|
| #1 | ||
Reframing for a Cleaner, Clearer Marketing Message
by Paul Johnson
If you want someone to get your message, you should speak their language, right? That's pretty obvious – if my listener understands French, speak French. If my audience understands English, deliver the message in English. Ah, if it were only that simple. What's Love Got to Do With It? We often don't deliver the message we intend because we take some very important words for granted. Just think how many ways the word “love” can get us into trouble! From a business perspective, we need to make sure we're not taking for granted the meanings behind the key words in our marketing message. If we do, we run the risk of setting up expectations in our customers that we never intended to fulfill. Unfulfilled expectations cause unhappy customers, collection problems, bad publicity, lost business, and a weak referral base. You can make sure the key words in your marketing messages are clearly understood by your prospects and customers by using the simple Reframing technique described below. If you're a software provider, the most misunderstood, taken-for-granted word in the English language is “Enhancement.” Software authors have promised them for years and, consequently, software purchasers have been trained to expect them. While the meaning of “enhancement” may have been clear to everyone years ago, that is no longer the case. Unfortunately, everyone takes for granted that they know what an enhancement is. Here lies a dangerous opportunity to under-perform and consequently disappoint your customer. When I took on the role of national sales director at an established software company, I was told we were having difficulty managing our customers' expectations with respect to software enhancements. Many of our customers accused us of not delivering what we promised. As we tried to get a handle on their expectations, we found they were all over the map. The Enemy is Us! Our customers had a right to be confused. Our software offering was over 8 years old, and we were dealing with legacy issues left behind by former salespeople, trainers, and support people who all had contact with the customer and imparted their own definition of “enhancement”. Most customers believed that enhancements were more than bug fixes, and all customers believed that enhancements should be free as a part of their prepaid support agreement. Frequency became an interesting topic of debate; some would like enhancements as soon as they were available, and some would only want to load them once or twice a year. Some had considered enhancements optional and chose to run as many as 6 enhancement release levels behind, which created nightmares for our support group who had to keep up with many versions of software. While it would have been easy to blame the field staff for “distorting” the real meaning of the term “enhancement”, that wasn't the problem. When we went internal and asked our product development and customer support people what an enhancement was, they couldn't agree on a common definition. Everybody did have a clear idea in their head. Unfortunately, the ideas were all different, and no one had ever written a standard. Some thought that an enhancement is the same as a bug fix. Others thought enhancements were modifications of and improvements to existing features, which sounded like an Update to a few. Others believed that an enhancement was a whole new revision level that included new features. Or was that an Upgrade? As we sorted things out, we found that an enhancement could be one of eight distinctly different things:
It's Time to Reframe Reframing is a metaphor for relabeling a term that we take for granted. It's the same thing you'd do to fix a picture on the wall that you don't really see anymore. You know - the one that's hung there for so long it's become part of the landscape. You cease to think about it. To freshen it up and draw attention to it, you don't need to change the picture, all you need to do is take it to the art studio and have it reframed. A fresh frame around the old artwork will cause you to look at it in a new way and appreciate what's been there all along. Reframing with words does the same thing by taking a jaded term that's lost its meaning and restating it in a functional, new way. We chose to create the term “BeneFix”, which we defined as “all the changes we make to our software to make it stronger.” Notice that we didn't use the term “enhancement” in the definition. Then we included several of the 8 points listed above, so that no mistake could be made regarding what was included with BeneFix. To address the frequency issue, we agreed to make BeneFix available “up to twice a year.” Our goal was to reduce the need for software changes to less than that, so it would be easy for our customers to load them and stay current on the latest release. By Reframing the term “enhancement” to “BeneFix”, our customers and our employees could finally all agree on exactly what we would be delivering under the terms of our support agreement. We received positive results because everything was spelled out, the old baggage was purged, and nothing was taken for granted. Use Reframing to make sure the meanings behind your marketing messages aren't taken for granted. Finally, you can properly set customer expectations, improve customer satisfaction, cut receivables, raise your image, and book more business through referrals, simply by making sure that you're not taking for granted the key words you use to sell your offering. By Reframing the term “enhancement”, our customers, both new and old, could understand exactly what we would deliver. Give some thought to the stale terms that you use in your marketing efforts. Maybe it's time to breathe new life into them through Reframing. You'll find Reframing to be a powerful, yet simple way to improve customer satisfaction levels and exceed customer expectations. © 2004 Paul Johnson. All rights reserved. |
||
|
