 Great photo by Grok. We had a client who recently showed us a whole new program they were going to present to their clients and new prospects alike.
It was well thought-out. It was super detailed. It had lots of impressive features. It promised to deliver a ton of value and ROI. And it was terrifying. Who sees what—and when This may seem contradictory, if not counterintuitive. Here it is, we’d just lauded this new program which our client had created and unveiled to us. And then we undercut that review with the dreaded T-word. What gives? We can give you a little more detail now, and you’ll certainly say “Ohhhh…!” Our client—like many business owners—lives and breathes in spreadsheets. So that’s what they’d shared with us. Indeed, they screen-shared it with us. And this spreadsheet (was it Excel? was it Google? who cares?) was about 40 rows deep by about 25 columns across. All at once. Yep. Terrifying. The good news: We were the first, and only, ones to see it in this state. Our client was justifiably and understandably excited by the cool new program they’d worked so hard to develop. But boy was it ever un-exciting when presented as a swimming sea of spreadsheet cells. This is hardly a tragic story. And you likely can see exactly where it’s going, even if our client wasn’t able at the time. We patiently listened to the whole presentation, which took about a half hour. We took notes. And then we asked some pointed questions:
The idea was to turn down the spigot on this fire hose so it would better resemble a soda straw. The client—they’re very smart—immediately saw where we were going. Easier than you think Once our client realized that they needed to carve their presentation of this new program into bite-sized chunks, all that was left was the execution. And here we can describe a kind of MVP or minimum-viable-product version of that effort: Sure, the client could have gone on and created a snazzy new PowerPoint deck, with discrete slides for the different phases of this proposed program. But that would take time, effort, and resources—and at this point, the client really just wanted to test out this idea: socialize it with existing clients and see how receptive they’d be. So why even make a PowerPoint? The solution was even simpler: Tabs. Yep. That’s all they needed. If this program has five phases, then carve the spreadsheet into five clickable tabs. Simply screen-share a single tab when you present it. And if the conversation leads to a discussion of Phase Two, then click the Phase Two tab. Done. Steve Jobs famously said that simple is hard. But sometimes it’s hard to see what’s simple, and staring right at you. Do you really need to spend a fortune on a shiny new CRM (customer relationship management) platform when your Excel is still working fine? Of course not. Wait for the expense to be more than justified. Ditto for things like learning management systems or LMSs, or even slick PowerPoints as we’d described in this story. Have a marketing challenge that you suspect is simpler than it appears? Contact us and let us put a fresh set of eyes on it for you.
0 Comments
 Great photo by Grok. We have a client who’s an accomplished executive speaker and wanted to book more bookings. We were tapped to help.
If you, too, want to build business by building your live audience outreach, this article is for you. Or if you know someone with the same desire, share it with them. Teaser: we’ve got a killer tip to help you, toward the end of this article. The lay of the land First off, we’re not talking about using some high-priced speakers’ bureau that books A-list celebrities at Fortune 500 corporate events. We’re talking about getting our client booked at things like regional association meetings and conventions of larger national business organizations. The point here, in case it wasn’t glaringly obvious to you, is to place our client in a target-rich environment. This isn’t about ego or garnering some kind of Tony Robbins-like adulation. It’s about presenting to business prospects, and then getting opportunities to close them, afterward. It’s a very narrow use-case of biz-dev. So. No big booking agency. No chanting crowds. But there are tons of these more-realistic gigs, across the country, all the time. And they’re booked, typically, ages in advance: we’re talking anywhere from six to 12 months, easily. How do you find them? These days, there are digital exchange platforms that connect speakers (such as our client) with event planners (i.e., people who seek to book speakers for their gatherings). An obvious one is eSpeakers; we’ll talk about that one here. Load up your ammo If you want to get booked as a speaker on a site like eSpeakers, you need to stand out. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume that you, like our client, are a stellar speaker with a great stage presence, absolute command of your thought-leading/breakthrough material, and have also done this before/are a published author/have been featured on podcasts, and so on. Yep. A high bar to start. Assuming all of that, you’ve got to let all of those eSpeakers-seekers know. Which means that, after you sign up for a (pretty darned affordable) eSpeakers membership, you’ll need to upload a lot of stuff about yourself to entice that audience. And herein is the gist of this article. Here’s what you’ll want to upload, with some notes and thought-starters to help you along:
The best tip you’ll get What’s the best way to find out how to put the best stuff up on a site like eSpeakers? Simply visit the “other side” of the site and pretend that you’re an event planner. Use the filters to drill down to direct competitors of yours. Take a look at them. You’ll easily see who the most impressive ones are. Then you can simply see what they’ve included in their “packages,” and use that as a baseline for you to, well, blow out of the water. Need help with a challenge like this? Contact us! We’d love to help you.  Great photo by Grok. Question: As the year draws to a close, are you merely older… or wiser?
