PartnerTalks’ Post

Transcript

Hello everybody. My name is Rick McCutcheon. I'm a Dynamics 365 MVP, and I'm here today with Marie Wiese, who is now also a Microsoft MVP. Marie, tell us who you are, what you do, and how did you become an MVP? Ooh, that'll take a long time that that question. My name is Marie Weiss. I'm the CEO of a company called Marketing Copilot and I've been running this business as since 2006. And we help Microsoft partners and end customers figure out marketing automation. We help them with their go to market strategies and we provide a lot of marketing services to companies who don't want to have to deploy marketing themselves. So that's where we started. But over the last 10 years, we've slowly focused all of our time and energy on the Microsoft Channel, helping people within the Microsoft Channel and. By with respect to the MVP thing, I, I have to say I took the advice of my friend Rick McCutcheon and went to a lot of conferences and contributed a lot of thought leadership and content and did a lot of speaking engagements and connected with the community. Started to see who was talking about different things related to CRM and marketing automation, particularly around Dynamics. That's how I first got in there. And this year I was made an MVP in AI and so I. I'm excited about that. We've been building a couple of products and testing some things in the area of sales and marketing around this. I mean everybody in their uncle is scrambling to do something with I talk about AI. I think it's interesting, but there's still a lot of work that needs to be done to get the fundamentals right in sales and marketing. And Rick, I think that's what we're going to talk about today is, you know, before you start layering on these other tools, let's get the fundamentals right. So I'm glad you brought this up the other day in a conversation. I thought we should get on to talk about it because, you know, trade shows are coming back strongly. Now. We just came out of the spring trade show world and last fall, you know, you and I are both were involved with the user group communities and the big DCI show, and it was a great show. Lots of traffic and I'm talking to vendors, ISV's that are getting 2300 leads. And now when I talk to them again, let's say three to six months after the show, how were the leads? They were OK. Right. And I think, well, what do you mean with OK, were the people you wanted to talk to? Yes, right. And I think the whole concept of. They should have converted already, right? You know, they should go from the idea stage that, you know, this may work for me to the convert stage very quickly in order to make it a good lead. So for me, I need leads that are going to close where, you know, in our world, where we do, we've built content. We've been at this for years. We realized that someone saw a piece of content three years ago. They're now behind today, right? It sometimes it doesn't happen overnight. But I think, you know, that's the conversation I wanna have with you today. What are you seeing happening out there and why are people in such a rush? Well, we've talked a lot in the past about buyer behavior and what the buyer journey looks like and what the buyer is doing before they even hit your website or they pick up the phone and call your sales Rep or show up at a trade show and introduce themselves. And what I'm discovering, particularly in the last 18 months, is buyer behavior has gotten even more. Um, scrupulous than before. So it wasn't even five years ago that we talked about five to seven touches in order for somebody to become aware of something and engage with you in that first engagement, whether it's on your website, giving you an e-mail address, doing whatever. Now we're up over 30. And. What I think the misconception in the marketplace is right now is that. These things with digital and AI and all these things that we have to do to create a strong relationship with prospect and actually get them to purchase something is actually becoming harder, not easier. There's a misconception that tools like AI and all these other things are going to generate all these content, but guess what? It's harder, not easier. We're seeing a significant decline in engagement on LinkedIn. We're seeing significant decline in engagement on e-mail marketing. And some of these shows you were talking about, I've been able to do some some presentations to sponsors and communities on e-mail marketing as an example, and how you should use e-mail after trade show. And I ask people, did you keep in touch with these people throughout the year or did you just send them one e-mail after the trade show and say, hey, great seeing you at the trade show, Call me if you want something. Because people expect a ton of value and a ton of relationship building before they do anything. There's so much choice out there. Supply exceeds demand 20 fold. And so you're only one of about 20 solutions that somebody has to fix a problem. If you're not talking to them in ways that resonate with them, connect with them. Really identify how to solve a problem. It doesn't matter how much e-mail you send out or how many keep in touch newsletters you send. It's not going to resonate. And to get that kind of content is hard work. It takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of effort, it takes a plan, it takes consistency. It as you pointed out, it could take two years before somebody you met at the show turns into a sales ready lead. Want to give you a good example, Marie, I'm gonna stop you right here because I just passed the mark on 200 partner talks. And how many and how many sessions have you done to your podcast? Over 150. Alright, And how long have you been at it? Six years and then how many podcasts and shows like partner talks have come and gone after 10, you know, sessions because I wasn't getting in business out of it. Right, exactly, exactly. And so when we talk about the three sort of tenants that you should be aware of in your marketing awareness consideration conversion and that's not conversion to a sale, that's conversion to a sales ready lead. The content required in each one of those categories and how you weight your marketing program takes some sophistication and fine tuning. People who are out doing awareness activities, which quite frankly, I put a trade show in the awareness category. That does not mean I have somebody considering my product just because they stopped by my booth and I gave them a free pair of socks. There has to be a level of effort of demonstrating you understand the customer's problem, you have a solution for it and you're probably a very cost effective or function rich solution for that specific problem. And that's what we call