Yep, this is the end-game of "customers buy benefits, not features" marketing writing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fully on board with the idea of marketing your benefits, not features, but so very much of the marketing writing you see out there now takes the concept to this unhelpful extreme.
I ride my bike past a shop every few days that's called something like "Shelter Solutions," but in smaller print they say "We rent equipment for commercial and residential roofing need". Boom, done, that's what I care about.
Or some lady who gave me a fistful of business cards at a networking event (she apparently has five thriving gigs, eyeroll), one of which was "telecommunications solutions consultant"--talking to her, she has some cell phone MLM program she's a part of.
Customers buy benefits, but if you're not telling them what the features are, you've failed at writing clear copy. Most people do.
I sometimes feel like I'm an alien on this planet. I can't imagine how "customers buy benefits, not features" could possibly work.
What I mean is this - I'm not going to buy a product that I don't understand, period. Be it a piece of software (from kitten photo apps to CAD software) or an appliance, I only buy (and ever imagine buying) things for which I at least clearly understand what inputs and outputs are. I can use this software to upload JPGs to friends. I put dirty dishes in this appliance, add some consumables, and clean dishes pop out. Those are "features", not "benefits".
On the other hand, when I see people selling on "benefits", I immediately assume they're dishonest and steer away. The listed benefits usually are, at best, a serious abuse of some cherry-picked words, and at worst outright lies. It's one of the strongest negative signals for me when evaluating companies (especially when I don't have third-party information on their actual products).
Do most people really live their lives looking for something to buy that will make their lives "connected", or their company "full of streamlined cloud synergy" or something?
Given how the sales and marketing people at my place of employment respond to corporate announcements... they'll probably do anything to arrange words and phrases into something that triggers a "sounds like a corporate executive" response from their superiors.
This is exactly what happens in enterprise software companies. I've been part of a team that built a $100m ACV SaaS service from 2010 to today. Recently our sales have been taking a big dip and I've been trying to workout what is going on.
What I discovered resonates with this blog post...
1. I compared powerpoint decks from 2010 to 2017. The pictures got better but the fluff and high level descriptions got further and further away from what our product actually does! I think this is due to multiple marketing leaders taking over and putting their veneer on the marketing message rather than sticking with the current message in order to justify their role.
2. Current sales reps are taught the high level benefits and problem the solution solves but they had no idea of the basics. So again when they speak to potential customers they sound like a Deloitte consultant using words that are so far away from the basic issue a customer is trying to solve.
3. R&D also became focused on the high level benefits and forgot that we sell technology and features DO actually matter they just shouldn't be the only focus of a sales/marketing team.
Its interesting to see that most sales strategies today imbue this idea but I think what happened is most of us have gone so far off the map that we end up with Meltwater problems.
I've been trying for several years to determine the company size at which we will be forced to turn our understandable site into marketing buzzwords and incomprehensible sentences. 50 people? $5 million/year in revenue? What is the turning point and who drops by to force us into incomprehensibility?
I don't know, but there are phrases on my company's website that literally don't mean anything to me, and I work on the product it's supposed to be referencing. We have about 100 employees.
It's probably the point where what you're selling is so amorphous, customizable, and expensive that it's different for each customer and you want to be able to say "Yes, we solve that problem" to everything. Maybe 7 figures per sale?
The bait-sunk-cost approach = get em talking however you need to (including them asking what the hell you actually do) to tell you what they want and sell your solution as a possibility or the best approach.
I hate this transparent attempt to trick (me) the customer. IBM has done this to me when I'm drilling down into technical requirements like I'm some middle manager who doesn't know the actual needs. I always suspected that IBMs bread and butter is to move the sunk cost of contact into an actual sunk cost of technical debt, but I have firsthand experience now. The sign of a bad culture and lazy marketing.
One problem is people trying to pack ALL the features and ideas into that summary. So in the pursuit of wanting everyone to get the entire vision, the "what you offer right now" is lost.
As a company's product offerings expand into many, this gets even harder.
This is some Silicon-Valley-the-HBO-show-grade stuff. I wonder whether the people designing these website still think they're being hip or they just have to cater to some blissfully unaware managers.
> the more expensive the service a B2B company provides, the more incomprehensible its website
> I think the big companies do it to get you on the phone — so they can upsell.
I was thinking these things, and then BOOM, he says what I'm thinking haha.
These are sales oriented companies. By contrast, B2C is quantity oriented. They need more customers buying their mostly undifferentiated price tiers. Selling expensive pants vs regular pants isn't worth high touch sales. However, in B2B, selling "really really expensive enterprise plan" vs "regular enterprise plan" is definitely worth high touch sales. They want to do everything they can to get you "interested, but confused" and pick up the phone.
You may want to get them "confused" (or, to use a more positive phrase, excited), but crucially, you don't want them to get sticker shock. Most software is essentially free on the margin. You don't want to leave $20k on the table by scaring them with a $40k price tag, but you also don't want to charge someone who'd be happy to pay you $50k tens of thousands less, just because you felt called to put a number on your website.
