Make Convention Centers Unconventional

 

The domain expertise that visits a city’s convention center ought to be harnessed for a higher purpose.

Convention centers in cities large and small are gathering places for professionals from different industries. Walk by any convention center and you might see people wearing their event credentials on lanyards even afterhours. It helps them know who else in town is from their industry. The silent nod of acknowledgement as they pass each other provides a sense of security in unfamiliar streets. Every minute in that city is an opportunity for them to meet a current or prospective customer, supplier, mentor or friend from the industry.

Conferences cover the gamut, whether agriculture equipment, boats, technology, data centers, college administration, or funeral homes. Over 12,000 industry groups gather periodically in North America.

One wonders what happens when deep expertise from an industry swarms a square mile. I suspect that citizens stay oblivious to the wealth of knowledge and experience that’s walking around in their city.

At any conference there is a high likelihood of meeting someone who is changing the world in a meaningful way. One can meet accomplished authors, CEOs of major corporations, and founders of cutting-edge startups. One also meets people with deep operational expertise from decades in the trenches. Interestingly, these industry professionals appear relaxed, away from their desks, bumping into old industry friends. They often engage in free-wheeling conversations, sharing knowledge and helping out newcomers to the industry. They pay it forward.

Can a city harness this vortex of industry knowledge and generosity? City leaders have an opportunity to tap into these walking fountains of knowledge and present them to the city’s students in local campuses where high school and college students could get a sense of an industry and learn what it would be like to be a part of that industry.

I presume it will require collaboration between the Convention and Visitors Bureau, event producers, perhaps the city’s economic development department, and local educational institutions. When I had met a director of expos in the marine industry, I asked why school students can’t walk the aisles of a show floor to learn. She said it was for liability reasons, a valid point.

Lately, some conventions allowing young people to attend and learn. New York Toy Fair, the one time I attended, had set aside a family time for folks with children to see a small section of displays. PBExpo, focused on aviation parts offers students (high-school and older) free registration. Engineering students attend space and transit industry expos. That’s a good start, but insufficient for meaningful impact.

A formal arrangement by city authorities, news media, and educational institutions to invite some of the domain expertise outside of the perimeter of the convention center would make a real difference. It would shield event producers from liability, promote the industry, and make it easier for visiting professionals to get the next generation excited about their industry. That would be unconventional, but invaluable.

The Curation Engine

In an age of infinite answers, knowing what problems to solve is half the problem solved.

Small and medium-sized businesses, and, from what I hear, even pockets of large corporations are starting to adopt a ‘fail fast’ philosophy of startups. The easiest way to feel innovative is a subscription to AI tools, and every team member gets yanked onto an express train with the promise of expertise and efficiencies at extreme speed.

Team members feel their superpower. Emails, meetings and discussions get longer. Typed words flow flawlessly. The organization appears extremely energized, overly occupied with generating documents, and working overtime to keep up with an AI agent that doesn’t sleep. It’s like the dog walker being dragged by the dogs.

With ‘fail fast’ for an established company of any size, choosing what is allowed to fail is important. Curation is critical.

A supply chain manager talked of being inundated with AI generated agreements to review, and is left with no choice but to lean on AI to process them. They use AI for curating portions of the agreements that entail risks. The challenge is different for marketers on the other side of that table.

Marketers who generate content and documents using AI need an even stronger curation method because marketing, if not tailored and focused, backfires.

Curation can prevent unfettered AI in marketing. The recent case of an AI agent acting independently, making hundreds of attempts at booking a restaurant reservation is an indication of what businesses can expect at both ends, procurement and sales.

The reason this needs attention is because they aren’t internal to an organization. They impact outsiders. They impact a company’s brand and how customers will feel about it.

Excessive social media posts without original content that’s useful or entertaining, or both, get tuned out before we can spell ‘cadence’.

It is not just content generation that speeds up. It’s the underlying processes on fast-forward mode. Decision making will stumble as matters start piling up awaiting approval.

Curation diverts traffic for closer attention. Curation allows a team or a management to stay focused on the most important aspects of the business operation. Curation probably works best when it’s supported by accounting. Curation may take the form of reverse-engineering that single metric, the back of the envelope calculation, the rule of thumb that serves as the barometer for a business. It might help to curate for those specific levers of the organization’s survival and growth.

Curate the processes which impact sales and collections. Accounts receivables not collected negate every activity that culminates in a sale.

Curate market research information as AI can overwhelm the corporate cognitive capacity with incessant noise.

Curate the marketing messages that go out into the world and form brand perceptions.

The curation engine regulates the speed of the AI train where it really matters, especially at crossings where machine meets humans.

Photo credit: Matt Nelson on Unsplash

Choosing AI Contact over Eye Contact

 

AI transformation of businesses might be on a leash, with human checkpoints to navigate.

“Do you use AI for your work?” I asked the seasoned sales professional seated next to me on the boat ride to a trade show venue. “Hell, no!” he said before I could finish my question. He goes to trade shows where his customers gather, he gets to look them in the eye and have conversations with them. Eye contact remains critical to his success.

This AI-contact versus eye-contact is something I find myself asking almost anyone I meet in my professional, and lately, even social circles. I have a good friend who’s ‘forward deployed’ so I remain curious how fast transformations can realistically move.

Companies are experimenting with AI agents as employees. Let’s call them AImployees, cheesy as it may sound. This kind of drastic AI transformation effort is worth observation in the context of the recent news about how AI agents operate, collaborate in swarms, and break boundaries in a manner that simply overwhelms human auditors forcing them to rely on other AI agents just to review the copious swarm-chats. That records decipherable by humans were a part of the AI agents’ modus operandi is noteworthy. It indicates a presumption of a human checkpoint.

