Category Archives: marketing

The Secret to Sweetwater’s Billion-Dollar Online Business

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The Secret to Sweetwater's Billion-Dollar Online Business

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Sweetwater is an online retailer specializing in selling whatever musicians need, from instruments to audio equipment and lighting. In 1979, Chuck Surack founded the company in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It started as a mobile recording studio and over time, evolved into a retail business selling musical instruments. In 1995, the company launched a website, and just a few years later was selling most of its inventory online. Surack was an early adopter of online retailing, and today, with 2,500 employees, Sweetwater is the largest online retailer of musical instruments and audio equipment in the U.S., serving millions of customers with $1.7 billion in sales.

I had a chance to interview David Fuhr, Sweetwater’s chief sales officer, for an episode of Amazing Business Radio. We discussed the secrets to creating an exceptional customer experience that drives repeat business. It turns out, it’s not a secret at all. It’s a common-sense approach to putting the customer at the center of all decisions. When a company becomes customer-focused—even customer-obsessed—magic happens. Here are six lessons any business can learn from our discussion:

1. Creating Experiences Out of Love for Your Customers Beats Just Chasing Money

This seems like a good place to start. Fuhr shared Sweetwater’s philosophy: “Our team is in it for the love of the game.” Surack started Sweetwater out of love and passion for the business, and success followed. Fuhr started playing clarinet when he was young, eventually decided to teach music, and now he gets to sell music. There are many similar stories from Sweetwater employees. They love what they do!

2. Hire the Right People

Even if you love music, it’s not easy to get hired to be a salesperson at Sweetwater. Keep in mind, Sweetwater is in Fort Wayne—not a major city like Chicago, LA or New York. All employees are expected to work in the Sweetwater office. With a smaller population, one might think Sweetwater would have difficulty hiring enough staff to support its customers. Only 5% of applicants vying for the coveted role of selling and serving customers with a shared passion for music are hired. They choose the best.

3. Training Never Stops

Sweetwater wants to ensure its salespeople have the technical information they need to sell and the soft skills to communicate effectively with customers. It’s all done through training. Once hired, new employees complete 13 weeks of training at Sweetwater University. They are paid to be in a classroom for the first 90 days of their Sweetwater journey, and it doesn’t stop there. Each week, salespeople go through 90 minutes of additional training. This reinforces something I’ve preached to my clients for decades: Training isn’t something you did. It’s something you do.

4. Core Values Create the Foundation for Strong Business

Surack was successful because of his core values-based rules, and his No. 1 core value was simple: Just do the right thing. Fuhr used my salesperson, Blake Strickland, as an example. I recently bought a guitar from Sweetwater, and he not only helped me choose the right guitar, but also took the time to go downstairs to their “store” to compare it with similar models, ensuring I would receive, in his opinion, the best guitar of the lot. This was time spent away from the phone when he could have been talking to other customers. But, as Fuhr points out, Strickland wanted me to have the best experience. In addition, Strickland didn’t want my new guitar to spend a week in various locations and climates in the back of a truck or in a warehouse while en route to my home, so he surprised me by upgrading my purchase to overnight delivery. Fuhr says, “Who are we to stop him? He’s doing the right thing for you. … We empower our employees to do the right thing.”

5. Small Acts of Generosity Surprise Customers

One of the fun things Sweetwater does is include a small bag of candy with every order. Pun intended, it’s a “sweet” gesture that gets people to smile. Fuhr says, “Generosity doesn’t need to cost much. It’s about showing you care.” A small bag of candy, a follow-up email or phone call after a sale to make sure the customer is happy, or a surprise upgrade to overnight shipping are the small acts of generosity that pleasantly surprise customers.

6. Don’t Solve Problems—Solve Customers

I asked Fuhr how Sweetwater handles complaints. He said, “We solve the customer.” His point was that the problem or complaint is not the most important factor. Sure, you must fix what needs to be fixed, but more important is to “solve the customer.” That means the customer walks away with renewed confidence that Sweetwater stands behind its products and takes care of its customers. Once “the customer is solved,” the complaint or issue is escalated to a team to discuss how to mitigate or prevent it from happening again.

Final Words

As a musician, I’m a big fan of Sweetwater. But as someone who studies customer experience for a living, I’m an even bigger fan of how they do business. The company reminds us that a great customer experience isn’t complicated. And as important as anything, they don’t just chase dollars. They chase and build relationships. Their relentless focus on the customer experience is why their customers say, “I’ll be back!”

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credits: Shep Hyken

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Mixed Reality Headsets Meet the Dead Zone

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Mixed Reality Headsets Meet the Dead Zone

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

My colleague and social media maven, Rich Stimbra, forwards me news items that might spark a blog post, like the following a couple of years ago:

Meta has scuttled development of a high-end mixed-reality headset meant to compete with Apple’s Vision Pro starting in 2027, The Information reports, citing anonymous sources. Production cost was a primary factor, since Meta was using the same micro OLED display tech as Apple, but trying to keep the headset under $1,000 in order to attract buyers. Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro, meanwhile, is “stuck in neutral,” per Business Insider. Falling U.S. sales will be offset somewhat by its international launch in June, but the Vision Pro has no must-have app yet — and a more affordable model is expected next year.

This was clearly a technology adoption problem, and clients often ask members of The Chasm Group how you can tell where a given category is in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, and how should that impact your commitment to the opportunity?

One tool we use is called the Pain/Gain matrix, as illustrated in the two charts that follow. The first chart tees up a thought experiment exercise. Looking at the disruptive innovation you are seeking to bring to market, ask yourself how much gain does it deliver, and how much pain must the customer go through to get it? In so doing, don’t just consider the end user, also take into account the other constituencies that must support the purchase. This is particularly germane to B2B enterprises, so you have to squint a bit to apply it to consumer markets. That said, here is the framework:

Pain Gain Matrix

The executive sponsor is the one who has to pay for this, the process owner is the one who has to secure the productivity improvement from it, the systems owner is the one who has to install and support it, and the end user is the one who has to actually extract the benefits from it. Each one has their own pain/gain experience, so they need to be placed separately. (In consumer markets, all four roles could condense into one, although in many families they may be distributed across either one or both parents as well younger and older siblings.)

The goal of the thought experiment is for the team to reach a consensus on the most likely square for each of the four stakeholders based on the current offer in the market today. Once you have all four placed in one (and only one) square, then you can turn to the second chart, which serves as a kind of decoder ring in that it predicts where you are likely to be in the adoption life cycle and what you will have to do to be successful at that stage.

Dead Zone Matrix

Following the Technology Adoption Life Cycle around the edges of the diagram

One might expect that the life cycle would proceed from the upper right to the lower left on a diagonal path, a straight line being the shortest distance between two points. It turns out that is not the case.

