hum."
It's all about the conversation. Enter the prospect's world, that talk they're having with themselves about their biggest problem, and you'll get their undivided attention.
Mark Bohrer
is a technology writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Call him at (408)
866 9405, or email to ask about his availability to write online copy, articles and white
papers. He also does technical marketing research. Mark spent 25 years designing
and managing semiconductor products for analog and networking markets.
