Conversations with Jeff Weinberger – A marketing strategist, problem solver, and disruptive thinker

As a marketing strategy innovator and sustainability visionary, Jeff’s career has been focused on identifying strategic opportunities and creating actionable outcomes for companies such as WebEx (Cisco), Saba, and SAP.

MS> Jeff, Are you a gamer?

JW> I’m not a gamer in today’s typical sense of electronic, console, or internet games, but I have always been interested in gaming. The games I’ve always gravitated toward are strategy games. I enjoy games that require a tremendous amount of thought and problem-solving, as well as a lot of complexity. I enjoy games where there is no specific set of steps you need to follow. Each time you play, the process and the outcomes can be different. And like so many others, I’ve also gotten in to some on-line versions of Scrabble lately (ed. feel free to challenge him!).

MS> Some people game for purely for the challenge, and others do it to learn. And then there are the folks who just want to tune out a bit and play purely for fun.

JW> There’s a trend now toward time or activity-based social and on-line games, versus problem-solving-based or strategy gaming. The time and activity-based games are much more social and more about the connections among players. I find it really interesting to see how these shorter, social games have become so popular. There are some really interesting ideas around how you can use that kind of gaming for corporate and social good. And that’s a topic I find really interesting.

MS> This leads me into another subject I wanted to discuss: gamification. How have you seen the corporate world adopt and use gamification?

JW> First, I must say I think gamification is going to be the most annoying buzzword for 2012. Gamification is being discussed everywhere right now. I think it’s a very positive trend. It’s a way to engage tremendous numbers of people behind a particular cause or goal. It can be used behind any goal, whether it be charitable, corporate, or something else. The engagement factor doesn’t have to be long term, it just has to be interesting enough to get people to want to work together and create common good and common outcomes. It’s a much more engaging way to deal with today’s learner or workforce than any other more traditional manner.

If you were my employee, and I tell you to go update a spreadsheet or complete a mundane task, you may grudgingly do it. But if I tell you that you and 10 coworkers need to collaborate together to do this task as part of a game, that you’ll get points for completion, and that the outcome is an award; the task becomes more interesting and more motivating. There’s a tremendous potential for engagement.

There’s a downside though. If you look at gamification in the sales, prospecting, and marketing world — it’s very hot right now. We know there is tremendous potential for engagement. The problem is, you may only be able to engage a small percentage of your audience in a gaming scenario. So, it may be really wonderful that you get a big hit-count or lots users of the game you put up on your website. And you may realize a certain conversion or purchase rate out of the effort. But you may miss out on engaging a large portion of your audience which could be extremely valuable to you.

MS> There’s an obvious hook to using games this way, but I think there needs to be an understanding of the entire picture. What percentage of your whole consumer base are you grabbing? And what happens after they play? If you are attracting customers, or potential customers, through gamification strategies, are you converting them or retaining them?

There is a core belief at PAKRA that any marketing or sales effort we undertake must have measurable outcomes. We need to understand the effectiveness of any effort we launch. There needs to be identified metrics that will tell us how many people we engaged, how we engaged them, and whether the end result was a new lead or a closed sale.

JW> The idea of engaging your whole audience – and knowing how to address each segment - is a core concept to disruptive marketing, which is what I’ve been known for over the past decade or so. You have to look at your relationships with your entire community, not just with your top 10% or 20% who may be the largest customers or those with whom you engage the most. To be quite honest, the easiest customers for your competitors to pick off are the 80% you aren’t paying attention to. When I am running a company, I want to make sure I find a way to not let that 80% become vulnerable to competitive loss. I think ignoring that segment of customers is a dangerous strategy, and it’s the reason a lot of companies fail or are the victims of market disruption.

MS> That’s so important to be mindful of that 80% that we’re talking about. New accounts acquisition and new sales are important, but so is retention of existing customers.

JW> Customer loyalty and retention is a critical issue in today’s business world. Many companies, in software or internet services for example, are moving more toward a subscription-based model. If you are in a subscription-based business, the most important thing a customer can do for you is to renew. It’s important to make sure that after you’ve closed that initial sale, you are able to retain that customer month after month and year after year. Figuring out customer loyalty is not that easy. Of course you want all your customers to renew. You may not get 100% renewal, but that should be your goal. If you look at cell phone companies, cloud-based companies or even media-based companies, the renewal rates are pathetically small. A churn rate of 20% for a cell phone provider is just not acceptable. When you look at the customers in the other 80%, those who are not leaving, there is more than loyalty there. There is disruptive potential there. And the potential for that group to help you find out why your 20% is leaving.

You may find that you have customers who are more interesting, flexible, and more innovative than your top 20%. These customers are going to provide seeds for the way your market is going to be disrupted. And I assure you, at some point, your market will be disrupted. As a CEO or customer service executive, I want to know what my 80% are thinking so I can disrupt my own market. I would rather have my customer base tell me what needs to change than hear it from my competitor, and I’d rather make that change than let a competitor do that to me. My goal in working with a company on marketing strategy is to help them know what those customers are thinking. In my role as marketing strategist, I want to help you disrupt your own market. If you are the CEO of a company, I want to help you figure out how to listen to your customers and understand what all your customers are thinking. You’ve got to be able to figure out which customers are going to do really interesting things — things that will drive your market.

MS> You said your practice is focused on finding and maximizing the value of customer (and other) relationships. How do you figure out that value and what does it mean for your clients?

JW> I believe in using a customer value model. This looks at the entire customer community and asks, “What is the value of these relationships?” There’s a revenue component to this, because what your customer pays you is obviously important. But there are also some other components we all understand, but may not put together. “Share of wallet” is a common term in many industries. In other words, how much of that customer’s budget are they spending with you? A large customer may give you a small share of wallet compared to what they can spend. A small customer may give you a larger share of wallet and actually be more profitable over time, and will be less likely to walk away. You can develop a much deeper relationship with the latter customer based on loyalty in the relationship, even though the revenue number may appear lower on the surface.