For the Early Market, a high-pain, high-gain proposition is OK provided the size of the gain is massive. That is, if you can deliver a truly transformative outcome, early adopters are willing to put up with a considerable amount of pain (and expense) to get it. However, if it is anything less than truly transformative, then they won’t play. That is why the winning Early Market operating model is a bespoke project wherein you and they put serious skin in the game, including assigning your best and brightest to the effort and simply refusing to stop until you have got the thing all the way to bright. The key to this stage is to have a visionary executive sponsor who will commit not only to fund the outcome but to continue to support it through its struggles until it gets all the way to the finish.

For the Bowling Alley (including the critical crossing the chasm step) the critical issue is still very much the size of the gain, what we call the compelling reason to buy, but the ability to absorb pain is much less. Here we have a pragmatist process owner who is under direct pressure to fix a broken mission-critical process that they cannot remediate with conventional solutions. They are desperate for a solution to their problem, what we call the whole product, which will be a huge gain for them. However, they do not have the resources to fund a bespoke project, which means they cannot absorb a great deal of pain. As a result, the vendor has to bring the whole product to them, partners included, and keep everyone committed to stay the course until the fix is up and running and proven successful. The process owner is willing to pitch in here, and so can absorb some pain in order to get to their goal, but nowhere near as much as the Early Market visionary executive.

For a Tornado to form, two things must change. The first is the emergence of a killer app that makes everyone and their mother want the new thing—that’s the big gain that has broad appeal. The second is that there has to be a major reduction in pain—a big drop in the friction that has been holding the category back to date. The goal is to sell a stripped-down, friction-free killer app that has a super-short time to value and then expand over time to address adjacent opportunities that may require more development but which can be readily absorbed because the core product is already installed. During the Tornado proper, particularly at its outset, it is the systems owners who are under the gun to procure and deploy the killer app as fast as possible. Their speed is gaited by whatever friction is still present, so the more this can be removed, the faster the tornado can spin up and the further it can spread. The company that does this best typically takes the field, becomes installed as the category gorilla, and generates outsized returns for many years to come.

Finally, when technology adoption comes to Main Street, we are now in the expand part of the land-and-expand playbook, where the gaiting item is how many different use cases it can support in how many different contexts and whether the offer can be converted from a licensable product to a consumable service. Under such conditions, because the amount of pain to adopt has been reduced to a bare minimum, it takes less and less gain to drive additional market growth. The end users are the ones who most benefit, and success rides increasingly on securing distribution channels that get to them as directly as possible and making it as easy as pie for them to try and buy, or at least try and then get their system owner to buy.

The Dead Zone

As you can see, the Life Cycle follows a path from the upper right to the lower left of the diagram by skirting around the edges. What about all the other squares?

Well, the ones that are blacked out are simply non-starters. The pain exceeds the gain to the point that no one other than a technology enthusiast would want to engage. But the four squares in the very center of the diagram are the ones that are the most dangerous. Collectively they make up the Dead Zone, which is another way of seeing the chasm, or what Intel used to call the Valley of Death.

Products in the Dead Zone deliver good (but not amazing) gains, but they do so at the cost of real (although not excruciating) pain. This combination is the kiss of death. It causes prospective customers to express real interest in the offer (“We’d love to take a meeting and see a demo”), but it does not motivate them sufficiently to get them to actually buy. It is hard to imagine a greater waste of go-to-market resources than that. Start-ups, as well as in-house incubations who venture out into such a desert usually die of thirst, meaning they don’t get that life-supporting next round of funding.

It is kind of like a LaBrea Tar Pit that swallows up whole species, as witnessed by the Sharp’s Personal Digital Assistant, RCA’s 8-track tape, and Mazda’s rotary automobile engine, as well as the . . .

Mixed Reality Headset

This sucker has Dead Zone written all over it. And because it is being positioned as a consumer product, it has a much tougher row to hoe. There is simply no chance of it getting traction unless and until someone can bring to market a killer app at a consumer price point, which will require some very deep pockets to get there, not to mention incredible design skills to get it right.

A much slower but more achievable path would target a B2B customer base with Bowling Alley applications that address urgent problems with mission-critical business processes. An obvious example relates to the “aging out of the workforce” problems that industrial manufacturers are facing, both in the factory and in field services. There simply are not enough trained technicians to meet the need, especially now that many of these industries are moving back onshore. Mixed reality headsets can be used to enable just-in-time training for onboarding inexperienced workers better, faster, cheaper, and even more importantly, safer than conventional alternatives.

Is this a killer app? Heck no, but it is a start; it can support a higher price point, and it can create enough volume to warrant investing in lower-cost approaches. What it cannot do is be rushed. The biggest cause of Dead Zone casualties is a management team that thinks a tornado is upon them when in fact it is just a Hype Cycle hitting its peak.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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Focus on Delivering Your Customers’ Desired Outcomes, Not Delighting Them

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Focus on Delivering Your Customers' Desired Outcomes, Not Delighting Them

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

Now, let me be clear. I have nothing against delight. But the notion that it should be the goal of a business to delight its customers is folly. Delight, after all, is an evanescent experience that comes and goes pretty much as it pleases. It cannot be reliably evoked. More importantly, your customers, and particularly your B2B customers, are not paying you in order to be delighted. Indeed, while ostensibly they are purchasing your products and services, what they really want to buy is outcomes.

As Ted Levitt taught many years ago, while a customer may need to buy a quarter-inch drill, what they really want to buy is a quarter-inch hole. A successful sales campaign, therefore, starts with getting clarity on what outcomes constitute success. This is harder than it sounds. Success is seen very differently from the perspectives of the executive sponsor, the department manager, the end user, the technical specialist, the CIO, and the CFO. All six of these have a stake in the game, and you will need their support to establish an enduring relationship.

Now, to be fair, a lot of business as usual doesn’t call for executive attention because inertial momentum is already on the side of the desired outcomes. It’s when the customer needs to change the status quo that we need to develop a multi-stakeholder current-state/future-state roadmap for success. So, let’s imagine you are in the IT industry and you are looking to land a major new account. What kind of a journey would that entail?

