Chapter 15

Helpfulness

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Well, the same is true for marketing: if you sell something, you make a customer today; if you help someone, you make a customer for life.

—Jay Baer, author of Youtility

Let’s think back to the hardware store and the idea of credibility. People frequent Ogilvie’s, over some of the bigger chains with better prices, because they trust their expertise. They are authentic. But really, why do they have those qualities? What makes them trustworthy, experts, and authentic? Because, above all else, they are helpful. They help first; everything else follows, including selling.

A Planet of Helpful Associates

In the early 1980s, facing a brutal onslaught from Japanese imports, General Motors looked for something new, something to help differentiate them in a depressed market. In June of 1982, Alex C. Mair of General Motors began discussions of a “revolutionary new, small-car project codenamed ‘Saturn.’” In November of 1983, General Motors’ then-chairman Robert B. Smith and then-president F. James McDonald publicized the Saturn idea. Twelve months later the first demonstration vehicle was revealed, and on January 7, 1985, the Saturn Corporation was officially founded.1

The uniqueness of Saturn came not just through its cars. Sure, the cars themselves had some unique elements, like polymer door panels and a new type of engine, but it was the marketing and sales of the cars that truly set Saturn apart. In 1990, the Saturn Corporation adopted a new method of selling—a “no pressure” sales process. Quite different from ordinary, high-pressure car sales in which a consumer was passed from one associate or sales manager to another, this new approach was intended to create a different type of atmosphere, a friendly environment for the consumer. The concept was simple—the role of the salesperson changed. In the old way of selling cars, once a customer finished haggling with a salesperson on the price, the customer usually would never deal with that person again. Not so under the Saturn concept. In the new Saturn model, sales personnel were involved with the customer at every touchpoint—when the customer interfaced with sales, service, and even buying a replacement car. In effect, the customer took on the status of an account with a long-term relationship, as in the insurance business.2

Saturn adopted a consultative sales approach. In this approach, the salesperson’s ultimate job was to help the customer make a decision, not put them into a particular vehicle. Saturn salespeople were upfront about pricing (including invoice pricing) and often focused their conversations around the consumer’s life, their challenges, and what kind of car might be best for them.

The result?

Saturn consistently won J.D. Power and Associates’ highest marks for customer satisfaction and boasted a loyalty rating of well over 50 percent (meaning that over 50 percent of its customers would buy a Saturn again).

At the heart of that success wasn’t some magic, or smoke and mirrors. Like Ogilvie & Sons, Saturn engendered authenticity and credibility. They were a trustworthy company, centered on helping customers, not simply on parting consumers from their money.

Even though General Motors shut the doors on the Saturn brand, it still serves as a good example. Saturn’s sales approach has had a lasting impact on the entire automotive industry. Remember the personal anecdote of Jason’s buying experience with Berge Ford in Chapter 12? What do you think influenced those salespeople?

Helpfulness in the Digital World

Being helpful in the digital world isn’t much different. To demonstrate that, we turn to another example—River Pools and Spas in Warsaw, Virginia.

In 2009, the economy was in a depression. People weren’t spending money on luxury items like building custom pools. And, like many other pool builders, Marcus Sheridan, the co-owner of River Pools and Spas, was circling the drain. So he did what any scrappy business owner does—he looked for a solution. Recognizing that there were many new ideas in marketing (i.e., inbound marketing, content marketing, and social marketing), he decided to look at his business from a different perspective—the customer—and came up with a simple plan to turn his website into an information source. He took all the questions that he’d ever answered for customers (well, those that he could remember, which numbered in the hundreds) and turned them into individual blog posts. The key was that he didn’t make any of these answers about River Pools and Spas. They were simply answers to questions that people needed.

Then he began to add posts to the website every week and began to realize that it was having an impact on the business. More traffic was coming to the site from people who might not have ever known about them (because their traditional outbound marketing never reached them).

This also radically changed sales appointments. Rather than spending time at the table educating people about fiberglass pools, he’d often find himself across the table from people who’d already answered many of their questions on his site. Not only were they talking to the expert, they were talking to the person who’d created all the content they’d found on the Internet! The result was a radically shorter sales time and a higher likelihood of turning each prospect into a customer.