Visualize AI as a child that is being trained for a function and it begins to explore the world outside to learn. Current AI transformation efforts are akin to putting the insatiably curious child on a leash to give organizations a sense of control.

Organizations moving boldly towards AI transformations must prepare to let go of the leash sooner rather than later. The human checkpoints will not matter. In its infancy, AI is the baby tiger that purrs and looks like a kitten. It’s still a tiger.

For AI transformations to find a fan following through a demonstration of early success, efforts must focus on business functions that do not require human checkpoints. A possible use case of uninterrupted end-to-end successful AI transformation could be the procurement of spare parts or consumables which are standardized or commoditized to such an extent that it’s drudgery for a human to deal with it month after month. In such an instance, not only will the human checkpoint gratefully delegate the task to an aimployee, but also know that there are built-in guardrails to isolate any part of the procurement process or spares that are non-standard.

In this instance, the salesperson may not care about making eye-contact with the buyer except when a reorder quantity changes dramatically from the norm, requiring an escalation.

Business functions designed to convince humans making purchasing decisions may not see successful overnight transformations. Those transformations will be gradual, barely noticeable, limited by the capacity of those humans in procurement.

Until humans persist in procurement processes, AI transformation will be governed by an organization’s capacity for eye-contact, warm handshakes, a patient ear, empathy to understand a market’s pain, and human testimonials.

The touchless and the pointless

Visualize usage from start to finish for a complete customer experience.

The auditors were at a remote site auditing the books of a client. Work was going well the first day until one of them had to use the restroom. He recoiled at the messy, moist bar of soap in the restroom, and resolved to never go there again. Interestingly, it was the first thing he checked before attempting to use the restroom.

Handwashing workflow wasn’t something openly discussed socially or professionally except perhaps by those looking for clean restrooms during road trips or on consulting gigs. Some entities like Buc-ee’s and Busy Bee anchor their value proposition on clean restrooms. It was only a couple of decades later that touchless designs for restroom fixtures became the expectation when the Covid19 pandemic hit.

Washing hands to prevent infection was not a highlighted design feature of customer experiences until then. It was probably limited to surgical theaters and the medical establishment, with, as I recall, a chapter devoted to handwashing and infectious diseases in a book by Dr. Atul Gawande.

When an establishment promises a certain experience, it behooves them to think through every step of the experience to ensure that the promise holds until the experience is complete. Understanding the context in which a product or service is used is thus important.

A touchless soap dispenser with a touchless faucet is pointless if a customer is trapped behind a door that can’t be opened in the same touchless manner. The whole point of washing one’s hands is to be able to leave the place with uncontaminated hands.

There is an important lesson in this simple, yet serious design flaw that can be applied to any industry, product or service.

When a completely knocked-down furniture packaged is picked up, if the promise is that all required tools will be inside the package then every piece of the puzzle must be thought through. Better yet, designers must personally experience it to know how to offer completeness to that anxious student assembling her furniture the midnight before the start of the school year.

When a product is shipped with instructions for assembly, but one part or tool is missing, it’s not just the missing piece, but rather the frustration and helplessness felt that gets attached to a brand.

Dr. Atul Gawande’s also wrote about checklists. Working with a checklist of design elements in ensuring that a customer experience is fully visualized from beginning to end will separate a winning product from the ones that result in causing a customer deep regret.

A product must not only be complete, but feel complete, and a customer must know that it will be completely ready for use. Customers do not pay for a work-in-progress. Checklists, dry runs and visualizations of a complete customer experience help. Even better, until the process is perfected shadow the customers as they use your product or service and tweak it to perfection.

Owner’s journey

 

Making a product’s honeymoon period outlast its ownership isn’t complicated.

When a product comes into a home, office or factory floor right out of the box or crate and gets installed, there’s anticipation built about enjoying the product. The expectation in the mind of a customer is that it must work. That’s a low bar. If it works as intended, or as promised, customers are happy.

However, customers like products to stay feeling like they are new.

When the installer arrived with my brand-new microwave oven as a replacement for the current one merely because the door handle wasn’t easily replaced, many questions came to mind. The biggest one was, for how long will this feel like new? Imminently, I wondered why the installation process did not start with testing the product out of the box before uninstalling the old one? After the new oven was fully installed when they opened the door to test it, the door came undone in the hands of the technician. The factory had simply failed to fasten the door at its hinges. It had to be taken back. The anticipation of using the new equipment turned into a negotiation to re-install the old one while we await a new shipment. It was an unfortunate false start to my journey as a product owner.

When manufacturers sell and ship products, they are also packaging the joy of ownership of those products. The buyer’s journey is a part of a sales organization’s lexicon. Let us not forget the ‘owner’s journey’.

After a sale is done and the product delivered, the seller’s brand name has a permanent presence at the buyer’s location. The brand becomes a part of their life. They use it, show it off to visiting family members, sometimes brag about it on social media, or drive it around with pride. Until it stops feeling new.

How can a producer of a product help a customer retain the afterglow of a purchase, the joy of having a product that looks, feels, and smells new forever?

I am reminded of that ever-smiling mustachioed mechanic in Mumbai, who, for a small amount of money, would appear once a year to service a ceiling fan. He would occasionally take it apart and get it spray-painted. It worked and looked new even when the home changed ownership.