That kind of pricing is bad in the long run, though, because that customer who paid $50k is eventually going to learn that their competitor only paid you $20k and then they're going to be pissed at you about it forever and ever.
Will they learn about it? Or will they be pissed about it? For the former point, people move jobs, people talk, word gets around. For the latter, that's just human nature.
In practice, the $50k customer will typically be getting something tangible that the $20k customer isn't. Perhaps they have a custom feature developed, perhaps they have special on-call/on-site support, perhaps they pay a much discounted unit-price, say $10/user (but for 5000 light users) where the other customer is paying $200/user for 100 heavy users.
If you're selling the exact same product ("exact" in the business-sense that includes stuff like support or long-term price commitments, not in the geek-sense where CentOS is the exact same as RedHat) for two vastly different price points, you should probably make sure those customers don't meet.
It's an answer that provides a possibly logical reason for the behavior but I don't buy it.
Firstly because inbound phone calls are incredibly rare. Maybe it's more common for people to pick up the phone in the states but in my three years selling B2B SaaS (enterprise and startup) I never received a hot inbound lead on the phone. It's a bit different if your market leader but most companies and products aren't so I don't think it's a valid strategy.
Secondly because if you are doing a proper inbound strategy you need to entice people with content, product demonstrations or trials (ie showing the product).
Finally, if you want to obfuscate your offering, you don't need to hide it behind a bunch of mumbo jumbo. People rarely understand exactly what your product does even if you give them full access to it for a month.
I think the reason is simpler. A mixture of incompetence - B2B companies don't have the marketing savvy of FMCGs - and the fact competitors don't do a much better job. It's harder to write a clear, concise and enticing description of what you do than just generating buzzwordy corporate bs. It looks marketingy, so the copy is going to be signed off by everyone. Besides, everyone else in the industry is throwing around the same buzzwords, so you get this bubble of nonsense speak and everyone just rolls with it.
B2B startups don't rely on inbound phone calls, they want you to leave your email, phone number, and company size in order to "receive a case study", "book a product demo", or "subscribe to a newsletter", and that's when the real sales process starts.
They put a lot of money and effort into sales and marketing, and you underestimate them by thinking that it's a sign of incompetence.
We're talking about why a lot of B2B tech companies have a lot buzzwordy nonsense instead of descriptions of what they can do for their customers (this is not unique to tech companies, I would say this goes for most B2B) and the theory put forward was that it's to get people to pickup the phone so they can understand what the fuck the product does. This is what I debunked.
I literally worked as a salesrep at a fairly big B2B marketing startup and one of the largest enterprise software companies.
What you refer to is content marketing to generate inbound leads. Those leads would then be put on a mailing list and and an outbound process would start. Except the "book a demo" (inbound lead) which I never recall leading to a good deal.
If you are a small stage startup with a small sales team you can probably get by on inbound but you have to go outbound to saturate the market. Even then, having poor description is going to hurt your Google fu so I don't buy the strategy.
If your the market leader, like salesforce in crm, you're going to see a lot of inbound but that's because people know your product and you're gartner quadrant status. Even then you'd still do maybe 50/50 inbound outbound.
In either case, the "it's shit because it works" argument still doesn't really hold up.
They put a lot of money into sales, they put a lot of money into going to conferences. They do not, however, seem to put really any money into a decent copywriter.
All very good points. I was just saying that in my opinion they might be intentionally abstract to make you feel like they can solve all your problems, and vague enough to convince you to leave your contact details to find out more, but the ultimate goal is to get you into the funnel. I think we agree on most points, I just think it's not necessarily a sign of incompetence.
That might be the case but vagueness doesn't sell.
I'm not saying the message should be an engineering manual of the ins and outs the product but it should be clear, concise and entice customers to give the product further attention.
Consider seo description field of HubSpot
>HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.
Vs. Optimizely
> Be brave, experiment everywhere, and transform your customer experience with Optimizely.
Last point is on the dot. I work to optimize websites and bring this issue with clients all the time. In the end, a mid-level in house marketing guru will convince his seniors that this is the way to go - after all how else will they justify their jobs?
Worth noting is I learnt jack shit about copywriting in my communications degree. You'd have to work in an agency, FMCG, media or similar industry to learn that stuff and in my experience, you don't often see that in tech.
I feel your pain. I just brought the Google fu aspect up in another comment.
Or it is just a case of the site contents not having a very big priority, because your contracts come from person to person sales anyway; and the need of never saying anything dangerous, because your sales people will tell all kinds of different stories to all kinds of people, and your site must contradict none.
Definitely could be this as well. The answer to "can the product do _____" may entirely depend on who's asking. If its a big enough customer at a high enough price, they may want the ability to say "yes".
Also, the more expensive your product, the higher up the ladder you have to sell because corporate budgets work that way. While people who will be using the product want to know what the product does, senior managers with budget approval want to know something more abstract, like will it improve their ROI by accelerating synergies or leverage their human capital to drive innovation. It can be more important to optimize the website for the people approving the budget.