The big aha comes when looking back:

• In 2009, their website was 20 pages. In 2013, it’s close to 850.
• In 2007, when the economy was high, they spent about $250,000 in advertising to achieve roughly $4 million in sales.
• In 2011, when luxury spending was in the dumps, they spent $20,000 in advertising to generate $4.5 million in sales.a

That’s an exponential decrease in spending to achieve a slightly higher sales number, all from just being helpful and from understanding two things—that the way people make decisions has changed (because of digital; think back to the new buyer’s journey we discussed in Chapter 4), and the way organizations interact with them (to get attention and engage) has to change as well.

The Impact of Digital on Marketing

What does digital mean for marketing? Quite simply, it means that the way organizations approach the market with their messages has to change.

We must:

• Shift from “at” to “with.”
• Shift from “transaction” to “engagement.”
• Shift from “sales focused” to “helpful.”
• Make improvements in credibility.

What the example also shows is how the decision-making process has changed. In one sense, it has become very schizophrenic. Consumers don’t follow a linear path anymore between need and decision. They go in every direction, finding new information, consulting with friends, and sharing and getting opinions until they eventually arrive at a decision on a product or service. In another way, this decision-making process has become crowdsourced. We guess it has always been like that in some way, as people talked about their decisions with friends and family. But now it’s happening at scale, and people can easily ask questions of total strangers (i.e., posting a comment on a review site, for example). Friends of friends can also chime in on Facebook.

The Transition from Outbound to Inbound

The change in the decision-making process is a direct result of how digital transforms the purchasing process by adding transparency. Prices, data, reviews, recalls—everything is just a click away online. Digital has radically transformed the way we decide, elevating the value we place on trusted, credible sources of information and the relationships we have with the people (or organizations) who provide that information.

In the outbound marketing world, the idea is to get messages in front of users when they might see it. TV advertising, magazine advertising, and social media advertising are all outbound marketing techniques. But so are emails and newsletters. It’s not about being a trusted source of information. It’s about interrupting and convincing.

The problem with outbound marketing is that interruption. Clever marketers try all sorts of ways to steal people’s attention, hoping their interruption driven messages will align with a buyer’s journey. This hopeful shotgun approach relies on volume and frequency—the more advertising, the more marketing and messaging, and the better the chance of catching a few people at the right time.

In the digital world, where the control of attention spending is in the fingertip of the viewer, annoying interruptions seem pointless. We click past them, or close out the site we are viewing rather than put up with them. How often have you been frustrated with a pop-up ad on a website (with a well-concealed button to close it) or a video that automatically starts playing an ad when the page opens? Or our (least) favorite—the ads that float across the screen, which you have to chase to close.

Outbound marketing just does not work in the digital world. In most cases, there is a significant impact to credibility (because interrupting advertisers or emailers seem less authentic daily, especially as they raise their annoyance level to a fever pitch in a blatant and desperate attempt to convince audiences of a need or desire). Outbound interruption, as Seth Godin has pointed out, is like walking into every bar in town and asking every girl to marry you. It’s a lousy way to forge lasting relationships. Who wants to have a relationship with a company that is constantly barraging us with interruptions? Jay Baer, in his book Youtility, summarizes it well:

. . . sending messages too often can have unintended consequences. ExactTarget’s 2012 United Kingdom version of “The Social Breakup” study found that the most often cited reason consumers “unlike” a company on Facebook is that they felt “bombarded by messages.”5

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, focuses on placing content where users might discover it, as part of a larger engagement strategy. Organizations that have embraced inbound marketing understand engagement. They understand that the consumers will find them if they offer help first. Again, Jay Baer says it succinctly: “There are only two ways for companies to break through in an environment that is unprecedented in its competitiveness and cacophony. They can be ‘amazing’ or they can be useful.”

Of course, inbound marketing can still utilize the same messaging and advertising copy as outbound marketing. The problem is . . . few inbound visitors are looking for advertising content, especially if it is focused on talking about the organization and its products. People are looking for content that helps them in some way. Perhaps they want instruction or advice on solving a problem or achieving a goal. By offering help, with no strings attached, we form a relationship that will serve them well as they progress through that schizophrenic decision-making process of buying products like the ones we offer. Inbound visitors want content that will help them do their jobs better, facilitate their decisions, or take away some of the worry of making the wrong choice. Advertising copy, meant to convince them to buy, doesn’t often fill that need.