Not to flatter ourselves, but we think we can help with the latter. That’s because it’s time for our year-end round-up—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications —of our top posts for creatives like you. Catch the ones you’d missed. Or revisit those that helped. Enjoy!
Well, that’s all for this year. Have a suggestion for a post for next year? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!  Great photo by Grok. We love continuous process improvement here at Copel Communications!
In this article, cash in on all the tweaking and optimizing we’ve been doing, literally for years, with different clients of ours, to make things as efficient and repeatable as possible. Today, we’re going to talk about B2B “demo” videos. Does your company ever make these? We’re talking about those “watch this screen and see what happens” kinds of explainers which also, of course, sell. So it could be a product demo. A software demo. A service. A SaaS platform. A training session. There are tons of these. They are common. And chances are, if you need to make one of these, you probably need to make a ton of these. And this is where optimized efficiency—that “Big Mac-ifying” of the process—really comes into play. In this article, we’ll describe (in broad strokes, with the details purposely blurred) how we do this for a couple of clients of ours. Pay attention: We guarantee that there are elements of this process, perhaps many elements, that apply to your situation. And the more that apply, the more you can benefit. The challenge at hand As we’d stated above, we’re going to anonymize these specific client assignments. But you’ll get enough detail to follow the process, and recognize opportunities to improve your own workflows. In the first example, this client of ours will do a screen-sharing demo of the prototype of a use-case solution they create for their clients. And they do lots of these. The big opportunity here: If you could anonymize these brilliant solutions, and pare them down into, say, little two-minute stories, you’d have marketing gold. You could use them to quickly populate, say, a dedicated playlist on your YouTube channel. You could use that to show to prospective clients, who stand to be awed, once you hit the critical mass of sheer videos posted to that playlist. Not to mention your ability to feed the voracious appetite of the SEO algorithms and web crawlers of YouTube, Google, and so on. It’s one big virtuous snowball. Turning those client demos into marketing videos, incidentally, was not as obvious a choice as you might think. You’re starting with a lot of sensitive material. You need to see the bigger marketing picture, strategically… and be able to literally blur the lines of sensitive information, tactically, once it comes time to execute. So. This client does more than have one of their reps conduct (and record, via Zoom) the client demo of each new prototype. The prototype itself is based on a use-case that was presented/sold to their client beforehand, in order to get the green-light to make the prototype. Follow? Between the raw footage of the demo Zoom call and that original use-case PDF, we’d almost have everything we need to script the video. But not quite. So here, after lots of back-and-forth and tweaking with the client, the third of our three pieces of input evolved. In this case, it’s a super basic Excel sheet. In one column, it lists the timecode of the demo video; in the column beside that, there’s a quick description of what is happening on screen at that time. Example: “00:32 – 00:41 User logs into platform, using two-factor authentication with an emailed six-digit code.” Someone on the client side makes that little Excel, typically only about ten rows deep, for us. It takes them about 30 minutes. And that’s all we need! From there, knowing this client well, we can pen the video script using a basic three-act structure:
Even easier As you can clearly see, the big lift, for the client, in the scenario above, is to create that little Excel sheet for us. But more recently, we’ve started making videos, for a different client, with no Excel required. That’s because, for the cool things that this client is creating (we can’t share details, sorry), they already create three PDFs which are not only goldmines for us, but they’re also all we require to start scripting. The three PDFs, broadly speaking, are:
These PDFs are so detailed that we’ve been able to write video scripts from them, using their details as the visuals, with the simple addition of a basic voice-over. So there will be shots such as “Zoom in ultra-tight on the detailed box at the lower right of Page 3, and pan across the different functions listed in its flow chart.” In other words, no “lift” from the client at all! It reminds us of Craisins. Huh? You know Craisins. Those “dried cranberries” originally created by Ocean Spray. While making cranberry juice, they would throw out all of the skins of the actual cranberries used. Until someone got the great idea of drying the skins and adding sugar to them, and coming up with a clever portmanteau name like “Craisin,” which implies “cranberry + raisin.” (Read our article about portmanteau names and how you can profit from them.) Think about that: All those cranberry skins were not being used. Today, they’re a massive source of newfound revenue. Ditto for the three abovementioned PDFs. They were used to create a client deliverable, and then effectively shelved. Today, they’re the basis of a “found money” marketing effort. With very little effort! Need help “McDonald-izing” some of your existing deliverables and processes into efficient marketing gold? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. If you’re an aspiring business book writer, this article is for you. And if you know someone who is, this article is for them. Share it with them.
Our topic: How to get the most from your ghost copy-editor. We feel pretty qualified to weigh in on this topic, having ghost-copy-edited numerous books for various authors, some of whose works have gone on to become Amazon bestsellers. First things first: Credit where it’s due. Those aforementioned bestsellers did not become bestsellers because of us. It was due to the authors’ vision, as well as the complete marketing team that guided the book through its gestation. Still. We were along for the process from concept to completion. Interested in penning a business book? Let’s dive in. Division of labor When you hear phrases like “ghost writer” or “ghost copy-editor,” you likely think of some celebrity, sitting back and sipping martinis, while some poor hack does all the work of actually writing the celebrity’s so-called “memoir,” or whatever. And that may well be true, in that instance. But that is not what we’re talking about here. Here, we’re talking about you, as a thought-leader in your business area of interest. You want to share your wisdom and experience with others. Done right, everyone benefits: Your readers elevate their knowledge. And you elevate your status as an authority. Heck, a published authority. So this is, clearly, not about sipping martinis and letting someone else come up with the ideas. The ideas here are yours. All of them. After that, however, it gets fuzzier. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, the opposite is true. When this process is done right, it’s custom tailored to you, and no one else. We’ve worked with authors who are detail freaks. We’ve worked with authors who are bulls-in-China-shops. And in every case, it’s our job to accommodate their style of working. Ta-dah. If you take nothing else away from this article, it should be this: Your preferred and most comfortable style of working is the one that is best for you, when working with a ghost copy-editor. Period. It’s hard enough for you to get these ideas out of your head and down on paper. And then to pay someone to lubricate that process can feel like adding insult to injury. But if it’s a good fit, it will be the opposite. It will be intuitive, stress-relieving, and rewarding. You’ll get to see pages appear that make you say, “Dang! I never realized I was that good!” And that’s just when it comes to the finished product: the pages. In consultant-speak, that’s the “destination.” Which is certainly crucial. But equally important is the “journey.” How do you like to work? In person? Via Zoom? Transactionally and asynchronously, via email? Or some crazy hybrid of all of the above? Are you serious? Are you playful? Do you work in marathons? Or sprints? Again, it doesn’t matter. Whatever works best for you is what’s best. Period. So we’ve done brainstorming sessions to help authors tease out ideas. And we’ve worked with others who have simply “thrown stuff over the wall” at us, nearly completely baked. And what’s our reward? Sure, we get paid. But the far bigger reward is seeing the happiness that our authors derive from both the journey and the destination. Remember: “Ghost.” Our name does not appear, anywhere, on any of the books we’ve helped shepherd to press. So it’s got to be a good relationship—on both sides—for it to work. Writing a book is a big project. It takes a long time, typically measured in months. So be sure you choose a ghost you can live with. Have a book project you’d like to discuss? Contact us, and let’s see if it’s a good fit.  Priceless photo by Grok. There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again.