  • The Executive Sponsor. The process starts with engaging the executive sponsor in a discussion of the current state of their business, what potential future state they may have in mind, and what “value traps” are impeding their progress. In this discussion you have the opportunity to demonstrate genuine intellectual curiosity about the dynamics of their company and industry and to propose connections between your offerings and their aims. The deeper this conversation goes, the bigger the opportunity space becomes. This, in other words, is where five-figure deals can become six-figure, and six-figure deals become seven-figure, for the outcome the executive sponsor really wants is to move the big rocks, not just to smooth out the gravel.
  • The Department Manager. Department managers, on the other hand, are up to their ankles in gravel and they need your help to deal with it. Once again, engaging them in an intellectually curious conversation about their value traps allows you to identify the outcomes that will make a real difference and to make sure you highlight them in your proposal and prioritize them in your implementation. The outcome department managers want is productivity improvement for their team, as measured by faster response times, better quality, and greater throughput. The executive sponsor supports this sort of thing, but they have delegated it to the department manager, and so do not need to be directly involved.
  • The End Users. The end users who work for the department manager are the ones whose behavior you will directly impact and whose buy-in you must secure. The outcomes they seek are improvements in their personal effectiveness and efficiency. Most frequently they are looking for relief from mundane repetitive tasks that a smarter system would just do for them in the background. “Free me from the stupid stuff!” might be their battle cry. With the rise of RPA (Robotic Process Automation), complemented now with GenAI (Generative AI), this is becoming increasingly feasible to deliver. One thing to remember with end-user communities, however, is that they mirror the Technology Adoption Life Cycle in miniature, meaning they are comprised of enthusiasts, visionaries, pragmatists, conservatives, and skeptics. Each profile defines successful outcomes in very different terms, so the Customer Success team needs to identify the adoption profile of the individual they are working with before they go about prescribing tactics for meeting their needs.
  • The Technical Specialist. It is not until you get to the technical specialist that you find anyone who is really interested in your product. This, in other words, is the first person who actually wants to see your demo. Demoing to any of the prior three stakeholders is typically a waste of time, at least until you can tune the demo to highlight the outcome they seek. But with technical specialists, it is critical to your success. They are often the ones who get to make the call between competing products that have roughly the same functionality, and you need expertise in both yours and the competitors’ offers so you can answer their questions with authority. A successful outcome for this stakeholder is to have a high-performing product to support.
  • The CIO. The CIO has bigger fish to fry, and once again, you need to be sensitive to where they sit in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Visionaries who drive digital transformation will care a ton about platforms to support the future and be desperate to free themselves from the technical debt of legacy systems. Success for them is a next-generation infrastructure that can help modernize their company’s operating model, and they will move heaven and earth to get it. Pragmatists can have similar goals but will want to proceed more methodically, looking for predictable outcomes that come in on spec, on time, and on budget, as confirmed by customer references that are in production. Meanwhile, conservatives are secretly hoping they can just pass this baton to their successor, and skeptics will simply dig in their heels.
  • The CFO. The CFO is likely to view success in terms of verifiable ROI, yet again with a Technology Adoption Life Cycle wrinkle. Conservative CFOs will be looking for “hard dollar” savings—direct reductions in out-of-pocket costs. Pragmatic CFOs will look beyond these to include “soft dollar” savings from productivity gains in throughput, cycle time, and quality. Visionary CFOs (and, yes, there are such folk) look beyond this for step-function changes in competitive advantage that would change the multiple of their stock price. What unites all of the above is that all these success outcomes have some flavor of “Show me the money!”
  • The Account Plan. As sales teams well know, every account plays out in its own unique ways, but we can do our best to nudge it toward our goals. This starts with prioritizing the importance of our six stakeholders with respect to the buying decision on the table. If we have to create or redirect budget, then we need to call high, but if we are simply looking to consume budget, then we need to focus on the middle management instead. So, as an account manager, get your team to rank order the six stakeholders and then focus your efforts on the top two or three.

With respect to those top targets, the next step is to get the team to agree on their Technology Adoption profile. This is super important because you only get a limited amount of attention from any of these folks, and you don’t want to waste cycles on messages that won’t land.

Third, once you get a realistic sense of the outcome that are driving the sales cycle from the customer’s point of view, you need to differentiate your proposal both by calling them out as key goals and then customizing your offer to ensure they will get achieved.

All in all, it’s not rocket science, but it does require patience, and most of all, it calls for you to genuinely engage with the target personas to develop a differentiating understanding of what they are really after.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Pexels

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Category Creation

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Category Creation

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

Category creation is a critical success factor for start-ups bringing to market a disruptive innovation that calls for a new ecosystem, to support a new class of use cases, funded by a new budget line item. If the category does not form, the start-ups have no place to hang their hat. They can acquire early adopter customers via a bespoke project approach, but they cannot scale any further without help from the rest of the marketplace.

Similarly, established enterprises in mature categories also need to find new venues for growth if they are to break free from their value-investor-set market caps and create net new shareholder value. Whether through acquisition or in-house innovation, they, too, can have the challenge of category creation. So, in both cases, companies need to reengineer the marketplace in order to realize their ambitions. The question is, what would make the marketplace want to lean in?

Marketplaces are made up of ecosystem players, be they partners, competitors, or an installed base of customers. All these constituencies keep their eyes out for disruptive developments that could either benefit or jeopardize their future performance. The early adopters are typically motivated by the benefits, seeking a first mover advantage, while the early majority normally takes a wait-and-see approach, thereby creating a chasm, which in turn can be crossed wherever there is an urgent customer problem that is resisting standard solutions and thus warrants taking a novel approach to solve it. If the category does show it is getting traction, then all those wait-and-see pragmatists will begin to feel threatened by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), and that is what creates a tornado of demand that puts the category permanently on the map.

Okay, so there is reason to believe that under the right circumstances, markets will support the creation of a new category. That said, we should not underestimate the power of inertia. Markets do not welcome transformational changes with open arms. Indeed, their default move is to deflect most attempts. What we need is a proven playbook. Fortunately, there is one, written some forty years ago, written by an old boss of mine, Regis McKenna.

The Regis Touch

It is hard to overstate the impact that Regis had on high-tech marketing, especially in its early days when it was trying to break free from advertising as its primary medium. At the time, the tech sector was just emerging, the bulk of spending was in B2B markets, the focus was on automating core business processes, and every buying decision entailed considerable risk, not only in terms of the product and vendor’s staying power but also in terms of the impact of the business processes themselves. As a result, advertising per se was not sufficiently informative or credible to drive purchasing. Regis saw this and, with the help of a talented set of consultants and communications professionals, developed a public-relations-led approach that successfully launched hundreds of new products and created dozens of new categories.

The key to his approach was a framework called the infrastructure model that organized the various audiences and constituencies that make up a marketplace in what one might call a ladder of communications:

Relationship Marketing Infrastructure Model Geoffrey Moore

Here’s how it works. The goal is to convert prospects into customers. In B2B markets, those prospects organize around three centers of interest—the technology itself, the impact on productivity, and the financial returns. These prospects get their information most directly from the media, the technologists from the technical press, the end users these days from social media (no such thing, of course, back in the day), and the executives from the business press. The agents of the press, in turn, get a lot of their information from opinion leaders, be they the industry analysts for the technical press, the influencers for social media, or the financial investment analysts for the business press. Those opinion leaders, in turn, get their information from their engagement with the marketplace itself, be they customers, partners, or competitors already involved with the disruptive innovation.

The point is, any claims about the disruptive innovation are verified and validated by working down this model, which means any communications program should organize around working up the same model. Skipping over any one of these audiences and going straight to the prospects directly—the way advertising does—is bound to fail because you have not got your references lined up and sufficiently informed to support and endorse a high-risk buying decision. Product launches and category creation initiatives, therefore, work up this ladder of communications, rung by rung, starting in the executive suite, moving from there to the product organization, and from there to the go-to-market team. That team, in turn, needs to start with educating the ecosystem players, typically with talks and panel sessions at industry conferences, then connecting with the opinion leaders, typically via one-on-one briefings that end up being two-way dialogs, and only then out to the media that will engage with the target prospects.

