You Ask, I Answer: Objections to Marketing Data Science?

In today's episode, Amanda asks, so what sort of objections do you come across when you go and work with a company or you or you talk to a company? Okay. Um it depends. Which is the answer to pretty much everything these days. Uh for the work of data science, a lot of the time, and this is something that we all struggle with, a lot of the time, when we get objections, it is around results.

Right? It is around what am I gonna get for my money? Price is relatively a relatively minor issue because price is an indicator that in the selling process we have not communicated enough value. If we communicate enough value, if we understand the person's pain that they're in and we can help them solve their pain, there's a good chance that price as an objection gets diminished. Not it doesn't entirely go away, right?

If somebody has five thousand dollars in their budget, you can make a great case for a $25,000 project, but they physically still only have $5,000 at the end of the process. So there is a hard limit to pricing. But if you can communicate the value that you get, price tends to diminish because very often it's cover. It's a it's a smokescreen for a person saying, I don't understand what I'm buying. Right?

If I have a box and I say the inside this box is is a hundred dollars worth of value, I'm selling you this box of fifty dollars. That's not super appealing, right? You're like, yeah, but but but what's in the box? Right? I mean, I might give you $50 for that box, but uh not if you don't tell me what's in it.

Like, what am I getting for my money? What am I getting? What what's what's the value? If I open up the box and show you it's like hamsters, you're like, I I don't want hamsters. Well, you may, you might, but um, in the context of analytics, that that's not helpful, right?

So then the pricing objection is is valid. It's like, yeah, it's that's not worth my money. I don't need a box of hamsters, I need X instead. So objections a lot of the time are because we didn't communicate enough value, and we didn't communicate enough value is often because we didn't focus on the results, instead, we focused on the process. Now, for risk-averse buyers, um, they do want to see the process, they want to understand what happens to some degree.

Um, but for a lot of non-risk-averse buyers, they care less about the process and much more about the results. Am I getting the thing? Right? Um, if I give you $40,000 and you give me a vehicle, does this vehicle do what it wanted to do? Right?

Do they care how it was assembled? Not really. Um they might make some token statements about sustainability or you know, labor conditions or whatever, but for the most part, most people when they're buying something like a vehicle, it it always comes down to Am I getting a good value for my money? And does this thing do what I want it to do? And so when we're talking about selling analytics, when we're talking about objections, most of the time it's around that.

It's around well, what exactly am I getting for my money? If we go with you, what exactly are you gonna do? And we have to tie it to the three things everybody wants, right? People want more time, uh, they want less effort, and they want bigger results, better numbers. And if we can tie ourselves to at least one of those, ideally through all three, objections tend to go away pretty fast, right?

We've, for example, in in the work I do uh with my company, Trust Insights, a lot of we do a lot of stuff with Google Analytics 4. And we sell audits and configurations and stuff and help people just do the thing. And what we're selling there is not the process of upgrading somebody to Google Analytics 4. We're up, we're selling the you don't have to think about it. We are selling the it'll get done right in a reasonable amount of time.

We are selling um, we will not stretch your internal resources um at all, because we can do this you know with with a minimum of hassle. And so we're really selling time, we're selling peace of mind, we're selling a feeling of security. And when you figure out what it is that somebody actually wants to buy, then the objections, the objections are pretty mute, right? Again, there are still some hard limits you run into, particularly around pricing, but beyond that, it's just proving value. So that's that's where I see the objections most.

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