Customer value is made up of a number of dimensions, including these two. To get a better understanding of the value of a customer – or the potential value of a prospect – it’s important to look at how important each is to your particular business and how your customers stack up.

Understanding how valuable each customer is and where they are in your community determines what effort you should put behind that customer and into keeping that relationship.

MS> It sounds like you are talking about a life-long profile of a customer.

JW> Exactly. And this is something that I’m passionate about. Helping companies understand these relationships. Although we are talking about business-to-customer relationships, my philosophies in this area are really drawn from personal experiences.

The value in my personal life, and what I enjoy most, are the relationships I have with people. One thing I’ve come to discover over time is that value in a relationship doesn’t come from an individual but from the interaction between two or more individuals. For example, you and I are talking. You have some ideas and I have some ideas, and that’s all great. But things become interesting once we start to exchange ideas, whether we agree or disagree. Once I discovered that was such an important driver in my personal life, I started to look at in a business context. It’s all about relationships among businesses, customers, suppliers, and shareholders.

As a marketing strategist, I spend a lot of time analyzing the issues around the relationships my clients have with their customers and looking at the value in those relationships. And then I started to ask the “how” questions about those relationships. How is value created between the business and the customer? How can the business continue to add to that value? How do you use that value to create competitive advantage?

MS> Talk to me about how you learn. What is your learning style?

JW> I have two unique learning styles that come up in different situations. In one respect, I’m very empirical. I look at something, and I see it happen six times, and I can say, “Oh, that’s how it works.” In many ways I don’t believe something until I’ve actually seen it work.

On the other hand, I am also very theoretical. I actually have to understand the “why” behind certain things in order for me to really understand it. The real test of learning for me – or anyone, I think -  is whether I can explain a concept or something I’ve learned. If I’ve understood the concept, the theory behind it, and I’ve seen it happen, then I can probably turn around and explain it in a way that shows I really understand it.

MS> What you’ve said makes me think about critical thinking skills and the different levels of learning that an individual goes through. Bloom’s Taxonomy tells us that learning sometimes starts at most basic understanding of a subject, knowledge. From there the learning can progress to comprehension, application, analysis, and, finally, synergy.

From PAKRA’s perspective, when we develop a customized learning solution for a client, it’s important for us to understand who our end user is and what their current level of understanding is of a business process. From there, we determine what level of knowledge our products need help attain. Once we’ve established those learning goals and learned the client’s business processes, we can begin to build a gaming simulation from there.

JW> That makes perfect sense. You need to put people in a learning environment that is going to make sense for them. There is a fairly destructive tendency in our businesses (and society) to put everyone in the same learning environment and teach everyone the same skills, and that doesn’t work. It’s just not an effective or efficient way to teach someone. People need to be taught in the way that they learn best.

MS> I call this the tendency to “teach everything to everyone,” regardless of the individual learner’s needs.

While we’re on the topic of learning, tell me what is your definition of immersive learning?
JW> I think of immersive learning very simply. Whatever it is you are trying to learn, you are completely surrounded by it in some way. You are forced to find your way through a subject. You aren’t so much being taught as you are discovering. And for me, I think this works better than other ways of learning. I learn a lot through discovery and experience.

MS> Let’s talk about user adoption of new technology. What do you think drives user adoption?

JW> I think there only two things that drive adoption of new technology in a business. One, there must be a desperate need. B2B companies are really selling to people, and that’s important to remember. There was a slogan on the wall of one of my past employers that said, “Organizations fund. People buy.” It doesn’t matter if you are selling directly to a business. You are still also selling to a person or a group of people. And as ClayChristensen pointed out, people “hire” a product to do a job. The product must have a job and it must do it well. That’s when you have to look at your potential customer base. What job does my product need to do for the end user? And how can my product do this job well? When you know that, you know why the people buying it will care.

The second part of the user adoption equation is having a champion who drives the change your product will bring. There must people in the organization who are willing to do things differently in order to get that job done. Is the champion willing to do something differently, to be disrupted, in order to solve a challenge? If the answer is yes, the chances of successful user adoption are greatly increased.

MS> How do you use social media? I’ve noticed your social media presence reflects a distinct “voice.” You clearly aren’t afraid to express a point of view. Is this part of your brand?

JW> We all want to be perceived as being positive and supportive. But I think there is sometimes a false sense of positivity when people are using social media to promote themselves. We all have challenging or contrary views on certain subjects, topics that challenge our thinking, and unique viewpoints. But many people have a fear of being opinionated in the realm of social media. My experience has always been that being opinionated and expressing yourself authentically is really the best way to establish your own uniqueness and personality.

You’ll notice I’m specifically avoiding the word brand. Branding and style are two very different things, and I think that distinction is often missed. A brand is not how you’ve defined yourself on your website, it’s not your logo, it’s not your company colors. That is your style. Your style is the image that you want to project to the world. A brand is what exists in the mind of others when they think of a company, a product, or a person. Your style may feed in to your brand, but they are two unique things. The classic example is the brand of Volvo: When they think of Vovlo, people think of safety. They don’t think about the logo, the style of the website or the advertising. They think of safety. Safety is why people buy Volvo, and therefore that’s their brand.

My personal style is I tend to be opinionated and put my ideas out there; I’m not shy. This translates in to my brand, how others see me. My brand – at least what I’m told it is - is that I will challenge and disrupt your current way of thinking, help you avoid getting trapped in a rut and get that to produce positive outcomes.

MS> Jeff, as always, it’s been a lot of fun speaking to you. Thank you!

Tweet