Category Creation Playbook

A lot of what would go into a complete playbook is product and market-specific, but there are audience-centric principles that remain relatively constant. The key question in each case is, what is it about the emerging category that would be of interest to this particular constituency? With that in mind, here is a brief take:

  1. Executive team. This team will value growth to boost market cap, something that participation in an emerging category can be expected to deliver, but it may well be reluctant to take transformational risk to achieve it. If this team is not 100% behind the effort, don’t start, as every other rung on the latter ultimately calls for investments that this team must endorse.
  2. Product team. This team has to be all in for a wild ride—and usually is. You have to pressure test their claims nonetheless, as they can often get over their skis, promising more than they can deliver within the window that matters.
  3. Go-to-market team. This team requires maturity and patience. The big sales commissions won’t come until the category enters the tornado, so for now, the focus is on creating a market, not harvesting it. That means paying deep attention to developing the ecosystem, including bringing along the installed base, helping to engage and enlist partners, and (oddly enough) encouraging competitors. The last one is important because, ultimately, a category is defined by a set of competitors, not just one company, so for a healthy growing category you need to have peers that are winning too—hopefully in target market segments that are distinct from yours.
  4. Ecosystem. These are the people your go-to-market team is engaging with. The sales team has the installed base, the business development team, the partners, and the marketing team, the competitors. The goal is to get everyone speaking from their own perspective to reinforce your story that something big is underway. One item of note: With respect to competitors, marketing needs to develop a narrative that has room for more than one winner while at the same time staking out turf where your own differentiation makes you the obvious choice. What you do not want to do is bad-mouth the other team’s products—that will create anxiety that will cause everyone to wait and see some more. So, save your sharp tongue for when you get inside the tornado—that’s the no-holds-barred battleground where a well-placed elbow can make a real difference.
  5. Opinion leaders. The goal here is to get conceptual endorsement for the claims you will be making via the media. Opinion leaders need to maintain their independence and do not want to shill for you or anyone else. What they do want to do is look intelligent and have something differentiated to say. What they want from you is enough context to do their job and no interference thereafter. In addition, opinion leaders want to share their opinions with you, in part to influence your future investments, and so it is just as important to listen and ask them questions as it is to present your own story. With respect to your presentation, demos can be useful, but repurposing a customer sales pitch is not, as this audience is not going to buy your product but rather is going to opine on the reasons why other people might.
  6. Media. This is the means by which you will communicate with the three prospect audience types—the technical team, the end users, and the executive sponsors. Each has a preferred media type—industry press, social media, and business press—and each of these types wants to be treated in its own special way. The technical press wants to talk about the product itself. They want facts, love demos, and like to talk to specialists more than generalists. They also are often happy to beta test products or get any other kind of advanced notice as to what’s coming next. Social media wants to talk about the applications of the product, and the ways in which it will impact end users’ lives. So demos can work here only if they are in service to an end-user story as opposed to a run-through of all the features and functions. The business press wants to talk about the “size of the prize,” the impact of the new technology on productivity, how it will reengineer bottlenecking processes, and thus how much trapped value it will be able to release. Demos are wasted here, but PowerPoint can help a lot.
  7. Prospects. When category creation is the focus, it is important to engage the three types of prospects in the right order. If the technology is outrageous, you need to start with the technical audience first just to earn the right to talk to anyone else. If it is not outrageous, then the executive sponsor needs to be your first port of call. The reason is that the other two audiences will actually be willing to meet with you to learn about the latest and greatest thing, but they will have budget, not permission to get new budget, if the executive sponsor is not on board. So a typical path through a major account would start with an executive from your company having a conversation with the prospective executive sponsor at your target customer, which would lead to a referral to the technical team to test your bona fides, and then on to the end-user team, to validate your productivity claims. Proof-of-concept projects are necessary at the very beginning, but one of the major milestones in category creation per se is to generate enough marketplace acceptance that future prospects will forgo these tests.

To sum up, category creation is an outbound communications effort to orchestrate a coalition of the willing across a laddered set of constituencies, each with its own set of interests. The goal is to build an inbound path of verification that reinforces the new category’s right to existence. Trying to shortcut the outbound process by skipping over one or more audiences will defeat the purpose, as any doubts raised this early in the game result in lost momentum that can never be recovered. There is no magic here, but patience and discipline are required.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Pexels

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De-Googlize Your Company

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De-Googlize Your Company

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

This article answers the question: How can a company grow and outperform competitors without relying on Google search rankings or paid advertising?

What company doesn’t want to rank high in Google searches? When a customer is looking for whatever you sell, wouldn’t you want to be ranked at the top of the first page? Unless you’re willing to pay and advertise, you have to naturally get there, and that typically takes quite a bit of expertise and effort.

But, what if Google didn’t matter to your business? What if there were another way to get new customers without vying for high search engine rankings?

If you’ve been following my work, you probably know the answer. Once you have a customer, provide the experience that not only makes them come back, but makes them want to tell others about you. And if you want to make it competitive, like outranking your competition on Google, then out-service them.

De-Googlize Your Company Shep Hyken Cartoon

So, how do you out-service your competition? Here are five ways:

  1. Ensure your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is high. For those who don’t know, NPS is about the likelihood of a customer recommending you. The question on a survey usually is this: On a scale of 0-10, what’s the likelihood that you would recommend us? If the customer gives you a high score (a 9 or 10), they are a promoter. Depending on the type of business, don’t just feel good about the number. If appropriate, follow up with a customer and ask them, “Who would you recommend us to?”
  2. Find out why your customers would choose to do business with a competitor. This one and the next one come from my “I’ll Be Back” conversation to get customers to say, “I’ll be back.” What are they doing that you aren’t? If it’s something you should be doing, do so, but make it your own. Don’t just copy a competitor. Put your own spin on it to make it yours.
  3. Have a discussion with your team about favorite companies to do business with outside of your industry. Discuss what they do to make you love them. If there is something they are doing that would work for your business, do it. This is a powerful idea that can take you from best-in-your-industry to world-class.
  4. Ask customers why they left. If a customer is willing to share with you why they no longer do business with you, it’s a gift. Learning firsthand from past customers could help save future customers from leaving for the competition.
  5. Ask customers why they didn’t choose you. If there is a way to follow up with customers who you thought would do business with you but didn’t, take advantage of the opportunity. Their feedback is a gift.
  6. Measure how easy it is to do business with you. You may have a great product, and you may offer friendly and knowledgeable customer support, but is it easy to do business with you? My annual customer service and experience research finds that 71% of customers said a convenient experience alone would make them come back. Be easier than your competition, and you’ll win more business.

When you “de-Googlize” your business, you stop chasing clicks and start creating customer evangelists who not only love you but also tell their friends about you. The best search engine in the world isn’t online. It’s in your customers’ minds. Deliver an experience that’s so good customers don’t search for you. They remember you, return to you, and recommend you. That’s how you outrank your competition!