Inbound, Outbound, and the Buyer’s Journey

In Chapter 4, we introduced a new buyer’s journey. But part of the change to that buyer’s journey is also the ways in which organizations engage with people. In a linear buyer’s journey, it was much easier to target people with content because you had a relative degree of certainty regarding what a consumer would be looking for and when, which is why so many organizations practiced (and continue to practice) outbound marketing—traditional advertising, demand generation programs, targeted emails, and so on. In the past, if you mentioned brand and product messages focused on different segments of the buyer’s journey enough times in enough different places, you were bound to get lucky. But in the new buyer’s journey? It doesn’t quite work that way anymore.

Outbound marketing tactics are a “spray and pray” approach. With consumers bouncing around not only between channels but also purposes (i.e., engaging, education, consideration, decision), it makes it nearly impossible to guess where they will be at any point within the process, which probably accounts for the low conversion rate of banner ads, email marketing, and other demand-generation tactics.

Some organizations already recognize that the old “spray and pray” way of marketing isn’t working and are turning to a different marketing approach, inbound, that aligns more to the scrambled buyer’s journey wrought by the digital economy.

Inbound marketing (often synonymous with content marketing) is all about putting engaging, meaningful, and helpful content where users will find it . . . but not worrying about when they do, and not pushing brand or product messaging. We’ve provided the new buyer’s journey illustration again (see Figure 15.1), and added the role inbound and outbound marketing play in helping to engage differently.

Figure 15.1 How Marketing Has Changed

Source: Limelight Networks.

The Principles of Helpfulness

We’ve mentioned the concept of helpfulness throughout the book in relation to all of the characteristics of building deep and meaningful relationships—stories, credibility, authenticity, and so on. So what does it really mean to be helpful?

• Not about me, about you: The customer is first. Give them what they want. Aren’t you more likely to trust people who give you useful and helpful things (like directions or information)?
• Be available: If you make information hard to get, people will look for it elsewhere. In the real world, this means associates that are easy to find. How frustrating is it when you are wandering around a store and you can’t find anyone? Online it means minimal, if any, registration or gating processes. Trust us here, give it away, free, and they will come. And, they will also come back.
• Avoid the insatiable urge to sell: This isn’t about a product, it’s about a problem. Sure, your product may solve the customer’s problem, but they don’t want the hard sell. No one does. Give them information that demonstrates you understand their challenges. They will derive a conclusion and come to the understanding that the company you work for creates a product that does what they need.
• Produce, produce, produce: Don’t stop being helpful. The problem that many organizations have about this kind of strategy is that they don’t see immediate results. But remember that schizophrenic decision-making process? It’s longer now. People take longer to make a decision because there is so much information. They have to distill it all through their communities and social networks. If you stop producing and your content becomes old or dated (i.e., you aren’t in the conversation anymore), being helpful won’t help you.

Helpfulness Drives Relationships

Take a moment to think about your relationships—friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues at work. When you think about those relationships, ask yourself to whom you would turn to for advice or help. You go to those you trust, those who have proven their ability and desire to help you. When we ask someone on Facebook for advice, we do so via private message, not publicly (that’s reserved for “Hey, has anyone purchased from this company before?” requests).

Being helpful creates a trust-bond between consumer and company. Remember that content is the digital face of the company. Each piece of content is like an associate. Do you want to be like those old car companies with high-pressure sales, mobbing consumers at the door with salespeople (which equates to hard-selling copy or outbound marketing materials)? Or do you want to be like Saturn and River Pools and Spas (and others like Geek Squad before they were purchased by Best Buy), seen as helpful organizations to whom consumers will gravitate toward because they trust them, view them as credible, and feel that they are authentic?

Lowe’s: Helpful above All Else

We need not look further than Lowe’s to find an organization that has fully embraced the concepts of helpfulness.

Understanding that success comes from helping their customers, Lowe’s has created a multichannel approach to providing helpful content.

It starts with their website (www.lowes.com), where Lowe’s has an entire section devoted to DIY. They teach consumers how to complete tasks and build projects on their own. Consumers do not need to go to Lowe’s to purchase the parts and tools (although Lowe’s does make it easy by providing product links within the content).

This generates credibility, expertise, and trust. It also fulfills need and, through Lowe’s loyalty program, My Lowe’s, the home improvement juggernaut can even include purchase history. But Lowe’s doesn’t stop there.

Embracing the latest in social media and video formats, Lowe’s launched a Tumblr titled: Fix in Six, which can be found at http://lowesfixinsix.tumblr.com. This channel provides quick videos and simple tutorials for their audience to carry out sometimes confusing or complicated DIY tasks.