I will second the website optimization for all audiences in general. When I come across a vendor website and I find I am spammed by "read our whitepapers" popups or stop-right-there page, I usually judt quit, unless I find the product interesting. I also prefer if vendor doesn't ask for an email address before letting me download. I get it is needed for marketing, but if I really do like your product, I will follow up.
Finally, usually sales end up with either director of engineering/whatever or VP/SVP, so do a really good presentstion...
some B2Bs started out doing one thing and then end up doing all kinds other random crap that clients just decided they rather have one team managing a whole project rather than spread out over 200 vendors and contractors and managing it themselves. there's nothing wrong with that! some clients are fighting to keep their business afloat instead of spending all day individually managing their service vendors. and if the B2B gets paid for that kind of work, it's sometimes worth doing.
so if you're a B2B with experience herding 200 different vendors and contractors doing odd crap for a single project, why not advertise it? alas when you do it just sounds really generic like "enterprise solutions" or even "everything". i mean, these companies in the article probably started off doing data analytics then ended up being really good at hooking up internal systems with data collection and then also doing consulting and then marketing and every other thing because their clients must have asked for follow up on their products.
to the author of the medium article. if you see that these companies do everything, why not just give them a call and ask them if they can do that one specific thing? chances are, they've done it before, and even if they haven't, maybe they'll do it for you anyway?
I think intentional obscurity is probably rare. I think it's more of an evolutionary explanation. We don't get old age illnesses in old age because they're useful, preventing old age illness is just less useful than preventing prime age illness.
Clarity is difficult, and if it rarely makes a difference to businesses then it gets left out.
One reason clarity is difficult is that it requires narrowing what you say. Measurable accountable and integrated business software solutions. From the outside this sounds pointless and meaningless. From the inside it sounds nice and wide, encompassing everything they do. Better too broad than too narrow.
People's CVs sometimes have the same problem, resistance to limiting language.
The reason it doesn't matter is the way they get business. In face-to-face sales, clarity is surprisingly unimportant. It can even hurt by allowing prospects to raise objections without the presence of a salesman. Basically, the company's marketing doesn't matter, so it sucks.
More likely that when you don't get it, that you're probably not the target audience. B2B companies typically have pretty narrow target personas, wither their very own set of needs and challenges. They need to get it. The rest does not really matter.
Marketing is hard. Writing compelling advertising copy is hard. Figuring out what people want and need to know about your product is hard.
Getting some designer with a great visual portfolio to make your website isn't the same thing as having a marketing plan or a marketing strategy, but it's a whole lot faster and cheaper and unfortunately most people don't know the difference.
Oh, and as awesome as Simon Sinek's Ted talk[0] is, you're not Apple and potential customers actually do care whether your product is useful for people like them.
I want to see this guy review the Tarsnap website. For all that some people don't like my web design, I'd like to think that it's very easy to figure out what Tarsnap is.
Oh, okay, that makes sense. Probably some super-secure online backup service...
>Encryption: Your data can only be accessed with your personal keys. We can't access your data even if we wanted to!
>Source code: The client code is available. You don't need to trust us; you can check the encryption yourself!
>Deduplication: Only the unique data between your current files and encrypted archives is uploaded.
Wow, that's... extremely clear. That's literally everything I wanted to know, save for maybe pricing...
>Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data
>Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data
...aha, it's something confusing!
>($0.25 / GB-month)
...never mind. This is extremely clear.
I could keep going, but as far as copy, this website is excellent. And even the design could be considered a plus given your target audience.
Though if Tarsnap ever gets a GUI, I would suggest giving the website one as well :)
I agree with your assessment of Tarsnap's website and had a quick look at my firm's website. Whilst we haven't sprouted web2arrhoea bootstrapped bollocks ... yet, I'll be having words with my marketing bods tomorrow.
The web design is indeed ugly, but at least it is functional.
Here are some easy to implement design suggestions: You should change the title of the first heading so it's not the same as the banner. I think "What is Tarsnap?" is a good choice. Speaking of the banner, vectorize it. Finally, please remove the bars from the asides.
Your product is good, so transferring a little attention to its web presence is worth the effort.
It's not ugly, so much as unconventional. It's also aimed at developers rather than c-levels or the general public. As for 'what is tarsnap?', the very first block of regular text on the tells you, in bullet-point form. It's the first place a native English speaker looks to read something; I read the text in the box before I read the heading for the box.
I hope he doesn't listen to the folks saying he should follow the herd. Websites where you have to page down below the fold to get basic information on the product? We should be pointing them at Tarsnap. But flat design is king on mobile, so we won't be getting many of these website layouts anymore.
picodollars - you've lost me, even though I'm tech.
I don't think this website should be made to "look better" i.e turned into some corporate garbage, but it could definitely look better... looks kinda like an open source programmers best shot at making something look good.
There's a middle ground between looking corporate (irrelevant) and looking unprofessional.
In your shoes I would be going for a style of "very plain, but very neat" looking. Aiming for perfectly spaced between elements, attractive font, minimal but matching colors. Function graphics only.
I thought Meltwater's flagship product was media monitoring, which their slogan kind of captures:
> Welcome to Outside Insight
> Billions of online conversations, freshly filtered.