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. To webinar or not to webinar This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. Those are huge assumptions. A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. Phew. If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. Building unbearable suspense Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: “The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: Clickbait! Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it. Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. Here at Copel Communications, we recently helped a client of ours to plan, execute, and roll out a new product. It was a big initiative, spanning several months.
Our client, not surprisingly or unreasonably, asked us to craft the rollout plan, along with a Gantt Chart so they could easily visualize the process. You know what a Gantt Chart is, right? It was invented by an early 20th century management consultant named Henry Chart. Okay, we couldn’t resist that one. It was Henry L. Gantt. And the chart—you’ve seen tons of them—is made up of little colored horizontal bars that “move forward” over time, showing what gets done and when. It’s basically a matrix. For ours, the vertical columns represented months, going forward in time from left-to-right. And the horizontal rows represented the different activity streams of this project. Some would, say, start in August and run through October. Others wouldn’t start until November, but would run for six months. And so on. Confession: We are not Excel mavens here at Copel Communications. If you are, we salute you! But you might still pick up a tidbit or two from this article. List, then draw The plan/execute/rollout initiative was, as we’d mentioned, very detailed. Indeed, the way for us to even wrap our minds around it was doing it as an outline. And that’s how we proceeded. It went something like this: Step One: Write up the highest-level bullet points of the outline. Things like “Come up with product ideas.” “Develop the best idea.” “Create marketing materials.” And so on. Step Two: Populate the sub-bullets of each. So bullets such as “Create marketing materials” would include sub-bullets such as:
And then there would be sub-sub-bullets. In the above example, “Develop social posts” would include sub-sub-bullets such as:
And so on. Chart your course Even if you’re an Excel maven, that little bit of Word-play can help you. Just use indented bullets for brainstorming; you don’t need any special Word skills to do that. Here’s the thing: The Gantt chart isn’t as detailed as that outline. It basically just charts out the highest-level bullet points, over time. There’s probably some built-in Excel (or even PowerPoint) command that will “Gantt-ify” a bullet list; if there is, illuminate us in the comments section. In the meantime, if you’re living in Word Land, like us, the chart-“drawing” process is actually quite easy: All you do is create a table in Word. The top row is the months (or days, weeks, whatever). The left-most column lists the titles of the different activity streams (“Come up with product ideas,” “Develop the best idea,” etc.). And then all you do is fill in the colors for where the two will overlap. If the first month of “Develop social posts” is, say, October, then make that cell a color other than white. And click-to-fill the other cells as needed. It takes all of about two minutes. We delivered both of these docs to our client, who was delighted to receive them. First and foremost was the Gantt chart they’d requested: A quick and easy visualization of how the project would play out over time. And, for added detail, there was a Word doc outline of the project, in which each row of the Gantt chart teed up to a top-level section of the outline. It was perfect. It may not have been obvious to the client that we “worked in reverse” to make these deliverables, i.e., starting with the outline and then culling from it to make the Gantt chart, but who cares? They were happy, and the process was efficient. Have a marketing challenge you’d like to address? Or have tips for us on how to make Gantt charting even easier? In either case, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us today.  Awesome photo by Grok. We don’t claim to be a publishing expert. That said, we have ghost-copy-edited several books, for different clients of ours, over the years. We’ve done everything from boutique self-publishing to working with one of the big-name New York publishing houses.