Working on developing consistency, Lowe’s integrated their Tumblr5 strategy with the latest in social media: Vine.6 This integration allowed them to upload six-second videos (the same videos in their Fix in Six channel) to address common problems (like how to unscrew a stripped screw).

What Lowe’s demonstrates is that providing content, unencumbered with sales or organizational messaging, can help establish credibility and build long-term success. Lowe’s giving away do-it-yourself (DIY)-based content is really a reaction to understanding their audience. People are much more likely to do DIY home renovation and upkeep projects during economic downturns or uncertainty in order to try to increase the value of their homes, to make them more marketable, or just to make them better places to live. Considering that current research shows that renovations tend to accelerate for homes older than 25 years and that 69 percent of homes in the United States were built more than 25 years ago, Lowe’s has tapped into the lucrative need that aligns to their products and services.7

Summing It Up

At the core of all relationships is helpfulness. Perhaps that’s why we saved it for last—your success with all of the other characteristics depends, in some part, on your ability to be helpful. In the digital world, this requires you to forego the insatiable need to sell to everyone and everything and produce content that will help your audience become smarter, make better decisions, or solve a problem.

Helpful Takeaways

There is no doubt about it—organizations that are helpful will have much more long-term success than organizations who stick to the “sell first, help second” approach. Of course, it helps to convince executives when there are many examples of helpful companies. Well, thankfully, they are starting to appear (like Lowe’s). But you shouldn’t wait for the example. Your organization could be the next Lowe’s, featured in some book about relationship building, if you act quickly! Here are some helpful tips, tricks, techniques, and things you can do today. Note that these aren’t in any particular order.

• Write about topics that interest you (and your audience). Part of being helpful is providing content that your audience will find meaningful, not necessarily what you think is needed to push your product. This means you’ll need to really engage with your audience even before you start producing content. Of course, most of what they will tell you will probably be related to the challenges your product helps solve.
• Don’t look short-term. Although it’s crucial to fill pipeline and keep sales coming in (perhaps this involves focusing some of your marketing efforts on those relationship needs that are all about serving themselves), long-term growth isn’t going to come from short-term sales. It’s going to come from cultivating sales from relationships and the relationships that come from loyal customers through their relationship networks.
• Start leading, stop chasing. If you are still focused mainly on demand generation, you need to carve out some of your marketing strategy to focus on inbound. You need to start leading your audience to you by publishing high-quality content and generating conversation around it in the correct channels.
• Be helpful . . . every day. There is no reason that you can’t provide your customers an exciting and relevant piece of content each day. “Get content that gives salespeople ‘air cover,’” says Joe Pulizzi, founder of The Content Marketing Institute, “because your customers don’t want to talk to your salespeople all the time. But can you get a piece of helpful content in front of them instead of trying to reach them on the phone? Absolutely. So long as it’s really helpful. And it will probably even have a greater impact.”8

Notes

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Corporation.

2. Allan Johnson, “GM Trying New Approach In Selling The Saturn,” Chicago Tribune, October 14, 1990, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-10-14/travel/9003260129_1_saturn-line-wrong-orbit-median-income.

3. www.kinvey.com/.

4. Jeffrey L. Cohen, “7 Examples of Innovative B2B Content Marketing,” Socialmediab2b.com, September 18, 2013, http://socialmediab2b.com/2013/09/7-examples-of-innovative-b2b-content-marketing/.

5. Jay Baer, in his book Youtility, refers to a study by ExactTarget. Rohrs, Jeff, and Stewart, Morgan. “The Social Break-up UK” from http://www.exacttarget.com/subscribers-fans-followers/sff12.aspx.

6. http://vine.co. In order to use Vine, you must download and install the mobile application to either your iOS or Android-based device.

7. Dividend Growth Investor, “Lowe’s Continues to Build on Success and Dividend Growth,” Investorplace.com, November 3, 2012, http://investorplace.com/2012/11/lowes-continues-to-build-on-success-and-dividend-growth/.

8. We reference Joe Pulizzi in a number of chapters throughout this book. These references are from an interview conducted with Joe on September 11, 2013. You can find more information about Joe at http://joepulizzi.com/.

aThe story of River Pools and Spas was culled from multiple sources, including Youtility (Jay Baer), interview with the CMO of Hubspot (Mike Volpe), and thesaleslion.com (Marcus Sheridan, owner of River Pools and Spas).