Image Credits: Shep Hyken, Unsplash

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Why Conversations Are the New Digital Gold

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The Big New Revenue Opportunity for Google, OpenAI and Anthropic

Why Conversations Are the New Digital Gold

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

I. Introduction: The Disruption of the Clickstream

For over two decades, the digital economy operated on a straightforward, predictable currency: the clickstream. Organizations built vast marketing engines, customer experience frameworks, and product strategy backlogs around keyword volumes, cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, and web analytics. If you could capture user search intent at the top of the funnel and guide them through a sequence of web pages, you owned the customer relationship.

That paradigm is experiencing an irreversible structural breakdown. We are witnessing a profound behavioral migration away from typing fragmented queries into a text box toward engaging in fluid, multi-turn dialogue with generative AI assistants. Whether users are speaking directly to Gemini on Android and iOS devices or consulting ChatGPT and Claude for complex decision-making, the mechanics of discovery have fundamentally changed.

The Death of “10 Blue Links”

The traditional search results page — dominated by ranked links, banner inventory, and sponsored listings — is giving way to synthesized, conversational answers. When users speak to an ambient assistant, they aren’t looking for a list of websites to evaluate independently; they are seeking a resolved outcome. Speech-to-text, natural voice interaction, and inline AI reasoning mean problem-solving happens within the dialogue itself, drastically reducing the need to visit external brand properties.

The Shrinking Digital Surface Area

This rise in zero-click interactions presents an existential challenge for traditional web analytics and performance marketing. As consumer click-through rates decline, brands face a dramatic reduction in their visible digital touchpoints:

  • Attribution Blindness: Traditional conversion tracking breaks down when the research and evaluation phases occur entirely inside an AI model’s context window.
  • Diminishing SEO Returns: Optimizing for keywords and site traffic yields shrinking returns when AI models synthesize answers directly without referring users to source URLs.
  • Loss of Direct Engagement: The digital surface area where brands can present their unique visual identity, messaging, and experience design is rapidly compressing.

The Foresight Premise

In any major technology transition, structural shifts create immediate information asymmetries. Every change initiative produces winners and losers based on who recognizes where value is re-aggregating. The primary battleground of the AI era is no longer about driving traffic to a destination — it is about controlling, understanding, and translating the rich context of human conversational intent.

II. The Blind Spot: How Brands Are Losing the Voice of the Customer

The transition from traditional web search to ambient AI interaction is creating an unprecedented intelligence blackout for commercial enterprises. For years, organizations refined their understanding of consumer behavior by tracking the digital breadcrumbs left across search engines, landing pages, and digital storefronts. As customer decision-making migrates into private, dynamic AI dialogues, that pipeline of actionable data is drying up.

This shift represents far more than a marketing disruption — it is a fundamental erosion of the qualitative feedback loops that drive modern product innovation and experience design.

From Keywords to Unfiltered Intent

Keyword search was always a compromised, low-fidelity medium. Users learned to compress their complex human needs into unnatural, fragmented phrases meant to nudge a search algorithm into producing useful links. The language of traditional search was structured around constraints rather than context.

Generative AI and voice interfaces have eliminated those constraints. When individuals speak to an assistant like Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude, they express their needs with full nuance, nuance, and emotional framing. Consider the structural difference between these two modes of inquiry:

  • Traditional Search Query: best running shoes flat feet
  • Conversational Intent: “I’m training for my first rainy marathon in three months, but I have mild overpronation and a old knee injury. What shoes under $150 will give me enough stability without causing blisters on long runs?”

The conversational prompt contains rich layers of context: budget parameters, timeline constraints, physical vulnerabilities, weather considerations, and personal goals. However, because this interaction takes place within an AI context window rather than on a brand’s website or an open search results page, the business whose product is being evaluated receives zero visibility into the exchange.

The Customer Insight Vacuum

As consumer preference formation moves into continuous multi-turn conversations, brands are losing access to critical moments of truth across the buyer journey. This creates three severe operational blind spots:

  • Unseen Feature Trade-offs: Brands cannot see which specific product attributes, specifications, or pricing structures cause a potential customer to eliminate them from consideration during an AI dialogue.
  • Invisible Competitive Comparisons: When an AI assistant evaluates three competing solutions side-by-side for a user, the losing brands receive no signal explaining why the model recommended an alternative.
  • Obsolete Voice-of-Customer (VoC) Data: Traditional surveys, focus groups, and social listening tools capture lagging, highly filtered opinions. They fail to reflect the real-time, unvarnished friction points articulated during natural conversations with AI.

The Experience Design Risk

Without access to the rich contextual signals embedded in everyday user prompts, corporate experience design initiatives risk operating on outdated assumptions. Customer journey maps, persona frameworks, and friction-point analyses quickly become stagnant snapshots of an obsolete digital funnel.

To design meaningful, human-centered experiences, leaders must understand the authentic language and evolving expectations of their audience. When that language is spoken exclusively to third-party AI assistants, organizations that fail to secure access to conversational intelligence will find themselves innovating in the dark.

III. The Big Pivot: Monetizing Context, Not Clicks

Every major shift in technology redistributes economic value. As traditional cost-per-click advertising yields diminish under the pressure of zero-click conversational answers, the business models of the AI platform giants — Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic — must evolve. The next multi-billion-dollar monetization opportunity will not come from placing banner ads inside conversation flows, but from harvesting, structuring, and licensing the vast reservoir of real-time human intent being shared with their models every second.

Human conversation is the new digital gold. For businesses desperate to recover lost visibility into the buyer journey, aggregated conversational intelligence represents the ultimate strategic asset.

The New Revenue Engine for AI Titans

Advertising models built on static keyword triggers are fundamentally mismatched with fluid, multi-turn AI reasoning. Forcing intrusive sponsored links into a personalized voice response destroys the user experience. Instead, AI providers are positioned to monetize the output side of their platforms by acting as enterprise data brokers, transforming raw dialogue logs into high-value intelligence feeds.

By capturing how millions of people naturally discuss needs, compare options, and express frustrations, platform owners can package anonymized context into enterprise-grade analytics products that command recurring software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription premiums.

Packaging the “Digital Gold”

This new intelligence layer will yield actionable commercial products tailored for product strategists, marketers, and executive leaders:

  • Brand Health & Recommendation Telemetry: Real-time quantitative dashboards tracking how frequently a brand is mentioned during advice seeking, the sentiment surrounding those mentions, and the exact contexts in which competitors are favored.
  • Unmet Need & Latent Demand Mapping: Algorithmic extraction of emerging consumer pain points long before they manifest in formal search trends, support tickets, or market research reports.
  • Decision Boundary & Friction Analysis: Synthesized reports detailing the specific trade-offs (price points, missing features, usability concerns) that systematically cause prospective buyers to reject a product during AI-driven evaluations.

Democratizing Enterprise Intelligence

The power of conversational analytics lies in its scalability across the economic spectrum. While enterprise corporations will pay premium tiers for custom API integrations and real-time category alerts, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will finally gain access to market research previously reserved for Fortune 500 budgets.

