RX for Marketing: Know Your Customers’ House of Pain

There is a crisis of creativity in many marketing departments today, and that is affecting everything from how enterprise software gets sold to which airlines will survive or not. Too many software companies are caught up in imitating competitors’ strategies, and others out of sheer complacency and the mistaken belief that working the same strategy year in and year out – doubling down on the past in essence – will deliver better results – yet fail to get to their goals.

When it comes to product strategies, this thinking delivers yesterday’s products tomorrow. It’s been my experience that when manufacturing companies run out of new marketing, product, and sales strategies it’s a sure sign they have no idea what the pain points of their prospects and customers are. Instead of taking risks with innovative new products, these companies stay focused on what worked in the past – stuck in a holding pattern of building products for the same pain points, again and again. The spiral continues until the Marketing department isn’t relevant anymore and eventually an entire company.

The bottom line is that Marketing in many companies is inching towards being irrelevant and dragging the entire company with them because they have lost touch with the most excruciating pain points of their prospects and customers.

No Pain No Gain

It’s time for Marketing to quit judging and applauding itself by how it excels on inward-centric metrics and start being experts in their customers’ House of Pain.

In the many forms of independent content lurks the greatest pains any company’s customers face. Yet it’s been the last place they look for feedback, and in the case of the highly publicized situation of Dell’s faceless and bureaucratic response to customer inquiries that were posted to blogs worldwide one can see how quickly pain points partially self-induced get noticed and now, promoted through blogs.

Marketing needs to map their customers’ House of Pain by putting all forms of independent, unstructured content at the center of how they listen to and interact with customers. These forms of independent content include:

• Blogs
• Call Center Logs and Recorded Calls
• Customer Service e-mails and Instant Messages
• Message Boards
• USENET
• Website comment forms

Constructing Your Customers’ House of Pain

Let’s be honest, the customer service e-mail addresses end up in an account that your well-meaning Director of Marketing or Product Management set up four years ago and since then it’s been mentioned. Sins of customer omission abound and it’s no one’s fault – the processes and incentives are in place to actually pay people more to ignore their customers, because they can make more slam-dunking internally defined goals. In a sense, some marketing departments are incented to deliver a terrible customer experience.

Call to Action

Marketing departments need to re-evaluate how they look at their performance and realize that the path to long-term relevance starts by finding their way to the door of their customers’ house of pain.

By Louise Columbus