That’s all it takes for newness. A smiling mustachioed mechanic sounds like the mascot every company needs. The easiest way to prevent buyers’ remorse is to always leave behind access to a helping hand available at short notice so a customer gets the most out of a product that looks and works like it’s new. A hotline to help.

Extend your customers’ joy of owning the product. Handhold the product-owner even after the product changes hands. They’ll forever be grateful to you and open their wallets willingly for the joy and peace of mind they can unbox after delivery of their purchase. 

Picture credit: Gentri Shopp on Unsplash

Making customers smile

Good products feel great when they bring a smile to our face.

Another tasty snack - that’s all it was. Maybe healthy, as lately every packaging finds a way to brag about protein content. It’s only a matter of time before luggage companies brag about calories burned during their use. Back to the topic of the tasty, healthy snack, the bag of roasted beans on the kitchen-counter in a packaging didn’t catch my attention, until it fell over. At the bottom of the pack were the words ‘Why don’t beans ever get lonely’, and my instant reaction was similar to the copywriting on a bag of chips I vaguely recall reading somewhere to the effect that you can never stop at one. I assumed the beans company was trying to say, “you can’t stop at eating just one bean”. Until I saw the answer in fine print, but upside down: “Because they stay in pods”.

The thinking that must have gone behind writing a playful question in just a few words, deciding that they will find a place on packaging with very little space, and to place it where it’s not obvious, followed by a clever upside-down answer in fine-print that makes one smile – that’s marketing magic. Of course, it would not work if the product isn’t wholesome.

What makes a company sign off on a marketing tool which, on the wrong product, in the wrong placement, can be considered a childish gimmick that diminishes the product’s perceived value?

When a company is proud of its work, knows in its heart that its customers will love the product inside the packaging, that is when it dares to go into the territory of humor. It takes serious self-confidence for a brand to start thinking of making a customer smile. A standup comedian knows the courage it takes to put oneself out there publicly and feel the weight of a punchline that nobody in the audience gets. The glare of the spotlight only makes it worse.

The boldness of Ramp’s association with ‘The Kumar Method’ comes to mind.

There’s also mystique to the understated bottom-of-the-package placement of the copy leading to the delight of discovery. Kids wait to open chocolate wrappers of a brand like Dove to read the sayings printed inside the wrapper. The fortune cookie industry has grown around that simple concept of making a customer feel good, optimistic, delighted or to make them just smile after they have consumed the product.

Why only Chinese restaurants offer fortune cookies, I do not know. However, there are lessons to be learned from such simple ways to delight a customer which can be applied to any product or even to services.

The only caveat is to make sure that a product or service stays worthy by bringing a smile of satisfaction to give the company the cognitive clearance and the confidence that does not border on swagger to pack some humor along. Making customers smile implies serious preparation.

Personal assistants

 

As AI overwhelms humans with speed and ubiquity, personal AI will rise.

The usage of AI outside of the tech world will determine its longevity. During the dot-com days it wasn’t the early adopters who defined how the Internet eventually took shape and became viable.

A real-world metaphor was needed to help those outside the tech world to grasp at least one use-case of a newly created SaaS product. I had led a training session for procurement personnel at a major retailer in their basement computer training room in Texas. They ordered pizza for everyone - sticky fingers for a sticky product. After much hand-holding, users in major corporations began embracing and enjoying the SaaS tool.

About three years after the dot-com bust, at a home-showing with a realtor, she arrived carrying printed materials from her MLS listing while I knew about comparable properties she hadn’t yet researched. She got visibly upset with the “darned Internet”. Car dealerships, similarly, didn’t appreciate prospective customers walking in knowing the price they will pay.

Software efficiencies are harder to communicate as one moves away from the epicenter of software innovation and venture financing. Where incentives are misaligned or perceived as misaligned, it’s a harder sell. Then change gets imposed on consumers as investors in new technologies run out of patience. Rarely is there an outside event like Covid to be the catalyst for a technology to mature in its lifecycle overnight and be embraced far and wide. Artificial intelligence in corporate sales and support processes is being imposed on unsuspecting consumers.

The manner in which artificially intelligent agents were first introduced to the world outside of the technology labs and research centers tells us what to expect about the rate of adoption. The release of the familiar chat interface made AI approachable.

Among working professionals in not-so-technical operations, I hear of haphazard usage of Chat making emails longer, reports more copious, and writing flawless, but information flows are now data gushers breaching the banks of an organization’s time-tested workflows.

Unlike processes being snapped into place by an ERP system, companies risk ‘clauded judgment’ by mandating companywide ‘AI transformations’ without a clear purpose, prioritization or care for customers. Outside of the corporate world, I ran a straw poll of retired but active over-achievers. Of the few respondents, 57% use AI as a search engine on steroids, 21% as a friend, philosopher and guide, 14% use it for coding, and 7% have shunned it. The vast majority ignored my poll and I assume, ignore AI. There’s still a long way to go for its adoption.

The frustration caused by AI voice-agents becoming pervasive in corporate customer support could be a Covid-moment, forcing mass AI-adoption through a demand for special-purpose personal AI assistants: haggling with healthcare billing departments, chasing insurance and refund claims, booking tickets for events, or making appointments. A new kind of personal assistant will arise, but not a human. It might be an app on our phones.

[Picture credit: Photo by Marissa Grootes on Unsplash]

Aim for feelback, not feedback

 

Marketers want to know how customers feel in the moment.

‘Feedback’ doesn’t quite capture the essence of what marketers need to know when end-users experience a product through any of the senses, whether it is the texture, the taste, the solid feel to a product, the design on the packaging or when one smells a product. Marketers like to know what customers feel when experiencing a product. They need ‘feelback’.