The title of their landing page is even more to the point:
> Media Intelligence, Media Monitoring, and Social Monitoring
I thought Optimizely was an A/B testing tool, which makes their punchline OK:
> Optimizely lets you experiment on everything—from design choices to algorithms. That way the best ideas always win, and the best customer experiences get even better.
I suppose this only adds to his argument though, it's hard to tell what companies do.
You're right, Meltwater and Optimizely aren't as bad as it gets (84.51 definitely is). And after spending some time on those websites, you're able to get a pretty good sense for what they do.
My main point is that it shouldn't ever be difficult for a potential customer to quickly get to that understanding, and I do believe these sites could do a far better job at quickly and clearly explaining their companies' function... just like you did.
"Meltwater's flagship product is media monitoring". "Optimizely is a website A/B testing tool". Boom.
I think they want to be able to pivot and add new services without having to retract how they previously labeled themselves.
For instance, Optimizely has a website A/B testing tool. They also support smartphone app A/B testing, and I think some backend/server-side testing. If smart watches or VR take off, they'll probably try to support those as well.
They also recently added automated content generation: I know they can generate product and page recommendations, and there may be other options as well.
They're a relatively young company and probably aren't ready to be typecast as "website A/B testing," in case another offering really takes off.
My startup is focused on customer-oriented experiential personalized relationship-building solutions by leveraging distributed smart reactive coin offerings powered by unsupervised blockchain adversarial deep learning supported by containerized self-driving car clouds.
Investors plz line up, take a number, and contact me thru PM.
My company is "a leading provider of business process services with expertise in transaction-intensive processing, analytics and automation. We serve as a trusted business partner in both the front office and back office, enabling personalized, seamless interactions on a massive scale that improve end-user experiences"
Designers have nothing to do with it. Most designers unless specifically hired to also write copy, use placeholder text. It's usually the inhouse marketing person who has marketing language fatigued drilled down from their bosses that can't think straight to get the right words out. I don't blame those people, I feel sorry for them.
Bezos was infamous for jealously controlling every pixel on the Amazon landing page. You could easily imagine a better design but at least you knew what to do.
I think the main problem is that people assume that in order to sell expensive products/services, the website needs to have 50 pages and feel like a complex entity. We sell a B2B UI Design service to web and mobile development companies, all we have is a simple one pager that doesn't do anything except explain in plain-english what the service is about. We have people buying/subscribing to our service sometimes as fast as a B2C product. I personally wouldn't want to be a slimly salesman on the phone, hide our prices and have complex copy on the website. The customers that do want that are not a fit for us. So the question is, what type of a customer are you trying to attract?
It all depends on what kind of business you are running. Your 2k design package might be great for someone on a budget but a large number of businesses want value and don't focus on price. Ironically you are attracting a certain kind of client yourself. You post about attracting 300 clients but do you talk about the quality of life of your employees? Do hey work minimum wage? Outsourced to India? I have no idea what kind of quality of life you create for your employees at your rates. Not to mention you are selling a commodity not a specialized service so to say that people are blissfully unaware of affordable companies like yours might be better achieved on junk showcase sites like dribbble - spew out a bunch of garbage and see what sticks.
Also, PUT THE PRICES ON THERE. Even more infuriating than a company that won't tell you what they do is a company that tells you what they do and then demands you contact them to be salespersoned at before they'll tell you the price. Fuck you, no.
I understand they aren't getting my business without prices listed. I don't get to make any multi-million dollar decisions (except maybe in the extreme long term) but several times I've been tasked with research problems where commercial software or external services may be part of the solution. The ones with no prices get taken out of the evaluation process because I can't evaluate if they're feasible or not.
Whenever I'm seriously considering purchasing an enterprise B2B product, I mostly know what they do before visiting their website. I've heard of them already, either through word of mouth, or by explicitly asking friends for recommendations. I suspect that I'm not too different from most purchasers.
If a company's targeting a landing page for someone like me, perhaps they shouldn't optimize for clarity; they should optimize for signaling reliability. So, the "Web 20.17 parallax-ed boots[t]rap-ed responsive home page" serves a purpose - it reminds me of all the other Web 20.17... B2B services I've happily used in the past.
I'm probably ascribing way too much significance to the semiotics of B2B homepages [1]. But I find it tough to believe that (e.g.) Optimizely hasn't, well, optimized their homepage for something.
[1] Also, take what I say with a huge grain of salt. My business' homepage needs a lot of work...
Agreed. Probably for some B2B companies, getting people talking about your product and then having a vague but fancy landing page makes sense. Landing pages need to be optimized to create sequences of actions that lead to "buy" decisions. So maybe: 1) Developer at company X hears good things about Y from Hackernews 2) Cost of product for X is high enough that it needs to be approved by senior people at the company 3) These senior decision makers may not be engineers, and they may just look at the landing page as a marker of how well capitalized the company is / if they give the impression that if customization is required, company Y will be willing to step outside the bounds of "shrink wrapped software" to accommodate company X's needs.
Websites like that are "websites for the record". There are certain markets who think it's weird that a company doesn't have a website, but don't really care about the content or how it looks.
