Our cat may never learn from her mistakes. But you can.
This is Morgan. Sometimes her water dish is empty, or she wants to go outside. But unlike other cats, she doesn’t cry near the water dish, or the back door. She stands near someone in the family and howls until we figure it out. As a result, you can often hear us muttering, “Cry near the problem, Morgan.”
Just like Morgan, sometimes organizations miss the mark because their marketing efforts are not crying near the problem — they’re crying near the solution. You’d think that would work just as well, or even better. But if your product or service is high-ticket, technically or conceptually complex, or requires a change in thinking by your customer, that’s not enough. You need to cry near all the problems, and near everyone who has them.
In fact, you need to
- Talk to the person who has the problem.
- Talk to the person who can solve the problem.
- Talk to the person who has to pay for the problem.
Case in point:
I know of a company that has developed a highly advanced technical product. Coolbeans Widgets has been working their butts off to market it to the target market categories that need it badly. Their materials and pitch effectively address every objection they hear in the field. Yet, to their surprise and disappointment, they’ve been getting a tepid reception.
Last week, purely by accident, I was in a meeting with some people that could really use a Coolbeans Widget solution to solve a customer service problem. Yet none of them were aware that it existed. All work for organizations that are heavily marketed about products like this one. All were thrilled to learn that there was a solution, and all eagerly asked for information about it. In other words, they were a receptive, even excited audience. But none of them had even heard of Coolbeans Widgets; in fact, no one in the meeting even knew of the Coolbeans Widgets category.
The reason for this disconnect is that none of the people in this meeting work in their company IT departments. IT executives make decisions about technical products their companies buy and implement. Funding for those purchases comes out of IT budgets. So naturally, Coolbeans thinks of those IT decision-makers as their customers.
Clearly, that’s not the whole story.
The IT execs aren’t being insensitive to the needs of the business folks. They don’t know that they have a solution to the customer service problem — they probably don’t even know that the customer-service problem exists. The business people never thought to ask IT for help. Why would they? In their heads, customer service issues are people problems. In fact, if they had asked for IT help, the IT department may not have made the leap. The clear, well-presented materials delivered by Coolbeans address every single one of the problems and objections voiced by their IT customers — but they don’t spend a single paragraph addressing the problems of influencers outside the IT department.
Whose job is it to connect the dots? Yours, of course, oh Mighty Marketer. Or, in the case of Coolbeans, theirs. You have to put The Morgan Principle into action:
- Talk to the person who has the problem.
- Talk to the person who can solve the problem.
- Talk to the person who has to pay for the problem (so you can make the business case).
…and talk to each one of them in a way that addresses their particular concerns.
This isn’t a new idea. Marketers have been relying on it for centuries, because it works. I’ve written about it before, and I will again. I’ve worked with companies that have expanded their markets, eliminated seasonal slumps, and dramatically reduced their sales process (and costs) simply by using the Morgan Principle.
Remember, your target audience is not just the person who pays the bill.
Even if you never meet them, whether you call them buyers, influencers, gatekeepers, or end-users — if you want to be successful, they’re all your customers.
