Quick tips on user experience for your web site

March 1, 2011 Leave a comment

For most companies, a web site is a fundamental tool of marketing and lead generation. It all began in having a site to showcase your products and services, and then you had to have an online store. Not to forget to ever-elusive blog page. And lately, you now must have a social media presence, from tweeting to liking pages on your site. But across all the must haves and checklists of things we must do, we often overlook user experience. What makes your site compelling to visit? Why should I come back? I am finding what I am looking for that will make me buy what you do? Online marketers should take a break from tracking unique visitors you are getting and measure instead measure the user experience. While this can sometimes be measured in terms of bounce rate, you can simply take a stroll on your site like if it was the first time. You might discover a few problems. Here is my quick list of usual suspects:

Target users

Who are you selling to? You better understand the buyer persona that you are trying to attract. For example: making a hip and snazzy looking site that is targeted at finance people might not be the right approach (they most likely will prefer a simple design with immediate access to stats and visual dashboards on ROI, etc).

Focus on message

What is your website saying? Visitors should get a good understanding of what you do and why you are relevant in a few lines (think of your cocktail pitch put on a web site…). Unless I am crystal clear on what you do and why I am here, you will need to educate me about your value proposition and competitive advantage.

Every page is a landing page

Don’t spend too much time just tuning the main page. While being the first page that many people will see, today’s search engines bring people directly to the relevant page as much as possible. Don’t assume that people will all start from the same place. Every page should have a meaning and an ability to quickly put the visitor in context.

Minimize navigation

Everybody hates searching on a web site for what they need, even more when you need to click a handful of time to just get started. Again, if you know you buyer persona, you should be able to place everything they needs within one or two clicks. While adding a search bar can be convenient, it is not the right way to fix a faulty and confusing web site.

What are you looking for?

If you are looking to capture leads or sell a product, make this an obvious and simple process. Many companies will ask you to fill a form in order to download something, make the process as enjoyable as possible. For example, don’t ask me to fill in something and then get someone in inside sales to review my request. People in today’s world expect downloads to be automated. Nothing more frustrating than to wait for a couple of days and then getting someone trying to sell me something before I am ready. There is nothing wrong in trying to convert business, just don’t make it annoying or painful.

Keep testing your site

Managers spend a great deal of time testing a brand new web site and then they go away. This should be an on-going process; to make sure that everything is running fine, that the user experience is not broken (don’t wait for someone to email you if something does not work, fix it before).  Getting regular focus groups is another good way of making sure you have not missed the mark. Even more when your site is your primary source of revenue generation; you can’t afford to have a bad user experience.

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My Presentation Tips & Tricks

February 8, 2011 1 Comment

Here is a follow-up on my latest post regarding the content of an investor presentation. Beyond the information that needs to be put into each slide, here is my top 10 list of tips when it comes to doing a presentation.

Simplify the content

Making presentation is an art form where less is better. Try to make each of your slides and clean and simple as possible. Try to extract the essence of what you are trying to say in each and every slide.

Use words that are easy to pronounce

Sounds silly but in a Province where English is most likely not your first language, try to pick words that are easy to pronounce. Be careful about words that might have a different meaning when badly pronounced (for example, saying “fuck us” when wanting to say focus). Of course, some words cannot be replaced so you just need to practice your pronunciation.

Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse

You never rehearse enough; don’t just try to wing it. Even the pros practice a lot their speeches and presentations. Practice your timing, practice the quality of your speech. You can do this by yourself but it is also quite valuable to practice in front of a mirror, in front of people that you are not as comfortable with, and ultimately record yourself with a camera.

Lead the presentation

Too many times, we start talking once we have flipped the slide. If you ever have noticed great speakers such as Steve Jobs, they will lead the slides; starting to talk about the content that will appear next – BEFORE the slides is displayed. This will create a better flow and prevents you from just reading what’s on each slide.

Tell a story

Presenting is very much about telling a story. Make your presentation compelling by focusing in getting your audience engaged and getting them thru a series of steps; up to the closing statement.

Take your time

By keeping the content short, you can make sure not to exceed any allocated time period. You can then make sure to take your time. Nothing worse than a rushed presentation because you have too much to say or are not sure on how long you will take.

Pause by taking a sip of water

One useful trick is to take a quick sip of water once in a while. This will allow you to take a second, make sure you are focused and composed (if you were starting to lose it). While this sip of water will feel like you have paused for a minute (or even feel like an hour), it creates just a small enough of a break to catch your breath.

