Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

Consider the source of the message; that’s the crux of that folksy, funny principle.  As recipients of non-stop information flying at us, we must always wonder:

• What's the motivation of the messenger?
• What's the angle of the agent?
• Who's benefiting from this idea?

I’m not suggesting one should filter all the world’s information through a jaded and cynical lens. Rather, a reasonable amount of critical thinking should always be our first defence, especially in today’s environment of pervasive alternative facts and misinformation.

In marketing, who says what matters.

As marketers and content creators, we must also consider who we choose as couriers of our messages.  For example, let’s say you’re making a video or putting on a webinar. Maybe you’ve got an intelligent, articulate salesperson at your disposal who looks like an Italian film star with a penchant for performance. You’re thinking, this guy’s going to pack ‘em in! Engagement galore, right? But guess what? He’s the barber! He’s the one making commission on what they buy, so it’s likely many of your listeners are discounting the message appropriately, or should be.

I’m not saying to never feature a slick salesperson or marketer in your content (there’s always a place for it), but you’ve got to have variety. Mix-in the self-effacing, bookish engineer, who helped design your differentiating technology, and is actually a rockstar. She might be less comfortable under the bright lights, and might require all of your persuasive skill to recruit, but her expertise is what your customers and prospects want to hear.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Decades ago, at the dawn of the Internet age, a group of Silicon Valley ideologues (Doc Searls, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, and David Weinberger) wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, which described their vision of how the Internet would change marketing – for the better.

One of the many ideas they posited was that marketing departments and public relations teams would no longer be able to guard the unfiltered knowledge that markets really want, nor could they withhold access to the smart, honest employees with whom the market really wanted to engage. They predicted that the omnipresent Internet would allow markets to bypass the “sterile happy talk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it,” and enjoy unfettered access to the truth (follow me, to freedom!).

I think the manifesto’s authors got that one wrong, for the most part.  Even with the ubiquity of the Internet, marketers still control the vast majority of product/service information that hits the marketplace. There are leaks and slip ups, of course, but generally speaking, product/service information is meticulously curated and delivered.

So when you create marketing messages that need to be served up to the market, don’t get the barber to tell people they need a haircut. Give a nod to the authors of the manifesto, and recruit your product managers, engineers, and R&D people to be the messengers.

Pro Tip:

I have noticed that a technical audience is generally not as bothered by a lack of polish in the presenter as general business people. The techies don't care. They just want the knowledge.

How to Turn Subject Matter Experts Into Marketers

Suppose you selected an eloquent salesperson to present a topic to a technical audience on a webinar, for example. That salesperson may have years of experience selling in that domain, but if a participant asks a very technical question that he doesn’t know, it’s a missed opportunity to not only educate the asker, but the rest of the audience as well. Sure, you’ll take the question down and get back to everyone with the answer, but momentum was lost.

If, in an alternate universe, you had a product line manager up there, they would have probably been able to provide that obscure answer. In addition, they may have been able to provide some background. For example, she could have explained that the reason they chose design element A over B was to leverage a technology inflection point yet to hit the market, and that design element B, while popular now, can never accommodate it. A perceived negative could be flipped to a positive, just by getting a person with the knowledge out front (thank you, manifesto).

The risk, however, to giving a techie the stage who is not used to it is precisely why the market wants to hear from him – he may not hold anything back, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  That said, even the honest revelation of product faults may win the long-term respect of a techie audience.  I think it’s always better to err on the side of honesty, and in addition to the sales and marketing people, let the R&D and engineering folks share the spotlight to provide the unbiased information your targets crave (just vet their slides first 😊).

If you need help engaging your customers in a language they understand, I’d love to hear from you.

Thought Leadership (31)