A lot of the text seems to be placeholder/written by a designer who asked about what the company wanted for the content and never got a response.
They just raised a $140m round of financing so apparently they have some good stuff going on. If you look at the website though:
The Unified Analytics Platform. Accelerate innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.
Sorry, what? Click on "learn more about the platform":
DATABRICKS IS A TRULY UNIFIED APPROACH TO DATA ANALYTICS AT SCALE. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.
I still have no clue what exactly TF the product is but I sure got my weekly dose of BS buzzwords.
Not a Hadoop distribution as Databricks uses S3 and DBIO for storage not HDFS. It doesn't even use Yarn so it can't really be called Hadoop at all.
Basically the product is Spark Notebooks (think Juypter) on AWS that allow you to quickly create clusters and even do fancy stuff with spark streaming.
A key thing that people miss also is the the creator of Spark is the CTO of Databricks and Databricks to some extent controls the direction of Spark. This probably impacts its valuation.
I kind of disagree with you. Working in data science myself, I get that scientists, engineers and business people are not on the same page. Scientists like python hacks, engineers like big data architecture, business guys want reports. So to me databricks says it's an infrastructure that combines all of that.
Then there's a Learn More button right there, which explains all that in more details.
It's certainly complex and has a large ambition, but it's not like they're advertising that they're making the world a better place while selling todo lists.
Don't waste your time watching it. It's a promo video for yet another a very scammy looking ICO.
I watched through the entire 3 minute video, only because I found it increasingly amusing how long they were taking to "get to the point". As it turns out, this video is 3 minutes of stock videos of Dubai with a pseudo-inspirational voiceover about nothing in particular, followed by their logo being shown for a mere 10 seconds at the end.
I couldn't believe that this wasn't a parody (at least, I don't think it is), it's exactly like something out of HBO's Silicon Valley show.
You sold that video short. I mean c'mon, they clearly state at the end that they are the first marketing cloud for blockchain. It doesn't get any clearer than that! /s
I ignored your warning and tried to watch it. After about a minute and a half of non-sequitur platitudes, I couldn't take it anymore!
Edit: It's fascinating like a train wreck. Imagine using this as the script for a scene where someone is on the phone with their dad, who is in a room with a bomb that will detonate exactly 3 minutes and 6 seconds from now (but we compress it to 2 minutes because the actor will be saying the lines very fast) and the dad hurriedly and tearfully tries to deliver all the advice he can cram in. As he remembers things to say in pretty much random order, he blurts them out.
By skipping the second half, you missed the push of "I've been on Oprah, therefore this company will be successful". Seriously, the last 20 seconds before the logo reveal starts is footage of him on Oprah.
OK granted it has AI, big data, cloud and blockchain, but is it social? That's what I wanna know. Never forget social, because that's what leads to viral. Also engine. We need an engine. If it was a viral AI bigdata social marketing cloud engine for blockchain, then you'd have something.
I feel like I'm getting left behind with all the wank words these days, I swear it was only yesterday that we were still giggling about 'clicks and mortar'.
... This seems normal for the US system. Punishments aren't exactly reflective of the crime, partially stemming from some of the "tough on crime" pushes in the 90's.
> I watched through the entire 3 minute video, only because I found it increasingly amusing how long they were taking to "get to the point".
I think that's on purpose. They want you to invest time in it so that the sunk-cost-fallacy prevents you from admitting to yourself that it's a scam. It's the same reason that many courses start with a free video "but first, a little bit of history" or something.
Is this how guys like Ramit Sethi and other blogging self help guys get away with selling shoddy quality products? You basically read their free material and have invested insane amounts of time, that you might as well fork over $400 a month for slightly better material.
So glad this conversation is being had. I figured me not understanding how the new hype machine works was a function of me getting old and slowly slipping into senility.
It frustrates me so much especially when smaller companies are doing this.
Anytime I go onto a company's website and I either can't figure out what they do, or pricing information isn't available, I think "Right, their business model is to overcharge folks who have more money than sense" and I promptly leave.
There are a number of reasons some websites do not list prices:
1. Pricing sets the wrong expectation for the true price you may actually pay once you get all the features you need and may not be aware of thus making the sale more difficult.
2. Pricing sets a transactional tone vs a mutually beneficial relationship
3. Pricing anchors your mind set to how much something costs vs how much value / ROI you get out of that product or service.
All of these do disservice to seeker and provider.
Yes - perhaps - but If I'm a small business looking for a thing that does X - I want to know if this is in the ballpark for me - or perhaps this is targeted at someone bigger. Price is a helpful way to determine that - because god knows, you can't figure that out from the marketing gobbledygook on the website anymore. The ROI doesn't matter if you can't afford the investment in the first place.
In other words, the provider's attempting to "look into your eyes," and determine how much value this is providing, thus how much you're able to pay, and base what they charge you off that.
It's called price discrimination. As Joel Spolsky says in his essay on the topic [1], "it pisses the heck off of people."
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadDon't get me wrong, I'm fully on board with the idea of marketing your benefits, not features, but so very much of the marketing writing you see out there now takes the concept to this unhelpful extreme.