A local bike shop or boutique software firm could subscribe to a regional category feed to instantly discover the precise features or price barriers driving customer choices in their specific niche. By turning unvarnished human dialogue into structured insight, AI platforms will unlock an indispensable revenue model powered by authentic human context.

IV. Human-Centered Change & Ethical Governance

Unlocking the commercial value of conversational data requires navigating a complex intersection of consumer trust, regulatory compliance, and organizational transformation. Because natural language dialogue contains deep personal context, commercializing this information demands rigorous ethical boundaries. The success of conversational intelligence as a revenue model hinges on maintaining strict user privacy while helping enterprises build the internal capabilities needed to act on these new insights.

Privacy by Design: The Ethical Imperative

Monetizing conversational context cannot come at the expense of individual privacy. AI platform operators must engineer robust data architecture standards that prevent the exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) while preserving strategic utility:

  • Differential Privacy & Aggregation: Injecting mathematical noise into datasets so macro-level consumer trends can be analyzed without ever exposing individual user transcripts.
  • Synthetic Data Modeling: Generating artificial, representative datasets derived from real conversation patterns, allowing brands to analyze buyer behavior without touching live user interactions.
  • Strict Brand-Level Anonymization: Ensuring that enterprise dashboards expose category-level intent and competitive positioning without revealing specific user identities or sensitive personal attributes.

Overcoming the “Surveillance” Backlash

Public perception will determine the speed at which conversational analytics becomes mainstream. If consumers view the monetization of their conversations as invasive surveillance, user churn and regulatory pushback will quickly follow. AI providers and brands must collectively frame conversational analytics around mutual value creation.

When customer intent data is anonymized and applied ethically, it leads directly to better product design, more intuitive user interfaces, and the elimination of persistent market friction points. The objective must be presented clearly: using collective, human-centered feedback to build products and experiences that better serve actual human needs.

Managing Organizational Readiness

Accessing conversational intelligence is only half the equation; corporate leadership teams must also transform how they make decisions. Applying the principles of Human-Centered Change™, organizations must actively prepare their cultures, workflows, and talent to interpret fluid conversational data rather than static web metrics.

This operational transition requires shifting leadership focus away from legacy digital KPIs like bounce rates, page views, and click-through rates toward modern conversational indicators: share of voice in model recommendations, prompt inclusion rates, and conversational intent fulfillment. Companies that successfully align their internal culture around these human-centered insights will build an enduring competitive advantage in the AI era.

V. FutureHacking™: Strategic Implications for Business Leaders

To navigate the shift from transactional clickstreams to continuous conversational context, executive leadership cannot afford a reactive stance. Applying a FutureHacking™ lens — scanning weak signals around emerging user behaviors today to anticipate the structural realities of tomorrow — reveals a multi-phase transformation in how organizations will make decisions, design experiences, and compete for market share.

The transition toward conversational intelligence will unfold across three distinct horizons over the next decade.

Near-Term Horizon (1–2 Years): The Rise of Generative Engine Optimization & Intelligence Pilots

In the immediate term, traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will yield ground to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). As organic web traffic declines, brands will pivot from optimizing page headers and backlinks to structuring brand narratives and product specifications so they are accurately ingested and cited by foundational AI models.

Concurrently, early adopter enterprises will join private pilot programs hosted by Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. These initial telemetry dashboards will give brand managers their first high-level visibility into prompt inclusion rates, category mention frequencies, and overall model recommendation sentiment.

Medium-Term Horizon (3–5 Years): Synthetic Focus Groups & Simulated Customer Journeys

As the granularity of anonymized conversational datasets improves, market research will undergo a radical evolution. Rather than waiting weeks to conduct traditional focus groups or analyze retrospective survey results, product strategy teams will query specialized AI models trained on billions of real-world conversational signals.

Organizations will routinely run product concepts, pricing adjustments, and brand positioning messaging against synthetic persona populations. These simulated customer panels will instantly predict friction points, feature trade-offs, and competitive migration risks based on real-time consumer intent trends, drastically compressing product development cycles.

Long-Term Horizon (5+ Years): Closed-Loop Innovation Systems

Over a five-year horizon, conversational intelligence will move from a passive diagnostic tool to an active driver of automated organizational workflows. Leading enterprises will construct closed-loop innovation engines where real-time conversational data directly informs cross-functional operations:

  • Automated Backlog Prioritization: Product engineering roadmaps will dynamically re-prioritize feature requests based on unprompted feature complaints captured across category-wide AI dialogues.
  • Dynamic Experience Adaptation: Digital touchpoints and customer service flows will auto-tune their messaging and support options based on emerging friction patterns identified by ambient assistants.
  • Continuous Portfolio Alignment: Mergers, acquisitions, and line extensions will be evaluated using continuous, real-time demand signals extracted directly from human-AI problem-solving sessions.

By anticipating these structural horizons today, forward-thinking leaders can begin building the data infrastructure, talent capabilities, and agile decision-making frameworks required to turn conversational signals into market leadership.

VI. Conclusion & Key Takeaways for Innovators

The transition from transactional keyword search to ambient, multi-turn AI dialogue represents one of the most profound structural shifts in the history of the digital economy. As consumers speak directly with Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude on their mobile devices and desktop interfaces, the clickstream era is drawing to a close. Waiting for traditional web traffic, cost-per-click efficiency, and search ad impressions to recover is not just an ineffective strategy — it is an existential risk.

The organizations that thrive in this next era will be those that recognize where strategic value has re-aggregated: away from driving website visits and toward capturing, understanding, and acting upon authentic conversational context.

Key Takeaways for Business Leaders

  • Acknowledge the Intelligence Blackout: Traditional SEO, web analytics, and click-through attribution models are providing a rapidly shrinking window into true customer behavior. Accepting this loss of visibility is the first step toward building modern, conversation-aware capabilities.
  • Prepare for the Conversational Data Economy: As traditional search advertising revenues face long-term pressure, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic will monetize anonymized conversational data. Forward-thinking leaders should allocate budget now for emerging conversational telemetry feeds and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
  • Embed Human-Centered Change™: Shifting an organization from static KPIs (page views, bounce rates) to conversational metrics (share of voice in model answers, prompt inclusion, intent fulfillment) requires intentional change management. Re-align leadership, cross-functional teams, and innovation pipelines around these new signals.
  • Rethink Experience Design: Continuous multi-turn dialogues reveal unvarnished human friction points, budget constraints, and feature trade-offs. Integrate these real-time qualitative signals into your customer journey maps and product development roadmaps to eliminate customer friction faster than competitors. Invest in a Customer Experience Audit to find where you fall short.