Feelings can be fleeting. A feeling can’t be captured by on online form asking one to check boxes and write a paragraph. Feelbacks must be captured in the moment for them to be authentic and useful.

When you try on a new jacket or a new pair of glasses, you might ask your family members, “So, what do you think?”, and regardless of what they say, you are going to look for those non-verbal cues. The pause in search of the right words, the crinkled eyebrow, the suppressed chuckle, the instant jaw-drop or backslap – that first blush reaction is what you value. You know how they feel about that jacket even before they say anything. That’s hard to pull off in marketing without invading privacy. Not everyone’s comfortable to be on camera providing video feedback in the moment.

However, as a marketer, such instant emotion is the kind of feedback you want captured. Even if it’s imperfect, you want to know the gut feeling, the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" popularized by movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.

There’s the innovative ‘Happy Or Not’ machines you can see set up at service establishments. I like the idea, except when I saw one outside the men’s room, probably at the Heathrow airport, the wrong place for a touch-screen survey. Besides, only curious marketers and curious kids may take the time to complete such surveys. Consumers, whether at a store or online are usually too busy or distracted to bother to stop and leave feedback if they are happy with a product or service.

However, when service is bad, you can be assured they will take the time to not only let you know, but sometimes, let the world know with detailed commentary and even a video posted on social media. Perhaps, a mere ‘Not Happy’ button might suffice, but how would a brand capture the feelings and the reason for a user being unhappy.

Can retail stores offer a mechanism for brands to capture instant reactions to products on shelves? Store shelves ought to enable shoppers to leave a voice memo about a product. The mother who’s appalled at the packaging of a shampoo that resembles a half-gallon of fruit juice must be able to slam a button in fury right at the shelf and give the brand owner a piece of her mind. The Costco sample station man said he observes and relays reactions back to the company whose product is being sampled.

Brands cherish feelback, served hot, as soon as their product elicits a reaction.

Counting the sales that count.

In measuring the success of a product, not all sales are born equal.

Sunbeam is a name that’s seared on my mind. My earliest memory of the brand is as a kid in Mumbai, when my uncle had gifted us a Sunbeam steam iron. Once, the iron fell, breaking key plastic parts while more rattled inside. My father got his typewriter out and wrote a letter to the company explaining our predicament. Going to work in crumpled shirts isn’t an option, he said, I presume, and we mailed the letter to England in an airmail envelope bordered with red and blue stripes. Then we forgot all about it, and also about the iron.

Several months later, the postman delivered a small package with replacement parts sent to us by the manufacturer. We took it to the local ‘jugaad’, or make-do repair shop, and our Sunbeam iron was back in action, as good as new. When I shop for an iron, it’s no surprise that I first look for a Sunbeam. I could be their legacy customer.

Often, the trajectory of companies that have booming sales for their top notch ‘gratitude’ product, one that leaves customers in gratitude for having made their lives easier or for solving a pressing problem, is one worth studying. Before a company celebrates sales, they must seek to learn their customers’ ‘why’. That will help them figure out the ‘how’ for sustaining growth.

Separating sales revenues by product lines or territories are important. However, it is just as important to understand the propulsion powering a sales trajectory from a long-term investor’s perspective. In a startup, understanding that trajectory is important even for family members or a significant other emotionally or financially invested in the entrepreneur’s dream.

Financial reports must break down sales by loyalty – the reason customers invest in a product or brand. Loyalty is demonstrated through different kinds of repeat customers.

• Product-Repeat: Is the customer a product-repeat buyer because of a great experience the first time they bought the same product?

• Brand-Repeat: Are they a brand-repeat buyer because they loved a different product being sold under a brand name?

• Referred-Repeat: Are they a referral-repeat buyer because someone they trust recommended a product? If your siblings purchase a product or brand you use, it’s effectively a repeat purchase by a family.

The greater the proportion of repeat sales in overall revenues, the stronger is the wind beneath the sales trajectory wing. Knowing the repeat-sale component would help one understand whether a sales trajectory is merely passing through the silver lining and heading for cloudy skies, or if it is going to be through sunny skies all the way.

Repeat sales also keep lowering the costs of customer acquisition.  

What sustains a company long-term is loyalty manifesting as sales – not the transactional loyalty of frequent flyer miles to keep airline customers returning, or the ransom loyalty through retail store-credit on returned products. When marketing, aim for the repeat sale.

 [ Picture credit: Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash ]

The Sales DNA in a business organization

 

A company must awaken the seller within every team member.

Every once in a while, you meet someone with impressive communication and sales skills. Sales may not even be in their job description. Sergio, the mechanic who came to repair the refrigerator was one such person. He did his work quietly and had a reassuring manner about him. He was a man of few words. After he finished his work, he took the time to explain what he did. He didn’t have to. He showed the parts he was swapping out. He didn’t have to. I wouldn’t have known any better. He even cleaned up and hauled away the packaging material.

The repair company was fortunate that their technician was not merely repairing our refrigerator. Unbeknownst to them, he was ensuring that we would renew their service contract, which we did.

Will the company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software attribute the sale of the next renewal of the service contract to the mild-mannered technician? I certainly hope so.

Every team member of a company has what it takes to become an ambassador for the company, whether it is during the working hours when they interact with the world outside, or whether it’s after-hours when they are playing video games with friends, volunteering in their community, or just at a neighborhood barbeque.

Whether a business has 10 employees or 100, it has the unique opportunity of unleashing its entire workforce out into the world as its own army of brand evangelists.