But the lessons we learned recently—and will share in this article—really underscore how much, and how fast, the world of book publishing has changed, in just the past few short years. Big boys can be bullies Boy were we ever disappointed, not terribly long ago, when we helped a client of ours shepherd their book through the process/wringer of a major you-know-their-name publishing house. We—mistakenly—thought that our client would get the white-glove treatment from this storied icon. Were we ever wrong. Their business model had followed—or perhaps preceded—the seismic shifts that have upended the music industry. Rather than the publishers having all the power, it’s effectively the influencers who have all the power. So if you’re, say, an indie rock band and you’ve got a zillion followers on TikTok, you hold all the cards. Why fork over your hard-earned money to some record label? Ditto for publishing. You can self-publish, pretty easily, these days (more on that in a minute), and if you can drive lots of followers and sales, then what value does a publisher—regardless of how big or how storied—have to add? This is, unfortunately, a double-edged sword. In the case of our client, they’d written a brilliant manuscript, but weren’t exactly Kardashians in terms of their social-media influence. And that was all, apparently, that the big-name publisher cared about. They peppered us with questions, such as:
And one other, which we were shocked to hear:
Ouch. You’d think that as publishers, their job would be to, well… publish. But no. They’re looking for coat-tails to ride. They want to “barnacle” themselves onto a trend, rather than expend the effort and capital to start one, regardless of how trend-worthy that manuscript might be. How disheartening. But the story does get better. The Magazine Magnate Before we get to the silver-lining chapter, we have one more churn-your-stomach tale to tell. We worked with another client, recently, and helped them to complete their book manuscript. Shortly thereafter, our client was approached by another huge-name publisher, known primarily in the magazine world, but who were now leveraging their brand name to create a publishing service to authors like our client. Hmmm. Intriguing. Well, it was, until we dived into their sales pitch. They would publish the book. And they would push out a press release for it. And they would feature it on their website. Now, in stark contrast to the old-school publisher we’d mentioned in the previous story—who, to their credit, paid our client an advance (i.e., money) against future sales for the manuscript—this magazine-magnate wanted to charge this other client of ours for the privilege of having their big name on the spine of the book… along with the aforementioned press release and website page. So now the money is flowing in the opposite direction. But okay. We’ll bite. How much did Magazine Magnate want for this service of theirs? Well, they offered different tiers. The cheapest one was $67,000.00. The priciest one topped out at $122,000.00. Can you say “Vanity offer targeted at ‘authors’ whose wallets are as inflated as their egos?” We politely declined. Goliath, meet David As we’d teased above, there is a silver lining to our client’s story—and for your book-publishing aspirations, too, especially if you don’t feel like self-educating on the arcana of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service which, while valuable, requires a ton of heavy lifting on your part. Turns out there’s a whole category of vendors out there known as book aggregators, and they do pretty much everything, for a sliver of the price we’d mentioned above. Example: For our client who declined the Magazine Magnate, they went with an aggregator who created a print-on-demand book and e-book version thereof, and distributed it to storefronts such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble and tons of others. And the whole budget was under $3k. So there’s no “advance” against sales; you’re betting with your own money. But if you can, say, sell more than $3k worth of books, you’re already in the black, and royalty checks will just keep on coming. So you can see why the old-school publishers are now very old school. Their business model has been shaken to the foundations. What value do they add, beside a logo on the spine? We’ll leave it to you to answer that question. Need help with a book project? We’ve worked on enough of them by now to have experience to offer that, we’d wager, you’d deem valuable. Contact us to learn more.  Great photo by Grok. Podcasting has exploded. It’s been around so long now that many people don’t even realize that the word “podcast” has its roots in the word “iPod.” Which doesn’t even exist anymore.