No matter what happened, focus on closing strong

Even if you have fumbled plenty during the presentation, you always have a last chance upon closing. Take a deep breath and make sure you deliver a good and final message correctly. While always better to do a perfect presentation, a good finish can go a long way.

Be careful of your body language

How are you placing your hands? How is your body moving around can say a lot about your level of confidence and comfort. Make sure that you don’t do any twitching, dangling, or too many sidestepping moves. This is where recording your rehearsals with a camera can greatly help. Sometimes we are just not aware of all the things we do when we present.

Smile

Nothing worse than a presenter that is tense and looks like he is in a bad mood. If you can, remember to smile and have an upbeat attitude as you are presenting; even more when a presentation is recorded and then posted to a public website.

 

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The target customer

December 20, 2010 Leave a comment

It’s a lot easier to build great technology than it is to properly identify your target customer and ideal market. Sure you may have found a market that has great potential. Once deployed, your solution will have a significant impact on the industry – or will it?

Who has the pain?

Before getting a chance of successfully selling a product, you need to have a very good idea of the target customer. This is the person that has the pain (or the need) that your product will solve (or satisfy). If there is not a well defined pain or need, there is limited chance that your solution has value; besides selling to a few people. Of course, the greater the pain, the bigger (and value) is the market opportunity.

Who has the money?

Without revenue, there is no business. One common problem of a lot of startups is a lack of strategy around getting money out of the hands of your customer (a.k.a. monetization). You need to draft a path from where the money will come from. The simplest form is the customer giving you a fat check. The more challenging one is indirectly making money from sponsors, adverts – that is if you have the right kind of volume.

When is your solution needed?

Even after finding a market and how you will monetize, you still need to know about time to market. As an example, tablet PC that came out 8 years ago are obviously not as popular as today’s iPad … It is so important to have a clear understanding on when the critical mass of your customers will be ready to buy your product. It is always better to delay than to simply burn money on a market that is yet not ready to purchase.

Are you too close to the problem?

While you may have been thinking about these things for a while, it is sometimes beneficial to have a little distance or fresh eyes in order to find the right answers. This is where someone like me comes in. You might be surprised on the outcome if you were to consider asking the advice of someone that has many years in developing product plans and go to market strategies. And while such consulting services are not cheap, there are certainly a lot less money than to ship a product to the wrong target customers or at a bad time to market; or even worse to have forgotten how to monetize. Sales and marketing activities are many folds more expensive than product planning and building the right kind of product marketing strategy.

I would be more than happy to provide you some guidance, just drop me a line at michelbesner (at) me (dot) com …

 

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Promos: how to devalue a product really fast

May 28, 2010 Leave a comment

Over the past couple of days, I’ve received a few marketing emails that was offering me great discounts and promos. This got me thinking that many companies are just great at diminishing the real value of their products by having a disorganized, badly planned schedule of discounts and extensions of promos. Well planned and organized promos that fit within a global strategy do have some value, but you need to follow a few strict rules.

Promos need a hard time limit
If  you keep extending your promos again and again, you basically create a behaviour by which most customer will just wait until the next promo comes in before buying your software. It does not take much for a customer base to understand that you usually extend promos; so they do not necessarily feel the rush to go and buy before the deadline. No matter what, pick an end date to all your promos and stick to it.

Move away from cyclical or calendar based promos
Again, you want to prevent behaviours that make consumers wait for the next promo to arrive. So if you have a bad habit of having end of month/quarter/year sales, you are teaching your customers to wait for a given time. This also applies to making your sales quotas; linearity of sales should be more important than making your numbers. I know a few companies that basically went bankrupt because their customer always waited until the last days of the year to make the big purchases – getting this way the best discount possible. If you want to make such a promo, make it well focused (back to school for example), short enough (black friday sales) and do those rarely.

Discounts don’t need to be that steep
I often see 20-30% discounts (and sometimes even more) on software products. While these have very low COGS and high profit margins, it is not an excuse to go that deep on discounting. Sometimes just a 10 to 15% discount can go a long way. If customer need that of a deep discount to justify buying your product, perhaps your product is not well priced. A promo or discount should be just a little push in order to help the laggard make a buying decision.

Never have a promotion page on your web site
Once in a while you see companies having a permanent promotion tab on their web site. I believe that this is a really bad idea; it shows how much you use promos to drive revenue. Unless I really need to buy your product today, I will just bookmark this page and wait for the right discount to arrive. And since this becomes a widely used behaviour, the discount will indeed come; with sales not coming at the right level (again focus on linearity, not on sales quotas).