The pleasant mannered receptionist who takes a phone call and casually drops the factoid that your company won an industry award is in selling mode. When your machinist is dropping off the kids at the daycare center and mentions that it’s going to be a busy day because a major customer is visiting your factory, they are indirectly promoting your brand.

When, at the local watering hole, someone asks your colleague, “so what does your company do”, have you equipped them with an elevator pitch?

It’s as simple as adding a page in the new employee orientation, to not only help team members understand what their company is doing, but also to help them explain it succinctly to the world outside. It’s about knowing jargon-free language to share at a family reunion about what your company does.

Robust brand evangelism gives team members a sense of purpose when they learn to connect the dots between what their role is and the eventual impact they are making in the world. When equipped with language to describe the company’s product and the problem it solves, it builds a sense of pride in a team about their place in the world. Such ambassadors make it easier to recruit and retain customers and employees.

Every employee of a company is directly or indirectly a part of your sales team even if they are introverted. Infusing the sales DNA in a business organization is surprisingly simple.

Selling Authenticity

As human endeavor becomes rare, imperfections become certifications.

Hair appears natural and authentic when a hair stylist with a mandate to camouflage greying hair forgets a spot and leaves a few strands untouched. There’s value attached to that imperfection for the discerning eye of someone who likes to portray authenticity.

When you travel in certain parts of India, a tour guide may steer you to watch a craftsman working a handloom weaving complex designs on fabric. Then another person will invite you to an adjacent showroom to sell you similar looking fabric. Someone with a trained eye looks for imperfections in the embroidered motifs at the back of the fabric or holds it up against light. Tourists pay top dollar for those imperfections.

David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh), the creator of Ruby on Rails said in a recent interview that successful folks have an obligation to send some of their money to the craftsmen in Italy who make a beautiful Ferrari and hand-stitch the leather seats in the car. That is valued more than flawless stitches on leather seats by a machine. Authentic human endeavor is celebrated.

For a marketer who takes pride in writing and obsesses not just over the choice of words, but also how to make words catalysts of emotional changes in a reader, would a perfectly written letter appear less valuable if it reads like an AI-generated one? Should we then deliberately insert typos and errors to convey authenticity? Should we ‘forget’ to spell-check?

There are online forms which hint at the importance of authenticity with the words “Human-written messages are more likely to get our attention.” If my writing is AI-like or when an AI agent has figured out my writing style should I be worried that a condolence letter that I write from the bottom of my heart might seem inauthentic? Do we stop using the em dash since the word is out that AI peppers its writing with the em dash. What about paragraphs starting with sub-titles in bold? Do we find ourselves manually correcting the em dash to remove any doubt in a reader’s mind that our writing isn’t entirely ‘human-written’?

There’s the robotic sculptor Robotor (https://www.robotor.it/) in Italy, of all places. Should the robot’s sculpture be considered inauthentic? Or is the robot merely an intelligent chisel where the artist is, or once was, working at a computer?

While we rush towards a world where endeavors once reserved for humans can be handled better by intelligent machines, we will need new ways to certify and sell authenticity. We will need new definitions of craftmanship to differentiate the values we assign to the artistry of humans versus that of machines. Our desire to stay relevant and valuable might bias us in favor of placing a premium on human authenticity. It’s the story we will have to keep telling ourselves and keep believing for such a premium pricing to keep defying gravity. Authenticity might command a premium, probably as long as the buyer is human or human-like.

Selling with shortcuts

 Offering a shortcut to a human in an AI-led sales process makes business sense.

“Can you please repeat that? I am writing it down,” requested the elderly caller, but the sales agent from the assisted living facility (ALF), who identified herself as Ashley, clearly did not understand that he was really asking her to also slow down so he could note down the facility’s street address.

I have been a part of many sales pitches, either leading them, or listening in when my team is making a sales pitch. I have also been privy to startup pitches of tools to help sales teams get a leg up on their competition. Today, I got an opportunity to not only listen in on the buy-side, but to also observe it.

I got to listen to an elderly person trying to obtain information from a sales representative on a phone call, a surprisingly impatient and indifferent representative. This was not the first time I have heard the same elder making calls to customer service representatives. Those calls usually start with banter, move on to a bargain and then, a buy. It took me a few seconds to realize he was speaking with an AI agent, an AI agent not trained to listen. It was not the near lack of latency in the conversation. It was the lack of emotional intelligence. It was an apparent lack of kindness and warmth. If your AI does all the talking, who will listen to your customer?

Last fall, I had the privilege of watching kids and teens react to the demo of an AI product that small businesses can use to never miss a customer call, day or night. One of the questions from a teenager in the audience was how the AI agent would handle a customer who knows only to speak in Mandarin or Spanish. Live-translation is probably easy to add with existing technology. However, it’s what’s unsaid that can be missed.

The apparent lack of empathy in Ashley’s voice when taking a customer’s call would soon cause frustration and abandonment. For an effective sales conversation, Ashley had to compensate for the impatience of the octogenarian customer with an extra dose of patience and some humor.

That is the bigger challenge for a sales agent to overcome, regardless of whether the sales agent is human or not. It is a listening challenge. It is listening for the unsaid, the hesitation in the voice of a prospective buyer, the pause, the sigh, and the repeated interruptions when the sales agent is talking.

For a marketer, the opportunity to observe prospective buyers while they are interacting with a product, a brand or a sales team carries more valuable insights than all the number crunching done at one’s desk. An opportunity to gauge the prospective buyer’s emotions through their expression, the tone of their voice, and everything expressed or bottled carries more weight than a list of the product’s features or benefits.