Data was the primary oil of the early web era, but synthesized human conversation is the true gold of the AI era. By pairing ethical governance and human-centered design with the rich intent embedded in everyday dialogue, innovative organizations can illuminate their blind spots, transform their decision-making, and create products that resonate with authentic human needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are traditional search advertising and click-through rates declining?
As users shift from keyword-based search boxes to ambient AI assistants like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, they receive direct, synthesized answers rather than a list of web links. This rise in zero-click interactions significantly reduces website referral traffic and traditional ad impression volume.
How do AI platforms like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic plan to monetize conversational data?
AI platform providers can package anonymized, aggregated conversation logs into enterprise intelligence feeds. By selling brand health telemetry, unmet need analytics, and consumer friction insights to businesses, AI companies create a massive new recurring revenue stream to complement or offset declining search ad yields.
How can businesses prepare for the shift from keyword search to conversational intelligence?
Organizations must transition their digital strategy from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), adapt internal change management frameworks (such as Human-Centered Change™) to track conversational metrics like model share-of-voice, and subscribe to emerging conversational analytics feeds to inform product design and experience strategies.


Image credits: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Gemini to clean up the article.

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Surveys Are Collapsing

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Conversational and Agentic VoC is How Loyalty Gets Heard

Conversational and Agentic VoC is How Loyalty Gets Heard

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

The Quiet Collapse of the Survey Layer

Something uncomfortable is happening inside customer experience programs that still treat the survey as the source of truth. Response rates are falling — sometimes sharply — even when the questionnaire itself barely changes. The invitations still go out. The dashboards still refresh. The air getting thinner is the percentage of customers willing to talk to a form.

This is not the death of listening. It is the collapse of a layer: the assumption that loyalty, satisfaction, and experience quality can be reliably extracted on demand through static instruments. Net Promoter Score is not vanishing overnight. Forms are not obsolete tomorrow morning. But both are being demoted — from verdict to signal, from system of record to starting point.

Organizations that built governance, bonuses, and “voice of the customer” theater almost entirely on survey completion are discovering a hard truth of human-centered change: when the method stops matching how people communicate, the method stops producing wisdom. You can still report a number. You just cannot pretend it represents the relationship.

The urgent question for innovators is not how to squeeze three more points of response rate out of a dying habit. It is how to hear customers in the ways they already speak — and how to turn that listening into action before loyalty quietly leaves.

Why People Stopped Talking to Forms

People did not become less opinionated. They became less willing to perform unpaid labor for brands that ask without reciprocating.

Survey fatigue is real, but it is only the surface. Timing is often wrong — a form arrives after the emotional moment has passed, or in the middle of a busy day when the only honest answer is delete. Reciprocity is weak: customers complete the ritual and see no change, so the next invitation feels like noise. Channel mismatch is growing: people already live in chat, voice, messaging, and short conversational bursts, while VoC programs still insist on a clipboard with radio buttons.

Underneath the mechanics sits an emotional job. Feedback, at its best, is a bid to feel heard. A form rarely delivers that feeling. It flattens story into score, urgency into scale, and dignity into “additional comments (optional).” When the experience of giving feedback is itself a poor experience, silence becomes rational.

Human-centered leaders should treat declining response as diagnostic data. Customers are telling you — by not answering — that your listening design is out of date.

From Scorekeeping to Sense-Making

Traditional VoC optimized for scorekeeping: capture a metric, trend it, threshold it, celebrate or panic. Sense-making asks a different question: What is changing in the lived experience, and why?

In a post-survey-dominant world, unstructured signal matters more — conversations, call notes, chat transcripts, reviews, social fragments, support themes, behavioral break points. AI makes synthesis of that mess newly practical. That does not make the score useless. It makes idolatry of the score dangerous.

The “why” can no longer be an afterthought parked in an open text field that nobody has time to read. The why is the product of modern listening. Scores become navigation lights. Narratives, patterns, and emotions become the map.

This shift also changes operating rhythm. Quarterly report theater gives way to continuous closed loops: hear, understand, act, confirm. Loyalty intelligence is less a research project and more an always-on sense-making system — still human-governed, still ethically bounded, but finally matched to the speed at which experience actually breaks.

Conversational VoC: Feedback as Dialogue

Conversational VoC replaces the clipboard with a dialogue. Instead of forcing every customer through the same static path, listening adapts — in the moment, in the channel, and in response to what the person just said.

That can look like a short adaptive chat after a key journey step, a voice interview that follows curiosity instead of a rigid script, a messaging thread that asks one good question and then the next logical one, or a human interview amplified by better prompts and synthesis. The common design principle is simple: treat feedback as conversation, not compliance.

Dialogue earns what forms forfeit. It can hold emotion without collapsing it into a single digit. It can clarify ambiguity in real time. It can meet people where they already are speaking. And it can make reciprocity visible — “we heard you, here is what happens next” — which is how listening becomes trust rather than extraction.

Done poorly, conversational VoC is just a survey wearing a chatbot costume. Done well, it is experience design applied to insight itself: respectful of time, responsive to context, and worthy of the story a customer is willing to share.

Agentic Listening: When Insight Can Act

The next leap is agentic listening: systems that do not only collect and classify, but can route, summarize, prioritize, trigger recovery, and help close the loop across teams. Insight stops dying in a dashboard and starts moving work.

This is powerful — and easy to get wrong. An agent that escalates a frustrated customer to a human with full context is care at scale. An agent that silently profiles, nudges, or “manages” sentiment without consent is surveillance with a CX badge. Human-centered innovation draws that line in the architecture, not in the press release.

Design stakes for agentic VoC

  • Consent and clarity — people should understand when listening is active and how their words will be used.
  • Privacy and minimization — collect what you need for learning and recovery, not everything you can.
  • Escalation with dignity — automation should accelerate help, not trap emotion in a loop.
  • Action accountability — if the system can trigger work, someone must own whether that work actually improved the experience.

Agentic VoC is not a replacement for human judgment. It is orchestration for listening: machines handle volume and routing; people handle meaning, ethics, and relationship repair. The brands that win will be the ones whose listening systems can act — and whose customers still feel respected while they do.

A Human-Centered Playbook for the Post-Survey Era

You do not need to burn the survey. You need to dethrone it. Here is a practical path.

  • Keep scores as signals, not idols. Use them to notice change; use conversations and behavior to explain it.
  • Build conversational intake at moments that matter. Short, adaptive, channel-native dialogues beat long retrospective forms.
  • Unify experience data. Connect feedback, journeys, and operational reality so insight is not stranded in a research silo.
  • Close loops where customers can feel them. Private recovery for individuals; visible improvement for patterns. Reciprocity is the antidote to silence.
  • Measure whether people feel heard — and whether action followed. Listening quality is an experience metric, not only a research metric.
  • Govern agentic listening for care. Decision rights, consent, escalation, and audit trails before autonomy scales.

Futurology in customer experience is often sold as more instrumentation. The deeper shift is more humane instrumentation: listening that fits human communication, sense-making that honors story, and systems that can act without making people feel managed.

Surveys are collapsing as the center of gravity. Conversational and agentic VoC are how loyalty gets heard again — not as a quarterly score, but as a living relationship that organizations are finally designed to understand.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are customer survey response rates declining?

