Do Something With Your Marketing: Speed to Answer

In this week's Do Something with Your Marketing, uh I have a tip for checking out and vetting software vendors. So for a lot of folks, uh, as I'm recording this is coming up on the end of the year, a lot of people are doing planning for the coming year. A lot of people are thinking about evaluating new vendors or existing vendors trying to figure out what to put in budgets, uh, what to what to buy coming up. Understandably, when you go to a vendor's website or you talk to their sales professionals, you hear just how amazingly shiny and wonderful that that solution is and how it's gonna solve all your problems. And we all know as as educated business folks that it's not a magic bullet, right?

It's not the uh the the one tool to rule them all, as it were. We know that every tool has its upsides and downsides. And it's tough when you're trying to evaluate a tool to figure out is this something that is worth spending money on, especially if you've got a limited budget. Um how do you see past that the shine of that perfect demo with the curated data set and you know people just going through and being wizards and doing things and it looks so easy? How do you how do you see past that and get under the hood a little bit?

There's two kinds of videos to look for. Number one, you want to look for uh bake offs or contests. So a lot of companies, uh particularly in the analytics space, have uh user conferences, and at these user conferences they have competitions where you get to see uh the true expert-level practitioners working with a tool in real time to try and compete, you know, sort of iron chef style uh uh uh to win a prize of some kind. Those demos are really important because you get a chance to see how real people are trying to solve a real problem under uh a significant time constraint. And what you want to keep track of is how many steps does it take for them to do something.

Uh is it a couple of steps to get to uh an intermediate thing like a regression analysis or to make a chart or uh whatever uh statistical or data task that you're trying to do. Same thing is true if you're looking at sales CRM software, you know, you're watching somebody configure something. How many clicks does it take for them to start a new contact or set up a new deal or build a nurture program? In those competitions, you get a real sense for how onerous is this piece of software, is this environment? Uh, if it is super easy, you should see you know, people flying through these competitions so fast, you're like, uh I'm gonna have to like pause this just to see what it is they're doing because they're so proficient and the interface is so easy to use.

On the other hand, if you're watching like uh more of a hackathon, you're just watching people type, like, okay, clearly this is not a beginner's tool. Uh it's not something that's easy to do. The second kind of video is of course um, you know, people just showing up doing regular walkthroughs in videos on YouTube, not necessarily hackathons, just somebody putting up a video like how to use you know Watson Studio, for example, from IBM. And you can watch and just count the number of steps, count the number of clicks or or tasks it takes to go from beginning to end, particularly in just regular non-sales videos. Like someone just putting up, like, hey, I'm trying this thing out.

You know, they go live or whatever, they're trying the thing out, and they're like, oh wow, that's taking a really long time. Back in the old, old, old days. Uh, you know, I have a fair amount of gray hair here, so we're talking, you know, 1990s, early 2000s. There was a company called Palm that made a handheld device called a Palm Pilot. And it was one of the four world's first you know, tablet style little computers.

And one of the things that Palm prided itself on in its operating system was what they called um uh tap counts, where they had people whose job as user interface designer was to count the number of taps it took to get to a certain feature or to complete a task, and their goal was always how can we reduce the number of taps, how can we reduce the number of taps. When you're comparing like a marketing automation package or an email package or social media marketing tool, measure that. How many clicks does it take? And you can even do it in you know, watching some uh demo. I it's better to do it watching a pre-recorded demo if you can, so that you know you the person doesn't feel like they're being you know watched.

Um but how many clicks does it take to get to the result? That's a uh not a bad proxy for how well designed a tool is. But in terms of what it can do and how quickly you can get to your answers, there's a reason why it was the market leader and and why Salesforce acquired it. Any marketing tool that you're looking at, any software tool, whether it's making you know banner images or whatever, look at the number of clicks it takes to get something done. I was using um I just subscribed uh from uh Black Friday self to Adobe Creative Cloud to do some video editing.

And of course Adobe Premiere is included in there. And if you've been watching these shows for a while, you've seen I've been using Tech Smith's Camtasia for a while. The number of clicks it takes me just to get a video into Premiere, much less do the same editing, you know, titles, bumpers and stuff and and and all that, uh, is like five times more than what uh it takes me to do the same thing in Camtasia. So uh for the foreseeable future, I will be sticking to Camtasia, at least for the day-to-day editing of these videos. But it's a really good example of I've got two pieces of software, which one's better?

Go look up people doing the thing on YouTube and you're like, okay, this one here and this one here, the result that comes out is about the same, but this one requires five times less work. Which one should you pick? If you're crunched for time, probably start with the one that takes five times less work. So that's the suggestion for this week for do something with your marketing. If you're evaluating vendors, go crawling YouTube for demos and examples and walkthroughs and live streams, and just start counting the clicks, counting the taps until somebody gets to an answer and see which software package just by watching makes you go, hmm, that looks like it's not really well designed, not really well thought out.

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