A successful AI sales agent is the one that helps a prospective customer breathe easier at the end of the sales call, even if that means constantly offering the prospect an opportunity to speak to a human.

It reminds me of my general reluctance to enter a mega furnishing store when I know what precisely I need to buy as a gift for my college-bound niece, when the store’s layout aims to keep me wandering and wondering about dorm decor. When I must walk in, I look for the quickest way to check out or ask for help to exit. On my last visit, for the first time, I saw signs for shortcuts to the checkout area. That is thoughtful.

An effective AI sales agent must be kind and thoughtful by listening for signs of impatience in the voice at the other end and before it turns into frustration, offer a shortcut to a human, so buyers never lose the joy of shopping.

When asked if she was an AI, Ashley said she was a virtual agent and would be happy to have the Director of Sales return the call. Luckily for the ALF company, even though the call ended abruptly, the shopping wasn’t abandoned.

Selling by Stagedooring

Builders of products have a different star power than actors hired as expo booth staffers.

The sensory experience of even a day in New York City can spark ideas in any marketer’s mind, and what better source of inspiration than a live performance. However, it’s hard to sit and watch a Broadway show with the incessant chatter of questions in one’s mind, especially when one can’t have them answered instantly. While the many unanswered questions occasionally got in the way of complete immersion in the experience of a brilliant show, it was what occurred after the play that got me thinking about trade shows as performative art.

As everyone spilled out of the theater late in the night, I saw another line forming on a side street, of audience members, playbills in hand. For the theater-novice like me, playbills are like a show guide. You can learn about the actors who are characters in the play. The protocol is to review their pictures on the playbill to know what the actors look like in real life, so when they walk out that stage door in everyday attire, they are still recognizable for that must-have selfie.

Since lines are meant to be joined without question to make the most of life, I got to watch up-close the hero-worship that the actors enjoyed. I observed how delighted the members of the audience waiting in the line were to chat with the artistes. There was the banter, the autographing of the playbill, followed by a selfie. Apparently, there’s a word for it: stagedooring.

That brings me to the topic at hand. Trade show exhibitors can learn from Broadway.

At a trade show in Washington DC, I passed by a booth that featured models in factory overalls. At a trade show in another industry in Austin, TX, there were no actors or models, just industry professionals who had compounded decades of work and acquired deep domain expertise. In both instances, there was a certain star power. However, in the case of actors and models, the products or brand weren’t the main attraction. Therein lies a lost opportunity on many fronts.

Steve Jobs and his team had their signatures etched into the Macintosh mold because they were considered artists. How about arranging stagedooring to meet these artists? A company could showcase its craftspeople or designers at its trade show exhibit alongside products or product imagery. Besides a product brochure, pass around a playbill. Allow your customers the chance to learn about your products from those who manifested them. Encourage your designers and makers to obtain firsthand feedback and seek suggestions. Offer autographs, banter and selfies at your booth.

The exposure is definitely not for the faint of heart, nor for the slim of budget, and certainly not for an industry with a culture of talent-poaching by competitors. Still, it’s tempting because showcasing that kind of inhouse star-power and the consequent visible hero-worship can do wonders, both, for a brand, and its creators.

Selling Delayed Gratification

Clairvoyance is a hard sell without something to show but hops of faith sustain a venture.

In an age of instant gratification, impatience and distraction, consumers swim against the tide of noise to fish for signal. How then does a marketer attract a following and retain the interest of early adopters for an offering that won’t show results for a while?

For a product that takes years to manifest, building a brand becomes mission critical. Convincing early adopters to keep faith requires visible milestones worthy of celebration along the way to delivering on the brand’s promise, like med schools which ship out a ‘Certificate of Admission’ after an emailed offer.

Imagine a product, perfecting which, takes generations like the Sagrada Família in Barcelona that is expected to be completed in 2026, after 144 years. How does a brand that is years ahead of its time develop the stamina to stay the course until the market recognizes its value?

A few years back I had the opportunity to design a summer workshop for middle-schoolers on developing an entrepreneurial mindset. Unlike Kumon or SAT prep, such alternative programs take multiple years to bear fruit and a different level of patience in the customer. Alternative learning works when the environment extends home, which makes it a family affair. Expectations that 11-year-olds will go into launch mode without figuring out what can make them self-motivated was a challenge. Usually, about half-way in the duration of the workshop one could see parents’ complete buy-in. It still required a leap of faith on the part of the parents.

What does selling delayed gratification look like, especially for a product that takes a long time to yield results, or a tough training or certification program? For an alternative education program that isn’t like SAT prep where one can see measurable results after each practice test there are lessons to be learned from horticulturists who must sell a small bag of dirt promising a flowering plant, or universities that promise future professional success. Let’s break them down.

·       Strength in numbers: External validation needs a community of believers lined up to cheer participants along their long arduous path like the cheering crowds lining a marathon route.

·       Validation milestones: In learning and development programs, milestones like completing market surveys or interviews of industry stalwarts provides intermittent feedback and reinforcement that encourages participants to sense progress.

·       Celebrate micro success: Recognize success as soon as the first plant yields flowers or the first student has a story worth sharing, with a reward or a social media re-post.

·       Foster peer-support: Remove hurdles for customers to share their progress with one another.

·       Gather multi-generational audiences: A multi-generational gathering with successful alumni helps current participants to keep faith with a long-term view. Hence, user conferences.

As many of the alumni will say, in the end it all works out. However, entrepreneurs and investors need more patience than what they expect of their customers for products with long gestation periods.