Never discount a product at launch (or even before)
I never liked pre-launch and on-launch product discounts. As you release a new product, this is where your customer base should be willing to pay the highest price (assuming your pricing is fair of course). Discounting from the get go just means you are telling your customer: “please disregard our standard pricing, they are bloated and know about it”. Announcing a new release should be exciting enough that your customer want to buy it; if it’s not the case, maybe you want to sit down with your product management team.

If you seeing yourself do some or all of these bad behaviours, you are ultimately hurting the product value and actually leaving money (i.e. better margins) on the table. Be smart about promos and make them fit within a global and well thought out strategy.

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Beyond the recession and blaming sales: check your Product Management

January 25, 2010 Leave a comment

Now that we are starting to see the end of the tunnel with this recession and startups have used this as a strong reason for lackluster performances (when they are not blaming their sales or marketing), it’s time to really evaluate our product plans. I find that too many times (and I’ve done the same mistake more than once) we forget to closely look at the cause (product plans) and focus all our energies on the symptoms (sales, marketing, economy).

The Economy is not the mother of all problems
Yes everybody has been hit to some degree by the recession but as things are picking up, this will be less of a reason to explain you’re past couple of missed quarters … Of course, we can always feel better when we compare to our competitors but, and this is a big but: I strongly believe that startups can navigate better in a storm. Startups should be nimble and quick enough to move around (some regions are doing better than other, re-focusing sales efforts for example).

When beating on sales and marketing does not suffice anymore
Ok by now, you have changed more than 75% of your sales team, re-built your marketing team two or three times, the average tenure for anyone in sales and marketing is now below one year. There is so much you can do by shuffling around sales and marketing resources. Rarely a good person turns bad in a few months (unless you have a very bad environment but let’s assume that is not the case). So what happened? Well, just like you can build a new software product (from scratch) in a few months, a sales and marketing team takes time to build and strengthen.

When was your last deep product review?
If you can’t just blame the economy and beat on the sales and marketing team, what else can you do? Clearly there is nothing wrong with the engineering team … Well, how do you decide what features (and why) are being done? How many customers will want to buy this upcoming release – are you on the right time to market? When was your last product review? So maybe your engineers review code together. I am talking here about a market driven product review. What were the steps that you took to decide what goes in (or not)? Have you measured if there are sufficient customers out there ready to buy this? And to buy this WHEN it is released? Great ideas and innovative technologies are all over, building and bringing to market a great product – not so much.

Small steps in product management yield great results in sales
I will not say it enough. Product Management is a common weakness in engineering heavy startups. How many engineers do you have? How many product managers and product designers? While a proper Product Management process requires investment in market research, product validation, and other important facets – you can always start small. This is what a believe is the best thing to do in any engineering driven company that is looking to be more market driven. Of course, this will take a few years before you have a fully functional Product Management process, but at least you will do better during each step of the process. You will be surprised on how much little steps can yield a much better product plan and roadmap.

Don’t be shy to challenge status quo
Ok sometimes it is not so easy to do so from the inside. This is a great opportunity to bring a consultant in and help you assess where you stand on both your Product Management process and how you can quickly improve your product plans. If you want to see how Product Management can make your overall business run better, please contact me an I can put you in touch with a talented Product Manager in your area …

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Never underestimate the customer buying experience

December 1, 2009 Leave a comment

How much do you understand what your customer is going thru in order to buy your product? How many hoops does he have to pass before he can talk to a sales rep? How many steps does he need to do before he can actually try your solution? As an entrepreneur, you need to walk in the shoes of your customers in order to understand how easy (or painful) you make the customer buying experience.

Assuming you know nothing
Too many times, we make wrong assumptions about what the customer is seeing. So when they complain, we do not understand, they most likely did not do it right. Did they? One simple test is to assume you know nothing – play dumb and try buying your product like it was the first time. Call a reseller (how easy is it to find one?), ask some basic question… try another one… are you getting the same message, the same answers?

Consistency is important
You are not getting the same message depending of which sales guy or reseller you are talking to; or even worse what they are saying is not exactly what the web site is saying? You have a big problem. Don’t take the cheesy response that each sales person has their own specific talent and they are adapting the message that will make them successful. While everyone has a different style and you can’t hire robots – you still need a consistent message. What your product does, why is it better than the competition and why the customer should buy it. The customer needs to get the same message period.

Understanding the path of buying
What are the steps that your customers usually take in order to make a buying decision? Does your company mimic that process? If your customer requires download a trial license, then make one available. If they need to have access to consulting, make someone available. While temptation is high to innovate, stay focused in not disturbing the buying cycle. You can still be creative but any radical change might just confuse the hell of your customer.