value proposition. So I mentioned we've built a couple of tools. If you go on to our website, marketingcopilot.com, you'll see Marketing Copilot AI and you can click on there and you can put the URL from your website in it. We're not asking for any information. It's not gated. Just throw your URL in there and you'll get a response that we created in AI with a series of prompts that explains what the world seeing what it analyzes, your value proposition. And you know what, I've done this a few times and most companies, I don't wanna say you pass or fail, but they fail, right? Because this is what they're selling. This is their or this is the value proposition of what I'm selling. And it's not there. They're talking about everything else and giving everybody this message or trying to be 1000 feet wide when they should be, you know, three feet wide and, and what they're offering. You know, like, let's use an example. I'm not saying there's a specific company out there in the channel that's doing this, but let's just say I go to somebody's website and I see the most trusted Microsoft partner in. Alabama, well, throw whatever we want in after that in real estate, we'll throw it out. And then I think, OK, So what kind of content is going to be on the website to validate and back up this statement that you're the most trusted Microsoft partner? OK, so you've got some certifications. So does every other Microsoft partner. So you've got some solutions that you might have cookie cutters or figured out that runs off Dynamics and you do it in a more efficient way. So do lots of other people. All you have to do is go into the app source today and see who's listing in the app Source and what they're listing. And so it's not just the clarity of your value proposition for your ultimate buyer, it's whether you have the proof points and whether you're proving it to be true. And a really good value proposition is something that accompany proves to be true every day in the work they do. And it's not just a tagline, it's not a positioning statement, it's not a missioning statement. It's none of those things. It's a precise articulation of why should I buy from you? And in a channel that's flooded with partners. And we all do something slightly different, we all do something slightly better. We all do something maybe in a different way. But in a marketplace flooded. With the same types of companies. Your only job as a CEO should be articulating your value proposition and proving it to be true every day. And what is our North Star? What makes us somehow unique or better that you should follow us, right? Because if you lose that and you become, I don't want vanilla like everybody else, then there's no reason to follow you and to listen to you. This is why thought leadership content is so important and so few partners really understand. You know all we did a thought leadership session and we only got we didn't get that. Their leads or the leads weren't that good. No, you don't do it because of the leads. You do it because you want your company to see you talking about it. You want your partners to see you talking about it, and you want Microsoft to see you talking about it. And you might get lucky in a new prospect sees you talking about it. But we want you to hold that ground. Find where you, you know, find your North Star, find who you want to be and be that consistently over time, and you'll win. Right. And we tell people you should go back and review your value proposition once a year. Once a year, at the end of the fiscal year, do a customer scorecard. We have customer scorecards on our website you can download and it shows you how to go back over your last 12 months of deals and figure out who was a good customer and who wasn't. So what do we have to model around that good customer to get go find more of them? Nobody does this work. Nobody rolls up their sleeves and wants to do this work. We all want the quick win. We all want the silver bullet that's going to get us. You know, 10 new customers in the door and guess what? It's not working that way. And these companies have to, and I, you know, you do a lot of work with Isvs. And Isvs are notorious for focusing on features and functions and what they built on top of, you know, G or on top of dynamics or whatever they built it on. And they are not spending the time to talk about why it matters. And in some cases you're going to have companies who build stuff on top of Great Plains or GP and now you're into. Business applications. You're into all new products. Doing things with power platforms and that value proposition doesn't hold true anymore. What it did on a product like Great Plains is very different than might might do in Business Central or or something else that we're grappling with with our customers. And you know, one of the things that that every single partner I work with, you know, wants to tell me is how great they are at upgrades, transitioning customers want from 1 product to another. And I always say to them. Have you ever had a customer who's come to you and said we are so thrilled to be upgrading our technology? We're so excited, We can't wait to do it. And how Like, no, I said, it's a job everybody hates. It's like taking out the trash. You need to find a different way to talk about this. Yes, you need to include in your messaging that you're technically savvy, but that can't be the message exactly. And I think, you know, just that is one thing I'm seeing. I come back from these trade shows with the directories and I look to see the company name and what their value prop is. And it's like. Repetitive, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive. Very few people are standing out, which is mind boggling to me because if you did take the time to create that thought leadership, take that time to create that unique value proposition, and stand out, you'd win. You would be so far ahead. So it it really. Makes me wonder sometimes and, and it, it's, I know it's hard work. I know this is not easy. And because if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Absolutely. So on that note, Marie, I'm going to have to say we're at time, but we're going to continue this conversation. We've got a lot of events coming up this fall. We're going to do some more educational content on Ms. Dynamics world around this subject, right? How do you get your message across? And keep it there and get your. Ecosystem to understand who you are and what you do O Marie, always a pleasure talking to you and we'll be back again in the near future to talk more about. How do you market in this this world of dynamics? Absolutely. And Congrats on 200 episodes. That's a huge accomplishment. Well done. Alright, thank you and bye for now.