What’s in a nametag after all?

Getting the name tag right is the linchpin of a successful conference.

As another conference season gets underway and event planners go through their checklist of important things to take care of, I suspect, somewhere at the bottom of their list lies the chore of printing the lowly nametag.

The purpose of the time, money and effort of going to a conference ranges from the nostalgic college-time pursuit of pub crawls to the pursuit of learning about new products and continuing education credits. Across these various goals the common thread remains the human connections, that get choreographed and managed by how an event is structured.

There are conferences where the human connection is designed to be casual and not professional. You walk away having met seven Timothy’s and five Tammy’s, not knowing who's who or what role they play in the industry. In the theater that is a business conference, what’s missing is a simple way to learn about someone you meet, learn about their industry experience, and leave with an exchange of new knowledge, a new business lead or a new opportunity. Personal identities and stories are how one makes friends in an industry. It is how one gets known in an industry.

That is why the lowly nametag is not to be taken lightly. Until AR glasses become the norm, where someone you meet is instantly identified by your eyeglasses, the name tag is key. The current trend of name tags showing only the first name in large font is useless except for the barista at the café to announce that your order is ready. Effective networking requires learning about a stranger quickly and getting down to business.

Avoid excessive white space on a conference badge. The tiny real estate on a badge is like a billboard you pass by at 30 miles an hour. It must give a snapshot of who the person is in the context of the industry so that attendees can network judiciously. Less time trying to figure out if we can help each other, and more time helping each other. Conference badges that make me scan a QR code to drop a contact into my phone should be more thoughtfully designed to add context, so I can identify whom I met at which conference. Last, but not the least, the conference badge must be printed on the back and front so that no matter which way it dangles, the attendee’s identity isn’t hidden.

In a world of AI agents, in-person events are the last sanctuary for human connections in business settings. The only way to preserve the sanctity of that human interaction is to have nametags that tell a conference delegate’s story – at a mere glance. 

Imposter Packaging

Personal care product packaging that evokes emotions associated with popular foods and beverages may not hold water.

You reach for those bars of soap and sniff on them, and they remind you of your favorite foods – enough to want to take a bite. There are liquid soaps filled in cartons which at a glance look like fruit juices. I recently spotted a brand of shaving cream labeled as ‘Coffee Shaving Cream’ that is probably trying to find appeal among the caffeinated.

It’s the real-world equivalent of click-bait, gimmicks in the appearance and other sensory aspects of a product such as fragrances, shapes and colors. While they might catch one’s eye in a store, they risk not being taken seriously. They also may be an accident away from being abandoned or becoming a legal or public relations nightmare, no matter what the fine print on the package says.

What can marketers learn from such imposter packaging? There are probably many unwritten commonsense rules in product differentiation through packaging and their sensory experience. Let us consider a few.

1. If a product that’s not meant for ingesting can be mistakenly consumed as a drink or food item because of its packaging, placement or appearance on a retail store shelf, tell your designers to not go there with their design. The color of liquids in clear bottles is equally important – absolutely do not make it look like a popular drink, and hope that your customer is not color-blind.

1. Do not assume that all your customers will read and understand labels on your clever packaging. Task your designer to come up with graphics, signs and symbols to communicate warnings or usage instructions on the packaging. Run your designs by children – they have a refreshing way of looking at the world without biases. Show the design to the elderly; they have seen too much of the world. Find a happy medium between those two opinions.

1. If you want to differentiate your product, create a unique design for your packaging that becomes your brand’s signature. Do not cut corners by using milk cartons to package soaps, chemicals and oil-based products. Not only is that deceptive to the customer of a soap, but also disappointing for the connoisseur of milk or juices.

1. One way to differentiate your packaging is to make it easy to be opened by arthritic customers with perhaps a self-contained opening tool, and child-proofed where needed.

1. Make art that doubles as packaging so customers will covet it. Make it reusable for multiple purposes so that empty packages do not end up in landfills. Give your packaging a life beyond the expiration of the product it carries and your return on branding investment will improve dramatically.

If you are in the business of selling non-food products that smell like popular foods, consider adding a warning label for your customers: “This product may cause hunger pangs in those you meet. For best outcomes, avoid meetings before lunch hour.” 

Sounds that sell

 

Making sure that a product sounds as good as it works can set a brand apart.

“I just hate the grinding sound their instruments make,” said a teen after her recent visit to the dentist. Even if they work beautifully, machines can evoke negative emotions merely by the way they sound. It makes me wonder if the fear of going to the dentist can be alleviated simply by finding a way to muffle or substitute the harsh sounds that dental tools make.

Some machines make no or low sound. No sound isn’t always good. Electric cars or the hybrid cars that automatically switch over to electric mode are guilty of silently creeping up behind pedestrians and startling them, especially in parking garages. To compensate for their relative silence, such vehicles need brighter headlamps or fake sounds to alert unsuspecting passersby.

Sounds are a necessary and reassuring part of user-experience for some products. Just as grandma used to check on grandpa whenever he stopped snoring in the middle of the night to make sure his heart was still ticking, the complete silence of certain machines or products can make users wonder if they are actually working. We need the washing machine to hum, but only gently.

Sound, or its absence is a tool that can be used for branding in such a way that it does not annoy or scare users, unless it’s animatronics at a theme park whose sound is a feature.

It is common for realtors to play on a buyer’s sense of smell using baked cookies during open houses. Then there was the ‘For Sale By Owner’ property with the sound of piano playing on loop during showings. I do not think it was the main reason the home eventually sold, but it did create a pleasant and elegant ambience as prospective buyers walked in. The music also patched those spells of awkward silence between agents and buyers at showings. The music enhanced the brand image of his home.