Make it obvious
The sales process needs to be intuitive for the customer. For each step that requires the customer to think and analyze in order to get it, you are loosing prospects. If you produced a video clip showing a great new feature, what is the next step that your web site offers to them? If you expect the customer to navigate to the “Contact” page then you are asking them to make an additional step. Adjust your real estate to place right beside the clip a form allowing them to ask for a trial or to contact you.

The elusive web site
How many times do you go thru the discovery process on your web site? What is your main page saying? Are you guiding the customer to a natural path where he will discover what you do, why this is important for them and why you are the best choice to address their needs? Do you like it when you go in a clothing store that the second you step in they already ask you if want to buy something and keep bugging you every two minutes? Probably not. So don’t do the same on your web site. Give the time to the customer to come in, walk around and when they start to show interest, then you can ask if you can assist and if they need help in making a buying decision.

No matter what you do, always take the time to experiment it yourself, ask friends and colleagues to try it for themselves, seek continuous feedback. The beauty is that if you listen, you will end up creating a beautiful customer buying experience – and win more business.

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Don’t let anecdotes run your business

October 29, 2009 Leave a comment

Don’t you love the excitement when you land a brand new deal?  The company is a big player in a market you never addressed before. Your current product does not do what they need but with a few extra efforts from the development team, you could. This is too good to pass up. The sheer excitement of having found the next big market for your business…

One deal does not make a trend
Entrepreneurs should never let anecdotes run the business. Yes these one off deals can be exciting and very profitable on an individual basis. But does this mean that you just entered a new market. As an example: if you are building a software for architectural design and it happens that one dentist purchases your solution, does this mean that you can stat selling to the dentistry industry? Of course not. While this is an extreme example, anecdotes do not make for real market trends – or new market opportunities.

Can you repeat more than once
Ok lets say that you truly believe that this is a new trend or a new market, how easy would it be to sell exactly the same solution to more than one customer? If you can actually do this many time, then great; perhaps you have stumbled into a new market. If you product needs to have new features for each new potential customer, then you are blind being led by a blind. Step back from the excitement and try to be realistic on your ability to repeat a deal many times without requiring extra product development work.

Adjusting a product to a new market
So if you can’t really repeat the anecdote that easily, you need to evaluate if this is a market you want to enter. This is where Product Validation is a key element in determining if you are on the right track. IF you are able to define a feature set and competitive positioning that will allow you the successfully build a product for more than one customer, then maybe it’s worth the time to investigate.

But in my own experiences, anecdotes are usually just that – nothing more. So you should set a limit on the number of anecdotes you try to nail in a given time; even better if you decline to steer away from your plan. Of course, some people might just call this FOCUS.

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The Purpose of a Web Site

September 18, 2009 2 Comments

Of course, everybody knows that you need to have a web site for your Company. But are you clear about its purpose for your specific needs? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads or even sell your product online?

Having a clear understanding of what is the purpose of the site as well as having measurable targets and objectives is fundamental to having a web site that will actually help to grow your business – not just spending Marketing dollars.

Targeted audience

Who are the people that you want to attract to your web site? If it’s a targeted audience, you need to be able to articulate what they are looking for and how you need to design your site in order to be compelling and valuable for them. If you are selling a product, you need to take the visitor by the hand and lead him thru a discovery process that will lead them ultimately to contact you or to buy directly your product from the site. Having a BUY NOW button on the front page of a B2B web site even before you have explained why someone should consider buying your solution will result in virtually no click-thru.

Telling a story

Visitors to your site may not fully grasp all the value of your offering. You need to think of telling a story with the end result of getting them to contact you. Why would they care about what you do? Why is this valuable for their business? This requires you to build a journey where the prospects will navigate and inform/document themselves about your solution. Pushing a bunch of action calls such as request a demo, contact us and buy now won’t help the process unless they are ready to be pro-active with their visit. Think of your own experience on the web. How many times to you ask to contact a company unless you are convinced you want to talk to someone? The web is a lot about self-service; create a great web experience and they will end up contacting you – if you have the right product of course.

Limit the number of calls to action

Customers are very good at determining when they are ready to talk to you. In the meantime, provide them with sufficient content that will inform and educate them: e-books, video, white papers, etc. The call to actions on any page needs to make sense for the visitor. If you are entering a product overview page of an expensive B2B solution, the next step should be GET MORE INFO, not BUY NOW.  The more the lead learns about your product thru self-service, the lower your cost of sales will be. Forcing a quick transfer of a web lead to a manual/human driven process is cost prohibitive and is not scalable. As a rule of thumb, you should not have more than 3 calls to action: one for additional info, one for referencing (customer stories, etc) and lastly (and really the last item) one asking to contact you – this should NEVER be the first call to action in a B2B world.