But you’re not interested in etymology. You want to build your business and make more money. Sure, you could create and host your own podcast—quite the lift—or you could essentially ride the coat-tails of someone else who already has a big following, and grab a little bit of that love for yourself. If only it were that easy. What are the odds? The sad reality of today’s podcast landscape (“podscape”?) is that the numbers are driven by popularity. Media exposure, once it gets going, can snowball. But it’s hard to get it going. We hate to employ this analogy, but it’s useful nonetheless: If you’re some business wonk, how many people will follow you? How many companies will be lining up for paid sponsorships? Now replace the words “business wonk” with “Kardashian.” Ouch. As we’d said, sad reality. This is not to say that business-related podcasts can’t have influence or big audiences; they can. But before you aim to be a guest on Acquired, for example, set your sights more realistically. You, too, can build momentum and rise up the pecking order. Who are you? (And who cares?) An easy way to approach the I-want-to-be-a-podcast-guest-to-promote-my-business challenge is to look at it through the eyes of the podcast host. Why would they want you? Why would you help them? If you can definitively answer that question, you’re in good shape. Some considerations:
The more of the above boxes you can check, the better. Money can’t buy happiness It wasn’t long ago that we would advise clients to reach out to attractive podcasts on their own—usually in the form of a note from, say, an underling who would say “Hey! I think my boss would be a great guest for your podcast! Here’s why!” And then that underling would rattle off as many of the bullet points we’d listed above, as possible. Dirty little secret: No underlings were harmed in the making of that email. They were actually ghost-penned by—you guessed it—Copel Communications. Looking back, those days were quaint. As we’d said at the outset, podcasting has exploded. There are well over four million podcasts out there today. Not episodes. But actual podcasts. And the good ones—the ones you want to be on—are overwhelmed by entreaties from wanna-be guests, 24/7. So what do you do? There are actually agencies out there, today, which specialize in booking you as a guest on podcasts. No kidding: Google them and you’ll find them. And you’ll quickly see a pattern, too: They’ll often offer tiers of service, for, say, booking you on two podcasts per month. Or four, for a higher fee. But here’s the catch: You can’t simply hire one of these agencies. Throw money at them—it won’t work. Because they need to vet you first. It’s like any talent agent. They can only take your money if they can sell you in the first place. Which brings us back, once again, to all of those bullet points we’d listed above. What do you think those podcast-guest-booking agencies’ applications look like? Yup. Just like our bullet points. We can’t guarantee that we can get you “signed” by a booking firm. But we can help you burnish your credentials and make an honest assessment of your odds. Contact us and let’s talk.  Great photo by Grok. We were recently tasked with writing some marketing copy for a B2B client of ours, utilizing real-life success stories from their client files. The goal, not surprisingly, was to lure other prospects into becoming clients, too, when they read about these great successes.
This is so straightforward that it’s boring. Right? Nope. It warrants an entire article. Who wants what? Granted, we need to cloak this story in anonymity—just as we’d needed to cloak this assignment in anonymity. We couldn’t tell the world, for example, that our client’s specific client suffered from broken systems, couldn’t serve their customers, and so on. Similarly, you don’t want to get too deep in the weeds on the technical side. And herein lies the gist of this story, and its lesson. Let’s get specific. For our client’s client—the one in the success story—they’d used Systems A, B, and C to do their work. They had problems with Systems A, B, and C, which our client helped them solve. So we could have been very specific, in calling out Systems A, B, and C by name, even when we never mentioned who-the-client-was, by name. That would have been accurate. It wouldn’t have gotten anyone into trouble. And, on the surface, it seemed to be the thrust of this assignment. But you’ve got to take a customer-back approach here. (Yes, you can make a drinking game out of how many times we say “customer-back approach” here at Copel Communications.) Here’s the rub: The goal here, if you really look at it, is not to explain how the client in the success story succeeded. It’s not? Nope. The goal, rather, is to tell a prospective client how they could succeed. Aha. That’s different. Which gets back to Systems A, B, and C. In this world in which our client competes, there’s a lot more than Systems A, B, and C for their clients and their prospects. There are systems which compete with Systems A, B, and C. Put it this way: You don’t want to turn off a prospect just because they’ve opted to use System D. Get it? This gets back to the marketing challenge. It’s subtle, yet important. For this assignment, we didn’t want to call out Systems A, B, and C by name… but rather by function. We wanted to create blanket terms for them, for the exact reason of not alienating a prospect who uses System D. So instead of saying “We helped our client with System A,” we said “We helped our client with their transactional reporting platform” (or whatever). This way, whether you use System A or System D for transactional reporting, you both perceive the value of what the company does. As we’d said, this is a subtle difference—the matter of just a few words here and there—but it really makes the difference between attracting the prospects you want, or having them self-select elsewhere. Remember: This distinction was not spelled out to us in our marching orders. It was incumbent on us to read between the lines, to take that customer-back approach, and do the right thing by our client. Need help with a similar under-the-radar marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! |