I ride my bike past a shop every few days that's called something like "Shelter Solutions," but in smaller print they say "We rent equipment for commercial and residential roofing need". Boom, done, that's what I care about.
Or some lady who gave me a fistful of business cards at a networking event (she apparently has five thriving gigs, eyeroll), one of which was "telecommunications solutions consultant"--talking to her, she has some cell phone MLM program she's a part of.
Customers buy benefits, but if you're not telling them what the features are, you've failed at writing clear copy. Most people do.
What I mean is this - I'm not going to buy a product that I don't understand, period. Be it a piece of software (from kitten photo apps to CAD software) or an appliance, I only buy (and ever imagine buying) things for which I at least clearly understand what inputs and outputs are. I can use this software to upload JPGs to friends. I put dirty dishes in this appliance, add some consumables, and clean dishes pop out. Those are "features", not "benefits".
On the other hand, when I see people selling on "benefits", I immediately assume they're dishonest and steer away. The listed benefits usually are, at best, a serious abuse of some cherry-picked words, and at worst outright lies. It's one of the strongest negative signals for me when evaluating companies (especially when I don't have third-party information on their actual products).
Do most people really live their lives looking for something to buy that will make their lives "connected", or their company "full of streamlined cloud synergy" or something?
What I discovered resonates with this blog post...
1. I compared powerpoint decks from 2010 to 2017. The pictures got better but the fluff and high level descriptions got further and further away from what our product actually does! I think this is due to multiple marketing leaders taking over and putting their veneer on the marketing message rather than sticking with the current message in order to justify their role.
2. Current sales reps are taught the high level benefits and problem the solution solves but they had no idea of the basics. So again when they speak to potential customers they sound like a Deloitte consultant using words that are so far away from the basic issue a customer is trying to solve.
3. R&D also became focused on the high level benefits and forgot that we sell technology and features DO actually matter they just shouldn't be the only focus of a sales/marketing team.
Its interesting to see that most sales strategies today imbue this idea but I think what happened is most of us have gone so far off the map that we end up with Meltwater problems.
It might be because the adage, "don't sell a product, sell an emotion," but taken to an inconceivable level.
Or maybe it's like legalese, it's not necessary, but looks good if you are billing at $500 an hour.
I hate this transparent attempt to trick (me) the customer. IBM has done this to me when I'm drilling down into technical requirements like I'm some middle manager who doesn't know the actual needs. I always suspected that IBMs bread and butter is to move the sunk cost of contact into an actual sunk cost of technical debt, but I have firsthand experience now. The sign of a bad culture and lazy marketing.
One problem is people trying to pack ALL the features and ideas into that summary. So in the pursuit of wanting everyone to get the entire vision, the "what you offer right now" is lost.
As a company's product offerings expand into many, this gets even harder.
> I think the big companies do it to get you on the phone — so they can upsell.
I was thinking these things, and then BOOM, he says what I'm thinking haha.
These are sales oriented companies. By contrast, B2C is quantity oriented. They need more customers buying their mostly undifferentiated price tiers. Selling expensive pants vs regular pants isn't worth high touch sales. However, in B2B, selling "really really expensive enterprise plan" vs "regular enterprise plan" is definitely worth high touch sales. They want to do everything they can to get you "interested, but confused" and pick up the phone.
If you're selling the exact same product ("exact" in the business-sense that includes stuff like support or long-term price commitments, not in the geek-sense where CentOS is the exact same as RedHat) for two vastly different price points, you should probably make sure those customers don't meet.
Firstly because inbound phone calls are incredibly rare. Maybe it's more common for people to pick up the phone in the states but in my three years selling B2B SaaS (enterprise and startup) I never received a hot inbound lead on the phone. It's a bit different if your market leader but most companies and products aren't so I don't think it's a valid strategy.
Secondly because if you are doing a proper inbound strategy you need to entice people with content, product demonstrations or trials (ie showing the product).
Finally, if you want to obfuscate your offering, you don't need to hide it behind a bunch of mumbo jumbo. People rarely understand exactly what your product does even if you give them full access to it for a month.
I think the reason is simpler. A mixture of incompetence - B2B companies don't have the marketing savvy of FMCGs - and the fact competitors don't do a much better job. It's harder to write a clear, concise and enticing description of what you do than just generating buzzwordy corporate bs. It looks marketingy, so the copy is going to be signed off by everyone. Besides, everyone else in the industry is throwing around the same buzzwords, so you get this bubble of nonsense speak and everyone just rolls with it.
They put a lot of money and effort into sales and marketing, and you underestimate them by thinking that it's a sign of incompetence.
We're talking about why a lot of B2B tech companies have a lot buzzwordy nonsense instead of descriptions of what they can do for their customers (this is not unique to tech companies, I would say this goes for most B2B) and the theory put forward was that it's to get people to pickup the phone so they can understand what the fuck the product does. This is what I debunked.
I literally worked as a salesrep at a fairly big B2B marketing startup and one of the largest enterprise software companies.