Nurturing leads on the Web takes time

Like many things in life, nothing happens overnight and a web site is no exception. You need to continuously improve your site for targeted traffic and help the visitors navigate thru a positive learning experience about your company and the solutions you sell. There is no quick fix and the stronger the content on your site will be, the better you will do. Look at metrics that can actually help achieve the goals and objectives of your site. For example, if you want to improve credibility and demonstrate the strength of your solution, do not track necessarily traffic size but rather the quality of the feedback of the leads that come in or the number of inbound links to your site.

Bottom line: stay focused on your objectives and give yourself time to measure success…

One key tool to improve your web site is to have proper launch plans, read more

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What’s the point of a Launch Plan?

September 3, 2009 Leave a comment

How annoying can it be to build a launch plan – can’t we just launch the product and get over it?  Sounds funny but I am sure that I lot of people think like this – just because they do not understand the importance of planning ahead. The success of a launch is as successful as the planning that when into it. Just to take a sport analogy: every pro team has a pre-built playbook that has been reviewed and rehearsed before game time. No hockey player just goes on the ice and wings it…

If you are expecting a well designed and synchronized execution across multiple stakeholders, you need to have a launch plan. This is how everybody can be on the same page for every details including: messaging, positioning, and timeline of events and activities. This is even more important when you are dealing with people in multiple time zones and working with 3rd party partners and suppliers. There is nothing worse than to see a component being executed at the wrong time or even worse being forgotten.

Key Elements that I look for in a product launch plan include:

  • Product Information
  • Customer Definition
  • Target Customers
  • Market Sizing, Projections and Trends
  • Competition & Competitive Summary
  • GTM Objectives & Success Metrics
  • Product Positioning & Messaging
  • Buyer Persona
  • Messaging & Positioning for Press & Analysts
  • Marketing Programs, Deliverables and Budget

Just like a business case, there are a lot of details in a launch plan that is usually overlooked – and that is a shame. The better your plan is, the better the execution and delivery will be. Don’t underestimate the lack of clarity that can happen even in the smallest of the companies. You need to make sure that everyone can quickly repeat the product launch message including why are you doing this release and to whom does this bring value …

Which brings me to the point of the buyer persona (definition courtesy of Pragmatic Marketing). The buyer persona is a short biography of the typical customer; not just a job description but rather a person description. It comments on the buyer’s background, daily activities, and how they deal with their current set of problems. How can you sales team be successful if there is no clarity about the buyer you are targeting – of course you can always wing it and make a few deals – but that is not a scalable business.

Bottom line, the key to a successful launch is execution; you need to spend the time to do regular review of the play by play of all the activities. This is the only way you can make sure that everyone is on the same page and that there are no confusion about the launch. At first, this process can sound tedious but you will be surprised how much the better product launches are managed like clockwork …

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The value of doing Product Validation

August 26, 2009 5 Comments

It is always interesting to look and the evolution of a technology that slowly becomes a product. Most engineering teams in startups will begin by assembling some cool features that could be sold to a few customers. But how much of a product do you need before you can actually sell your solutions to a large audience? How long before you “cross the chasm”?

The wrong way about this would be to keep adding features over features in the hopes of nailing it at some point (i.e. Feature Creep). Again, there will be always exceptions that will show that this could work but from a business standpoint, that is taking a lot of risk – both on time and money. What if there was a way to rapidly determine a market, the problems they have and how quickly can you bring to market a solution? It’s called Product Validation.

A few years ago, I was fortunate to come across a system that allowed management to objectively measure the quality of a product plan and what kind of financial results would arise from releasing this product. In short, SyncDev allows you to start with an idea or a product concept, make it tangible by test-selling it. As you go thru the process, you’ll find problems, fix them and continue as necessary until you have the right product to bring to market.

To begin, you create a core team of Product Management, Marketing, Sales and R&D that will work on the validation process (lead by Product Management). Once you have your initial “sales pitch”, you go on the road with the ENTIRE core team. That’s right, everybody get’s to listen in on the feedback the prospects and customers will have on the product idea. As you continue your tours, you end up refining the product plan (remove what does not resonate with clients, refine what stuck in their minds). The whole process is to give a voice to the customers: you are not trying to convince them but rather to listen to what they have to say.

The outcome is better user adoption of the released product, shorter time to money and minimized risk by doing what’s right (a.k.a Minimum Viable Product vs. Feature Creep). And as an added benefit, you might be surprised to hear your sales team saying that these were the best customer meetings they ever attended …

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