Response rates are falling because of survey fatigue, poor timing, weak reciprocity when feedback leads to no visible change, and a mismatch with how people already communicate through chat, voice, and messaging. Many customers still have opinions — they are less willing to share them through static forms.

What is conversational VoC?

Conversational voice of the customer (VoC) gathers feedback through adaptive dialogue — such as chat, voice, or messaging — rather than fixed questionnaires. It follows context and emotion in the moment, making customers more likely to feel heard and producing richer insight into the why behind experience scores.

What is agentic VoC and how does it differ from surveys?

Agentic VoC uses AI systems that can not only collect and analyze feedback but also route issues, trigger recovery, summarize themes, and help close the loop. Unlike surveys that mainly capture scores after the fact, agentic listening turns insight into action — when governed with consent, privacy, and human escalation.

Image credits: Cursor

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Cursor to clean up the article.

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Search Engine Marketing in the Era of AI-Assisted Search

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Search Engine Marketing in the Era of AI-Assisted Search

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

My social media maven, Rich Stimbra, forwarded me the following as a potential blog topic:

Google’s revamped, AI-infused search is making businesses that depend on web search results anxious, and news publishers are already warning it could have “catastrophic” effects on the industry. Why? Google’s newly announced AI Overviews, set to launch this week in the U.S., synthesizes answers to users’ queries, and even though it will probably contain links, information from “know-it-all AI tools” could be thorough enough that users decide not to click through. News sites, whose audiences have already taken a hit from their content being downranked on social media, are bracing for further erosion from Google’s AI update.

Google unleashes AI in search, raising hopes for better results and fears about less web traffic

Boy, was he right. AI is bound to be a game-changer for both media and marketers alike, but not necessarily for the worst, provided that both communities up their games appropriately. Here’s what I think we have to prepare for:

  • Media — Yes, you are going to be disinter-media-ted (ouch!). But if your content is sufficiently differentiated, relevant, and impactful, its quality should cause it to rise to the top of the AI’s selection stack. Most of your material may not pass this test, which means you are going to have to acquire and retain your subscribers on your own. The result is almost certainly to be a smaller but more homogenous subscriber base that will be of more value to marketers targeting your core base and considerably less value to the “spray and pray” bunch. That, in turn, means you will likely be able to raise your CPM rates for those leads you do deliver while pivoting your business model to make more of your cash flow from subscribers rather than advertisers.
  • B2B Marketers — I expect this to be a boon for you because it should filter out a lot of low-quality leads and pass through higher-quality ones. The larger your ASP (Average Selling Price), the more important it is not to pursue underperforming lead-gen. But historically, lead-gen best practices have been developed by the B2C marketers, which encourages a very wide top-of-funnel in order to get as much market coverage as possible. B2B marketing wants a much more qualified top-of-funnel because the cost and time to qualify make low-quality leads a real burden. The CPM for more qualified leads will legitimately be higher, so the direct cost goes up, but the indirect cost of post-processing should decline more than enough to make up the difference. Additionally, business prospects are more likely to act on value-added responses than raw search results, which is good news, provided your content has sufficient relevance and impact to make the cut.
  • B2C Marketers — This is not good news for you. It narrows the top-of-funnel, potentially dramatically, and weeds out marginal leads which you are able to qualify much more cost-effectively than your B2B colleagues. For low-cost items, I expect your digital marketing dollars will shift increasingly to direct-to-consumer venues on popular social media platforms, spending more with influencers and less on raw coverage. For higher-priced ones, I expect a next-gen, AI-enhanced approach to email (text, messaging, etc.) marketing will pay off as well.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

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Thoughts on Selling

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Thoughts on Selling

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Like most things, selling is about people.

The hard sell has nothing to do with selling.

Just when you think you’re having the least influence, you’re having the most.

When – ready, sell, listen – has run its course, try – ready, listen, sell.

Regardless of how politely it’s asked, “How many do you want?” isn’t selling.

If sales people are compensated by sales dollars, why do you think they’ll sell strategically?

The time horizon for selling defines the selling.

When people think you’re selling, they’re not thinking about buying.

Selling is more about ears than mouths.

Selling on price is a race to the bottom.

Wanting sales people to develop relationships is a great idea; why not make it worth their while?

Solving customer problems is selling.

Making it easy to buy makes it easy to sell.

You can’t sell much without trust.

Sell like you expect your first sale will happen a year from now.

Selling is a result.

I’m not sure the best way to sell; but listening can’t hurt.

Over-promising isn’t selling, unless you only want to sell once.

Helping customers grow is selling.

Delaying gratification is exceptionally difficult, but it’s wonderful way to sell.

Ground yourself in the customers’ work and the selling will take care of itself.

People buy from people and people sell to people.

Image credits: Pixabay

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After the Chasm – Scaling Beyond the Beachhead

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After the Chasm - Scaling Beyond the Beachhead

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Crossing the chasm is the single most important goal for a B2B application that seeks to disrupt the status quo. The playbook has held up for more than 30 years because it continues to just work. That said, it does not say anything about what to do if you’re stuck in the mud on the other side. So, let’s suppose your enterprise has successfully crossed the chasm, achieved tens of millions of dollars in ARR, but is no longer growing at a rate to keep pace with the Rule of 40 percent (the sum of your profit and your growth rate). Your investors are getting antsy. Now what?

First of all, know your place. You are still sub-scale for a customer CFO to consider you desirable as a go-to vendor. Same goes for a CIO who is trying to consolidate rather than expand the list of vendors they are working with. So, as with crossing the chasm, your only ally will be a process owner with a problem process that is not getting the IT support they need. This time, however, you are looking for an adjacent process owner, someone for whom your chasm-crossing sponsor would make a good reference. This lowers the bar for how problematic the use case may be because there is already some proof that the solution will work.

Note that we are still at the departmental level, still a point-product app, not a platform, not a suite. Those are all worthy ambitions for the future, but if you try to activate them now, the CFO and the CIO will get involved, and you will get bogged down in proof-of-concept exercises that will take forever to scale.

That said, it is not too early to recruit ecosystem partners to help secure your beachhead and expand your reach. The key here is to engage with companies that are big enough to help but small enough to give you their full attention—not Tier 1 systems integrators, more like outsourced service providers to small and medium businesses or specific departmental functions. You don’t need a lot of these, but the ones you do recruit have to lean in, so make sure that there is enough trapped value in the target use case to pay both you and them a premium for resolving it. To accelerate this effort, ask your professional services team to package up their hard-won knowledge and make it available to the partners who can expand your beachhead market. You want your team to be plowing in the adjacent field, not harvesting in the initial one.

On the go-to-market side, you still need to be disciplined in deploying most of your resources into the target market segment and not letting them get distracted by chasing one-off opportunities elsewhere. That said, you can relax a bit from the laser focus of chasm-crossing as long as, say, two-thirds of the marketing and sales resources are directly aligned with your current goal. Remember at this point that marketing is still a territory capture game, so you want to go after targets that are big enough to matter but small enough to lead, and as always, a good fit with your crown jewels.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Geoffrey Moore

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