What you refer to is content marketing to generate inbound leads. Those leads would then be put on a mailing list and and an outbound process would start. Except the "book a demo" (inbound lead) which I never recall leading to a good deal.
If you are a small stage startup with a small sales team you can probably get by on inbound but you have to go outbound to saturate the market. Even then, having poor description is going to hurt your Google fu so I don't buy the strategy.
If your the market leader, like salesforce in crm, you're going to see a lot of inbound but that's because people know your product and you're gartner quadrant status. Even then you'd still do maybe 50/50 inbound outbound.
In either case, the "it's shit because it works" argument still doesn't really hold up.
They put a lot of money into sales, they put a lot of money into going to conferences. They do not, however, seem to put really any money into a decent copywriter.
I'm not saying the message should be an engineering manual of the ins and outs the product but it should be clear, concise and entice customers to give the product further attention.
Consider seo description field of HubSpot
>HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.
Vs. Optimizely
> Be brave, experiment everywhere, and transform your customer experience with Optimizely.
Seriously WTF
I feel your pain. I just brought the Google fu aspect up in another comment.
Finally, usually sales end up with either director of engineering/whatever or VP/SVP, so do a really good presentstion...
some B2Bs started out doing one thing and then end up doing all kinds other random crap that clients just decided they rather have one team managing a whole project rather than spread out over 200 vendors and contractors and managing it themselves. there's nothing wrong with that! some clients are fighting to keep their business afloat instead of spending all day individually managing their service vendors. and if the B2B gets paid for that kind of work, it's sometimes worth doing.
so if you're a B2B with experience herding 200 different vendors and contractors doing odd crap for a single project, why not advertise it? alas when you do it just sounds really generic like "enterprise solutions" or even "everything". i mean, these companies in the article probably started off doing data analytics then ended up being really good at hooking up internal systems with data collection and then also doing consulting and then marketing and every other thing because their clients must have asked for follow up on their products.
to the author of the medium article. if you see that these companies do everything, why not just give them a call and ask them if they can do that one specific thing? chances are, they've done it before, and even if they haven't, maybe they'll do it for you anyway?
Clarity is difficult, and if it rarely makes a difference to businesses then it gets left out.
One reason clarity is difficult is that it requires narrowing what you say. Measurable accountable and integrated business software solutions. From the outside this sounds pointless and meaningless. From the inside it sounds nice and wide, encompassing everything they do. Better too broad than too narrow.
People's CVs sometimes have the same problem, resistance to limiting language.
The reason it doesn't matter is the way they get business. In face-to-face sales, clarity is surprisingly unimportant. It can even hurt by allowing prospects to raise objections without the presence of a salesman. Basically, the company's marketing doesn't matter, so it sucks.
Getting some designer with a great visual portfolio to make your website isn't the same thing as having a marketing plan or a marketing strategy, but it's a whole lot faster and cheaper and unfortunately most people don't know the difference.
Oh, and as awesome as Simon Sinek's Ted talk[0] is, you're not Apple and potential customers actually do care whether your product is useful for people like them.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA
Oh, okay, that makes sense. Probably some super-secure online backup service...
>Encryption: Your data can only be accessed with your personal keys. We can't access your data even if we wanted to! >Source code: The client code is available. You don't need to trust us; you can check the encryption yourself! >Deduplication: Only the unique data between your current files and encrypted archives is uploaded.
Wow, that's... extremely clear. That's literally everything I wanted to know, save for maybe pricing...
>Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data >Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data
...aha, it's something confusing!
>($0.25 / GB-month)
...never mind. This is extremely clear.
I could keep going, but as far as copy, this website is excellent. And even the design could be considered a plus given your target audience.
Though if Tarsnap ever gets a GUI, I would suggest giving the website one as well :)
Here are some easy to implement design suggestions: You should change the title of the first heading so it's not the same as the banner. I think "What is Tarsnap?" is a good choice. Speaking of the banner, vectorize it. Finally, please remove the bars from the asides.
Your product is good, so transferring a little attention to its web presence is worth the effort.
On small width device the menu will be on the bottom, so there's no duplication. (website seems to be responsive)
I like that the menu is on the bottom and not hidden behind a hamburger button.
I hope he doesn't listen to the folks saying he should follow the herd. Websites where you have to page down below the fold to get basic information on the product? We should be pointing them at Tarsnap. But flat design is king on mobile, so we won't be getting many of these website layouts anymore.
Since we're doing website critique, here's some CSS tweaking (no serious adjustments) that fixes most of my design complaints:
Before: http://i.imgur.com/yopLaY7.png
After: http://i.imgur.com/iANMrgp.png
CSS: https://gist.github.com/madebyollin/41e7aaf1d7604c2ccd54b8f3...
I don't think this website should be made to "look better" i.e turned into some corporate garbage, but it could definitely look better... looks kinda like an open source programmers best shot at making something look good.
There's a middle ground between looking corporate (irrelevant) and looking unprofessional.
In your shoes I would be going for a style of "very plain, but very neat" looking. Aiming for perfectly spaced between elements, attractive font, minimal but matching colors. Function graphics only.
