Tien Wong describes the "elevator rant" technique: probing questions that reveal what customers really think about your brand but won't say out loud. When attention is scarce, he argues, you need to do homework on prospects and reach them at peak attention, not interrupt them like HubSpot's content marketing model does. Wong credits his outsourced CMO Bob with delivering the customer insights that made the difference.
Chapters
I learned about the elevator rant, which is to get your customer to reveal their true feelings about your brand and your service, stuff that they ordinarily wouldn't tell you. And I think that the questions on the slides was useful. I took pictures of them and will be distributing those myself because those are great questions. Depends on the context and it depends on what they're using to get to me, to grab my attention. Attention is the marketing currency that everyone wants. You want to find me or anyone else that you're trying to target, you want to hit them when their attention is at the maximum. In my world, for me, by being consultative, by being very relevant, by having done their homework and by kind of guessing very well what my hot buttons are, by knowing my industry and knowing my needs ahead of time, that helps a lot as well. I call the other kinds of marketing, quote, "interruption marketing." You know, what HubSpot calls content marketing. HubSpot worked great when content marketing was new and no one was really doing it. It's like the NFL, there's no secrets. Once there's a shiny object that's out there, it works for a little while and then it fails. Everyone I know gets literally 500 emails a month. HubSpot is the great arms dealer in the content marketing space, and it's not their fault that they're selling arms. It's the users of their arms that are at fault, but you can't blame them either because they're trying to do the best they can for their company. And the problem is, is that when everybody piles in, then there's more noise. So you got to find the next wave, the next place where the attention is going. We've had a great experience working with Bob. He's extremely strategic, he's high-level, he really was our outsourced CMO for our SaaS product. He was able to get incredible insights that we ordinarily would not have gotten, and we were very happy with that. And also on the creative side, he developed marketing looks and feels that hit the mark with what our target customer was looking for. So I would recommend Bob for sure. He's great to work with, very easy to work with, and at the end of the day, he really gets it.