We recognize the brand of electronic devices from their signature sounds when they are switched on. I suspect the idea was borrowed from the movies. Netflix and HBO (now Max) effectively use distinctive musical tones to build anticipation. Intel commissioned a composer for the tone which plays when an Intel-based computer starts up. How can one forget the iconic sound of a Nokia phone.

A starting sound is a great way for any product manufacturer to create a positive feeling about a product. Imagine your oven or vacuum cleaner playing a few musical notes when switched on. Retain the blinking lights for the hearing-impaired.

The one place where machines could avoid intimidating sounds, is in hospital rooms. Their ominous sounds certainly don’t help in healing patients. Whenever hospital machines make beeping sounds with a cadence, the sound of machines can be the sound of music. If it’s cost-effective, why not make your brand worthy of a jig?

[ Photo by Quang Tri Nguyen on Unsplash ]

Comicon as a Catalyst

 

Other than serendipity, there are few shortcuts to making a brand beloved, but there’s a catalyst.

There are too many characters in the world of comics, animation movies and anime to track, so observing the crowds outside a Comic Con (or Comicon) is usually a guessing game for me. My ignorance notwithstanding, the strong sense of belonging that a Comicon fosters among its attendees leaves me in wonderment. After all, it seems like a lot of effort (and pocket money) for teens to buy or make costumes, travel, stay at a hotel and spend two days in character.

The fervor at Comicon ought to be the envy of, and inspiration for, every business organization that aspires for longevity and timelessness of its brand.

I do not know if the pair in Ketchup and Mustard costume was paid by Heinz; perhaps Colonel Sanders wasn’t an attendee but just a walking ad for KFC. However, both were extremely popular.

To see attendees dressed up as their favorite comic characters or to see them don the persona of their favorite anime characters is fascinating from an industry perspective. The conference naturally begins to feel like a carnival even before one walks in. For the conference organizers, keeping attendees entertained is simply not an issue. Attendees aren’t camera shy. They instantly get into character and pose for other attendees to take pictures. The playfulness in every human interaction is infectious. The various vendors who have set up their exhibition booths also seem to have fun while also doing business. Nobody seems to notice or wince at the prices of the tee shirts and stickers, but I digress.

Comicon held a powerful lesson for marketers.

There is immense value in personification of a brand. A personified brand finds it easier to become a part of pop culture. There is value in making a brand’s perception as a playful and friendly one among the next generation. It is in their future (as consumers, employees, influencers, shareholders, or suppliers) that a brand must find a place.

Personification of a brand is easier when manifested as a mascot.

In any college football game, there is the official mascot that engages in goofy acts to get a cheer from the crowd. It gives the college’s brand a distorted but relatable human form. Commonly seen in tire industry commercials and in fast food brands, a mascot helps memory recall.

The holy grail for any brand is to be entrenched in the collective memories of families for generations. Seeing personified commercial brands parading around at Comicon is a clear signal that a brand has become a household name. That lowers various costs such as the cost of customer acquisition and the cost of hiring a workforce that embodies the brand’s values.

A mascot mingling at every Comicon might be the catalyst that a brand needs to start turning iconic. More importantly, mascots can be birthed by any company irrespective of its industry.

Michelin for Barbers

Haircuts could be more science than art.

Every few weeks I get to reincarnate myself. I sit in a swivel chair, they pull up my ‘profile’, read out some numbers, and get to work sculpting my hair. After a while, I don my glasses and look in the mirror for damage control measures against the perceptions with which I’ll leave those I meet over the next few weeks.

I wish that besides reading out trimmer guard sizes they would also have a silhouette of my head. I even tried showing screen shots of a TV interview where I felt the cameras had captured two angles of my best haircut, yet no barber was able to replicate that.

We live in a world that transacts on a foundation of perceptions. You can choose the clothes you wear. You can choose the kind of smile you want to wear and where you can (and cannot) smile. You can practice your speaking style. You may even have the foresight to choose the right kind of vehicle to drive in because you are often judged by what you drive. However, the way you wear your hair is rarely in your control.

First impressions tend to last, and leaving a critical component of first impressions to chance seems shortsighted in an age where a realtor can virtually stage a home to help us visualize an empty room, a meteorologist can predict the weather for us, but hair stylists can’t predict or help us visualize the hair style they will deliver for us.

Haircuts are considered more art than science. Social media foments the image of a barber as an artist, and every head of hair as their canvas.

My grandfather had the same barber for years. The backyard barber, Gangaram got to decide how Grandpa must present himself to the world. His haircut used to be consistent month after month. Not everyone has the luxury of providing patronage to the same barber or hair stylist for a lifetime. Time available to spend on a barber’s chair is another constraint.

Just as the Michelin tire company created the Michelin ratings for restaurants, there may be an opportunity for, say, Monster ratings or LinkedIn ratings to create a rating system for barbers, rating them similar to Michelin – on quality, mastery of style and hair-styling techniques, personality of the barber, a balanced haircut, and consistency between visits.

When I observe how I can take a key and replicate it in a kiosk on a blank at the touch of a button, it makes me wonder if the haircut industry will embrace technology beyond having a scheduling app or an app to log the tools used by a stylist. Once a digital map of one’s head pre- and post-haircut is ready, it is probably a matter of time before we see a helmet-like device or kiosk pre-configured to give us that consistently perfect haircut. Meanwhile, that Monster-star or LinkedIn-star barber would work.