This kinda looks OK:
https://weirdkid.com/emailchemy/
> Welcome to Outside Insight
> Billions of online conversations, freshly filtered.
The title of their landing page is even more to the point:
> Media Intelligence, Media Monitoring, and Social Monitoring
I thought Optimizely was an A/B testing tool, which makes their punchline OK:
> Optimizely lets you experiment on everything—from design choices to algorithms. That way the best ideas always win, and the best customer experiences get even better.
I suppose this only adds to his argument though, it's hard to tell what companies do.
My main point is that it shouldn't ever be difficult for a potential customer to quickly get to that understanding, and I do believe these sites could do a far better job at quickly and clearly explaining their companies' function... just like you did.
"Meltwater's flagship product is media monitoring". "Optimizely is a website A/B testing tool". Boom.
For instance, Optimizely has a website A/B testing tool. They also support smartphone app A/B testing, and I think some backend/server-side testing. If smart watches or VR take off, they'll probably try to support those as well.
They also recently added automated content generation: I know they can generate product and page recommendations, and there may be other options as well.
They're a relatively young company and probably aren't ready to be typecast as "website A/B testing," in case another offering really takes off.
Investors plz line up, take a number, and contact me thru PM.
Whenever I'm seriously considering purchasing an enterprise B2B product, I mostly know what they do before visiting their website. I've heard of them already, either through word of mouth, or by explicitly asking friends for recommendations. I suspect that I'm not too different from most purchasers.
If a company's targeting a landing page for someone like me, perhaps they shouldn't optimize for clarity; they should optimize for signaling reliability. So, the "Web 20.17 parallax-ed boots[t]rap-ed responsive home page" serves a purpose - it reminds me of all the other Web 20.17... B2B services I've happily used in the past.
I'm probably ascribing way too much significance to the semiotics of B2B homepages [1]. But I find it tough to believe that (e.g.) Optimizely hasn't, well, optimized their homepage for something.
[1] Also, take what I say with a huge grain of salt. My business' homepage needs a lot of work...
A lot of the text seems to be placeholder/written by a designer who asked about what the company wanted for the content and never got a response.
They just raised a $140m round of financing so apparently they have some good stuff going on. If you look at the website though:
The Unified Analytics Platform. Accelerate innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.
Sorry, what? Click on "learn more about the platform":
DATABRICKS IS A TRULY UNIFIED APPROACH TO DATA ANALYTICS AT SCALE. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark, Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering, and business.
I still have no clue what exactly TF the product is but I sure got my weekly dose of BS buzzwords.
Basically the product is Spark Notebooks (think Juypter) on AWS that allow you to quickly create clusters and even do fancy stuff with spark streaming.
A key thing that people miss also is the the creator of Spark is the CTO of Databricks and Databricks to some extent controls the direction of Spark. This probably impacts its valuation.
That sounds like a calendar + recipe aggregator idea.
Then there's a Learn More button right there, which explains all that in more details.
It's certainly complex and has a large ambition, but it's not like they're advertising that they're making the world a better place while selling todo lists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l644fAxGzlw
Don't waste your time watching it. It's a promo video for yet another a very scammy looking ICO.
I watched through the entire 3 minute video, only because I found it increasingly amusing how long they were taking to "get to the point". As it turns out, this video is 3 minutes of stock videos of Dubai with a pseudo-inspirational voiceover about nothing in particular, followed by their logo being shown for a mere 10 seconds at the end.
I couldn't believe that this wasn't a parody (at least, I don't think it is), it's exactly like something out of HBO's Silicon Valley show.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BYmAdNGn9K0/?hl=en
Feels very scammy. Brought to you by Gurbaksh Chahal..
Edit: It's fascinating like a train wreck. Imagine using this as the script for a scene where someone is on the phone with their dad, who is in a room with a bomb that will detonate exactly 3 minutes and 6 seconds from now (but we compress it to 2 minutes because the actor will be saying the lines very fast) and the dad hurriedly and tearfully tries to deliver all the advice he can cram in. As he remembers things to say in pretty much random order, he blurts them out.
This is pure comedy.
You'll notice over there that you can "BELIMITLESS", if you like.
At least today this is making my world a better place.
https://belimitless.com/gurbaksh-chahal/
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/gurbaksh-chahals-ugly...
I had to pay a larger fine for forgetting to pay a $40 ticket.
What I can't believe is who the hell would watch this video and think anything other than "run away".
I think that's on purpose. They want you to invest time in it so that the sunk-cost-fallacy prevents you from admitting to yourself that it's a scam. It's the same reason that many courses start with a free video "but first, a little bit of history" or something.
It frustrates me so much especially when smaller companies are doing this.
1. Pricing sets the wrong expectation for the true price you may actually pay once you get all the features you need and may not be aware of thus making the sale more difficult.
2. Pricing sets a transactional tone vs a mutually beneficial relationship
3. Pricing anchors your mind set to how much something costs vs how much value / ROI you get out of that product or service.
All of these do disservice to seeker and provider.
It's called price discrimination. As Joel Spolsky says in his essay on the topic [1], "it pisses the heck off of people."
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...